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Title: Christianity and Progress

Author: Harry Emerson Fosdick

Release Date: July 19, 2007 [EBook #21992]

Language: English

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Produced by Al Haines










  The Cole Lectures for 1922
  delivered before Vanderbilt University




Christianity and Progress


By

HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK


  _Professor of Practical Theology in the
  Union Theological Seminary;
  Preacher at the First Presbyterian Church,
  New York_



NEW YORK ------ CHICAGO

Fleming H. Revell Company

LONDON AND EDINBURGH




Copyright, 1922, by

FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY




  New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
  Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave.
  London: 21 Paternoster Square
  Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street




THE COLE LECTURES

The late Colonel E. W. Cole of Nashville, Tennessee, donated to
Vanderbilt University the sum of five thousand dollars, afterwards
increased by Mrs. E. W. Cole to ten thousand, the design and conditions
of which gift are stated as follows:

"The Object of this fund is to establish a foundation for a perpetual
Lectureship in connection with the School of Religion of the
University, to be restricted in its scope to a defense and advocacy of
the Christian religion.  The lectures shall be delivered at such
intervals, from time to time, as shall be deemed best by the Board of
Trust; and the particular theme and lecturer will be determined by the
Theological Faculty.  Said lecture shall always be reduced to writing
in full, and the manuscript of the same shall be the property of the
University, to be published or disposed of by the Board of Trust at its
discretion, the net proceeds arising therefrom to be added to the
foundation fund, or otherwise used for the benefit of the School of
Religion."




Preface

No one who ever has delivered the Cole Lectures will fail to associate
them, in his grateful memory, with the hospitable fellowship of the
elect at Vanderbilt University.  My first expression of thanks is due
to the many professors and students there, lately strangers and now
friends, who, after the burdensome preparation of these lectures, made
their delivery a happy and rewarding experience for the lecturer.  I am
hoping now that even though prepared for spoken address the lectures
may be serviceable to others who will read instead of hear them.  At
any rate, it seemed best to publish them without change in
form--addresses intended for public delivery and bearing, I doubt not,
many marks of the spoken style.

I have tried to make a sally into a field of inquiry where, within the
next few years, an increasing company of investigators is sure to go.
The idea of progress was abroad in the world long before men became
conscious of it; and men became conscious of it in its practical
effects long before they stopped to study its transforming consequences
in their philosophy and their religion.  No longer, however, can we
avoid the intellectual issue which is involved in our new outlook upon
a dynamic, mobile, progressive world.  Hardly a better description
could be given of the intellectual advance which has marked the last
century than that which Renan wrote years ago: "the substitution of the
category of _becoming_ for _being_, of the conception of relativity for
that of the absolute, of movement for immobility." [1]  Underneath all
other problems which the Christian Gospel faces is the task of choosing
what her attitude shall be toward this new and powerful force, the idea
of progress, which in every realm is remaking man's thinking.

I have endeavoured in detail to indicate my indebtedness to the many
books by whose light I have been helped to see my way.  In addition I
wish to express especial thanks to my friend and colleague, Professor
Eugene W. Lyman, who read the entire manuscript to my great profit;
and, as well, to my secretary, Miss Margaret Renton, whose efficient
service has been an invaluable help.

H. E. F.

New York



[1] Renan: Averroès et L'Averroisme, p. vii.




Contents


LECTURE I
  THE IDEA OF PROGRESS


LECTURE II
  THE NEED FOR RELIGION


LECTURE III
  THE GOSPEL AND SOCIAL PROGRESS

LECTURE IV
  PROGRESSIVE CHRISTIANITY

LECTURE V
  THE PERILS of PROGRESS

LECTURE VI
  PROGRESS AND GOD




LECTURE I

THE IDEA OF PROGRESS

I

The supposition that fish do not recognize the existence of water nor
birds the existence of air often has been used to illustrate the
insensitive unawareness of which we all are capable in the presence of
some encompassing medium of our lives.  The illustration aptly fits the
minds of multitudes in this generation, who live, as we all do, in the
atmosphere of progressive hopes and yet are not intelligently aware of it
nor conscious of its newness, its strangeness and its penetrating
influence.  We read as a matter of course such characteristic lines as
these from Tennyson:

  "Yet I doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs,
  And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the suns."

Such lines, however, are not to be taken as a matter of course; until
comparatively recent generations such an idea as that never had dawned on
anybody's mind, and the story of the achievement of that progressive
interpretation of history is one of the most fascinating narratives in
the long record of man's mental Odyssey.  In particular, the Christian
who desires to understand the influences, both intellectual and
practical, which are playing with transforming power upon Christianity
today, upon its doctrines, its purposes, its institutions, and its social
applications, must first of all understand the idea of progress.  For
like a changed climate, which in time alters the fauna and flora of a
continent beyond the power of human conservatism to resist, this
progressive conception of life is affecting every thought and purpose of
man, and no attempted segregation of religion from its influence is
likely to succeed.

The significance of this judgment becomes the more clear when we note the
fact that the idea of progress in our modern sense is not to be found
before the sixteenth century.  Men before that time had lived without
progressive hopes just as before Copernicus they had lived upon a
stationary earth.  Man's life was not thought of as a growth; gradual
change for the better was not supposed to be God's method with mankind;
the future was not conceived in terms of possible progress; and man's
estate on earth was not looked upon as capable of indefinite
perfectibility.  All these ideas, so familiar to us, were undreamed of in
the ancient and medieval world.  The new astronomy is not a more complete
break from the old geocentric system with its stationary earth than is
our modern progressive way of thinking from our fathers' static
conception of human life and history.


II

It will be worth our while at the beginning of our study to review in
outline this development of the idea of progress, that we may better
understand the reasons for its emergence and may more truly estimate its
revolutionary effects.  In the ancient world the Greeks, with all their
far-flung speculations, never hit upon the idea of progress.  To be sure,
clear intimations, scattered here and there in Greek literature, indicate
faith that man in the past had improved his lot.  Aeschylus saw men
lifted from their hazardous lives in sunless caves by the intervention of
Prometheus and his sacrificial teaching of the arts of peace; Euripides
contrasted the primitive barbarism in which man began with the civilized
estate which in Greece he had achieved--but this perceived advance never
was erected into a progressive idea of human life as a whole.  Rather,
the original barbarism, from which the arts of civilization had for a
little lifted men, was itself a degeneration from a previous ideal
estate, and human history as a whole was a cyclic and repetitious story
of never-ending rise and fall.  Plato's philosophy of history was
typical: the course of cosmic life is divided into cycles, each
seventy-two thousand solar years in length; during the first half of each
cycle, when creation newly comes from the hands of Deity, mankind's
estate is happily ideal, but then decay begins and each cycle's latter
half sinks from bad to worse until Deity once more must take a hand and
make all things new again.  Indeed, so far from reaching the idea of
progress, the ancient Greeks at the very center of their thinking were
incapacitated for such an achievement by their suspiciousness of change.
They were artists and to them the perfect was finished, like the
Parthenon, and therefore was incapable of being improved by change.
Change, so far from meaning, as it does with us, the possibility of
betterment, meant with them the certainty of decay; no changes upon earth
in the long run were good; all change was the sure sign that the period
of degeneration had set in from which only divine intervention could
redeem mankind.  Paul on Mars Hill quoted the Greek poet Aratus
concerning the sonship of all mankind to God, but Aratus's philosophy of
history is not so pleasantly quotable:

  "How base a progeny sprang from golden sires!
  And viler shall they be whom ye beget." [1]

Such, in general, was the non-progressive outlook of the ancient Greeks.

Nor did the Romans hit upon the idea of progress in any form remotely
approaching our modern meaning.  The casual reader, to be sure, will find
occasional flares of expectancy about the future or of pride in the
advance of the past which at first suggest progressive interpretations of
history.  So Seneca, rejoicing because he thought he knew the explanation
of the moon's eclipses, wrote: "The days will come when those things
which now lie hidden time and human diligence will bring to light. . . .
The days will come when our posterity will marvel that we were ignorant
of truths so obvious." [2]  So, too, the Epicureans, like the Greek
tragedians before them, believed that human knowledge and effort had
lifted mankind out of primitive barbarism and Lucretius described how man
by the development of agriculture and navigation, the building of cities
and the establishment of laws, the manufacture of physical conveniences
and the creation of artistic beauty, had risen, "gradually progressing,"
to his present height.[3] Such hopeful changes in the past, however, were
not the prophecies of continuous advance; they were but incidental
fluctuations in a historic process which knew no progress as a whole.
Even the Stoics saw in history only a recurrent rise and fall in endless
repetition so that all apparent change for good or evil was but the
influx or the ebbing of the tide in an essentially unchanging sea.  The
words of Marcus Aurelius are typical: "The periodic movements of the
universe are the same, up and down from age to age"; "He who has seen
present things has seen all, both everything which has taken place from
all eternity and everything which will be for time without end; for all
are of one kin and of one form"; "He who is forty years old, if he has
any understanding at all, has, by virtue of the uniformity that prevails,
seen all things which have been and all that will be." [4]

When with these Greek and Roman ideas the Hebrew-Christian influences
blended, no conception of progress in the modern sense was added by the
Church's contribution.  To be sure, the Christians' uncompromising faith
in personality as the object of divine redemption and their vigorous hope
about the future of God's people in the next world, if not in this,
calcined some elements in the classical tradition.  Belief in cycles,
endlessly repeating themselves through cosmic ages, went by the board.
This earth became the theatre of a unique experiment made once for all;
in place of the ebb and flow of tides in a changeless sea, mankind's
story became a drama moving toward a climactic denouement that would
shake heaven and earth together in a divine cataclysm.  But this
consummation of all history was not a goal progressively to be achieved;
it was a divine invasion of the world expectantly to be awaited, when the
victorious Christ would return and the Day of Judgment dawn.

The development of this apocalyptic phrasing of hope has been traced too
often to require long rehearsal here.  If the Greeks were essentially
philosophers and welcomed congenially ideas like endless cosmic cycles,
the Hebrews were essentially practical and dramatic in their thinking and
they welcomed a picture of God's victory capable of being visualized by
the imagination.  At first their national hopes had been set on the
restoration of the Davidic kingdom; then the Davidic king himself had
grown in their imagination until, as Messiah in a proper sense, he
gathered to himself supernal attributes; then, as a child of their
desperate national circumstances, the hope was born of their Messiah's
sudden coming on the clouds of heaven for their help.  Between the
Testaments this expectation expanded and robed itself with pomp and
glory, so that when the Christians came they found awaiting them a
phrasing of hope which they accepted to body forth their certainty of
God's coming sovereignty over all the earth.  This expectation of coming
triumph was not progressive; it was cataclysmic.  It did not offer the
prospect of great gains to be worked for over long periods of time; it
offered a divine invasion of history immediately at hand.  It was
pictured, not in terms of human betterment to be achieved, but of divine
action to be awaited.  The victory would suddenly come like the flood in
Noah's day, like the lightning flashing from one end of the heaven to the
other, like a thief in the night.

To be sure, this eager expectation of a heavenly kingdom immediately to
arrive on earth soon grew dim among the Christians, and the reasons are
obvious.  For one thing, the Church herself, moving out from days of
hardship to days of preferment and prosperity, began to allure with her
inviting prospects of growing power the enthusiasms and hopes of the
people, until not the suddenly appearing kingdom from the heavens, but
the expanding Church on earth became the center of Christian interest.
For another thing, Christ meant more to Christians than the inaugurator
of a postponed kingdom which, long awaited with ardent expectation, still
did not arrive; Christ was the giver of eternal life now.  More and more
the emphasis shifted from what Christ would do for his people when he
came upon the clouds of heaven to what he was doing for them through his
spiritual presence with them.  Even in the Fourth Gospel one finds this
good news that Christ had already come again in the hearts of his people
insisted on in evident contrast with the apocalyptic hope literally
conceived.  For another thing, dramatic hopes of a sudden invasion of the
world are always the offspring of desperate conditions.  Only when people
are hard put to it do they want history catastrophically stopped in the
midst of its course.  The Book of Daniel must be explained by the
tyrannies of Antiochus Epiphanes, the Book of Revelation by the
persecutions of Domitian, the present recrudescence of pre-millennialism
by the tragedy of the Great War.  But when the persecution of the Church
by the State gave way to the running of the State by the Church; when to
be a Christian was no longer a road to the lions but the sine qua non of
preferment and power; when the souls under the altar ceased crying, "How
long, O Master, the holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our
blood on them that dwell on the earth?" then the apocalyptic hopes grew
dim and the old desire for a kingdom immediately to come was subdued to
an expectation, no longer imperative and urgent, that sometime the course
of history would stop on Judgment Day.

