SERENE See IG ice , a wi ae ett ay ate YY eee . ‘: a = egete exwasis fees x ish oi vteasts P aaetn 8 S815 ae rf ris “tee by bata eae preepise sEaeense fizs behceess eagle wwe: reshed *y, fF eotitite PE Rei 7 4 fae * aks a ses OS cs tae at ate oor ENS eh betes aeons ef if ye shee ; cog Aer Estaehn Nees. ate se panes (aes a : ne nate aes Re eee tae erste vt = Pak = = as ay, Neorg soe alee es ' re ¥ piety sestietroas Serta SORT xi Hips fet , Bhi Se ewes = Barts . 3 pee i8 7 Us lade aes ee; Patntin tote the fields of Time”’ is suggestive, but nothing more. These misgivings are rife among literary leaders and churchmen. Those who in the repercussion of the late war consign the race to perdition are given to proposals which would be logical there. Those who for the same cause speak of it in terms befitting heaven seem oblivious to the fact that its life has to be lived out on earth, where ‘‘ Truth is the daughter of slow Time,” and few things are more deliberate than real progress. Their sensational outlook warns us that experi- mental treatment is the key to every period. Not the results of any definite experiences in any age, but the sum total of all experiences, past and present, historic and personal, is the controlling factor of the human story.’ When authors or preachers forsake the experimental for the sensational inter- pretation of life, they are certain to indulge hectic ideas and =~ fabulous predictions concerning it. Yet what are their qualms and fears, their ill founded anticipations and hopes, but registrations of the larger life, the lifting horizons, ever on before, to which they have not been accustomed? 6 Benjamin Kidd: ‘‘ The Science of Power,” p. 3. ff. 7Cf. J. B. Bury: ‘‘ The Idea of Progress,’’ p. 5. 16 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE The majority of men and women who plod along prosaic ways may not be aware of the steady accumulations of heredity and of history which create life’s changing scenes. But they are keenly aware of their relation to the past. The stultifying idea that they are cut off from it is instinctively set aside. Previous civilizations did not exist for our sole benefit, nor did their economies die in giving birth to ours. The debris of former generations is not so much “‘filling in” of the gulf over which our generation proceeds to its fore- ordained supremacy. ‘The cocksureness of these conceits flatters our pride and vanity, but a moment’s reflection con- demns them. It is an open question whether ancient Greece or Judea does not now exercise a far more pregnant influence upon the world than any modern State. The true distinction of our age is that it forms a single layer in Time’s strata, and few conceptions are more misleading than those which attribute to it excessive importance either for good or evil. But to conceive of it as a part of the whole of that human history which from first to last has been an indivisible unity, is to liberate beneficial social and political ideals. There is one law, one life, one element, one destiny; and the seemingly static differences that contradict this oneness are slowly giving way. What the forbears were, the children are; they stand and fall together. If the brotherhood of the race is honorable, so are we; if we are dishonorable, so is it; if other nations squander the soul’s heritage we are the poorer; if we enrich it, they are the richer. They live in us as we live in them; there is no life divided in the succession of its eddying forms. One flesh, one blood, one story, one strife, one defeat, one victory—this is the underlying secret of the human drama. Scan it where you will, there shine the righteous to cheer our darkness, there cower the profligate to dim our prospects.® 8 Cf. “Henry Scott Holland. Memoirs and Letters.’’ Edited by Stephen Paget, p. ITI. THE TWO VOICES li Iil At the same time none must forget that neither praise nor blame, human good nor human evil, closes man’s case with his Maker. ‘Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic Soul of the wide world, dreaming on things to come” determines its fate. A divine justice and a divine love which burn ere they transform have to be reckoned in the process. In man himself there is a residual greatness which is not too familiar to a materialized era. The sidereal universe is apparently unique in its grandeur and sublimity. Yet how ephemeral it becomes when compared with the astronomer who watches it. Likewise the thinker who, as Pascal did in his last years, looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues therein, shows us the duality of human life and human nature. ‘‘Man is a reed, but he is a thinking reed, and all his dignity lies in his consciousness.”’ The eternal silent spaces, the absurdities of life, the brutality of death cannot quench that consciousness. The happiness he pursues is evanescent as the dew; the lower levels he frequents have no rational terminus. Even an Asiatic nomad knows full well what he wants, and is glad to get it. But once he has tasted of the powers of the world to come he will start the prayer wheels on which a million petitions revolve daily to satisfy the long- ings of his heart for freedom and for rest. These realities have no relation to the contemptible brochures on success that deal with getting and spending. They belong to the soul which, once “‘secure in herself,’”’ said Addison’s Cato, “‘smiles at the drawn dagger.” The homeless Pilgrim, tossing upon the North Atlantic in a rude and ill found ship, is doubtless a far less congenial spectacle for lovers of luxury than Cleopatra in her gorgeous barge floating on the unruffled Nile like a burnished throne. But the humble Pilgrim came out of great tribulation to be the builder and maker of Commonwealths, whereas the haughty Queen glided on to self-murder and the destruction & 18 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE of a vast empire. The fascination of sensuous delights does not deceive God-seeking spirits. The Pilgrim temperament is averse to the hole and corner existence of the prosperous, the well-fed, the bovine. It does not too readily accept those vulgar social estimates that are often repeated but seldom weighed. It understands that prosperity, lightened of scruples, kills far more virtue than deserving poverty on a daring quest; that the abundance of this world’s goods is still a vexation, since life does not consist therein. It prefers the music of existence played in major chords, with the over- tones of victorious suffering enveloping it. Its delight is in the steep rugged ascent. It believes that to breast the heights heroically makes the heroical man. The voice that summoned Abraham from plenteousness to pilgrimage has resounded in courageous hearts at various but appointed seasons. It was heard centuries later on the Babylonian plains; and centuries later still, in the hill country of Judea and Galilee. It should be heard by those of our generation who know many things, but understand few things with the wisdom which is insight. It is the voice of Faith, whose resonance drowns the dis- cordance of the voice of Fear, the lamentations of which are now all too prevalent. It bids us hope and see our hope frustrated, then hope again. Listen to its trumpet note in the opening words of the original Gospel attributed to St. Mark. The author quotes the unknown seer of Israel’s exile: ‘Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, Who shall prepare thy way; The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make ye ready the way of the Lord, Make his paths straight.” 9 This prophet viewed all preceding ages as a prolonged pre- paration for God’s approaching entrance into history. The Evangelist applied his rhapsody to the revelation of God in 7 St. Markil) 2) 3: THE TWO VOICES 19 Jesus Christ. The exposition of Christ’s mediatorial sov- ereignty does not belong here. But what does belong here is the fact that countless multitudes have never known what life was until they knew it in His life. The too long delayed enforcement of His ideals also belongs everywhere: of truth as opposed to falsehood, of freedom as opposed to tyranny, of peace as opposed to war. These are the hall marks of the Faith which He ordained; the revelations of the God and Father who ordained Him. It is men’s degraded conceptions of that Father’s nature and purposes which have inflicted its more deplorable evils upon society. And the question is opportune, why the luminous spiritual experiences that at- ~ tended the creation of the Church and inspired the writings of Holy Writ should not make a fresh contact with the present stage of civilization. Students of the past who compare it with the present are aware of the Providence which has been “the great corrector | iy of enormous times”’; ‘“‘the shaker of o’er rank States ’”’; often using very unlikely agencies to advance causes that seemed weak beyond words. We have already noted that the visible fabric vanishes, which is an implication that the invisible realm remains. The spirit in man subsists with marvellous capacity for adaptation, while all else takes its determinate leap and disappears. The wider range of his intellectual faculties has resulted in a lopsided knowledge which reports that during the last one hundred and fifty years the human race has literally been rediscovered. Its numbers have grown to one thousand six hundred and fifty millions of people now living on the globe, whose diversities in color, language, social habits and religion create the differences from which most international differences spring. Twenty-five languages are spoken in Europe; forty-five in Asia; and the remaining sixty which swell the total to one hundred and thirty are spoken in America, Africa, and the Islands. The present number of independent States isabout sixty-five; of which twenty-seven are in Europe, eighteen in Asia, twelve in South 20 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE America, and eight in North America. These statistics bring out the extraordinary human complexity of the modern world and the necessity for an ordered observation of its requirements. The complexity is furthered by the advance of modern learning, some of the ill effects of which have been ' noted. It has grown ten times as fast as in the period between Cesar and Napoleon, and one thousand times as fast as in pre-historic days. Upon the authority of Professor Karl _ Pearson, the product of this tremendous activity is in many ‘instances worthless. The age in