CHAPTER II.

THE OVERFLOW OF BROTHERHOOD

The Church of Jesus Christ should not be alarmed at the inundating progress of democracy. She, of all institutions, should not oppose it. It is her child. But even democracy, with its majestic vindication of the worth and dignity of the humblest and least-endowed human soul, is not so distinctively and gloriously the offspring of Christianity as is the principle of brotherhood. The movement towards brotherhood, the great master-passion of our day, is just the overflow of Christianity from the conventionally religious into the economic realm. One might rest the divine claim of Christianity on this irrepressible impulse to overflow.

The ancient heathen faiths, with a few possible exceptions, did not seek to overflow. They asked only a strictly delimited area, definite times, definite places, definite gifts, definite ceremonial, observances and regulations. Outside that circumscribed area, life might go on as it would.

Even some forms of Christianity have shown little disposition to overflow. There has long been and still is a type of Christianity which fixes its eye on heaven and abandons earth. It is indifferent and acquiescent in regard to the affairs of this life, with no surge of passion for their purification and ennoblement.

This attitude has found expression in a hymn of John Wesley's which was once sung in its entirety but which, where it still lingers in our present collections, survives in a repeatedly and severely abridged form.

How happy is the pilgrim's lot! How free from every anxious thought, From worldly hope and fear! Confined to neither court nor cell, His soul disdains on earth to dwell, He only sojourns here.

His happiness in part is mine, Already saved from self-design, From every creature-love; Blest with the scorn of finite good, My soul is lightened of its load, And seeks the things above.

The things eternal I pursue, A happiness beyond the view Of those that basely pant For things by nature felt and seen; Their honors, wealth and pleasures mean I neither have nor want.

I have no babes to hold me here, But children more securely near For mine I humbly claim; Better than daughters or than sons, Temples divine, of living stones Inscribed with Jesus' name.

No foot of land do I possess, No cottage in this wilderness, A poor, wayfaring man; I lodge awhile in tents below, Or gladly wander to and fro Till I my Canaan gain.

Nothing on earth I call my own: A stranger to the world unknown, I all their goods despise; I trample on their whole delight, And seek a country out of sight, A country in the skies.

There is my house and portion fair, My treasure and my heart are there, And my abiding home; For me the elder brethren stay, And angels beckon me away, And Jesus bids me come.

I come,--thy servant, Lord, replies-- I come to meet Thee in the skies, And claim my heavenly rest! Now let the pilgrims' journey end, Now, O my Saviour, Brother, Friend, Receive me to thy breast.

As expressed in this hymn and still more in that spiritual classic, the "_De Contemptu Mundi_" of Bernard of Cluny, such a piety is not without its pathos and beauty and lofty idealism, but it is not Christianity.

It is only the pale bloodless spectre of Christianity. Christianity is a torrent. It is a fire. It is a passion for brotherhood, a raging hatred of everything which denies or forbids brotherhood. It was a brotherhood at the first. Twisted, bent, repressed for nearly twice a thousand years, it will be a brotherhood at the last.

Does Christianity mean Socialism? It means infinitely more than Socialism. It means Socialism plus a deeper, diviner brotherhood than even Socialism seeks. It abhors inequality. It always has abhorred inequality. It seems almost inexplicable that the censors in these days of panicky attempts at suppression of incendiary ideas have not put under the ban such words as these:

"My soul doth magnify the Lord,

And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.

* * * * *

He hath showed strength with his arm:

He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their heart.

He hath put down princes from their thrones, and hath exalted them of low degree.

The hungry He hath filled with good things:

And the rich He hath sent empty away."--Luke 1:46-53.

or these:

"Let the brother of low degree rejoice in that he is exalted;

But the rich in that he is made low; because, as the flower of the grass he shall pass away.

For the sun is no sooner risen with a burning heat but it withereth the grass, and the flower thereof falleth, and the grace of the fashion of it perisheth: so also shall the rich man fade away in his ways."--James 1:9-ll.