In all these Greek and Roman, Hebrew and Christian contributions, which
flowed together and then flowed out into the medieval age, there was no
suggestion of a modern idea of progress, and in the medieval age itself
there was nothing to create a fresh phrasing of expectancy.  Men were
aware of the darkness of the days that had fallen on the earth; even when
they began to rouse themselves from their lethargy, their thoughts of
greatness did not reach forward toward a golden age ahead but harked back

  "To the glory that was Greece
  And the grandeur that was Rome,"

and their intellectual life, instead of being an adventurous search for
new truth, was a laborious endeavour to stabilize the truth already
formulated in the great days of the early Church.  Indeed, the Church's
specific contribution of a vividly imagined faith in a future world, as
the goal of the most absorbing hopes and fears of men, tended rather to
confirm than to dissipate the static conception of earthly life and
history.  With an urgency that the ancient world had never known the
Christian world believed in immortality and visualized the circumstances
of the life to come so concretely that in a medieval catechism the lurid
colour of the setting sun was ascribed to the supposition that "he
looketh down upon hell." [5]  Nothing in this life had any importance
save as it prepared the souls of men for life to come.  Even Roger Bacon,
his mind flashing like a beacon from below the sky-line of the modern
world, was sure that all man's knowledge of nature was useful only in
preparing his soul to await the coming of Antichrist and the Day of
Judgment.  There was no idea of progress, then, in the medieval age.
Human life and history were static and the only change to be anticipated
was the climactic event

  "When earth breaks up and heaven expands."


III

The emergence of modern progressive hopes out of this static medievalism
is one of the epic occurrences of history.  The causes which furthered
the movement seem now in retrospect to be woven into a fabric so tightly
meshed as to resist unraveling.  Nevertheless, it is not difficult to see
at least some of the major factors which furthered this revolutionary
change from a static to a progressive world.

Among the first, scientific invention is surely to be noted.  Even Roger
Bacon, prophecying with clairvoyant insight far in advance of the event,
foresaw one of the determining factors of the modern age: "Machines for
navigating can be made so that without rowers great ships can be guided
by one pilot on river or sea more swiftly than if they were full of
oarsmen.  Likewise vehicles are possible which without draught-animals
can be propelled with incredible speed, like the scythed chariots, as we
picture them, in which antiquity fought.  Likewise a flying machine is
possible in the middle of which a man may sit, using some ingenious
device by which artificial wings will beat the air like those of a flying
bird.  Also machines, small in size, can be constructed to lift and move
unlimited weights, than which in an emergency nothing is more useful."
[6]  So dreamed the great friar in the thirteenth century.  When, then,
we find the minds of men first throwing off their intellectual vassalage
to antiquity and beginning to believe in themselves, their present powers
and their future prospects, it is this new-found mastery over nature's
latent resources which is the spring and fountain of their confidence.
Cardan, in the sixteenth century, marveling at the then modern inventions
of the compass, the printing press, and gunpowder, cried, "All antiquity
has nothing comparable to these three things." [7]  Every year from that
day to this has deepened the impression made upon the minds of men by the
marvelous prospect of harnessing the resources of the universe.  The last
one hundred and twenty-five years have seen the invention of the
locomotive, the steamship, the telegraph, the sewing machine, the camera,
the telephone, the gasoline engine, wireless telegraphy and telephony,
and the many other applications of electricity.  As one by one new areas
of power have thus come under the control of man, with every conquest
suggesting many more not yet achieved but brought within range of
possibility, old theories of cosmic degeneration and circular futility
have gone to pieces, the glamour of antiquity has lost its allurement,
the great days of humanity upon the earth have been projected into the
future, and the gradual achievement of human progress has become the hope
of man.

Another element in the emergence of the modern progressive outlook upon
life is immediately consequent upon the first: world-wide discovery,
exploration and intercommunication.  Great as the practical results have
been which trace their source to the adventurers who, from Columbus down,
pioneered unknown seas to unknown lands, the psychological effects have
been greater still.  Who could longer live cooped up in a static world,
when the old barriers were so being overpassed and new continents were
inviting adventure, settlement, and social experiment hitherto untried?
The theological progressiveness of the Pilgrim Fathers, starting out from
Leyden for a new world, was not primarily a matter of speculation; it was
even more a matter of an adventurous spirit, which, once admitted into
life, could not be kept out of religious thought as well.  In Edward
Winslow's account of Pastor Robinson's last sermon before the little
company of pioneers left Leyden, we read that Robinson "took occasion
also miserably to bewaile the state and condition of the Reformed
Churches, who were come to a period in Religion, and would goe no further
than the instruments of their Reformation: As for example, the
_Lutherans_ they could not be drawne to goe beyond what _Luther_ saw, for
whatever part of God's will he had further imparted and revealed to
_Calvin_, they will die rather than embrace it.  And so also, saith he,
you see the _Calvinists_, they stick where he left them: a misery much to
bee lamented; For though they were precious shining lights in their
times, yet God hath not revealed his whole will to them: And were they
now living, saith hee, they would bee as ready and willing to embrace
further light, as that they had received." [8]  Static methods of
thinking are here evidently going to pieces before the impact of a
distinctly unstatic world.  They were looking for "more truth and light
yet to breake forth out of his holy Word" [9] because they lived in a
time when new things had been happening at an exhilarating rate and when
pioneering adventure and general travel in a world of open avenues were
already beginning to have that liberating effect which has increased with
every passing century.

Closely allied with the two elements already noted is a third: the
increase of knowledge, which, as in the case of astronomy, threw
discredit upon the superior claims of antiquity and made modern men seem
wiser than their sires.  For ages the conviction had held the ground that
the ancients were the wisest men who ever lived and that we, their
children, were but infants in comparison.  When, therefore, the
Copernican astronomy proved true, when the first terrific shock of it had
passed through resultant anger into wonder and from wonder into stupefied
acceptance, and from that at last into amazed exultation at the vast, new
universe unveiled, the credit of antiquity received a stunning blow.  So
far was Aristotle from being "the master of those who know" whom the
medievalists had revered, that he had not even known the shape and motion
of the earth or its relation with the sun.  For the first time in history
the idea emerged that humanity accumulates knowledge, that the ancients
were the infants, that the moderns represent the age and wisdom of the
race.  Consider the significance of those words of Pascal in the
seventeenth century: "Those whom we call ancient were really new in all
things, and properly constituted the infancy of mankind; and as we have
joined to their knowledge the experience of the centuries which have
followed them, it is in ourselves that we should find this antiquity that
we revere in others." [10]  For the first time in history men turned
their faces, in their search for knowledge, not backward but forward, and
began to experience that attitude which with us is habitual--standing on
tip-toe in eager expectancy, sure that tomorrow some new and unheard of
truth will be revealed.

New inventions, new discoveries, new knowledge--even before the
eighteenth century all these factors were under way.  Then a new factor
entered which has played a powerful part in substituting a progressive
for a static world: new social hopes.  The medieval age had no
expectation of a better social life on earth.  Charity was common but it
was purely individual and remedial; it did not seek to understand or to
cure the causes of social maladjustment; it was sustained by no
expectation of better conditions among men; it was valued because of the
giver's unselfishness rather than because of the recipient's gain, and in
consequence it was for the most part unregulated alms-giving, piously
motived but inefficiently managed.  In the eighteenth century a new
outlook and hope emerged.  If man could pioneer new lands, learn new
truth and make new inventions, why could he not devise new social systems
where human life would be freed from the miseries of misgovernment and
oppression?  With that question at last definitely rising, the long line
of social reformers began which stretched from Abbé de Saint-Pierre to
the latest believer in the possibility of a more decent and salutary
social life for human-kind.  The coming of democracy in government
incalculably stimulated the influence of this social hope, for with the
old static forms of absolute autocracy now broken up, with power in the
hands of the people to seek as they would "life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness," who could put limits to the possibilities?  The medieval
age was gone; the modern age had come, and its distinctive note was
progress, with new inventions, new discoveries, new knowledge and new
social hope.

It would be a fascinating task to watch these interweaving factors at
their work and to trace their commingled influence as slowly their
involved significance became clear, now to this man and now to that.  The
best narrative that has been written yet of this epochal movement is
contained in Professor Bury's volume on "The Idea of Progress." There one
sees the stream of this progressive conception of life pushing its way
out as through a delta by way of many minds, often far separated yet
flowing with the same water.  Some men attacked the ancients and by
comparison praised the modern time as Perrault did with "The Age of Louis
the Great"; some men foresaw so clearly the possibility of man's control
over nature that they dreamed of terrestrial Utopias as Francis Bacon did
in "New Atlantis"; some men, like Descartes, sought to grasp the
intellectual conditions of human improvement; and others, like Condorcet,
became the fervid prophets of human perfectibility; some, like Turgot,
re-examined history in terms of the new ideas; and some, like Saint Simon
and Comte, sought to discover the law by which all progress moves.  This
new idea of life and history came "by divers portions and in divers
manners," but no one can doubt its arrival.  The life of man upon this
earth was no longer conceived as static; it was progressive and the
possibilities that lay ahead made all the achievements of the past seem
like the play of childhood.

At last, in the nineteenth century, the climactic factor was added which
gathered up all the rest and embraced them in a comprehensive philosophy
of life.  Evolution became a credible truth.  No longer a dim conjecture,
it was established in biology, and then it spread its influence out into
every area of human thought until all history was conceived in genetic
terms and all the sciences were founded upon the evolutionary idea.
Growth became recognized as the fundamental law of life.  Nothing in the
universe without, or in man's life within, could longer be conceived as
having sprung full-statured, like Minerva from the head of Jove.  All
things achieved maturity by gradual processes.  The world itself had thus
come into being, not artificially nailed together like a box, but growing
like a tree, putting forth ever new branches and new leaves.  When this
idea had firmly grasped the human mind, the modern age had come indeed,
and progress was its distinctive category of understanding and its
exhilarating phrasing of human hope.  Then came the days of mid-Victorian
optimism with songs like this upon men's lips:

  "Every tiger madness muzzled, every serpent passion kill'd,
  Every grim ravine a garden, every blazing desert till'd,

  "Robed in universal harvest up to either pole she smiles,
  Universal ocean softly washing all her warless isles." [11]


IV

Any one, however, who has lived with discerning thought through the
opening years of the twentieth century, must be aware that something has
happened to chasten and subdue these wildly enthusiastic hopes of the
mid-Victorian age.  Others beside the "gloomy dean" of St. Paul's,
whether through well-considered thought or through the psychological
shock of the Great War, have come to look upon this rash, unmitigated
enthusiasm about the earth's future as a fool's paradise.  At any rate,
no treatment of the idea of progress would be complete which did not
dwell upon the limitations to that idea, now definitely obvious to
thoughtful men.

As early as 1879, in Saporta's "Le Monde des Plantes," we run upon one
serious setback to unqualified expectations of progress.  Men began to
take into account the fact that this earth is not a permanent affair.
"We recognize from this point of view as from others," wrote Saporta,
"that the world was once young; then adolescent; that it has even passed
the age of maturity; man has come late, when a beginning of physical
decadence had struck the globe, his domain." [12]  Here is a fact to give
enthusiasm over earthly progress serious pause.  This earth, once
uninhabitable, will be uninhabitable again.  If not by wholesale
catastrophe, then by the slow wearing down of the sun's heat, already
passed its climacteric, this planet, the transient theatre of the human
drama, will be no longer the scene of man's activity, but as cold as the
moon, or as hot as colliding stars in heaven, will be able to sustain
human life no more.  "The grandest material works of the human race,"
wrote Faye in 1884, "will have to be effaced by degrees under the action
of a few physical forces which will survive man for a time.  Nothing will
remain, not even the ruins." [13]

Every suggested clew to a possible escape from the grimness of the
planet's dissolution has been followed up with careful search.  The
discovery of radioactivity seemed to promise endlessly extended life to
our sun, but Sir E. Rutherford, before the Royal Astronomical Society,
has roundly denied that the discovery materially lengthens our estimate
of the sun's tenure of life and has said that if the sun were made of
uranium it would not because of that last five years the longer as a
giver of heat.[14]  Whether we will or not, we have no choice except to
face the tremendous fact, calmly set down by von Hartmann in 1904: "The
only question is whether . . . the world-process will work itself out
slowly in prodigious lapse of time, according to purely physical laws; or
whether it will find its end by means of some metaphysical resource when
it has reached its culminating point.  Only in the last case would its
end coincide with the fulfilment of a purpose or object; in the first
case, a long period of purposeless existence would follow after the
culmination of life." [15]

In a word, men delighted at the prospect of human progress on this planet
have made an idol of it, only to discover that on a transient earth it
leads nowhere without God and immortality.  One disciple of naturalism
recently denied his desire to believe in God because he wanted a risky
universe.  But the universe without God is not risky; it is a foregone
conclusion; the dice are all loaded.  After the lapse of millions of
years which, however long they be stretched out, will ultimately end, our
solar system will be gone, without even a memory left of anything that
ever was dreamed or done within it.  That is the inevitable issue of such
a "risky" universe.  When scientifically-minded men, therefore, now take
a long look ahead, the Utopian visions of the mid-Victorian age are not
foremost in their thought.  Rather, as one of them recently wrote:


"One is tempted to imagine this race of supermen, of some millions of
years hence, grimly confronting the issue of extinction.  Probably long
before that time science will have perfectly mastered the problem of the
sun's heat, and will be able to state precisely at what period the
radiation will sink to a level which would normally be fatal to the
living inhabitants of the planets.  Then will begin the greatest of
cosmic events: a drama that has doubtless been played numbers of times
already on the stage of the universe: the last stand of the wonderful
microcosm against the brute force of the macrocosm. . . . .

