Chapter 9
The church which represents him in the world will need, for its social service, the same inspiration. Unless its life is fed from this fountain, its stream will soon run dry. There are those who seem to think that sociology can solve all the problems of our modern life. If sociology be sufficiently expanded, this may be true; for a truly scientific sociology would have to explain how men came to be social beings, and what is the bond that unites them. If it finds that their relation to a common Father is the fundamental fact of their existence, then it would know that religion is at the heart of it, and that right relations with God are the spring and source of right relations with men. But a sociology which ignores this primary fact has in it no redemptive power.
The more earnestly, therefore, we contend that the business of the church is the Christianization of the social order, the more strenuously we must maintain that she is powerless to do this work except as her life is fed by faith and prayer. The redemption of the social order is the greatest task she has undertaken, and she needs for it a strength that can only come from conscious fellowship with God. If she ever needed inspiration, she needs it now. If there ever was a time when she could dispense with the divine guidance and grace, that time is not now. The churches which desert the places of prayer, and think to substitute the wisdom of men for the power of God, are not going to give much aid in this struggle.
"It must be claimed," says one, "on behalf of the passion for God, that where it exists it will--automatically, as has been said--set charity, love, all sweet graces of philanthropic activity, into quick and ceaseless play.... If the emphasis of religious thought be made to fall upon the idea of life, this cannot fail to be; for to have the divine life is to be possessed of and to give out the divine love.... The regeneration of human society is found to come from the dominance of spiritual passion, even though it be not the first thing on which spiritual passion is set; the saint will be--just because he is a saint--a philanthropist too, since a true sainthood must number love among the graces of character it brings. It is a fact--one has to make the sad admission--that religious people, professedly spiritual men and women, have been and still are in some cases eaten through and through by selfishness; these are those who, so that they can declare heaven to be their own, have no care for the present hell in which so many of their fellows spend their days and years. But that is not because they are too deeply immersed in the passion for God,--it is because they have not really immersed themselves in its flood. And in claiming for a Godward passion the regulative and supreme place among the elements of life, we do but secure a fuller tenancy among those elements of a manward love; for the nature which sets itself to receive the whole of God will, ere it knows it, and as an automatic effect of the new life it wins, give itself to its brethren in their need. For God is love, and he must dwell in love who dwells in God."[27]
We may hesitate to say that when the passion for God is the only thing aimed at it is bound to result in social regeneration; there are too many facts which prove the contrary. The aim must always include both the Godward and the manward obligations; the first and the second great commandments are of equal rank; what needs to be insisted on is the impossibility of divorcing them.
The church which seeks the redemption of society cannot, then, dispense with its religion. Nothing has been made plainer, during the recent exposures of social decay, than the fact that our social morality must have a religious foundation. Even the man on the street is ready to concede that no righteousness is adequate for the present emergency but that which springs from faith in a righteous God. And nothing is more needed, at this hour, than the deepening of men's faith in the great religious verities.
It is often said that the only cure for existing social ills is a great revival of religion, and this is true. But the revival of religion which is needed is not the kind which the churches are most apt to seek. The religion which needs to be revived is not that which puts the sole emphasis on the safety and welfare of the individual, but that which equally exalts the social welfare; which identifies the interests of each with the interests of all; which makes men see and feel that no salvation is worth anything to any man that does not put that man into Christian relations with his neighbors. Nothing but religion will do this for any man, and the religion which fails to do this is a spurious Christianity.
A great revival we shall see, one of these days, which will have this character. It will bind together the two great commandments of the law, and make men feel the weight of both of them. It will compel them to recognize the truth that, while the root of their religion is faith in God, the fruit of their religion is love for men. It will drive home the fact that the religion which does not hinder a man from being a boodler or a grafter; which permits a man to enjoy religion while fleecing his neighbors by crafty schemes of finance or artful legalized robberies; which allows the love of gain to triumph over truth and honor and brotherly kindness; which sits serene and complacent while social classes make war on each other, and children's lives are consumed by grinding toil, and women are forced by want into the ways of shame, and the enemies of society are set free to make gain by the ruin of human souls, is a religion which is not worth having. It will insist that a religion which is rightly described as the life of God in the souls of men, would begin in the house of God itself, and kindle there a consuming flame before which such iniquities could not stand. Perhaps it would set men to saying--they might not feel like singing--Thomas Hughes's great hymn:--
"O God of truth, whose living word Upholds whate'er hath breath, Look down on thy creation, Lord, Enslaved by sin and death.