"Nothing is hid," was the word of Jesus, "that shall not be made manifest, nor anything secret that shall not be known and come to light." Many things have been hidden in that extraordinary amalgam that we call historical Christianity. St. Paul hid in it his peculiar idiosyncratic contempt of marriage and lack of reverence for women, and these elements worked out in the millennial denial of woman's rights and the abnormalities and tragedies of asceticism. St. Paul, again, and the unknown authors of the letter to the Hebrews and the fourth Gospel hid in primitive Christianity the Greek passion for metaphysics, and there emerged that perverse exaltation of dogma and orthodoxy which has, more than any other thing, withered the heart of the Church, smothered its fresh spontaneous life, kindled the infernal fires of heresy-trials and autos-da-fe. But Jesus hid something in historic Christianity, too, something deeper, diviner, mightier than any foreign ingredients added by other hands. Those commingling elements the Christianity of Jesus probably had to take up, test, and eventually reject. The only way, perhaps, in which the real meaning of Christianity could be discovered by men was in contrast with the innumerable and heterogeneous adulterations of it. We come to truth, it has been profoundly said, by the exhaustion of error. Humanity cannot apparently be sure of the right road till it knows all the wrong roads as well. So it would certainly have seemed to be with historic Christianity.

But deepest and most vital of all the elements that have found their way into historic Christianity is what Christ hid there,--the equality of brotherhood. That hidden element, too, must find its way to the light. Early repressed, driven in, well nigh smothered, it has, nevertheless, never been extinguished, for it is the secret force, the most deeply vital essence of Christianity. As Bernard Shaw has said, it is not true that Christianity has been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and has never been tried. But in the profound words of Martineau, "In the history of systems an inexorable logic rids them of their halfness and hesitancies and drives them straight to their appointed goal." Not always by a straight road but by a sure one.

Nothing is more certain than that the human intellect must refuse eventually to acquiesce in that strange, illogical, and inconsistent jumble we call our Christian civilization. Something drives it irresistibly to consistency. The Christianity of Jesus means nothing if it does not mean brotherhood. Brotherhood means nothing if it does not mean a passion for equality. The story is told that when the Duke of Wellington, who, like so many other great soldiers of other times and of our own, was a devout man, was kneeling to receive the Communion in the village Church near his estate, a humble neighbour found himself, to his consternation, kneeling close beside the great Duke. He was rising at once to move away when the Duke put out his hand and detained him, saying, "We are all equal here." It was a fine spirit that the Duke showed for the time and in a country such as England was then. But it holds in it explosives of which probably the Duke did not dream. Equal at the table of their Common Lord! Then equal everywhere! Equality everywhere or equality nowhere! The soul of every man who has seen the divine beauty of equality must forever war against all limitations and impairments of it. Even human logic can not permanently tolerate such a fundamental incompatibility and irrationality as religious equality and social inequality sleeping in the same bed. Religious equality has already worked itself out in political equality. Even in aristocratic England the last vestige of political inequality has disappeared. The accepted formula is now--one man, one vote. It may be a harder problem to work out, but economic equality will be worked out to the same conclusion--one man, one share of all the conditions of human dignity and well being.

The keen satire of Charles Kingsley in _Alton Locke_ will not always be justified.

"Faix, an' ain't we all brothers?" asked Kelly.

"Ay, and no," said Sandy, with an expression which would have been a smile, but for its depths of bitter earnestness; "brethren in Christ, my laddie."

"An' ain't that all over the same?"

"Ask the preachers. Gin they meant brothers, they'd say brothers, be sure; but because they don't mean brothers at a', they say brethren--ye'll mind, brethren--to soun' antiquate, an' professional, an' perfunctory-like, for fear it should be ower real, an' practical, an' startling, an' a' that; and then jist limit it down wi' a 'in Christ,' for fear o' owre wide applications, and a' that. But

For a' that, and a' that, It's comin' yet, for a' that, When man an' man, the warld owre, Shall brothers be, for a' that--

An' na brithren any mair at a'!"

Social inequality between human beings can never be a permanent relation. Ordinarily between normal human beings it is a hateful and demoralizing relation. It is twice cursed. It curses him who is down and him who is up.

It powerfully tends to make the one who is down and knows he is down, subservient, a truckler, a fawner. If a man is wise enough and strong enough to withstand the influence, the probability is that the very effort at resistance, unless he is very wise and very strong, will develop an unlovely and ungracious spirit of defiance, sometimes of hostility. In any case, human nature generally sours under it.

It is, perhaps, even worse in its effects on the one who is up. At the best he becomes condescending, affable, gracious, patronizing--intolerable attitudes every one. At the worst he becomes arrogant and insolent. Always he tends to become suspicious and cynical. He learns to distrust the forced respectfulness and obligingness everywhere shown to himself, and so comes to distrust courtesy and good-will in general.

