Part 15

Again, there has been another marked tendency in the history of religion and that is the substitution of the religion of feeling for the religion of will. Pietism and sentimentalism have supplanted in a large measure the ethical. Such religion is dominantly non-social, if not, indeed, anti-social in its character. It does not make for brotherhood. The pietistic monk shuts himself in a monastery and tries to work out his soul's salvation with fear and trembling, rather than to work it out by aiding his neighbor or society to work out theirs. Buddhism and Christianity have been most unfortunate victims of this substitution of solitude for solidarity. Dean Brown once said to the writer that there is a great deal of pietism that is utterly wanting in ethical quality, and that is true. It is a kind of selfish subjectivism devoid of any real moral character. It is self-centered and non-social. It represents the minimum of true religion. Where in such pietism do we find the universality of obligation involved in the ethical law of benevolence or in the Christian law of love? Such religion does not bear the marks of a really socialized gospel. It has developed a wrong sense of values.

Again, there is in practically all religions a large element of symbolism--the religious life expressing itself in worship--in rites and ceremony. And this carries with it a dangerous tendency in evaluation. It often substitutes ritual and ceremonial for what is the real essence of religion--namely, righteousness. The great Hebrew prophets contended strongly against this misinterpretation of religion. With them it represented an erroneous estimate of the essentials of religion. Indeed, it threatened its very life--the heart of which in their conception is righteousness in God and man. Isaiah represents Jehovah as being weary of sacrifice, incense and other forms of worship--regarding them as an abomination, and calling upon the people to live a life of righteousness: "Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do well; seek justice, relieve the oppressed."[7] Hosea exclaims: "I desired mercy, and not sacrifice."[8] Micah, inveighing against burnt offerings, says: "He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good, and what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?"[9] And Jesus, all through the Sermon on the Mount and in the parables, in the most positive manner represents righteous living as the very core of religion.

All of these elements--the intellectual, the pietistic, the aesthetic or symbolical--have a rightful place in the religious life, but they are all subordinate, and exceedingly subordinate, to the one great dominating element, the moral. And it is because of a failure to adequately recognize and practise this element that so many supposedly Christian nations are today in deadly conflict. All of them persist in their theological beliefs; all of them persist in pietistic communion; all of them persist in rite and ceremony; but some of them at least fail even to approximate the exemplification of the fundamental ethical requirements of their faith. Their theology, their pietism, their worship,--their religion,--have not been moralized; and unless we are willing to make, both in belief and practice, the religious basis of world-organization truly ethical, we will fail as lamentably in the future as we have in the past.

Finally, how is such a religious program to be carried forward? The answer is, by systematic religious education. Such an educational procedure involves beginning at the beginning, and that is, with the child. Here, again, we meet with a melancholy failure in the development of a true sense of values. Despite the progress that modern religious educational effort has made, there is still a widespread lack of genuine appreciation of the importance of childhood for moral and religious instruction. The premium is still placed on the adult. We have but to examine the average church program to be convinced of this. In a large number of churches we have three Sunday services--two of which are devoted to adults and one to children. In the average church the week-day services are largely services for adults. Our sermons, our hymns, our prayers, many of our week-day meetings cover chiefly the interests of grown-ups: and the lamentable condition of home religious education painfully fails to make up this deficiency in what Dr. Horace Bushnell called Christian nurture. Indeed, under a false conception of conversion, and a false apprehension of the spiritual birthright of children in most Protestant quarters, the child, as the late Professor George P. Fisher once remarked to the writer, is regarded as an alien to the Commonwealth of Israel. Instead of being born into the church and treated as a member of the household of faith, he must serve his probation as a heathen, and await the dawn of adolescence when he will have developed sufficient maturity of mind to interpret and give intellectual assent to a creed. The absurdity and tragedy of it all are manifest when we take into consideration the ethical character of religion, and the fact that childhood is preeminently the period for establishing the individual in habits of virtue. There may be some exaggeration in Dr. G. Stanley Hall's affirmation, that the moral and spiritual destiny of the average person is determined in the first ten years of his life; but, to anyone who has studied the psychology of moral and spiritual development, it is evident that Hall is dealing with far more than a half-truth. The receptivity and plasticity of the child make it possible for those to whom his most vital interests are committed to really save him or damn him. And, as we establish children in right thinking and right living, so we establish the community, the state, the nation, and ultimately the nations in their reciprocal relations. In more ways than one is Wordsworth's statement true, "The child is father to the man." It is preeminently true in the moral and religious sphere. The Kingdom of God and his righteousness will never make the progress on earth that they should make until the scales really fall from our eyes, and we gain a true vision of our duty to the child in establishing him in personal and community righteousness, and thus pave the way for the application of the law of righteousness in the state and among the nations of the earth.

