Chapter 7
A congregation is a mysterious and subtle social force. Its effect on a minister he can neither analyze nor explain. But he knows that its power is mesmeric and cannot be escaped. He goes into its presence from an hour of exalted and uplifted prayer, serene, happy, strong, and prepared to speak words of power and life. Gazing at his people--he can never tell why--the words freeze on his lips. An icy hand seems laid upon his heart, and he makes a cold and formal presentation of his glowing theme, and wonders who or what has done it all. Something satanic and repelling has laid hold of his tongue and brain.
Or again, he may have had a worried and troubled week, full of personal anxiety and sorrow. He has not had full time to study--he feels quite unprepared, and enters the pulpit with a halting step, and a choking fear of failure at his heart.
In a moment, the world changes. Something imperceptible, but sweet and comforting, steals over him,--an uplifting atmosphere of attention, sympathy, affection. He begins to speak, very quietly at first, with quite an effort. But the congregation leads him on, to deeper thoughts, to nobler words, to modulations of voice that carry him quite beyond himself. His voice rises, and every syllable is firm and musical. His language springs from some far centre of inspiration. He is conscious of superb power, and as sentence after sentence falls from his lips----sentences that amaze himself more than any other----he enters into the supreme height of joy, that of being a spiritual messenger to the hearts of longing men and women. He and they together talk of God.
This sympathetic atmosphere makes great preachers and great men. In return, there flows from a pastor toward his people a love that few can know or understand.
2. His rule is also over spiritual enthusiasm. What is a revival? We confound it with a local excitement, a community-sensation of an hysterical and passing type--with sensational disturbances, falling exercises, shouts, weeping, and the like. A revival is something far different. A revival is an awakening of the community heart and mind. It is a quickening of dead, backsliding, or inattentive souls.
Man as an individual is quite a different person from the same man in a crowd. One is himself alone; the other is himself, plus the influence of the Social Mind. A revival is a social state, in which the social religious enthusiasm is stirred up. It is a lofty form of religion, just as the patriotism which breaks forth in tears and cheers as troops go out to war is a finer type than the mere excitement and fervor of one patriotic man. What would the Queen's Jubilee have been, if but one soldier had marched up and down? A great commemoration! If we grant the reality of national rejoicing in the royal jubilees, commercial rejoicing in business men's processions, university enthusiasm on Commencement Day--shall we not grant the reality of the religious interest and enthusiasm of a great revival, in which whole communities shall be led to a clearer knowledge of spiritual things?
The Crusades were a magnificent revival. The Reformation was a revival. The Salvation Army movement is a revival. But the greatest revival of all times is even now upon us: it is a revival in the scientific circles of the race. Time was when science and religion were supposed to be at odds; to-day the intellectual phalanxes are sweeping Christward with an impetus that is sublime! Thinkers are finding in the large life of religion a motive power for their thought, their growth--a reason for their existence--a forecast of their destiny. We are beginning to realize the dynamic value of Belief. This revival is coming, not with shouts and noise, but with the quiet insistence of new ideas, of new facts--with the still voice of scientific announcement. The atheist is being overcome, not by emotion, but by evidence; the scoffer is being put down by cool logic.
Hence the evangelist of to-day is more than a man who can popularly address a public audience, and by tales and tears arouse a weeping commotion. The evangelist is a man of intellect and prayer, who can preach the gospel to a scientific age, and to a thinking coterie--a coterie of college men and mechanics, of society women and servant-girls, of poets and of mine-diggers, of convicts and of reformers. To-day calls for the utmost intellectual resources of the teacher of the truth, for a great imagination, great style, great sympathy with men, large learning, and unceasing prayer!
3. His rule is over social ideals. He must be a man of social insight. The social spirit is abroad in the world, but it is woefully erratic and misguided. Any one thinks he can be an altruist. Why not? Take a class in a college settlement, make some bibs for a day nursery, give tramps a C.O.S. card, with one's compliments, and attend about six lectures a year on Philanthropy--the lectures very good indeed. One is then a full-fledged altruist, _n'est-ce pas_?
The philanthropy of to-day has a bewildering iridescence of aspect. Each present impulse is reformatory. Correction, like a centipede, shows a hundred legs and wants to run upon them all. Much of the so-called philanthropy is not well balanced and is run by cranks. Cranks attach themselves to any social movement, as a shaggy gown will gather burrs. It is not all of philanthropy to classify degenerates, titter at ignorance, and to go a-peeping through the slums! We have not yet realized the fulness of redemption. Of what avail is it to save one street-Arab, or one Chinaman, if a million Arabs and Chinamen remain unsaved? Redemption is a race-savior: it seizes not only the individual, but his environment, his friends, and his future state.