H. G. Wells in his _The Future in America_ inserts a picture of "one of the most impressive of these very rich Americans." "My friend beheld him, gross and heavy, seated in an easy chair in the centre of his private car, among men who stared and came and went. He clutched a long cigar with a great clumsy hand. He turned on you a queer, coarse, disconcerting bottle nose with a little hard, blue, wary, hostile eye that watched out from the roots of it. He said nothing. He attempted no civility, he looked pride and insults--you ceased to respect yourself.... 'It was Roman,' my friend said. 'There has been nothing like it since the days of that republic. No living king would dare to do it. And these other Americans! These people walked up to him and talked to him--they tried to flatter him and get him to listen to projects. Abjectly. And you knew, he _grunted_. He didn't talk back. It was beneath him. He just grunted at them!"

Just as clear as the incompatibility of Christianity with social inequality is its incompatibility with business competition.

Competition for a livelihood, competition for bread and butter, is the denial of brotherhood. It is the antithesis of the Golden Rule. It is not the doing unto other men as we would that they should do to us. It is obedience to David Harum's parody of the Golden Rule, "Do unto the other fellow as he wants to do to you, and do it fust." The essential condition of competition is that always there shall be at least two men after the one contract, two men after the one job, two men after the custom, the patronage, the _clientele_ only sufficient for one. As a consequence, wherever competition exists, the success of one man always involves the failure of another. The man who gets the position knows that another man is suffering. The merchant who captures the trade knows that another must fail. The rule for success, as given by a highly successful business man of America, was, "So conduct your business that your competitor will have to shut up shop." The method is essentially disorderly and wasteful. Worse than that, it is inhuman.

It is difficult, indeed, to imagine how a more inhuman method of business could be devised short of methods which no man who had not ceased to be human would tolerate. Inhuman and dehumanizing. How deeply dehumanizing is seen in the effort of Christian men to justify it--the supreme illustration in our day of the morally blinding power of the accustomed, the familiar, and, above all, the profitable, which has made Christian men defenders of competition, of war, of the drink traffic, of the opium traffic, and of slavery.

Business competition to-day is, conceivably, as great an evil as ever intemperance was. Its working is more subtle, more wide-spread, more deeply destructive.

It hardens men. It dries up their natural and almost inextinguishable kindliness. It demoralizes them. It almost compels them to resort to crooked methods. It subjects them to temptations sometimes virtually irresistible. It presents them with the alternatives of failure and starvation for themselves and their loved ones or the doing of something, not right indeed, but which plenty of others do and which seems imperative. The honorable man has to compete with the dishonorable. The Hydrostatic Paradox of controversy, the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table has told us, lies in this, that as water in two connected tubes, however different their calibre, stands at the same level in both, so if a wise man and a fool engage in controversy, they tend to equality. The more demoralizing Hydrostatic Paradox of business competition is its deadly tendency to bring the honorable man down to the level of the dishonorable.

It is not always demoralizing. There are men strong enough to maintain their integrity, even sometimes at great risk. But the strain of it, the feverishness of it, the narrowing influences of it, still fewer men escape.

Under the shade and fallen needles of the pine forest, no other vegetation can grow. Under the absorption, the exhaustion, of the fierce business competition of America, little else than business shrewdness, business insight, business knowledge can grow. A thousand seeds of culture, art, music, philanthrophy, religion, human fellowship, home happiness die permanently or fail to germinate at all in the American business man. The struggle, like a remorseless machine, seizes him as a young man and works its way with him till it flings him off at the other end of the process, a failure with a dreary old age of dependence and uncertainty, or a successful man broken in health at fifty, to spend the rest of his days in search of health, or with the leisure and the means to develop the old tastes but the tastes themselves atrophied by long and enforced neglect.

In the name of the brotherhood of Christianity, in the name of the richness and variety of the human soul, the Church must declare a truceless war upon this sterilizing and dehumanizing competition and upon the source of it, an economic order based on profit-seeking.

With profits not merely as an inducement but as the absolutely essential condition, the _sine qua non_ not merely of success but of a livelihood, competition, even desperate competition, is inevitable. There is not usually the direct personal clash, the bloody or deadly combat, though these may be, but it is a life and death struggle none the less. In business competition, men are fighting with halters around their necks. They are fighting as wolves fight who know that the beaten one will be devoured by the pack.

How unfair and how futile under such conditions to heap reproaches upon the men who make what are called excessive profits! The risks are great. Should not a man make provision for them when he can? When, too, a man is immersed from boyhood in an atmosphere of profit-seeking, when in the talk around the meal-table and the conversation of his father with other men he gathers that profits are the measure of success, when in business he finds the whole energy and ingenuity and influence of men concentrated on profits, and men largely estimated by the amount of their profits, what capacity will be left after twenty years of such a life to distinguish between legitimate and excessive profits?