"One conceives that our supermen will face the end philosophically.
Death is losing its terrors.  The race will genially say, as we
individuals do to-day, that it has had a long run.  But it will
none-the-less make a grim fight.  Life will be worth living, for
everybody, long before that consummation is in sight.  The hovering demon
of cold and darkness will be combatted by scientific means of which we
have not the germ of a conception." [16]


If ever a river ran out into a desert, the river of progressive hopes,
fed only from springs of materialistic philosophy, has done so here.  At
least the Greeks had their immortality and the Hebrews their coming
Kingdom of God, but a modern materialist, with all his talk of progress,
has neither the one nor the other, nor anything to take their place as an
ultimate for hope.  Whatever else may be true, progress on a transient
planet has not done away with the need of God and life eternal.

Moreover, not only have our twentieth century thought and experience
seriously qualified the meaning of progress on this earth by the limiting
of the earth's duration; men have come also to distrust, as a quite
unjustified flourish of sentimentality, the mid-Victorian confidence in
an automatic evolution which willy-nilly lifts humanity to higher levels.
Said Herbert Spencer, "Progress is not an accident, not a thing within
human control, but a beneficent necessity."  "This advancement is due to
the working of a universal law; . . . in virtue of that law it must
continue until the state we call perfection is reached. . . .  Thus the
ultimate development of the ideal man is logically certain--as certain as
any conclusion in which we place the most implicit faith; . . . so surely
must the things we call evil and immorality disappear; so surely must man
become perfect." [17]  There is no scientific basis whatever for such a
judgment.  Evolution is not an escalator which, whether or not man run in
addition to its lift, will inevitably raise humanity to a heaven on
earth.  Potatoes in the cellar shooting out long white eyes in search of
light are evolving, but they are evolving worse.  Upon the basis of a
scientific doctrine of evolution, no idolatrous superstition could be
much more lacking in intellectual support than Spencer's confidence in a
universal, mechanical, irresistible movement toward perfection.  The
plain fact is that human history is a strange blend of progress and
regress; it is the story of the rhythmic rise and fall of civilizations
and empires, of gains made only to be lost and lost only to be fought for
once again.  Even when advance has come, it has come by mingled progress
and cataclysm as water passes, through gradual increase of warmth, from
ice suddenly to liquid and from liquid suddenly to vapour.  Our
nineteenth century ideas of evolution tended to create in us the
impression that humanity had made a smooth and even ascent.  We
artificially graded the ascending track of human history, leveled and
macadamized it, and talked of inevitable progress.  Such sentimental
optimism has ceased even to be comforting, so utterly untenable has it
become to every well-instructed mind.

To such unfounded faith in automatic progress a valuable counterweight is
acquaintance with the life of a man like St. Augustine.  As one reads
Augustine's sermons one can hear in the background the collapse of a
great civilization.  One can tell from his discourses when the barbarians
began to move on Rome.  One can hear the crash when Alaric and his hordes
sacked the Eternal City.  One can catch the accent of horror at the tidal
waves of anarchy that everywhere swept in to engulf the falling empire.
"Horrible things," said Augustine, "have been told us.  There have been
ruins, and fires, and rapine, and murder, and torture.  That is true; we
have heard it many times; we have shuddered at all this disaster; we have
often wept, and we have hardly been able to console ourselves." [18]  At
last, the empire in ruins, the old civilization tottering to its
collapse, Augustine died in his episcopal city of Hippo, while the
barbarians were hammering at the city gates.  Through such scenes this
generation too has lived and has had to learn again, what we never should
have forgotten, that human history is not a smooth and well-rolled lawn
of soft ascents; that it is mountainous, precipitous, terrific--a country
where all progress must be won by dint of intelligence and toil, and
where it is as easy to lose the gains of civilization as it is to fall
over a cliff or to surrender a wheat field to the weeds.  An archeologist
in Mesopotamia talked with an Arab lad who neither read, himself, nor
knew any one who did; yet the lad, when he acknowledged this, stood
within a stone's throw of the site where milleniums ago was one of the
greatest universities of the ancient world and where still, amid the
desolation, one could dig and find the old clay tablets on which the
children of that ancient time had learned to write.  Progress?  Regress!
While history as a whole, from the Cro-Magnon man to the twentieth
century, does certainly suggest a great ascent, it has not been an
automatic levitation.  It has been a fight, tragic and ceaseless, against
destructive forces.  This world needs something more than a soft gospel
of inevitable progress.  It needs salvation from its ignorance, its sin,
its inefficiency, its apathy, its silly optimisms and its appalling
carelessness.


V

Nevertheless, though it is true that our modern ideas of progress on this
earth never in themselves can supply an adequate philosophy of life, and
though it is true that they do not dispense with, but rather emphasize,
our need of God and immortality and the saving powers which Christians
find in Christ, yet those ideas have in them a permanent contribution to
the life of man from whose influence the race cannot escape.  When we
have granted the limitations which disillusioned thoughtfulness suggests
concerning progress upon this earth, it still remains true that, in our
new scientific control over the latent resources of the earth without and
over our own mental and moral processes within, we have a machinery for
producing change that opens up exciting prospects before humanity.  Never
in our outlook upon man's earthly future can we go back to the endless
cosmic cycles of the Greeks or the apocalyptic expectations of the
Hebrews.  We are committed to the hope of making progress, and the
central problem which Christianity faces in adjusting her thought and
practice to the modern age is the problem of coming to intelligent terms
with this dominant idea.

These lectures are an excursion to spy out this land and to see, if we
may, what the idea of progress through the scientific control of life is
likely to mean and ought to mean to Christianity.  If this modern idea is
not intelligently guided in its effect upon our faith and practice, it
will none the less have its effect in haphazard, accidental, unguided,
and probably ruinous ways.  If one listens, for example, to the preaching
of liberal ministers, one sees that every accent of their teaching has
been affected by this prevalent and permeating thought.  The God they
preach no longer sits afar like Dante's deity in the stationary empyrean
beyond all reach of change; their God is here in the midst of the human
struggle, "their Captain in the well-fought fight."  H. G. Wells may be a
poor theologian but he is one of our best interpreters of popular thought
and his idea of God, marching through the world "like fifes and drums,"
calling the people to a progressive crusade for righteousness, is one
which modern folk find it most easy to accept.  He is a God of progress
who undergirds our endeavours for justice in the earth with his power;
who fights in and for and with us against the hosts of evil; whose
presence is a guarantee of ultimate victory; and whose effect upon us is
to send us out to war against ancient human curses, assured that what
ought to be done can be done.

As men's thought of God has thus been molded by the idea of progress on
the earth, so, too, the Christ they preach is not primarily, as of old,
the victim by whose substitutionary sacrifice the race of men has found
an open door from the bottomless pit of endless woe to a blessed
immortality in Paradise.  The modern emphasis is all another way.  Christ
is the divine revealer whose spirit alone can transform individuals and
save society.  The sort of character he was, the life he lived, the ideas
he promulgated, are the salt that can preserve human life, the light that
can illumine the way to a kingdom of righteousness on earth.  He himself
is the leader in the fight for that kingdom, his sacrifice part of the
price it costs, his spirit the quality of life that is indispensable to
its coming, and when we think of him we sing,

  "The Son of God goes forth to war. . . .
  Who follows in his train?"


So, too, the Church, as presented by typical modern preachers, is no
longer an ark to which, from the flood of wrath divine, the few may flee
for safety.  If men tried to preach in that way, the message would stick
in their throats.  The Church is primarily an instrument in God's hands
to bring personal and social righteousness upon the earth.  When her
massed influence overcomes a public evil or establishes a public good,
men find the justification of her existence and a first-rate weapon of
apologetic argument in her behalf.  When wars come, the Church is blamed
because she did not prevent them; when wars are over, she takes counsel
how she may prove the validity of her message by making their recurrence
impossible; and the pitiful dismemberment of the Church by sects and
schisms is hated and deplored, not so much because of economic waste or
theological folly, as because these insane divisions prevent social
effectiveness in bringing the message of Christ to bear influentially on
modern life.

Likewise, hope, deeply affected by modern ideas of earthly progress, is
not primarily post-mortem, as it used to be.  Men believe in immortality,
but it seems so naturally the continuance of this present life that their
responsible concern is chiefly centered here.  The hopes which waken
immediate enthusiasm and stir spontaneous response are hopes of
righteousness victorious upon the earth.  Because men believe in God,
they believe that he has great purposes for humankind.  The course of
human history is like a river: sometimes it flows so slowly that one
would hardly know it moved at all; sometimes bends come in its channel so
that one can hardly see in what direction it intends to go; sometimes
there are back-eddies so that it seems to be retreating on itself.  If a
man has no spiritual interpretation of life, if he does not believe in
God, he may well give up hope and conclude that the human river is
flowing all awry or has altogether ceased to move.  A Christian, however,
has a spiritual interpretation of life.  He knows that human history is a
river--not a whirlpool, nor a pond, but a river flowing to its end.  Just
as, far inland, we can tell that the Hudson is flowing to the sea,
because the waters, when the tide comes in, are tinctured with the
ocean's quality, so now, we believe that we can tell that the river of
human history is flowing out toward the kingdom of our God.  Already the
setback of the divine ocean is felt among us in ideals of better life,
personal, social, economic, national.  That it is Christianity's function
to believe in these ideals, to have faith in the possibility of their
realization, to supply motives for their achievement, and to work for
them with courage and sacrifice, is the familiar note of modern Christian
hope.

The modern apologetic also is tinctured with this same quality.  Not as
of old is it a laboured working out of metaphysical propositions.
Rather, a modern Christian preacher's defense of the Gospel may be
paraphrased in some such strain as this: You never can achieve a decent
human life upon this planet apart from the Christian Gospel.  Neither
outward economic comfort nor international treaties of peace can save the
day for humanity.  Not even when our present situation is described as "a
race between education and catastrophe" has the case been adequately
stated.  What kind of education is meant?  If every man and woman on
earth were a Ph. D., would that solve the human problem?  Aaron Burr had
a far keener intellect than George Washington.  So far as swiftness and
agility of intelligence were concerned, Burr far out-distanced the
slow-pacing mind of Washington.  But, for all that, as you watch Burr's
life, and many another's like him, you understand what Macaulay meant
when he exclaimed: "as if history were not made up of the bad actions of
extraordinary men, as if all the most noted destroyers and deceivers of
our species, all the founders of arbitrary governments and false
religions, had not been extraordinary men, as if nine tenths of the
calamities which have befallen the human race had any other origin than
the union of high intelligence with low desires." Was Nebuchadnezzar of
Babylon unintelligent?  Caesar and Napoleon--were they unintelligent?
Has the most monumental and destructive selfishness in human history been
associated with poor minds?  No, with great minds, which, if the world
was to be saved their devastation, needed to be reborn into a new spirit.
The transforming gospel which religion brings is indispensable to a
building of the kingdom of righteousness upon the earth.

Wherever one listens, then, to the typical teaching of modern Christians,
he finds himself in the atmosphere of the idea of progress.  Men's
thoughts of God, of Christ, of the Church, of hope, their methods of
apologetic, are shaped to that mold--are often thinned out and flattened
down and made cheap and unconvincing by being shaped to that mold--so
that an endeavour to achieve an intelligent understanding of
Christianity's relationship with the idea of progress is in part a
defensive measure to save the Gospel from being unintelligently mauled
and mishandled by it.  Marcus Dods, when he was an old man, said: "I do
not envy those who have to fight the battle of Christianity in the
twentieth century."  Then, after a moment, he added, "Yes, perhaps I do,
but it will be a stiff fight."  It is a stiff fight, and for this reason
if for no other, that before we can get on much further in a progressive
world we must achieve with wisdom and courage some fundamental
reconstructions in our Christian thinking.