The true minister is a reformer. A reformer is one who re-crystallizes the social ideals of man, who breaks up idols and bad customs, and sweeps away abuses. But we must first ask: What is an idol? What is a bad custom? What is an abuse? They are social standards which are out of harmony with true concepts of God, life, and duty. Behind the work of the reformer is the dream of the reformer, the meditation of the mystic, the seer. He must first have in mind a plain, clear conception of what the relation is of man to God, of what man's environment should be, and of what the society of the Kingdom should be. The reformer is one who changes an existing social environment for approximately this ideal environment of his own thought. When he breaks an idol, it is not the idol itself that he everlastingly hates, it is the materialistic concept of the community. What he wishes in place of the idol is a right conception. No man could break up every idol in the Sandwich Islands. But a man went about implanting a spiritual idea of God, and the idols disappeared.
Hence the work of the reformer is deep and heart-searching work. It means constant study of the spiritual needs of the age, continual insight into the material forces which are moulding the age-images, money, conquest, or whatever they may be. He wishes to maintain a spiritual hold on civilization itself, so to transform the ideal within a man, a community, a nation, in regard to custom, observance, belief, that the outer rite shall follow.
To reform is not to rush through the slums, and then preach a sensational sermon about bad places in the slums, of which most people never knew before! To reform is to know something of the conditions which produce the slums--it is not to scatter the slum-people broadcast elsewhere in the town; it is not alone to give them baths, playgrounds, circulating libraries of books and pictures, dancing-parties, and social clubs. To reform the slums is to set up a new ideal of God, and of righteous conduct in the heart of the slum-dwellers. One must know something of the slow processes of social change, of social assimilation, growth, and stability, to have an intellectual perception of the problem, as well as a spiritual one. One does not make an ill-fed child strong by stuffing five pounds of oatmeal down its throat!
The reformer must not only be a man of energy, he must be a man of patience. Great reforms come slowly. As man has advanced, idleness, indolence, brutality, tyranny, drunkenness, cant, and social scorn are gradually being cast out. But behind these simple words lie hid centuries of strife and endeavor, and limitless darkenings of human hope.
To fly against vice is merely to invite enmity and opposition. To present a pure and noble ideal, to breathe forth a holy atmosphere for the soul, are constructive works. The trouble is not, that the ministers preach on social themes--all themes that concern the life of man are social themes. It is that they do piece-work and patch-work of reform, instead of plain, direct upbuilding work in the souls and consciences of men. To preach upon horse-stealing is one thing. The horse-stealer may be impressed, convicted, made penitent, and return the stolen horse. But not until his heart is imbued with a spiritual conception of honesty, as the law of God, will he steal a stray horse no more. Hence the first questions in reform are not: How many groggeries are there in my parish? How many corrupt polls? How many hypocrites on my church-roll? The question is: How is my parish society in enmity to the highest spiritual ideal I know? Many men preach about saloons, when they ought to be preaching about Christ.
The force of this reform-energy is uncomputed. We hear of occasional great reformers, but forget that there has been a prevailing influence extending over the ages, of holy men of God, who have preached and taught and prayed; who have preserved our social institutions of spiritual import, and have been a mighty and continuous force working for righteousness and peace.
Missions are a higher form of politics. To further missions is to further government, international comity, world-peace.
4. His rule is over creed. He is inevitably a teacher of doctrine.
What is doctrine? Doctrine is spiritual truth, formulated in a systematic way. It is also, in church matters, a system of truth which has been believed in, and clung to, by a body of believers constituting some branch of the catholic Church.
It is a noble and serious office to hand down from generation to generation the faith and traditions of the Church of God. But this handing-down must be upright. "You must bind nothing upon your charges," says Jeremy Taylor, "but what God hath bound upon you." Conviction is at the root of the lasting traditions of the Church. Only this--his conviction--can one man really teach another. If he try to speak otherwise, he shall have a lolling and unsteady tongue.
No soul is finally held by the indefinite, or the namby-pamby. It begins to question, Upon what foundation does this phrase, this fine sentiment, rest? It must stand upon a proposition. This proposition rests either upon a scientific fact, or upon that which, for want of a more definite term, we call the religious instinct of man. But a proposition cannot standalone. It is connected with other propositions, arguments, conclusions. Hence a system of logic, of philosophy, of expressed belief, of doctrine, inevitably grows up in a thinking community, a thinking Church.
The statement of an ecclesiastical system of doctrine may not be the absolutely true one, nor the final one. Doctrine changes, even as scientific theories change with fuller information. Doctrine also expands, with the growth of the human spirit and understanding. To-day, in one's library, one has a thousand books. They are shelved and catalogued, for reference, in a special order. But years hence, one's grandson, who inherits these books, may have ten thousand books. The aspect of the library is changed. It is filled with new volumes, and new thought. Shall we give a liberty to a man's library which we refuse to his belief? Must he--and his church--have only his grandfather's ideas, standards, and decrees?