A profit-seeking system will always breed profiteers. It cannot be cleansed or sweetened or ennobled. There is only one way to Christianize it, and that is, to abolish it. That is, it may well be believed, the distinctive task of the age that is now beginning, as the abolition of the liquor-traffic was of the age that is closing, and the abolition of slavery of a still earlier age.

This whole present industrial and commercial world, ingenious, mighty, majestic, barbaric, disorderly, brutal, must be lifted from its basis of selfish, competitive profit-seeking and placed squarely on a basis of co-operative production for human needs.

How this tremendous transformation will be eventually accomplished, probably no one of this generation can foresee. All we can see is some initial steps.

A hint, it may be, is given in the well-recognized tendency of competing industries to escape competition by specialization. Thus they become co-operative. The same tendency to co-operative specialization is at work among professional men. Medical men specialize ever more narrowly. Lawyers elect to become authorities in a very narrow field.

Another principle of transformation may be found in the union of competing businesses under government regulation as to prices. Such combinations, while often disadvantageous to the public unless governmentally regulated, at least attest the increasing recoil from competition.

The main line of development, however, it seems altogether probable, will be the extension of public ownership, municipal, state or provincial, and national.

There is no diviner movement at work in the modern world. It is emancipating, educative, redemptive, regenerating. "Whatever says _I_ and _mine_," says one of the wisest and most Christ-like of Medieval Mystics, "is Anti-Christ." The converse is equally true. "Whatever says _we_ and _ours_ is Christian." Public ownership, more extensively and powerfully than any other human agency, teaches men to say we and ours. It teaches them to think socially.

To discredit and attack the principle of public ownership is to discredit and attack Christianity. It would seem to be the special sin against the Holy Ghost of our age. He who doubts the practicability of public ownership is really doubting human nature and Christianity and God.

What we are facing to-day is the issue between learning to do things together and a struggle between competing individuals, competing classes, and competing nations, so frantic and ferocious that in it our civilization may go down.

In these two chapters there has been the effort to set forth two at least of the dominating principles of the new social order. They are both embodied in a significant report adopted by the General Conference of the Methodist Church of Canada, October, 1918, in the city of Hamilton, Ontario. This report presented by a Committee on the Church in Relation to War and Patriotism was adopted, after a long and deeply earnest debate, in a reduced but still large Conference, with but four dissentient votes. It has awakened unusual interest as perhaps the boldest and most outspoken deliverance on the social question which any great Christian body up to that time had made.

REPORT NO. 3

II. CHURCH LEADERSHIP IN THE NATION

"Your Committee has had its attention directed to the work of the Church in the problems of reconstruction by some pregnant passages in the address of the General Superintendent, and by a Memorial from the Alberta Conference.

"Even before the war it was widely foreseen that great social changes were imminent in the western world. This gigantic convulsion has precipitated the nations into the melting pot. Such an era summons the prophetic gifts of the Church, first, to the task of interpretation--to discern amid the turmoil and confusion the hand of God, and secondly, to the task of inspiration--to breathe into the hearts of men the faith, the courage, the patience, the brotherliness, by which alone the happy harbor can be won. And no Church is under a deeper obligation to assist in this two-fold task than our own. Methodism was born in a revolt against sin and social extravagancies and corruption. It was content with no aim lower than 'to spread scriptural holiness through the land.' Insisting on personal regeneration and all the implications therein, it transformed the face of England and saved that land from the excesses of a French revolution. To it the ideal of the Christian life was simply love made perfect. Without seeking at this time to commit the Church to a definite programme of economic policy, we would present for the consideration of our people the following statement which reflects our point of view:

"1. The present economic system stands revealed as one of the roots of the war. The insane pride of Germany, her passion for world-domination found an occasion in the demand for colonies as markets and sources of raw materials--the imperative need of competing groups of industries carried on for profits.

"2. The war has made more clearly manifest the moral perils inherent in the system of production for profits. Condemnation of special individuals seems often unjust and always futile. The system, rather than the individual, calls for change.

"3. The war is the coronation of democracy. No profounder interpretation of the issue has been made than the great phrase of President Wilson's, that the Allies are fighting to 'make the world safe for democracy.' It is clearly impossible for the champions of democracy to set limits to its recognition. The last century democratized politics; the twentieth century has found that political democracy means little without economic democracy. The democratic control of industry is just and inevitable.