[1] Aratus of Soli: Phaenomena, lines 122-3.

[2] Lucius Annaeus Seneca: Naturalium Quaestionum, Liber VII, 25.

[3] T. Lucretius Carus: De Rerum Natura, Lib. V, 1455--"Paullatim docuit
pedetentim progredienteis."

[4] Marcus Aurelius Antoninus: Meditations, IX, 28; VI, 37; XI, 1.

[5] Andrew D. White: A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in
Christendom, Vol. I, p. 97.

[6] Roger Bacon: Epistola de Secretis Operibus Artis et Naturae, et de
Nullitate Magiae, Caput IV, in Opera Quaedam Hactenus Inedita, edited by
J. S. Brewer, p. 533.

[7] Jerome Cardan: De Subtilitate, Liber Decimusseptimus: De artibus,
artificiosisque rebus.

[8] Edward Winslow: Hypocrisie Unmasked, p. 97.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Blaise Pascal: Opuscules, Preface to the Treatise on Vacuum, in The
Thoughts, Letters and Opuscules of Blaise Pascal, Translated by O.  W.
Wight, p. 550.

[11] Alfred Tennyson: Locksley Hall Sixty Years After.

[12] Comte de Saporta: Le Monde des Plantes avant L'Apparition de
L'Homme, p. 109.

[13] H. Faye: Sur L'Origine du Monde, Chapitre XI, p. 256-7.

[14] Joseph McCabe: The End of the World, p. 112.

[15] Eduard von Hartmann: Ausgewählte Werke, viii, pp. 572-3 (Leipzig,
1904).

[16] Joseph McCabe: The End of the World, pp. 116-117.

[17] Herbert Spencer: Illustrations of Universal Progress, Chapter I,
Progress: Its Law and Cause, p. 58; Social Statics, Part I, Chapter II,
The Evanescence of Evil, Sec. 4, p. 78 ff.

[18] Louis Bertrand: Saint Augustin, p. 342.




LECTURE II

THE NEED FOR RELIGION

I

One of the first effects of the idea of progress, whose development our
last lecture traced, has been to increase immeasurably man's self
reliance and to make him confident of humanity's power to take care of
itself.  At the heart of the idea of progress is man's new scientific
control over life, and this new mastery, whereby the world seems ready
to serve the purposes of those who will learn the laws, is the dominant
influence in both the intellectual and practical activities of our age.
That religion, in consequence, should seem to many of minor import, if
not quite negligible, and that men, trusting themselves, their
knowledge of law, their use of law-abiding forces, their power to
produce change and to improve conditions, should find less need of
trusting any one except themselves, was inevitable, but for all that it
is fallacious.  Already we have seen that a stumbling and uneven
progress, precarious and easily frustrated, taking place upon a
transient planet, goes but a little way to meet those elemental human
needs with which religious faith has dealt.  In our present lecture we
propose a more specific consideration of this abiding necessity of
religion in a progressive world.

How difficult it is to go back in imagination to the days before men
grasped the meaning of natural law!  We take gravitation for granted
but, when Newton first proclaimed its law, the artillery of orthodox
pulpits was leveled against him in angry consternation.  Said one
preacher, Newton "took from God that direct action on his works so
constantly ascribed to him in Scripture and transferred it to material
mechanism" and he "substituted gravitation for Providence." [1]  That
preacher saw truly that the discovery of natural law was going to make
a profound difference to religion.  For ages men had been accustomed to
look for the revelation of supernatural power in realms where they did
not know the laws.  And as men were tempted to look for the presence of
God in realms where they did not know the laws, so in those realms they
trusted God to do for them what they did not know how to do for
themselves.

Then men began discovering natural laws, and every time they laid their
hands on a new natural law they laid their hands on a new law-abiding
force and began doing for themselves things of which their fathers had
never dreamed.  Stories of old-time miracles are overpassed in our
modern days.  Did Aladdin once rub a magic lamp and build a palace?
To-day, knowledge of engineering laws enables us to achieve results
that would put Aladdin quite to shame.  He never dreamed a Woolworth
Tower.  Did the Israelites once cross the Red Sea dry-shod?  One thing,
however, they never would have hoped to do: to cross under and over the
Hudson River day after day in multitudes, dry-shod.  Did an axe-head
float once when Elisha threw a stick into the water?  But something no
Elisha ever dreamed of seeing we see continually: iron ships navigating
the ocean as though it were their natural element.  Did Joshua once
prolong the day for battle by the staying of the sun?  Yet Joshua could
never have conceived an habitual lighting of the city's homes and
streets until by night they are more brilliant than by day.  Did
Jericho's walls once fall at the united shout of a besieging people?
Those childlike besiegers, however, never dreamed of guns that could
blast Jerichos to pieces from seventy miles away.  Huxley was right
when he said that our highly developed sciences have given us a command
over the course of non-human nature greater than that once attributed
to the magicians.

The consequence has been revolutionary.  Old cries of dependence upon
God grow unreal upon the lips of multitudes.  Sometimes without knowing
it, often without wanting it, men are drawn by the drift of modern
thought away from all confidence in God and all consciousness of
religious need.  Consider two pictures.  The first is an epidemic in
New England in the seventeenth century.  Everybody is thinking about
God; the churches are full and days are passed in fasting and agonizing
prayer.  Only one way of getting rid of such an epidemic is known: men
must gain new favour in the sight of God.  The second picture is an
epidemic in New England in the twentieth century.  The churches are not
full--they are closed by official order and popular consent to prevent
the spread of germs.  Comparatively few people are appealing to God;
almost everybody is appealing to the health commissioner.  Not many
people are relying upon religion; everybody is relying upon science.
As one faces the pregnant significance of that contrast, one sees that
in important sections of our modern life science has come to occupy the
place that God used to have in the reliance of our forefathers.  For
the dominant fact of our generation is power over the world which has
been put into our hands through the knowledge of laws, and the
consequence is that the scientific mastery of life seems man's
indispensable and sufficient resource.

The issue is not far to seek.  Such has been public confidence in the
efficacy and adequacy of this scientific control of life to meet all
human needs, that in multitudes of minds religion has been crowded to
the wall.  Why should we trust God or concern ourselves with the deep
secrets of religious faith, if all our need is met by learning laws,
blowing upon our hands, and going to work?  So even Christians come
secretly to look upon their Christianity as a frill, something gracious
but not indispensable, pleasant to live with but not impossible to live
without.  Christian preachers lose their ability, looking first upon
their spiritual message and then upon their fellow men, to feel how
desperately the two need each other.  Religion has become an "elective
in the university of life."  But religion cannot persist as a frill; it
either is central in its importance or else it is not true at all.  Its
great days come only when it is seen to be indispensable.  We may use
what artificial respiration we will upon the Church, the days of the
Church's full power will not come until the conviction lays hold upon
her that the endeavour to found civilization upon a materialistic
science is leading us to perdition; that man needs desperately the
ministry of religion, its insight into life's meanings, its control
over life's use, its inward power for life's moral purposes; that man
never needed this more than now, when the scientific control of life is
arming him with so great ability to achieve his aims.


II

As we try to discern wherein man's need of religion lies with reference
to the scientific control of life, let us start with the proposition
that, when we have all the facts which science can discover, we still
need a spiritual interpretation of the facts.  All our experiences are
made up of two elements: first, the outward circumstance, and second,
the inward interpretation.  On the one side is our environment, the
world we live in, the things that befall us, the kaleidoscopic changes
of fortune in the scenery of which our lives are set.  On the other
side are the inward interpretations that we give to this outward
circumstance.  Experience is compounded of these two elements.

This clearly is true in ordinary living.  Two men, let us say, go to
their physicians and are told that they have only a few months to live.
This is the fact which faces both of them.  As we watch them, however,
we are at once aware that this fact is not the whole of their
experience.  One of the men crumples up; he "collapses into a yielding
mass of plaintiveness and fear."  Thinking of the event which he is
facing, he sees nothing there but horror.  That is his interpretation
of it.  The other man so looks upon the event which is coming that his
family, far from having to support his spirit, are supported by him.
He buoys them up; he carries them along; his faith and courage are
contagious; and when he thinks of his death it appears in his eyes a
great adventure concerning which the old hymn told the truth:

  "It were a well-spent journey
  Though seven deaths lay between."

That is his interpretation.  As we regard the finished experiences of
these two men, we see clearly that, while the same fact lay at the
basis of both, it was the inward interpretation that determined the
quality of the experience.

This power to transform facts so that they will be no longer merely
facts, but facts plus an interpretation, is one of the most distinctive
and significant elements in human life.  The animals do not possess it.
An event befalls a dog and, when the dog is through with it, the event
is what it was before.  The dog has done nothing to it.  But the same
event befalls a man and at once something begins to happen to it.  It
is clothed in the man's thought about it; it is dressed in his
appreciation and understanding; it is transformed by his
interpretations.  The event comes out of that man's life something
altogether different from what it was when it went in.  The man can do
almost anything with that event.  For our experiences do not fall into
our lives in single lumps, like meteors from a distant sky of fate; our
experiences always are made up of the fortunes that befall us and the
interpretations that we give to them.

So far as the relative importance of these two factors is concerned, we
may see the truth in the application of our thought to happiness.  If
there is any area in human experience where the outward circumstance
might be supposed to control the results, it is the realm of happiness;
yet probably nine-tenths of the problem of happiness lies, not in the
outward event, but in the inward interpretation.  If we could describe
those conditions in which the happiest people whom we have known have
lived, can any one imagine the diversity of environment that would be
represented in our accounts?  Let them move in procession before the
eyes of our imagination, those happy folk whose friendship has been the
benediction of our lives!  What a motley company they are!  For some
are blind, and some are crippled, and some are invalid; not many are
rich and fortunate; many are poor--a company of handicapped but radiant
spirits whose victorious lives, like the burning bush which Moses saw,
have made in a desert a spot of holy ground.  If, now, we ask why it is
that happiness can be so amazingly independent of outward circumstance,
this is the answer: every experience has two factors, the fortune that
befalls and the inward interpretation of it; and, while we often cannot
control the fortune, we always can help with the interpretation.  That
is in our power.  That is the throne of our sovereignty over our lives.


III

The deep need of a worthy interpretation of life is just as urgent in a
world where the idea of progress reigns as in any other, and to supply
that need is one of the major functions of religion.  For religion is
something more than all the creeds that have endeavoured to express its
thought.  Religion is something more than all the organizations that
have tried to incarnate its purposes.  Religion is the human spirit, by
the grace of God, seeking and finding an interpretation of experience
that puts sense and worth, dignity, elevation, joy, and hope into life.

A body of students recently requested an address upon the subject:
"What is the use of religion anyway?"  The group of ideas behind the
question is not hard to guess: that science gives us all the facts,
that facts and their laws are all we need, that the scientific control
of life guarantees progress, and that religion therefore is
superfluous.  But in such a statement one towering interrogation has
been neglected: what about the interpretation of the very facts which
science does present?  Could not one address himself to the question of
those students in some such way as this?  You say that science has
disclosed to us the leisureliness of the evolving universe.  Come back,
then, on the long road to the rear on which Bishop Usher's old date of
creation is a way station an infinitesimal distance behind us; come
back until together we stand at the universe's postern gate and look
out into the mystery whence all things came, where no scientific
investigation can ever go, where no one knows the facts.  What do you
make of it?  Two voices rise in answer.  One calls the world "a
mechanical process, in which we may discover no aim or purpose
whatever." [2]  And another voice says:

  "The heavens declare the glory of God;
  And the firmament showeth his handiwork." [3]

That is not a difference in facts, upon which we can get our hands.
That is a difference in the interpretation of the facts.

Or come forward together to look into that mystery ahead, toward which
this universe and we within it are so prodigiously plunging on.  Do we
not often feel, upon this earth whirling through space, like men and
women who by some weird chance have found themselves upon a ship,
ignorant of their point of departure and of their destination?  For all
the busyness with which we engage in many tasks, we cannot keep
ourselves from slipping back at times to the ship's stern to look out
along its wake and wonder whence we came, or from going at times also
to its prow to wonder whither we are headed.  What do you make of it?
Toward what sort of haven is this good ship earth sailing--a port
fortunate or ill?  Or may it be there is no haven, only endless sailing
on an endless sea by a ship that never will arrive?  So questioning, we
listen to conflicting voices.  One says there is no future except
ultimate annihilation, and another voice sings:

  "All we have willed or hoped or dreamed
    of good, shall exist."