"Set up thy standard, Lord, that we Who claim a heavenly birth May march with thee to smite the lies That vex thy groaning earth.
"_We_ fight for truth, _we_ fight for God, Poor slaves of lies and sin! He who would fight for thee on earth Must first be true within.
"Thou God of truth, for whom we long, Thou who wilt hear our prayer, Do thine own battle in our hearts, And slay the falsehood there.
"Still smite! still burn! till naught is left But God's own truth and love; Then, Lord, as morning dew come down, Rest on us from above.
"Yea, come! thus tried as in the fire, From every lie set free, Thy perfect truth shall dwell in us And we shall live in thee."
It is hardly needful to say that the redemption of the social order will not be wrought out without sacrifice. "The redemption of the soul is costly," says the Psalmist. No man is rescued from moral degradation and death without suffering and sacrifice. Those who are saved are more often saved by the suffering of others in their behalf than by their own suffering. But the price of a soul is apt to be high, and love is sometimes able to pay it.
The redemption of society from the welter of selfishness and brutishness and cruelty into which it is now plunged will be a costly undertaking. The church is here, as Christ's representative, to take up this work; and it must not expect to accomplish it without suffering. "It is enough for the disciple that he be as his Master, and the servant as his Lord." If the Church is Christ's servant, she must not expect to find any better way than his way of saving the world.
It is true, as we have seen, that the present deplorable conditions are due to the failure of the church to enforce the Christian morality. The price that she must pay for the redemption of society is heavy because of her own neglect. But it must be paid. There is no other way of salvation.
Thus it appears that the church which bears the name of Jesus Christ has come to its testing time. It finds itself in the midst of a society whose tendencies are downward. Mammon is on the throne; the greed of gain is eating the heart out of commercial honor; reputations are crumbling; confidence is rudely shaken; the most cynical schemes for plundering the multitudes are daily brought to light; social classes stand over against each other distrustful and defiant; the house of mirth resounds with the mad revelry of the wasters, while the purlieus are noisome with poverty and vice.
Can this society be redeemed? Can this all-ruling commercialism be held in check, and this reign of plunder be overthrown, and all this seething selfishness and heartlessness and suspicion be made to give place to good-will and kindness, to trust and truth, to faith and honor? It will never be done without a vast expenditure of sacrificial love. "This kind goeth not forth but by prayer and fasting." Is the church ready for this struggle? Is she willing to put forth the effort and pay the cost which is required for the redemption of society?
VIII
The New Evangelism
Those who have followed these discussions from the beginning will not be inclined to hesitate in answering the question with which the last chapter closed. That society can be redeemed, and that the church can and will purge herself from the things that defile her beauty and corrupt her powers, and gird herself for the redemptive work assigned her, is the faith of every loyal Christian. The grievous failures of the church we cannot deny and must not palliate; it is of the utmost importance that she be brought face to face with them, and be made to see how far short she has come of her high calling. Such criticism she has received from the beginning. The seven churches of Asia were sharply called to account by the beloved disciple; their faithlessness and neglect were unflinchingly brought home to them. The churches at Ephesus and Sardis and Laodicea had as hard things said about them as have been said in these chapters of the churches of this generation, and probably deserved them no less. We cannot doubt that that clear-eyed witness, if he were confronting the church of the twentieth century, would be constrained to say: "I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead.... Because thou sayest, I am rich and increased in goods and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art the wretched one, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked: I counsel thee to buy of me gold refined by fire, that thou mayest become rich; and white garments, that thou mayest clothe thyself, and that the shame of thy nakedness be not made manifest; and eye-salve to anoint thine eyes, that thou mayest see. As many as I love, I reprove and chasten; be zealous therefore, and repent." In every generation such chastisement has been needed; the need is no greater to-day than in past generations, and the chastening love no less. What Lowell says of this country, many a Christian believer has been constrained to say of the church:--
"I loved her old renown, her stainless fame; What better proof than that I loathed her shame."
But this keen sense of her shortcomings is not inconsistent with an unfaltering faith in the recovery of her integrity and in her final triumph. And those who have read the history of the Christian church with sympathetic vision can hardly doubt that her brightest days are still before her.