"4. Under the shock and strain of this tremendous struggle, accepted commercial and industrial methods based on individualism and competition have gone down like mud walls in a flood. National organization, national control, extraordinary approximations to national equality, have been found essential to efficiency.

"Despite the derangements and the sorrow of the war, the Motherland has raised large masses of her people from the edge of starvation to a higher plane of physical well-being and, in consequence, was never so healthy, never so brotherly, nor ever actuated by so high a purpose, or possessed by such exaltation of spirit as to-day--and the secret is that all are fighting or working, and all are sacrificing.

"It is not conceivable that, when Germany ceases to be a menace, these dearly bought discoveries will be forgotten. Relapse would mean recurrence, the renewal of the agony.

"The conclusion seems irresistible. The war is a sterner teacher than Jesus and uses far other methods, but it teaches the same lesson. The social development which it has so unexpectedly accelerated has the same goal as Christianity. That common goal is a nation of comrade workers, such as now at the trenches fights so gloriously--a nation of comrade fighters.

"With the earthquake shocks of the war thundering so tremendous a re-affirmation to the principles of Jesus, it would be the most inexcusable dereliction of duty on the part of the Church not to re-state her programme in modern terms and re-define her divinely-appointed goal.

"The triumph of democracy, the demand of the educated workers for human conditions of life, the deep condemnation this war has passed on the competitive struggle, the revelation of the superior efficiency of national organization and co-operation, combine with the unfulfilled, the often forgotten, but the undying ethics of Jesus, to demand nothing less than a transference of the whole economic life from a basis of competition and profits to one of co-operation and service.

"We recognize the magnificent effort of many great employers to make their industrial organization a means of uplift and betterment to all who participate, but the human spirit instinctively resents even the most benevolent forms of government while self-government is denied. The noblest humanitarian aims of employers, too, are often thwarted by the very conditions under which their business must be carried on.

"That another system is practicable is shown by the recent statement of the British Prime Minister, that every industry save one in Britain has been made to serve the national interest by the elimination of the incentive of private profit. That the present organization, based on production and service for profits, can be superseded by a system of production and service for human needs, is no longer a dream.

"We, therefore, look to our national government--and the factor is a vital one--to enlist in the service of the nation those great leaders and corporations which have shown magnificent capacity in the organizing of life and resources for the profit of shareholders. Surely the same capacity can find nobler and more deeply satisfying activity in the service of the whole people rather than in the service of any particular group.

"The British Government Commission has outlined a policy which, while accepting as a present fact the separation of capital and labor, definitely denies the right of sole control to the former and, insisting on the full organization of workers and employers, vests the government of every industry in a joint board of employers and workers, which board shall determine the working conditions of that industry.

"This policy has been officially adopted by the British Government, and nothing less can be regarded as tolerable even now in Canada.

"But we do not believe this separation of labor and capital can be permanent. Its transcendence, whether through co-operation or public ownership, seems to be the only constructive and radical reform.

"This is the policy set forth by the great Labor organizations and must not be rejected because it presupposes, as Jesus did, that the normal human spirit will respond more readily to the call to service than to the lure of private gain.

"The acceptance of this report, it cannot be too clearly recognized, commits this Church, as far as this representative body can commit it, to nothing less than a complete social reconstruction. When it shall be fully accomplished, and through what measures and processes, depend on the thinking and the good-will of men and, above all, on the guiding hand of God. But we think it is clear that nothing less than the goal we have outlined will satisfy the aroused moral consciousness of Canada or retain for the Churches any leadership in the testing period that is upon them. And in such an heroic task as this, our citizen armies will find it possible to preserve, under the conditions of peace, the high idealism with which they have fought for democracy in France.

"Recognizing the greatness and complexity of the task before the Christian people of Canada, and the imperative necessity of united action by the Churches, we recommend that the suggestion of the memorial from the Alberta Conference be adopted, and that this General Conference invite the other Churches of Canada to a National Convention for the consideration of the problems of reconstruction.

"Further, in order that our Church may give the most intelligent support to the movement, we recommend that our Ministers and people should acquaint themselves with such important documents as the Report of the United States Commission on Industrial Relations, the Inter-Allied Labor Party's Memorandum on War Aims, the British Labor Party's Programme of the new social order, and the British Governmental Commission Reports on Industrial Relations.

"Your Committee outlines this programme in the profound conviction that it can be carried out only by men quickened and inspired by the spirit of Christ, and that for that Divine Spirit, working in the hearts of men, nothing that is good is too high or too hard."