That is not a difference in the facts, that eyes can see and hands
handle; that is a difference in the interpretation of the facts.

Or from such large considerations come down into some familiar
experience of daily life.  Here is a man having a hard battle between
right and wrong.  There is no more impressive sight on earth to one who
looks at it with understanding eyes.  What do you make of this
mysterious sense of duty which lays its magisterial hand upon us and
will not be denied?  At once various voices rise.  Haeckel says the
sense of duty is a "long series of phyletic modifications of the
phronema of the cortex." [4]  That is his interpretation.  And
Wordsworth:

  "Stern Daughter of the Voice of God!
  O Duty!"

This sharp contrast is not a difference between facts, which can be
pinned down as the Lilliputians pinned down Gulliver; it is a
difference in the interpretation of the facts.

Or let us go together up some high hill from which we can look out upon
the strange history of humankind.  We see its agonies and wars, its
rising empires followed by their ruinous collapse, and yet a mysterious
advance, too, as though mankind, swinging up a spiral, met old
questions upon a higher level, so that looking back to the Stone Age,
for all the misery of this present time, we would be rather here than
there.  What can we make of it?  Hauptmann's Michael Kramer says "All
this life is the shuddering of a fever."  And Paul says, "the eternal
purpose which he purposed in Christ."  That is not a difference in the
facts.  It is a difference in the interpretation of the facts.

Yet once more, come into the presence of death.  The facts that human
eyes can see are plain enough, but what can we make of it--this
standing on the shore, waving farewell to a friendly ship that loses
itself over the rim of the world?  Says Thomson of the world's
treatment of man,

  "It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath,
  Then grinds him back into eternal death."

And Paul says: "This corruptible must put on incorruption, and this
mortal must put on immortality.  But when this corruptible shall have
put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality,
then shall come to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed
up in victory."  That is not a contrast between facts; that is a
contrast between interpretations of facts.

Is it not plain why religion has such an unbreakable hold upon the
human mind?  The funeral of Christianity has been predicted many times
but each time the deceased has proved too lively for the obsequies.  In
the middle of the eighteenth century they said that Christianity had
one foot in the grave, but then came the amazing revival of religious
life under the Wesleys.  In the middle of the last century one wiseacre
said, "In fifty years your Christianity will have died out"; yet, for
all our failures, probably Christianity in all its history has never
made more progress than in the last half century.  If you ask why, one
reason is clear: man cannot live in a universe of uninterpreted facts.
The scientific approach to life is not enough.  It does not cover all
the ground.  Men want to know what life spiritually means and they want
to know that it "means intensely, and means good."  Facts alone are
like pieces of irritating grit that get into the oyster shell; the
pearl of life is created by the interpretations which the facts educe.

In this difference between the facts of experience and their
interpretations lies the secret of the contrast between our two words
_existence_ and _life_.  Even before we define the difference, we feel
it.  To exist is one thing; to live is another.  Existence is comprised
of the bare facts of life alone--the universe in which we live, our
heritage and birth, our desires and their satisfactions, growth, age
and death.  All the facts that science can display before us comprise
existence.  But life is something more.  Life is existence clothed in
spiritual meanings; existence seen with a worthy purpose at the heart
of it and hope ahead, existence informed by the spirit's insights and
understandings, transfigured and glorified by the spirit's faiths and
hopes.  It follows, therefore, that while existence is given us to
start with, life is a spiritual achievement.  A man must take the facts
of his existence whether he wants to or not, but he makes his life by
the activity of his soul.  The facts of existence are like so much
loose type, which can be set up to many meanings.  One man leaves those
facts in chaotic disarrangement or sets them up into cynical
affirmations, and he exists.  But another man takes the same facts and
by spiritual insight makes them mean gloriously, and he lives indeed.
To suppose that mankind ever can be satisfied with existence only and
can be called off from the endeavour to achieve this more abundant
life, is utterly to misconceive the basic facts of human nature.  And
this profound need for a spiritual interpretation of life is not
satisfied by an idea of temporal progress, stimulated by a few
circumstances which predispose our minds to immediate expectancy.


IV

When, therefore, any one asserts the adequacy of the scientific
approach to life, one answer stands ready to our hand: science deals
primarily with facts and their laws, not with their spiritual
interpretations.  To put the same truth in another way, science deals
with one specially abstracted aspect of the facts; it drains them of
their qualitative elements and, reducing them to their quantitative
elements, it proceeds to weigh and measure them and state their laws.
It moves in the realm of actualities and not in the realm of values.
One science, for example, takes a gorgeous sunset and reduces it to the
constituent ether waves that cause the colour.  What it says about the
sunset is true, but it is not the whole truth.  Ask anybody who has
ever seen the sun riding like a golden galleon down the western sea!
Another science takes a boy and reduces him to his Bertillon
measurements and at the top of the statistics writes his name, "John
Smith."  That is the truth about John Smith, but it is not the whole
truth.  Ask his mother and see!  Another science takes our varied and
vibrant mental life and reduces it to its physical basis and states its
laws.  That is the truth about our mental life, but it is not the whole
truth.  What is more, it is not that part of the truth by which men
really live.  For men live by love and joy and hope and faith and
spiritual insight.  When these things vanish life is

        "a tale
  Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
  Signifying nothing."


When a man takes that quantitative aspect of reality, which is the
special province of natural science, as though it were the whole of
reality, he finds himself in a world where the physical forces are in
control.  We, ourselves, according to this aspect of life, are the
product of physical forces--marionettes, dancing awhile because
physical forces are pulling on the strings.  In a word, when a man
takes that quantitative aspect of reality, which natural science
presents, as though it were the whole of reality, he becomes a
materialistic fatalist, and on that basis we cannot permanently build
either personal character or a stable civilization.  It is not
difficult, then, to see one vital significance of Jesus Christ: he has
given us the most glorious interpretation of life's meaning that the
sons of men have ever had.  The fatherhood of God, the friendship of
the Spirit, the sovereignty of righteousness, the law of love, the
glory of service, the coming of the Kingdom, the eternal hope--there
never was an interpretation of life to compare with that.  If life
often looks as though his interpretation were too good to be true, we
need not be surprised.  Few things in the universe _are_ as
superficially they _look_.  The earth looks flat and, as long as we
gaze on it, it never will look any other way, but it is spherical for
all that.  The earth looks stationary and if we live to be as old as
Methuselah we never will see it move, but it is moving--seventy-five
times faster than a cannon ball!  The sun looks as though it rose in
the east and set in the west, and we never can make it look any other
way, but it does not rise nor set at all.  So far as this earth is
concerned, the sun is standing still enough.  We look as though we
walked with our heads up and our feet down, and we never can make
ourselves look otherwise, but someone finding a safe stance outside
this whirling sphere would see us half the time walking with our heads
down and our feet up.  Few things are ever the way they look, and the
end of all scientific research, as of all spiritual insight, is to get
behind the way things look to the way things are.  Walter Pater has a
rememberable phrase, "the hiddenness of perfect things."  One meaning,
therefore, which Christ has for Christians lies in the realm of
spiritual interpretation.  He has done for us there what Copernicus and
Galileo did in astronomy: he has moved us out from our flat earth into
his meaningful universe, full of moral worth and hope.  He has become
to us in this, our inner need, what the luminous phrase of the Book of
Job describes, "An interpreter, one among a thousand."  And in spite of
all our immediate expectancy, born out of our scientific control of
life, mankind never needed that service more than now.


V

There is a second proposition to which we should attend as we endeavour
to define the need for religion with reference to the scientific
mastery of life.  Consider why so often men are tempted to suppose that
science is adequate for human purposes.  Is it not because science
supplies men with power?  Steam, electricity, petroleum, radium--with
what progressive mastery over the latent resources of the universe does
science move from one area of energy to another, until in the
imagination of recent generations she has seemed to stand saying: all
power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.  With such power to
bestow, is she not our rightful mistress?  But who that has walked with
discerning eyes through these last few years can any longer be beguiled
by that fallacious vision?  Look at what we are doing with this new
power that science has given us!  The business to which steel and steam
and electricity, explosives and poisons have recently been put does not
indicate that humanity's problem is solved when new power is put into
our hands.  Even the power of wide-spread communication can so be used
that a war which began in Serajevo will end with lads from Kamchatka
and Bombay blasted to pieces by the same shell on a French battlefield.
Even the power of modern finance can be so used that nations will
exhaust the credit of generations yet unborn in waging war.  How some
folk keep their cheap and easy optimism about humanity's use of its new
energies is a mystery.  We have come pretty near to ruining ourselves
with them already.  If we do not achieve more spiritual control over
them than we have yet exhibited we will ruin ourselves with them
altogether.  Once more in history a whole civilization will commit
suicide like Saul falling on his own sword.

The scientific control of life, by itself, creates more problems than
it solves.  The problem of international disarmament, for example, has
been forced on us by the fear of that perdition to the suburbs of which
our race has manifestly come through the misuse of scientific
knowledge.  Humanity is disturbed about itself because it has
discovered that it is in possession of power enough to wreck the world.
Never before did mankind have so much energy to handle.  Multitudes of
people, dubious as to whether disarmament is practical, are driven like
shuttles back and forth between that doubt, upon the one side, and the
certainty, upon the other, that armament is even less practical.  The
statisticians have been at work upon this last war and their figures,
like the measurements of the astronomers, grow to a size so colossal
that the tentacles of our imaginations slip off them when we try to
grasp their size.  The direct costs of this last war, which left us
with more and harder difficulties than we had at the beginning, were
about $186,000,000,000.  Is that practical?  At the beginning of 1922
almost all the nations in Europe, although by taxation they were
breaking their people's financial backs, were spending far more than
their income, and in the United States, far and away the richest nation
on the planet, we faced an enormous deficit.  Is that practical?  In
this situation, with millions of people unemployed, with starvation
rampant, with social revolution stirring in every country--not because
people are bad, not because they impatiently love violence, but because
they cannot stand forever the social strain and economic consequence of
war--what were we doing?  We were launching battleships which cost
$42,000,000 to build, which cost $2,000,000 a year to maintain and
which, in a few years, would be towed out to sea to be used as an
experimental target to try out some new armour-piercing shell.  I
wonder if our children's children will look back on that spectacle and
call it practical.  In 1912 the naval expenses of this country were
about $136,000,000.  In 1921 our naval expenses were about
$641,000,000--approximately five times greater in nine years.  So over
all the earth war preparations were pyramiding with an ever
accelerating momentum.  And because any man can see that we must stop
sometime, we have been trying desperately to stop now; to turn our
backs upon this mad endeavour to build civilization upon a
materialistic basis, bulwarked by physical force; to turn our faces
toward spiritual forces, fair play, reasonable conference, good-will,
service and co-operation.

Yet how hard it is to make the change effective!  Long ages ago in the
primeval jungle, the dogs' ancestors used to turn around three times in
the thicket before they lay down, that they might make a comfortable
spot to nestle in, and now your highbred Pekingese will turn around
three times upon his silken cushion although there is no earthly reason
why he should.  So difficult is it to breed beasts and men out of their
inveterate habits.  So hard is it going to be to make men give up the
idea that force is a secure foundation for international relationships.
Yet somehow that change must be made.  They are having trouble with the
housing problem in Tokyo and the reason is simple.  Tokyo is built on
earthquake ground and it is insecure.  You cannot put great houses on
unstable foundations.  One story, two stories, three stories--that is
about as high as they dare go.  But in New York City one sees the
skyscrapers reaching up their sixty stories into the air.  The
explanation is not difficult: Manhattan Island is solid rock.  If you
are going to build great structures you must have great foundations.
And civilization is a vast and complicated structure.  We cannot build
it on physical force.  That is too shaky.  We must build it upon
spiritual foundations.

There are those who suppose that this can be done by progress through
the scientific control of life, and who treat religion as a negligible
element.  Such folk forget that while a cat will lap her milk
contentedly from a saucer made of Wedgwood or china, porcelain or
earthenware, and will feel no curiosity about the nature of the
receptacle from which she drinks, human beings are not animals who thus
can take their food and ask no questions about the universe in which it
is served to them.  We want to know about life's origin and meaning and
destiny.  We cannot keep our questions at home.  We cannot stop
thinking.  If this universe is fundamentally physical, if the only
spark of spiritual life which it ever knew is the fitful flame of our
own unsteady souls, if it came from dust and to dust will return,
leaving behind no recollection of the human labour, sacrifice and
aspiration which for a little time it unconsciously enshrined, that
outlook makes an incalculable difference to our present lives.  For
then our very minds themselves, which have developed here by accident
upon this wandering island in the skies, represent the only kind of
mind there is, and what we do not know never was thought about or cared
for or purposed by anyone, and we, alone in knowing, are ourselves
unknown.