which we live has been a series of dissolving views, in which recent economic and mate- rial gains were half obliterated by their swift succession. In the physical sciences alone radioactivity has shown us what unsuspected energies are bound up in the minutest particles of matter. But in organic chemistry a single worker may at any moment stumble upon a substance at the verge of related compounds, that will be infinitely more potent for good or harm than any now in operation. The atoms thus chem- ically treated are arsenals in disguise. Under these novel conditions races and nations recently far apart have been jammed together without previous preparation. The pace is killing; it strains to their utmost tension every educational and religious machinery; the forms of yesterday are the relics of today. Yet I cannot but believe that these wonders have brought us to the threshold of a renewed intimacy with their Creator; and one which is absolutely necessary to their right use and direction. The French savant, Madame Bisson, is convinced that if human intercourse and knowledge are to proceed to advantage, they will have to cultivate the spiritual side of life. She insists that further deference to the materialized metaphysic already mentioned will be inimical to the general welfare, and the French Academy has given her protest respectful atten- tion. In other words, she solicits for France and for mankind 10Cf. G. M. Trevelyan: ‘‘ British History in the Nineteenth Century,” Dias i: THE TWO VOICES 21 the voice of Faith which proclaims an Ideal Order behind all history, and an All Holy Being whose nature necessitates that Order. Whatever may be said about her protest, it can hardly be questioned that the vilest modern evils have arisen, not from ignorance, but from knowledge wrongly interpreted and fearfully misapplied. Whoever doubts the need of one visible universal Society in the Church, or the moralization of the Ideal of the State, few, I think, will doubt the benefit of that deeper and invisible unity which finds its outlet in a common love of the living God, and of His sensible creation. These conclusions are reached by what J. B. Mozley termed reason working on a higher plane. Nevertheless, they have substantial grounds on lower planes. The mon- archy of public opinion is always difficult to deal with, be- cause it cannot be called into the open. Its rivulets for the last half century have flowed into devastating currents, while the men and women who prided themselves on keeping in touch with it have been unaware of its real drifts. Seem- ingly great things have been observed; seemingly small things have escaped observation. What was viewed as im- portant fizzled out, while so small a matter as a pistol shot blew up half the world. A civilization thus exposed con- demns itself, and justifies insistence upon its regeneration. These conclusions also bespeak courage. They prevent in men the mixed determination for betterment which is afraid of ridicule; the vanity which will not endanger a rebuff; the faint-heartedness due to a sullen pride that must be sure of its ends before it will risk its means. True courage chal- lenges that patronage of religion which is the armor of half- witted spirits who cannot read the signs of the times. It abolishes the dread of life, which visualises its terrors ahead and ready to pounce, or even suspects that its Author may turn out malignant. Such courage means more than one can tell in a world of cross purposes, where so many people find their resolution to do well in the well-doing of the few. It is 22 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE “valor without vengeance,” as Dr. A. J. Lyman happily expressed it; apart from which no goodness is altogether secure, no wickedness is seriously threatened. Yet courage cannot be entrusted with the values of civilization unless it is united with patience, fidelity, and the spiritual vision which knows those values when it sees them. The belief that the man who heeds the Divine Voice, and forsakes all else to follow the right as he sees it will be backed up by God, is of immense service to morals and to faith. His course may appear imprudent or even fanatical, but its wisdom has been repeatedly demonstrated by a historic religious experience which is far more vital than the formulas in which it has been expressed.!! Deeper than the fear of penalty, higher than the hope of reward, stronger than any motive in life, is the assured confidence that the Moral Sov- ereign of the universe sustains every just and righteous cause. IV The courageous servant of God will not make his intellect the slave of his heart, nor blink disagreeable realities at the biddance of his emotions. But he will remember that instinct often outvies knowledge; that love is the height of good, the hate of ill; and that peace and progress come, not by unaided reason alone, but also as the outflowings of a brave, believing spirit. Principal L. P. Jacks pertinently states one feature of this discussion. ‘On the surface of things there is discord, confusion and want of adaptation; but dig down, first to the center of the world, and then to the center of your own nature, and you will find a most wonderful correspondence, a most beautiful harmony, between the two — the world made for the hero and the hero made for the world.” !2 This statement elicits sympathy even from the 11 Cf. A. Seth Pringle-Pattison: ‘‘ The Idea of God in the Light of Recent Philosophy, ’”’ p. 87. 