For while it must be admitted that she has neglected, hitherto, her great work of social redemption, it cannot be said that she is more neglectful of it now than she has been in past years; the truth is that she is nearer to the recognition of it to-day than she has ever been. Derelict as she is to her primary obligation, it must yet be said that a consciousness of that dereliction is beginning to make her uneasy, and that has never before been true of any large portion of her membership. Since the earliest centuries the possibility of transforming the social order by purely spiritual influences has scarcely dawned upon her. So long as society was feudalistic or aristocratic, the problem seemed to be beyond her reach; she might hope to improve society, by inculcating kindness and charity, but hardly to reconstruct it upon new foundations.
The advent of democracy has brought home to her her social responsibilities. Here in America, more than anywhere else, the nature of her social obligation has been revealed. Here the fact cannot be disguised that the people are the sovereigns, and that social as well as political relations are under their direct control. The sovereign people have pledged themselves one to another, in their constitution, to refrain from establishing, by law, any form of religion; but they have also covenanted together to promote the common welfare. This puts the responsibility for social conditions upon the whole people, and the Christian people are among them. They cannot avoid the obligation to apply Christian principles to social conditions. Power is theirs to be used in Christ's name and for the promotion of his kingdom. To see that society is furnished with right ruling ideas, and organized on Christian principles, is their main business. And while there are many by whom this obligation is still but feebly felt, yet there is a goodly number of those in whose minds the leaven is working, and to whom the nature of the kingdom that Jesus came to establish is being clearly revealed. That this number is destined to grow very rapidly we may reasonably hope.
The present situation is so clearly outlined by a recent writer that we may welcome a liberal quotation:--
"The first apostolate of Christianity was born from a deep fellow-feeling for social misery, and from the consciousness of a great historical opportunity. Jesus saw the peasantry of Galilee following him about with their poverty and their diseases, like shepherdless sheep that have been scattered and harried by beasts of prey, and his heart had compassion on them. He felt that the harvest was ripe but there were few to reap it. Past history had come to its culmination, but there were few who understood the situation and were prepared to cope with it. He bade his disciples to pray for laborers for the harvest, and then made them answer their own prayers by sending them out two by two to proclaim the kingdom of God. That was the beginning of the world-wide mission of Christianity.
"The situation is repeated on a vaster scale to-day. If Jesus stood to-day amid our modern life, with that outlook on the condition of all humanity which observation and travel and the press would spread before him, and with the same heart of humanity beating in him, he would create a new apostolate to meet the new needs in a new harvest time of history.
"To any one who knows the sluggishness of humanity to good, the impregnable intrenchments of vested wrongs, and the long reaches of time needed from one milestone of progress to the next, the task of setting up a Christian social order in this modern world of ours seems like a fair and futile dream. Yet, in fact, it is not one tithe as hopeless as when Jesus set out to do it. When he told his disciples, 'Ye are the salt of the earth; ye are the light of the world,' he expressed the consciousness of a great historic mission to the whole of humanity. Yet it was a Nazarene carpenter speaking to a group of Nazarene peasants and fishermen. Under the circumstances at that time it was an utterance of the most daring faith,--faith in himself, faith in them, faith in what he was putting into them, faith in faith. Jesus failed and was crucified, first his body by his enemies and then his spirit by his friends; but that failure was such an amazing success that to-day it takes an effort on our part to realize that it required any faith on his part to inaugurate the kingdom of God and to send out his apostolate.
"To-day, as Jesus looks out upon humanity, his spirit must leap to see the souls responsive to his call. They are sown broadcast through humanity, legions of them. The harvest field is no longer deserted. All about us we hear the clang of the whetstone and the rush of the blades through the grain and the shout of the reapers. With all our faults and our slothfulness, we modern men in many ways are more on a level with the mind of Jesus than any generation that has gone before. If that first apostolate was able to remove mountains by faith, such an apostolate as Christ could now summon might change the face of the earth."[28]
The time is ripe for such an apostolate. The old type of evangelism has plainly had its day. Strenuous efforts are put forth to revive it, but their success is meagre. It is easy by expending much money in advertising, by organizing a great choir, and employing the services of gifted and earnest men, to draw large congregations; but the great mass of those who attend these services are church members,--the outside multitude is scarcely, touched by them. Those who are gathered into the church in these meetings are mainly children from the Sunday schools. There may be evangelists who, by an extravagant and grotesque sensationalism, contrive to get the attention of the non-churchgoers, and who are able to report considerable additions to the churches; but the permanence of these gains is not yet shown, and we have no means of enumerating the thousands who, by such clownish exhibitions, are driven in disgust from the churches.