The consequence of this sort of thinking, which is the essence of
irreligion, is to be seen on every side of us in folk who, having thus
lost all confidence in God and the reality of the spiritual world,
still try to labour for the good of men.  They have kept one part of
Christianity, its ideals of character and service; they have lost the
other part, which assures them about God.  In a word, they are trying
to build an idealistic and serviceable life upon a godless basis.  Now,
the difficulty with this attitude toward life lies here: it demands a
quality of spirit for which it cannot supply the motive.  It demands
social hope, confidence, enthusiasm and sacrifice, and all the while it
cuts their nerves.  It tells men that the universe is fundamentally a
moral desert, that it never was intended even to have an oasis of
civilization in it, that if we make one grow it will be by dint of our
own effort against the deadset of the universe's apathy, that if, by
our toil, an oasis is achieved, it will have precarious tenure in such
alien and inhospitable soil, and that in the end it will disappear
before the onslaught of the cosmic forces; yet in the same breath it
tells men to work for that oasis with hope, confidence, joy and
enthusiastic sacrifice.  This is a world view which asks of men a
valorous and expensive service for which it cannot supply the driving
power.  Yet many of our universities are presenting just that outlook
upon life to our young men and women.  The youth are being urged to
fight courageously and sacrificially for righteousness upon the earth,
and at the same time they are presented with a view of the background
and destiny of human life similar to that which Schopenhauer expressed:
"Truly optimism cuts so sorry a figure in this theatre of sin,
suffering, and death that we should have to regard it as a piece of
sarcasm, if Hume had not explained its origin--insincere flattery of
God in the arrogant expectation of gain." [5]

What this generation, which so disparages religion and like the ancient
Sadducee calls its good right arm its god, will ultimately discover is
that the fight for righteousness in character and in society is a long
and arduous campaign.  The Bible says that a thousand years in God's
sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the
night.  It certainly seems that way.  It is a long and roundabout
journey to the Promised Land.  Generations die and fall by the way.
The road is white with the bones of pilgrims who attained not the
promises but saw them and greeted them from afar.  Some Giordano Bruno,
who gives himself to the achievement of mankind's high aims, is burned
at the stake; centuries pass and on the very spot where he was martyred
a monument is built with this inscription on it: "Raised to Giordano
Bruno by the generation which he foresaw."  This is exhilarating when
the story is finished, but in the meantime it is hard work being
Giordano Bruno and sacrificially labouring for a cause which you care
enough for and believe enough in and are sure enough about so that you
will die for it.  When such faith and hope and sacrifice are demanded
one cannot get them by exhortation, by waving a wand of words to
conjure his enthusiasm up.  Nothing will do but a world-view adequate
to supply motives for the service it demands.  Nothing will do but
religion.

One wonders why the preachers do not feel this more and so recover
their consciousness of an indispensable mission.  One wonders that the
churches can be so timid and dull and negative, that our sermons can be
so pallid and inconsequential.  One wonders why in the pulpit we have
so many flutes and so few trumpets.  For here is a world with the
accumulating energies of the new science in its hands, living in the
purlieus of hell because it cannot gain spiritual mastery over the very
power in which it glories.  Here is a world which must build its
civilization on spiritual bases or else collapse into abysmal ruin and
which cannot achieve the task though all the motives of
self-preservation cry out to have it done, because men lack the very
elements of faith and character which it is the business of religion to
supply.


VI

We have said that when science has given us all its facts we still need
a spiritual interpretation of the facts; that when science has put all
its energies into our hands we still need spiritual mastery over their
use.  Let us say in conclusion that, when science has given us all its
power, we still need another kind of power which it is not the business
of science to supply.  Long ago somebody who knew the inner meaning of
religion wrote:

  "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
  He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;
  He leadeth me beside still waters.
  He restoreth my soul."

That last phrase sums up one of the deepest needs of human life.  We
are in constant want of spiritual repair; we are lost without a fresh
influx of inward power; we desperately need to have our souls restored.
A young British soldier once came in from the trenches where his
aggressive powers had been in full employ and, having heard one of the
finest concert companies that London could send out, he wrote in a
letter to his family: "I have just come down from the trenches, and
have been listening to one of the best concerts I ever attended.  It
makes one feel that perhaps there is a good God after all."  The two
aspects of life which that soldier discovered in himself all men
possess.  One takes us to life's trenches; the other throws us back on
some revelation of grace and beauty that we may be sure of God.  With
one we seek aggressively to master life; with the other we seek
receptively to be inspired.  Every normal man needs these two kinds of
influence: one to send him informed and alert to his tasks, the other
to float his soul off its sandbars on the rising tide of spiritual
reassurance and power.  Every normal man needs two attitudes: one when
he goes into action determined to do his work and to do it well, and
the other when he subdues his spirit to receptivity and with the
Psalmist cries,

  "My soul, wait thou in silence for God only;
  For my expectation is from him."

When science has given us all the power it can, we still need another
kind of power which science cannot give.

Whatever else the scientific control of life may have accomplished, it
has not saved mankind from the old and devastating problems of trouble
and sin.  So far as individual experience of these is concerned, there
is little discernable difference between two thousand years before
Christ and two thousand years afterward.  Still disasters fall upon our
lives, sometimes as swift in their assault as wild beasts leaping from
an unsuspected ambush.  Still troubles come, long drawn out and
wearying, like the monotonous dripping of water with which old
torturers used to drive their victims mad.  Still sins bring shame to
the conscience and tragic consequence to the life, and tiresome work,
losing the buoyancy of its first inspiration, drags itself out into
purposeless effort and bores us with its futility.  Folk now, as much
as ever in all history, need to have their souls restored.  The
scientific control of life, however, is not adequate for that.
Electricity and subways and motor cars do not restore the soul; and to
know that there are millions upon millions of solar systems, like our
own, scattered through space does not restore the soul; and to delve in
the sea or to fly in the air or to fling our words through the ether
does not restore the soul.  The need of religion is perennial and would
be though our scientific control over life were extended infinitely
beyond our present hope, for the innermost ministry of religion to
human life is the restoration of the soul.

In this fact lies the failure of that type of naturalism which
endeavours to keep religion as a subjective experience and denies the
reality of an objective God.  If we are not already familiar with this
attempted substitution we soon shall be, for our young people are being
taught it in many a classroom now.  One of the basic principles of this
new teaching is belief in the spiritual life but, when one inquires
where the spiritual life is, he discovers that it is altogether within
ourselves--there is no original, creative and abiding Spiritual Life
from whom we come, by whom we are sustained, in whom we live.  Rather,
as flowers reveal in their fragrance a beauty which is not in the earth
where they grow nor in the roots on which they depend, so our spiritual
life is the mysterious refinement of the material out of which we are
constructed, and it has nothing to correspond with it in the source
from which we sprang.  Nevertheless, the new naturalism exalts this
spiritual life within us, calls it our crown and glory, bids us
cultivate and diffuse it, says about it nearly everything a Christian
says except that it is a revelation of eternal reality.  Moreover, it
is difficult to differentiate from this outspoken group of professed
naturalists another group of humanists who do retain the idea of God,
but merely as the sum total of man's idealistic life.  "God," says one
exponent, "is the farthest outreach of our human ideals."  That is to
say, our spiritual lives created God, not God our spiritual lives.
God, as one enthusiastic devotee of this new cult has put it, is a sort
of Uncle Sam, the pooling of the idealistic imaginations of multitudes.
Of course he does not exist, yet in a sense he is real; he is the
projection of our loyalties, affections, hopes.

It should go without saying that this idea of God has about as much
intellectual validity as belief in Santa Claus and is even more
sentimental, in that it is a deliberate attempt to disguise in pleasant
and familiar terms a fundamentally materialistic interpretation of
reality.  The vital failure of this spiritualized naturalism, however,
lies in the inability of its Uncle Sam to meet the deepest needs on
account of which men at their best have been religious.  This deified
projection of our ideals we made up ourselves and so we cannot really
pray to him; he does not objectively exist and so has no unifying
meaning which puts purposefulness into creation and hope ahead of it;
he does not care for any one or anything and so we may not trust him;
and neither in sin can he forgive, cleanse, restore, empower, nor in
sorrow comfort and sustain.  A god who functions so poorly is not much
of a god.  Once more, therefore, one wonders why in a generation when,
not less, but more, because of all our scientific mastery the souls of
men are starved and tired, the Church is not captured by a new sense of
mission.  It is precisely in a day when the active and pugnacious
energies of men are most involved in the conquest of the world that the
spirit becomes most worn for lack of sustenance.  To be assured of the
nearness and reality and availability of the spiritual world is a
matter of life and death to multitudes of folk to-day.  There could
hardly be a more alluring time in which to make the Holy Spirit real to
the world.  For the supreme moral asset in any man's life is not his
aggressiveness nor his pugnacity, but his capacity to be inspired--to
be inspired by great books, great music, by love and friendship; to be
inspired by great faiths, great hopes, great ideals; to be inspired
supremely by the Spirit of God.  For so we are lifted until the things
we tried to see and could not we now can see because of the altitude at
which we stand, and the things we tried to do and could not we now can
do because of the fellowship in which we live.  To one asserting the
adequacy of the scientific control of life, therefore, the Christian's
third answer is clear: man's deepest need is spiritual power, and
spiritual power comes out of the soul's deep fellowships with the
living God.

Such, then, is the abiding need of religion in a scientific age.  To be
scientifically minded is one of the supreme achievements of mankind.
To love truth, as science loves it, to seek truth tirelessly, as
science seeks it, to reveal the latent resources of the universe in
hope that men will use them for good and not for evil, as science does,
is one of the chief glories of our race.  When, however, we have taken
everything that science gives, it is not enough for life.  When we have
facts, we still need a spiritual interpretation of facts; when we have
all the scientific forces that we can get our hands upon, we still need
spiritual mastery over their use; and, beyond all the power that
science gives, we need that inward power which comes from spiritual
fellowships alone.  Religion is indispensable.  To build human life
upon another basis is to erect civilization upon sand, where the rain
descends and the floods come and the winds blow and beat upon the house
and it falls and great is the fall thereof.



[1] Andrew D. White: A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology
in Christendom, Vol. II, p. 16.

[2] Quoted in the Hibbert Journal, Vol. III, January 1905, p. 296.

[3] Psalm 19:1.

[4] Ernst Haeckel: The Wonders of Life, p. 413.

[5] Arthur Schopenhauer: Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Zweiter
Band, Kapital 46, Von der Nichtigkeit und dem Leiden des Lebens, p. 669.




LECTURE III

THE GOSPEL AND SOCIAL PROGRESS

I

Our last lecture started with the proposition that the dominant
influence in the intellectual and practical activity of the modern age
is man's scientific mastery over life.  This present lecture considers
one of the consequences of this primary fact: namely, the humanitarian
desire to take advantage of this scientific control of life so to
change social conditions that mankind may be relieved from crushing
handicaps which now oppress it.  For the growth of scientific knowledge
and control has been coincident with a growth of humanitarian
sentiment.  This movement for human relief and social reform, in the
midst of which we live, is one of the chief influences of our time.  It
has claimed the allegiance of many of the noblest folk among us.  Its
idealism, its call to sacrifice, the concreteness of the tasks which it
undertakes and of the gains which it achieves, have attracted alike the
fine spirits and the practical abilities of our generation.  What
attitude shall the Christian Church take toward this challenging
endeavour to save society?  How shall she regard this passionate belief
in the possibility of social betterment and this enthusiastic
determination to achieve it?  The question is one of crucial importance
and the Church is far from united on its answer.  Some Christians claim
the whole movement as the child of the Church, born of her spirit and
expressing her central purpose; others disclaim the whole movement as
evil and teach that the world must grow increasingly worse until some
divine cataclysm shall bring its hopeless corruption to an end; others
treat the movement as useful but of minor import, while they try to
save men by belief in dogmatic creeds or by carefully engineered
emotional experiences.  Meanwhile, no words can exaggerate the
fidelity, the vigour, the hopefulness, and the elevated spirit with
which many of our best young men and women throw themselves into this
campaign for better conditions of living.  Surely, the intelligent
portion of the Church would better think as clearly as possible about a
matter of such crucial import.