The tenets of a sect are the theological arrangement of belief which for the present seems best; it is the systematic arrangement of facts so far examined, determined, and classified. But no system of theology can be final. Thought is moving on. Experience is progressive. Providence is continually revealing. The race is a creed-builder, as well as a builder of pyramids, cathedrals, and triumphal arches.
The building-up of doctrine is superb. Into doctrine are woven the intellectual beliefs, the emotional experiences, and the spiritual struggles of mankind. Doctrine is an attempt to classify the spiritual problems of the race and to present a theory of redemption which shall be adequate, spiritually progressive, and the exact expression, so far as yet revealed, of the will of God for man. All Christian doctrine is centred about one point: the redemption of the race from sin. Dealing with such great and fundamental themes, each system of doctrine is an intellectual triumph.
Doctrine is an intellectual necessity. Christ is not sporadic, either in history or philosophy. To teach Christ, as the unlettered savage may who has just learned of Christ the Saviour and turns to teach his fellow-savages, might do good or save a soul from death. But in order to command the intellectual respect of the race, there must be another form of teaching yet than this, a teaching which presents Christ in the historic and philosophic setting: the central Figure in a great body of associated spiritual truth; Christ as the fulfilment of prophecy, the means of social adjustment and regeneration; the Finisher of our Faith, and the Source of eternal joy. We must be, not less spiritual Christians, but increasingly intellectual ones, as time rolls on.
Who are the men who have built up doctrine? Men speak as if doctrine were an ecclesiastical toy--to be shaken by priest or prelate, as one shakes a rattle, for noise, for play! A doctrine is not a toy; it is the crystallized belief of earnest, thoughtful, and godly men--belief which has passed into a church tradition, and is now received as an act of faith.
Shall doctrine be taught a child? Yes! To have a specific doctrine clearly in mind does not fetter the young soul, any more than to be taught the apparent facts of geography and history, which may change either in reality or in his own interpretation as his mind matures. A doctrine is a practical and definite thing to work with; in later life to believe, and to approve of, or disbelieve, and disapprove of. If a man wishes to build a house, does it fetter him to know square measure, cubic contents, geometry, mensuration, and mechanical laws? Yet when he builds his house, he builds it in his own individual way; he stamps it with his own personality and ideas. While building it, perchance, he discovers some new relation or geometric law.
Doctrine does not save from hell, but it does save from many a snare that besets the feet of man. It is a steadier of life, a strengthener of hope, a stalwart aid to a practical, devout, and duty-doing life. A catechism is a system of doctrine expressed in its simplest form. Therefore, for the intellectual and moral training of the Church, let us have sound doctrine in the pulpit, and the catechism in the home and Sabbath-school.
It is objected that doctrinal terminology is too hard for a child to understand. Is this not absurd, when the same child can come home from school and talk glibly of a parallelepipedon, a rhombus, rhomboid, polyhedral angle, archipelago, law of primogeniture, the binomial theorem, and of a dicotyledon! He also learns French, German, Latin, Greek, and the _argot_ of the public school!
The theological leader of to-day cannot be a creed-monger: he must be a creed-maker. Side by side with the executive officers who will reorganize the Christian forces, there will stand great creed-makers, giant theologians, firm, logical, scientific, and convincing, who, out of the vast array of new facts brought forth by modern science, will produce new creeds, a new catechism, a new dogmatic series. It is worth while to live in these days--to know the possibility of such monumental constructive work in one's own lifetime. The creed-makers must have a thorough literary training; no mere vocabulary of philosophy will answer. Like the Elizabethan divines, they must rule the living word, which shall echo for a century yet to come.
As the great Ecumenical Council was convened for missionary progress, so the times are now ripe for the assembling of a historic Theological Council, to revise and restate, not one denominational catechism, but the creed of Christendom; to provide a new literary expression of the Christian faith. Together we are working in God's world, and for His kingdom.
If doctrine be the crystallized thought and belief of godly men, what is heresy? What is schism? Who is dictator of doctrine? How far are the limits of authority to be pressed? What are the bounds of ecclesiastical control? of intellectual mandate in the Christian Church?
In the academic world, we do not cast a man out of his mathematical chair because he can also work in astro-physics or in psycho-physics. If he can pursue advanced research in an allied or applied field, it will help him in his regular and prescribed work. We do not cast an English professor out of his chair, because he announces that there are two manuscripts of Layamon's _Brut_, and that the text of Beówulf has been many times worked over, before we have received it in its present form. Yet there are accredited professors of English who do not know these facts, and who, if called upon, could neither prove them nor disprove them. They have not worked in the Bodleian, in the British Museum, or in other foreign libraries, on Old English texts and authorities. They think themselves well up in Old English if they can translate the text of Beówulf fairly well, remember its most difficult vocabulary, and can tell a tale or two from the _Brut_.