In still another way, to one who is convinced of the supremacy of moral and spiritual worths and of the ethical aim of all true religion, is the lamentable failure to develop a true sense of values manifest. Professor Pratt calls attention in his "Psychology of Religious Belief" to what he regards to be a fact, that in the average American community, "we find our friends and neighbors, of all degrees of education and intellectual ability, almost to a man accepting God as one of the best recognized realities of their world and as simply not to be questioned."[10] That statement is in the main true. In other words, we are a religious people. And yet, notwithstanding this fact, so far as thoroughgoing, systematic religious education is concerned, when compared with the time and efforts devoted to education along other lines, and its quality, it suffers painfully. In nearly all of the states, five days a week, of at least four or five hours each, are given to what we call secular education, as against one day per week, of one hour each, to religious instruction and worship. In secular education we have, on the whole, a trained body of teachers. In religious education we are dependent largely on amateurs. In most places religion is not allowed a voice in our schools, so far as _systematic_ training is concerned, and in comparatively few communities has a systematic course of moral training even been introduced. What does all this mean? Does it not mean that we err tremendously in our sense of values? If there is any doubt concerning this, reflect for a moment on the possibility of organizing a community on a basis of the vices instead of the virtues. Try to found a community on sensuality, falsehood, dishonesty, injustice, hate and murder, and see how far you will succeed. Society could not exist on such a basis. Were the German people to put into practice among themselves the vices and crimes they have committed against other peoples, their existence as a nation would be exceedingly short-lived. The vices are anti-social in their character. The virtues are social: they make for unity, for organization. And what is true of communities is true of states and nations--not only in their internal relations but in their relations to other nations. The virtues make for national and international organization. Now, religion deals with these sovereign values, and yet, comparatively speaking, we--a religious people--relegate them to the background in our educational schemes. We will never succeed in world-organization until we genuinely appreciate the unifying power of the virtues, the harmonizing and binding force of righteousness, and systematically train a generation from childhood in a knowledge and an appreciation of their supreme worth, and try to mould their wills in conformity to their requirements.

But, as Herbert Spencer wisely remarks, we have not an ideal environment in which to work out our ideals. And that is eminently true in this case; therefore, wisdom dictates that we try to do our work with reference to the conditions of the actual environment in which we are placed. If, for apparently good reasons, it be not expedient under present conditions to introduce systematic religious education into the public schools, it is possible for us to make provision in some other way for religion to have its rightful place in the general training of our children. This would require a religious school organization, with a curriculum that interprets religion as ethical in its aim. It would require a scientifically graded moral scheme with its corresponding religious sanctions; also the creation of a literature to meet these demands. It would require, at least, three sessions a week. It should be separate from the Sunday school, where, with present conditions, sectarianism still enters into education, and yet it should be supplementary to it. It would call for a specially trained teaching force; and for skilled professional supervision. All this ought to be done; it can be done; and it must be done. We must do it in the interests of the individual, of the family, of the community, of the state, of the nation, and of the brotherhood of nations. It is a thoroughly practicable scheme. The literature exists already; colleges, schools of religion, and theological seminaries can easily become training schools for the preparation of religious teachers. The only difficulty in the way, which is, indeed, a serious one, but by no means insuperable, is the time-schedule of the children. In my own judgment, if a real effort were made by the churches of any community, a plan could be formulated in relation to the public schools whereby the children would become available for such religious instruction. If the community is a religious one, it has a right to, and must insist upon, having the children a fair share of the time for such purposes. If the moral and spiritual values are the supreme values of society, then it is in the interests of society itself that these values should receive proper recognition in formal education for citizenship. The real trouble is, that the churches are not really in earnest concerning this important matter. It has taken an awful social cataclysm to make us realize that nations, like families and communities, can hang together on no other basis than the cardinal virtues, and that something more than a mere formal recognition of these virtues is required for world-organization. Men and nations must be disciplined in them, and the way to do this is to begin in childhood. If the schooling of a nation in a gospel of national egoism and hate be largely responsible for the present war, with the brutal indifference of the German people to moral considerations in provoking it and to humane methods of waging it, why is it not possible to school the nations in those things that make for good will and world-organization? To doubt it is to doubt the might of right.

In conclusion, my plea is, that, in our efforts at world re-organization, so far as religion is concerned, we adequately reckon with its ethical character. Let us take, first, an ethical view of God--that he is a righteous being, that he deals justly with all men and all nations, that he cannot be used by any individual or nation for unrighteous ends, that he is the father of us all, and that he cooperates with men in their efforts to bring in the reign of righteousness upon earth. And, secondly, let us take a more ethical view of man; recognizing the worth and inalienable rights of personality; that no man may be used merely as a means, but must be regarded as an end in himself; and thus, whatever may be the outward form of government, it must in essence be democratic, rather than autocratic; that the law of interaction among nations must be the same as the law among individuals--the law of benevolence or the law of love. Let us develop a true sense of values in religion that will place emphasis on the voluntaristic or ethical element rather than on either the intellectual, pietistic and symbolical or aesthetic. Finally, let us try to realize this program by thorough, systematic religious education in which we shall emphasize the interests of the child rather than the interests of the adult; by giving an ethical interpretation to the curriculum; by organizing a trained body of teachers; and by insisting that a fair amount of the child's time and effort shall be devoted to education in the supreme values of society. If we act on this program, if we make this really the religious basis of world re-organization, we will make long strides toward the dawn of a better day, when nations shall seek war no more; and the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of our righteous God and his Christ, whose gospel and life teach the universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man.

[1] Address delivered at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the National Religious Education Association, New York, March 5, 1918. Republished with modifications by courtesy of _Religious Education_.

[2] Paulsen, "A System of Ethics," trans., p. 559.

[3] On the servility of German university professors consult David Jayne Hill, _Harper's Magazine_, July, 1918, pp. 30-33.

[4] _Monist_, XI, p. 571.

[5] See, for example, the views of Pastors W. Lehmann ("About the German God"); H. Francke ("War Sermons"); J. Rump ("War Devotions and Memorial Services for the Fallen"); K. Koenig ("Six War Sermons"); also Tolzien and others in "Patriotic Evangelical War Lectures."

[6] Pt. I, ch. II.

[7] Isaiah 2:10.

[8] Hosea 6:6.

[9] Micah 6:8.

[10] Page 231.

Transcriber's Note:

Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Hyphenated words have been standardized. On page 67, "stablished" changed to "established"; on page 167, "sancity" changed to "sanctity". Illustration on title page is variant of Yale University crest.