At first sight, the devotee of social Christianity is inclined
impatiently to brush aside as mere ignorant bigotry on the Church's
part all cautious suspicion of the social movement.  But there is one
real difficulty which the thoughtful Christian must perceive when he
compares the characteristic approach to the human problem made by the
social campaign, on the one side, and by religion, on the other.  Much
of the modern social movement seems to proceed upon the supposition
that we can save mankind by the manipulation of outward circumstance.
There are societies to change everything that can be changed and,
because the most obvious and easy subjects of transformation are the
external arrangements of human life, men set themselves first and
chiefly to change those.  We are always trying to improve the play by
shifting the scenery.  But no person of insight ever believed that the
manipulation of circumstance alone can solve man's problems.  Said
Emerson, "No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character."
Said Herbert Spencer, "No philosopher's stone of a constitution can
produce golden conduct from leaden instincts."  Said James Anthony
Froude, "Human improvement is from within outwards."  Said Carlyle,
"Fool! the Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy
Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of."
Said Mrs. Browning:

           "It takes a soul,
  To move a body: it takes a high-souled man
  To move the masses even to a cleaner stye:
  .....    Ah, your Fouriers failed,
  Because not poets enough to understand
  That life develops from within."


Now, religion's characteristic approach to the human problem is
represented by this conviction that "life develops from within."  So
far from expecting to save mankind by the manipulation of outward
circumstance, it habitually has treated outward circumstance as of
inferior moment in comparison with the inner attitudes and resources of
the spirit.  Economic affluence, for example, has not seemed to
Christianity in any of its historic forms indispensable to man's
well-being; rather, economic affluence has been regarded as a danger to
be escaped or else to be resolutely handled as one would handle
fire--useful if well managed but desperately perilous if uncontrolled.
Nor can it be said that Christianity has consistently maintained this
attitude without having in actual experience much ground for holding
it.  The possession of economic comfort has never yet guaranteed a
decent life, much less a spiritually satisfactory one.  The morals of
Fifth Avenue are not such that it can look down on Third Avenue, nor is
it possible anywhere to discern gradation of character on the basis of
relative economic standing.  It is undoubtedly true that folks and
families often have their moral stamina weakened and their
personalities debauched by sinking into discouraging poverty, but it is
an open question whether more folks and families have not lost their
souls by rising into wealth.  Still, after all these centuries, the
"rich fool," with his overflowing barns and his soul that sought to
feed itself on corn, is a familiar figure; still it is as easy for a
camel to go through a needle's eye as for a rich man to enter the
Kingdom of Heaven.  When, therefore, the Christian, approaching the
human problem, not from without in, but from within out, runs upon this
modern social movement endeavouring to save mankind by the manipulation
of outward circumstance, his cautious and qualified consent may be
neither so ignorant nor so unreasonable as it at first appears.

As an example of manipulated circumstance in which we are asked to
trust, consider the new international arrangements upon which the world
leans so heavily for its hopes of peace.  Surely, he would be a poor
Christian who did not rejoice in every reasonable expectation which new
forms of co-operative organization can fulfil.  But he would be a
thoughtless Christian, too, if he did not see that all good forms of
international organization are trellises to give the vines of human
relationship a fairer chance to grow; but if the vines themselves
maintain their old acid quality, bringing out of their own inward
nature from roots of bitterness grapes that set the people's teeth on
edge, then no external trellises will solve the problem.  It is this
Christian approach to life, from within out, which causes the common
misunderstanding between the social movement and the Church.  The first
thinks mainly of the importance of the trellis; the second thinks
chiefly about the quality of the vine.

The more deep and transforming a man's own religious experience has
been, the more he will insist upon the importance of this inward
approach.  Here is a man who has had a profound evangelical experience.
He has gone down into the valley of the shadow with a deep sense of
spiritual need; he has found in Christ a Saviour who has lifted him up
into spiritual freedom and victory; he has gone out to live with a
sense of unpayable indebtedness to him.  He has had, in a word, a
typical religious experience at its best with three elements at the
heart of it: a great need, a great salvation, a great gratitude.  When
such a man considers the modern social movement, however beautiful its
spirit or admirable its concrete gains, it seems to him superficial if
it presents itself as a panacea.  It does not go deep enough to reach
the soul's real problems.  The continual misunderstanding between the
Church and the social movement has, then, this explanation: the
characteristic approach of the Christian Gospel to the human problem is
from within out; the characteristic approach of much of the modern
social movement is from without in.


II

If, therefore, the Christian Gospel is going to be true to itself, it
must carefully preserve amid the pressure of our modern social
enthusiasms certain fundamental emphases which are characteristic of
its genius.  It must stress the possibility and the necessity of the
inward transformation of the lives of men.  We know now that a thorny
cactus does not have to stay a thorny cactus; Burbank can change it.
We know that a crab-apple tree does not have to stay a crab-apple tree;
it can be grafted and become an astrakhan.  We know that a malarial
swamp does not have to stay a malarial swamp; it can be drained and
become a health resort.  We know that a desert does not have to stay a
desert; it can be irrigated and become a garden.  But while all these
possibilities of transformation are opening up in the world outside of
us, the most important in the series concerns the world within us.  The
primary question is whether human nature is thus transformable, so that
men can be turned about, hating what formerly they loved and loving
what once they hated.  Said Tolstoy, whose early life had been
confessedly vile: "Five years ago faith came to me; I believed in the
doctrine of Jesus, and my whole life underwent a sudden transformation.
What I had once wished for I wished for no longer, and I began to
desire what I had never desired before.  What had once appeared to me
right now became wrong, and the wrong of the past I beheld as right."
[1]

So indispensable to the welfare of the world is this experience, that
we Christians need to break loose from our too narrow conceptions of it
and to set it in a large horizon.  We have been too often tempted to
make of conversion a routine emotional experience.  Even Jonathan
Edwards was worried about himself in this regard.  He wrote once in his
diary: "The chief thing that now makes me in any measure question my
good estate is my not having experienced conversion in those particular
steps wherein the people of New England, and anciently the dissenters
of old England, used to experience it."  Poor Jonathan!  How many have
been so distraught!  But the supreme folly of any man's spiritual life
is to try thus to run himself into the mold of any other man's
experience.  There is no regular routine in spiritual transformation.
Some men come in on a high tide of feeling, like Billy Bray, the
drunken miner, who, released from his debasing slavery and reborn into
a vigorous life, cried, "If they were to put me into a barrel I would
shout glory out through the bunghole!  Praise the Lord!"  Some men come
in like Bushnell, the New England scholar and preacher, who, when he
was an unbelieving tutor at Yale, fell on his knees in the quiet of his
study and said, "O God, I believe there is an eternal difference
between right and wrong and I hereby give myself up to do the right and
to refrain from the wrong."  Some men break up into the new life
suddenly like the Oxford graduate who, having lived a dissolute life
until six years after his graduation from the university in 1880,
picked up in his room one day Drummond's "Natural Law in the Spiritual
World," and, lo! the light broke suddenly--"I rejoiced there and then
in a conversion so astounding that the whole village heard of it in
less than twenty-four hours."  Some come slowly, like old John
Livingstone, who said, "I do not remember any particular time of
conversion, or that I was much cast down or lift up."  Spiritual
transformation is infinitely various because it is so infinitely vital;
but behind all the special forms of experience stands the colossal fact
that men can be transformed by the Spirit of God.

That this experience of inward enlightenment and transformation should
ever be neglected or minimized or forgotten or crowded out is the more
strange because one keeps running on it outside religion as well as
within.  John Keats, when eighteen years old, was handed one day a copy
of Spenser's poems.  He never had known before what his life was meant
to be.  He found out that day.  Like a voice from heaven his call came
in the stately measures of Spenser's glorious verse.  He knew that he
was meant to be a poet.  Upon this master fact that men can be inwardly
transformed Christ laid his hand and put it at the very center of his
gospel.  All through the New Testament there is a throb of joy which,
traced back, brings one to the assurance that no man need stay the way
he is.  Among the gladdest, solemnest words in the records of our race
are such passages in the New Testament as this: Fornicators,
adulterers, thieves, covetous, drunkards, revelers, extortioners, such
were some of you; but ye were washed, but ye were sanctified, but ye
were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit
of our God.  One cannot find in the New Testament anything stiff and
stilted about this experience.  Paul's change came suddenly; Peter's
came slowly.  They did not even have, as we have come to have, a
settled word to describe the experience.  Ask James what it is and,
practical-minded man that he is, he calls it _conversion_--being turned
around.  Ask Peter what it is and, as he looks back upon his old
benighted condition, he cries that it is like _coming out of the
darkness into a marvelous light_.  Ask Paul what it is and, with his
love of superlative figures, he cries that it is like _being dead and
being raised again with a great resurrection_.  Ask John what it is
and, with his mystical spirit, he says that it is _being born again_.
See the variety that comes from vitality--no stiff methods, no stiff
routine of experience, but throbbing through the whole book the good
news of an illuminating, liberating, transforming experience that can
make men new!

It is the more strange that this central element in the Christian
Gospel should be neglected in the interests of social reformation
because it is so indispensable to social reformation.  Wherever a new
social hope allures the efforts of forward-looking men, there is one
argument against the hope which always rises.  You cannot do that--men
say--human nature is against it; human nature has always acted another
way; you cannot change human nature; your hope is folly.  As one
listens to such skepticism he sees that men mean by human nature a
static, unalterable thing, huge, inert, changeless, a dull mass that
resists all transformation.  The very man who says that may be an
engineer.  He may be speaking in the next breath with high enthusiasm
about a desert in Arizona where they are bringing down the water from
the hills and where in a few years there will be no desert, but orange
groves stretching as far as the eye can reach, and eucalyptus trees
making long avenues of shade, and roses running wild, as plenteous as
goldenrod in a New England field.  But while about physical nature he
is as hopeful of possible change as a prophet, for human nature he
thinks nothing can be done.

From the Christian point of view this idea of human nature is utterly
false.  So far from being stiff and set, human nature is the most
plastic, the most changeable thing with which we deal.  It can be
brutalized beneath the brutes; it can rise into companionship with
angels.  Our primitive forefathers, as our fairy tales still reveal,
believed that men and women could be changed into anything--into trees,
rocks, wolves, bears, kings and fairy sprites.  One of the most
prominent professors of sociology in America recently said that these
stories are a poetic portraiture of something which eternally is true.
Men can be transformed.  That is a basic fact, and it is one of the
central emphases of the Christian Gospel.  Of all days in which that
emphasis should be remembered, the chiefest is the day when men are
thinking about social reformation.


III

It is only a clear recognition of the crucial importance of man's
inward transformation which can prepare us for a proper appreciation of
the social movement's meaning.  For one point of contact between
religion's approach to the human problem from within out and
reformation's approach from without in lies here: to change social
environments which oppress and dwarf and defile the lives of men is one
way of giving the transforming Spirit a fair chance to reach and redeem
them.  All too slowly does the truth lay hold upon the Church that our
very personalities themselves are social products, that we are born out
of society and live in it and are molded by it, that without society we
should not be human at all, and that the influences which play upon our
lives, whether redeeming or degrading, are socially mediated.  A man
who says that he believes in the ineffable value of human personalities
and who professes to desire their transformation and yet who has no
desire to give them better homes, better cities, better family
relationships, better health, better economic resources, better
recreations, better books and better schools, is either an ignoramus
who does not see what these things mean in the growth of souls, or else
an unconscious hypocrite who does not really care so much about the
souls of men as he says he does.