The failure of the modern evangelism is not conjectural: the year-books show it. The growth of membership in several of our leading denominations has either ceased or is greatly retarded; the Sunday schools and the young people's societies report decreasing numbers; the benevolent contributions are either waning, or increasing at a rate far less than that of the growth of wealth in the membership. It is idle to blink these conditions; we must face them and find out what they mean. This slackening and shrinkage is not a fact of long standing; it represents only the tendencies of the past twenty years.
We hear rather frantic demands for a return to the old methods of evangelism, but that is a foolish cry:--
"The mill will never grind With the water that is past."
The old appeal, which fixed attention upon the interest of the individual, has lost its power. It is not possible to stir the average human being of this generation, as the average human being of fifty years ago was stirred, by pictures of the terrors of hell and the felicities of heaven. These conceptions have far less influence over human lives than once they had,--less, doubtless, than they ought to have; for there are realities under these symbols which we cannot afford to ignore. But the fundamental defect of that old appeal was the emphasis which it placed upon self-interest. "Look out for yourself!" was its constant admonition. "Think of the perils that threaten, of the blisses that invite! Do not risk the pain; do not miss the blessedness!" To-day this does not seem a wholly worthy motive. At any rate, it is below the highest. Men feel that the religion of Christ has a larger meaning than this. A presentation of the gospel which makes the welfare of the individual central does not grip the conscience and arouse the emotions as once it did. For the conception of human welfare as social rather than individual has become common; that "great fund of altruistic feeling," which, as Mr. Benjamin Kidd tells us, is the motive power of all our social reforms, is constantly stirring in human hearts; and although there are few whose lives are wholly ruled by this motive, there are fewer still who do not recognize it as the commanding motive; and a religious appeal which is based upon considerations essentially egoistic does not, therefore, awaken any large response in human hearts.
If the church wishes to regain her hold upon the people, she must learn to speak to the highest that is in them. A man's religion must consecrate his ideals. A religion which invites him to live on a lower plane than the highest on which his thought travels cannot win his respect. And therefore the new evangelism must learn to find its motive not in self-love, no matter how refined, but in the love that identifies the self with the neighbor. It must bring home to the individual the truth which he already dimly knows, that his personal redemption is bound up with the redemption of the society to which he belongs; that he cannot be saved except as he becomes a savior of others; nay, that the one central sin from which he needs to be saved is indifference to the welfare of others, and a willingness to prosper at their expense.
The time has come for the church to take an entirely new attitude in offering men the gospel. It has been too well content with pressing the personal advantages of religion, with trying to lure them into discipleship with baits addressed to their selfishness. It has been inventing attractions of all sorts,--fine buildings, sumptuous upholstery and decorations, artistic music, brilliant oratory; it has thought it possible to enlist men by pleasing their tastes and gratifying their sensibilities. So far has this gone that the average churchgoer consciously justifies his presence in church or his absence from it on the ground of pleasure. If it pleases him enough, he goes; if not, he reads the Sunday paper or goes out with his automobile. It is a simple question of enjoyment.
The response of those invited shows the nature of the invitation. It indicates that the church has been putting a great deal of emphasis on the attractions which it has to offer. We can hardly imagine such replies to be made by those who were invited to listen to the preaching of Jesus or his apostles. They did not suppose that it was a question of entertainment that they were considering. They knew that it was a summons to service and sacrifice. That, beyond all doubt, was the nature of the appeal of the church in those earliest centuries, when it was marching over Asia and Europe, conquering and to conquer. It was not baiting men with soft cushions and pictured windows, with coddlings and comfits; it was calling them to hardship and warfare, to ignominy and ostracism; the words of the Master to which it gave emphasis were not mere metaphors: "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me."
The call of the cross has never failed. The power of God and the wisdom of God are in it. And it is time for the church to take up this heroic note and sound it forth with new power. This is the new evangelism for which the world is waiting. It is not a call to be "carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease;" it is not an invitation to the sentimental soul to "sit and sing herself away to everlasting bliss;" it is the clarion of battle; it is the challenge to an enterprise which means struggle and suffering and self-denial.
The redemption of society is the objective of the new evangelism. How vast an undertaking this is was indicated in the last chapter. Let us look at it a little more in detail. How much does it signify, here and now, in the United States of America?