Not every man has Europe or Asia in his backyard, nor a lifetime of leisure for research, for special learning, on the moot questions of church-scholarship. Progress consists in each man's doing his best to advance the interests of the kingdom of God in his own special sphere. From others he must take something for granted. The ear of the Church ought always to be open to the sayings of the specialist. A Church should grant liberty of research, of thought, of speech--to a degree.
But whatever may come out of twentieth-century or thirtieth-century combats, one thing remains clear: A Church is an organization, a social body, with a certain doctrine to proclaim, a certain faith to hand down to men. The doctrine is not in all details final--each phase of faith may change. But the organization, to protect its own purity and integrity--however generous in allowing individual research, and the expression of individual ideas--must exert authority over the teachers in her midst, those who are called by her name, who have her children in their charge, and for whose teaching the Church, as a whole, is responsible. There is doubtless a time when the man who is really in advance of his times intellectually must be misunderstood, must be disagreed with, must be cast out. But all truth may await the verdict of time. If he has discovered something new, something true, the centuries will make it plain. There remains a chance--and the Church dare not risk too great a chance--that he is mistaken, impious, presumptuous, or self-deceived. We dare not rush to a new doctrine or spiritual conception, merely because one man, who knows more of a certain kind of learning than we do, has said so. One must be bolstered up by a generation of convinced and believing men, before he can draw a Church after him. No other process is intellectually legitimate. In any other event ecclesiastical anarchy would reign. To maintain the historic position of the Church is a necessity, until that position is proven untrue. So to maintain it is not bigotry, it is not lack of charity; it is merely common-sense.
The question, Where is the line between ecclesiastical integrity and individual freedom? is therefore one which the common-sense of Christendom is left to solve--not to-day, not to-morrow, but gradually, generously, and conscientiously, as the centuries go on.
THIRD: OBSTACLES AND OPPORTUNITY
It is said that a minister is greatly handicapped to-day in all his efforts for two reasons: First, that the times are spiritually lethargic, that men are so engrossed by material aims, indifference, or sin that a pastor can get no hold upon their hearts. Second, that he is bound hand and foot by conditions existing in the organization and personnel of his church, and hence is not free to act.
What would we think of an electrician who would complain that a storm had cast down his network of wires? Of a civil engineer who would lament that the mountain over which he was asked to project a road was steep? Of a doctor who would grieve that hosts of people about him were very ill? Of a statesman who would cry out that horrid folks opposed him? It is the work of the specialist to meet emergencies, and it is his professional pride to triumph over difficult conditions. The harder his task, the more he exults in his power of success.
It is a glorious task that lies before the minister of to-day--to maintain, develop, and uplift the spiritual life of the most wonderful epoch of the world's history; to place upon human souls that vital touch that shall hold their powers subject to eternal influences and aims. The times are not wholly unfavorable: our era, which spurns many ecclesiastical forms, is at heart essentially religious. _The World for Christ!_ How this war-cry of the spirit thrills anew as one realizes how much more there is to win to-day than ever before. The Warrior girds himself and longs eagerly to marshal great, shining, active hosts for God!
It is true that the conditions of work are more trying than they have usually been. A man goes out from the seminary. He has had a good education, followed by perhaps a year or two abroad, and some practical experience in sociological work. He has plans, ideas, ideals, a vigorous and whole-souled personality, a frank and generous heart.
What does he find? He soon discovers that the battle is not always to the strong, the educated, or the well-bred. Too often he is at the mercy of rich men who can scarcely put together a grammatical sentence; of poorer men who are, in church affairs, unscrupulous politicians; of women who carp and gossip; and of all sorts of men and women who desire to rule, criticise, hinder, and distrain. They, too, are the very people who, in the ears of God and of the community, have vowed to love him and to uphold his work! The more intellectual and spiritual he is, the more he is troubled and distressed.
Many churches, too, are in a chronic state of internal war. As for these rising church difficulties--try to put out a burning bunch of fire-crackers with one finger, and you have the sort of task he has in hand. While one point of explosion is being firmly suppressed, other crackers are spitting and going off. Whichever way he turns, and whatever he does, something pops angrily, and a new blaze begins! And this business, incredibly petty as it is, blocks the progress of the Christian faith. Men and women of education and refinement, of a wide outlook and noble thoughts and deeds, are more and more unwilling to place themselves on the church-roll; a minister sometimes finds himself in the anomalous position of having the more cultured, congenial, and philanthropic people of the community quite outside any church organization.