An illuminating illustration of this fact is to be seen in the
expanding ideals of missionary work.  When the missionaries first went
to the ends of the earth they went to save souls one by one.  They went
out generally with a distinctly, often narrowly, individualistic
motive.  They were trying to gather into the ark a few redeemed spirits
out of the wreck of a perishing world; they were not thinking primarily
of building a kingdom of social righteousness in the earth.  Consider,
then, the fascinating story of the way the missionaries, whatever may
have been the motives with which they started, have become social
reformers.  If the missionaries were to take the Gospel to the people,
they had to get to the people.  So they became the explorers of the
world.  It was the missionaries who opened up Asia and Africa.  Was
there ever a more stirring story of adventure than is given us in the
life of David Livingstone?  Then when the missionaries had reached the
people to give them the Gospel, they had to give them the Bible.  So
they became the philologists and translators of the world.  They built
the lexicons and grammars.  They translated the Bible into more than a
hundred languages on the continent of Africa alone.  Carey and his
followers did the same for over a score of languages in India.  The
Bible to-day is available in over six hundred living languages.
Everywhere this prodigious literary labour has been breaking down the
barriers of speech and thought between the peoples.  If ever we do get
a decent internationalism, how much of it will rest back upon this
pioneer spade work of the missionaries, digging through the barricades
of language that separate the minds of men!  When, then, the
missionaries had books to give the people, the people had to learn to
read.  So the missionaries became educators, and wherever you find the
church you find the school.  But what is the use of educating people
who do not understand how to be sanitary, who live in filth and disease
and die needlessly, and how can you take away old superstitions and not
put new science in their places, or deprive the people of witch doctors
without offering them substitutes?  So the missionaries became
physicians, and one of the most beneficent enterprises that history
records is medical missions.  What is the use, however, of helping
people to get well when their economic condition is such, their
standards of life so low, that they continue to fall sick again in
spite of you?  So the missionaries are becoming industrial reformers,
agriculturalists, chemists, physicists, engineers, rebuilding wherever
they can the economic life and comfort of their people.  The missionary
cause itself has been compelled, whether it would or not, to grow
socially-minded.  As Dan Crawford says about the work in Africa: "Here,
then, is Africa's challenge to its Missionaries.  Will they allow a
whole continent to live like beasts in such hovels, millions of negroes
cribbed, cabined, and confined in dens of disease?  No doubt it is our
diurnal duty to preach that the soul of all improvement is the
improvement of the soul.  But God's equilateral triangle of body, soul,
and spirit must never be ignored.  Is not the body wholly _ensouled_,
and is not the soul wholly _embodied_? . . .  In other words, in Africa
the only true fulfilling of your heavenly calling is the doing of
earthly things in a heavenly manner." [2]

Indeed, if any one is tempted to espouse a narrowly individualistic
gospel of regeneration, let him go to the Far East and take note of
Buddhism.  Buddhism in wide areas of its life is doing precisely what
the individualists recommend.  It is a religion of personal comfort and
redemption.  It is not mastered by a vigorous hope of social
reformation.  In many ways it is extraordinarily like medieval
Christianity.  Consider this definition of his religion that was given
by one Buddhist teacher: "Religion," he said, "is a device to bring
peace of mind in the midst of conditions as they are."  Conditions as
they are--settle down in them; be comfortable about them; do not try to
change them; let no prayer for the Kingdom of God on earth disturb
them; and there seek for yourselves "peace of mind in the midst of
conditions as they are."  And the Buddhist teacher added, "My religion
is pure religion."  But is there any such thing as really caring about
the souls of men and not caring about social habits, moral conditions,
popular recreations, economic handicaps that in every way affect them?
Of all deplorable and degenerate conceptions of religion can anything
be worse than to think of it as a "device to bring peace of mind in the
midst of conditions as they are?"  Yet one finds plenty of Church
members in America whose idea of the "simple Gospel" comes perilously
near that Buddhist's idea of "pure religion."

The utter futility of endeavouring to care about the inward
transformation of men's lives while not caring about their social
environment is evident when one thinks of our international
relationships and their recurrent issue in war.  War surely cannot be
thought of any longer as a school for virtue.  We used to think it was.
We half believed the German war party when they told us about the
disciplinary value of their gigantic establishment, and when Lord
Roberts assured us that war was tonic for the souls of peoples we were
inclined to think that he was right.  When, in answer to our nation's
call, our men went out to fight and all our people were bound up in a
fellowship of devotion to a common cause, so stimulated were we that we
almost were convinced that out of such an experience there might come a
renaissance of spiritual quality and life.  Is there anybody who can
blind his eyes to the facts now?  Every competent witness in Europe and
America has had to say that we are on a far lower moral level than we
were before the war.  Crimes of sex, crimes of violence, have been
unprecedented.  Large areas of Europe are to-day in a chaos so complete
that not one man in a thousand in America even dimly imagines it, with
a break-down of all the normal, sustaining relationships and privileges
of civilized life, and with an accompanying collapse of character
unprecedented in Christendom since the days of the Black Plague.  If we
are wise we will never again go down into hell expecting to come up
with spirits redeemed.

To be sure, there are many individuals of such moral stamina that they
have come out of this experience personally the better, not the worse.
There are people who would build into the fiber of their character any
experience that earth could offer them.  But if we are thinking of the
moral stability and progress of mankind, surely there is nothing in the
processes of war, as we have seen them, or the results of war, as they
now lie about us, that would lead us to trust to them for help.  War
takes a splendid youth willing to serve the will of God in his
generation before he falls on sleep and teaches him the skilful trick
of twisting a bayonet into the abdomen of an enemy.  War takes a
loyal-spirited man who is not afraid of anything under heaven and
teaches him to drop bombs on undefended towns, to kill perchance the
baby suckled at her mother's breast.  The father of one of our young
men, back from France, finding that his son, like many others, would
not talk, rebuked him for his silence.  "Just one thing I will tell
you," the son answered.  "One night I was on patrol in No Man's Land,
and suddenly I came face to face with a German about my own age.  It
was a question of his life or mine.  We fought like wild beasts.  When
I came back that night I was covered from head to foot with the blood
and brains of that German.  We had nothing personally against each
other.  He did not want to kill me any more than I wanted to kill him.
That is war.  I did my duty in it, but for God's sake do not ask me to
talk about it!  I want to forget it."  That _is_ war, and no more
damning influence can be thrown around the characters of people in
general or around the victims of military discipline and experience in
particular than that supplied by war.  How then could inconsistency be
made more extreme than by saying that Christianity is concerned about
the souls of men but is not concerned about international good-will and
co-operation?  After all, the approaches to the human problem from
without in and from within out are not antithetical, but supplementary.
This tunnel must be dug from both ends and until the Church thoroughly
grasps that fact she will lead an incomplete and ineffectual life.


IV

The purposes of Christianity involve social reform, not only, as we
have said, because we must accomplish environmental change if we are to
achieve widespread individual transformation, but also because we must
reorganize social life and the ideas that underlie it if we are to
maintain and get adequately expressed the individual's Christian spirit
when once he has been transformed.  Granted a man with an inwardly
remotived life, sincerely desirous of living Christianly, see what a
situation faces him in the present organization of our economic world!
Selfishness consists in facing any human relationship with the main
intent of getting from it for oneself all the pleasure and profit that
one can.  There are folk who use their families so.  They live like
parasites on the beautiful institution of family life, getting as much
as possible for as little as possible.  There are folk who use the
nation so.  To them their country is a gigantic grab-bag from which
their greedy hands may snatch civic security and commercial gain.  For
such we have hard and bitter names.  There is, however, one
relationship--business--where we take for granted this very attitude
which everywhere else we heartily condemn.  Multitudes of folk go up to
that central human relationship with the frank and unabashed confession
that their primary motive is to make out of it all that they can for
themselves.  They never have organized their motives around the idea
that the major meaning of business is public service.

The fact is, however, that all around us forms of business already have
developed where we count it shame for a man to be chiefly motived by a
desire for private gain.  If you thought that the preacher were in love
with his purse more than with his Gospel, you would not come again to
hear him, and you would be right; if you thought that the teacher of
your children cared for payday first and for teaching second, you would
find another teacher for them tomorrow, and you ought to; if you
thought that your physician cared more for his fees than he did for his
patients, you would discharge him to-night and seek for a man more
worthy of his high profession; if you had reason to suppose that the
judges of the Supreme Court in Washington cared more for their salary
than they did for justice, you could not easily measure your
indignation and your shame.  In the development of human life few
things are nobler than the growth of the professional spirit, where in
wide areas of enterprise, not private gain, but fine workmanship and
public service have become the major motives.  If one says that a sharp
line of distinction is to be drawn between what we call professions and
what we call business, he does not know history.  Nursing, as a gainful
calling, a hundred years ago was a mercenary affair into which
undesirable people went for what they could get out of it.  If nursing
to-day is a great profession, where pride of workmanship and love of
service increasingly are in control, it is because Florence
Nightingale, and a noble company after her, have insisted that nursing
essentially is service and that all nurses ought to organize their
motives around that idea.

What is the essential difference between professions and business?  Why
should the building of a schoolhouse be a carnival of private profit
for labourers and contractors alike, when the teaching in it is
expected to be full of the love of fine workmanship and the joy of
usefulness?  Why, when a war is on, must the making of munitions here
be a wild debauch of private profits, but the firing of them "over
there" be a matter of self-forgetful sacrifice?  Why, in selling a food
which is essential to health, should the head of a sugar corporation
say with impunity, "I think it is fair to get out of the consumers all
you can, consistent with the business proposition," when the physician
is expected to care for the undernourished with a devoted professional
spirit utterly different from the sugar magnate's words?  There is no
real answer to that "why."  The fact is that for multitudes of people
business is still in the unredeemed state in which nursing and teaching
and doctoring were at the beginning, and nothing can save us from the
personal and social consequence of this unhappy situation except the
clear vision of the basic meaning of business in terms of service, and
the courageous reorganization of personal motive and economic
institutions around that idea.

If, then, Christianity is sincerely interested in the quality of human
spirits, in the motives and ideals which dominate personality, she must
be interested in the economic and industrial problems of our day.  To
be sure, many ministers make fools of themselves when they pass
judgment on questions which they do not understand.  It is true that a
church is much more peaceable and undisturbing when it tries
experiments upon religious emotions with colored lights than when it
makes reports upon the steel trust.  Many are tempted, therefore, to
give in to irritation over misdirected ministerial energy or to a
desire for emotional comfort rather than an aroused conscience.  One
has only to listen where respectable folk most congregate to hear the
cry: let the Church keep her hands off!

Let me talk for a moment directly to that group.  If you mean, by your
distaste for the Church's interest in a fairer economic life, that most
ministers are unfitted by temperament and training to talk wisely on
economic policies and programs, you are right.  Do you suppose that we
ministers do not know how we must appear to you when we try to discuss
the details of business?  While, however, you are free to say anything
you wish about the ineptitude of ministers in economic affairs (and we,
from our inside information, will probably agree with you), yet as we
thus put ourselves in your places and try to see the situation through
your eyes, do you also put yourselves in our places and try to see it
through our eyes!

I speak, I am sure, in the name of thousands of Christian ministers in
this country endeavouring to do their duty in this trying time.  We did
not go into the ministry of Jesus Christ either for money or for fun.
If we had wanted either one primarily, we would have done something
else than preach.  We went in because we believed in Jesus Christ and
were assured that only he and his truth could medicine the sorry ills
of this sick world.  And now, ministers of Christ, with such a motive,
we see continually some of the dearest things we work for, some of the
fairest results that we achieve, going to pieces on the rocks of the
business world.

You wish us to preach against sin, but you forget that, as one of our
leading sociologists has said, the master iniquities of our time are
connected with money-making.  You wish us to imbue your boys and girls
with ideal standards of life, but all too often we see them, having
left our schools and colleges, full of the knightly chivalry of youth,
torn in the world of business between the ideal of Christlikeness and
the selfish rivalry of commercial conflict.  We watch them growing
sordid, disillusioned, mercenary, spoiled at last and bereft of their
youth's fine promise.  You wish us to preach human brotherhood in
Christ, and then we see that the one chief enemy of brotherhood between
men and nations is economic strife, the root of class consciousness and
war.  You send some of us as your representatives to the ends of the
earth to proclaim the Saviour, and then these missionaries send back
word that the non-Christian world knows all too well how far from
dominant in our business life our Christian ideals are and that the
non-Christian world delays accepting our Christ until we have better
proved that his principles will work.  Everywhere that the Christian
minister turns, he finds his dearest ideals and hopes entangled in the
economic life.  Do you ask us then under these conditions to keep our
hands off?  In God's name, you ask too much!

In the sixteenth century the great conflict in the world's life
centered in the Church.  The Reformation was on.  All the vital
questions of the day had there their spring.  In the eighteenth century
the great conflict of the world's life lay in politics.  The American
and French revolutions were afoot.  Democracy had struck its tents and
was on the march.  All the vital questions of that day had their origin
there.  In the twentieth century the great conflict in the world's life
is centered in economics.  The most vital questions with which we deal
are entangled with economic motives and institutions.  As in the
sixteenth and eighteenth centuries great changes were inevitable, so
now the economic world cannot possibly remain static.  The question is
not whether changes will occur, but how they will occur, under whose
aegis and superintendence, by whose guidance and direction, and how
much better the world will be when they are here.  Among all the
interests that are vitally concerned with the nature of these changes
none has more at stake than the Christian Church with her
responsibility for the cure of souls.


V

Still another point of contact exists between the Christian purpose and
social reform: the inevitable demand of religious ideals for social
application.  The ideal of human equality, for example, came into our
civilization from two main sources--the Stoic philosophy and the
Christian religion--and in both cases it was first of all a spiritual
insight, not a social program.  The Stoics and the early Christians
both believed it as a sentiment, but they had no idea of changing the
world to conform with it.  Paul repeatedly insisted upon the equality
of all men before God.  In his early ministry he wrote it to the
Galatians: "There can be neither Jew nor Gr