127,, P. Jacks: “ Religious Perplexities,’’ p. 61. THE TWO VOICES 23 arrant coward. It is idle to suggest that he relishes cow- ardice, or its accessories — fear and unbelief. He and the rest of men are on the side of the spiritual hero. Society favors the angels. Controversies about nebular or mate- rialistic hypotheses leave it cold. It looks upon naturalistic theories of the universe, if it knows them at all, as irrational attempts to explain it. The younger social groups are keenly aware of the new world which is being evolved out of its dis- orders. The older groups desire a bond of religion and morals that shall be sufficiently strong to anchor their drifting lives. Spiritual problems, always formidable, are encircled by the craving of old and young for an energizing faith which en- shrines courage, justice and right living as the integrating forces of society. Everywhere, so far as I can ascertain, love is esteemed the light of human existence: love of goodness, of reality, of progress, of one’s fellows, and above all, of one’s Maker. It is generally recognized that the New Testament Gospel exalts such love, and regards humanity as the field fertilized by God for its regenerating seed. Men ask for it in manifold ways, not the less religious because of their variety. And we have it, not primarily as a philosophy, a theology, an institutional method, a law; but incarnated in a living Person with whom all souls can commune. Christian truth is summed up in Christ’s Person; Christian character in His example; Christian morality in His teaching. Obedience to Him recreates human nature. The rebellious, the desperate, even the inhuman, as well as those who do a little conventional good with their superfluous means, and live apparently blameless but unoccupied lives, have been transformed by fellowship with Him. Not belief, therefore, in a metaphysical Absolute, nor in a Deity to be sought and found by reason alone; but belief in the God who was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, is the dynamic of all Christian creeds and of all Christian Churches. He is made known to them as the “‘God who lives in the perpetual giving of Himself, who shares the life of His finite creatures, 24 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE bearing with and in them the whole burden of their finitude, their sinful wanderings and sorrows, and the suffering with- out which they cannot be made perfect. . . . And thus, fora metaphysic which has emancipated itself from physical categories, the ultimate conception of God is not that of a preéxistent Creator, but, as it is for religion, that of the Eternal Redeemer of the world. This perpetual process is the very life of God, in which, besides the effort and the pain, He tastes, we must believe, the joy of victory won.” ® What- ever He may be as the Absolute, “‘existing in solitary bliss and perfection,’ the God of the Christian revelation is the Father of all spirits, Who manifests Himself in His Son to their varied stages of imperfection. He is, in the words of Earl Balfour, ‘‘A God Whom men can love, a God to Whom men can pray, Who takes sides, Who has purposes and preferences, Whose attributes, howsoever conceived, leave unimpaired the possibility of a personal relation between Himself and those Whom He has created.” 14 Hebrews, Catholics and Protestants who in the joint dis- charge of common duties, have at last found it possible to live together without regarding each other as natural en- emies, can approach the problems of our age in the light of their personal relation with the universal Father. ‘They have been obliged to recognize that truth, honour, purity, justice, manliness, are neither the growth nor the privilege of a belief in special formulas; that men can disagree in religion without wishing to destroy each other.” ?* The difficulties to which Industrialism (which involves Cap- italism), Militarism, and Secularism give rise are shared by right-minded citizens of every creed, or of no creed in par- ticular. Industrialism has been hampered by grave economic deficiencies which left a degraded sediment at the bottom of society. For centuries antiquated and corrupt methods of 13 A. Seth Pringle-Pattison: ‘‘ The Idea of God in the Light of Recent Philosophy, ”’ p. 411 f. 14“ Theism and Humanism, ’”’ p. 36. 15 James Anthony Froude: ‘“ The Council of Trent,’ p. 294. THE TWO VOICES 25 government prevented remedial legislation in behalf of manual toilers. Their countless hosts seem to have been outside the pale of social justice; to have had no connection with real citizenship. Ministers of State as wise as Pitt, Burke and Fox in Britain, practically ignored the economic revolution that began in their day. Casual references to it made by ardent sympathizers with political freedom were usually inspired by fear of the submerged masses. Of Amer- ican Constitutionalists, only Hamilton, who had read to good purpose ‘‘ The Wealth of Nations,’ foresaw the possibilities of an industrial uprising; but his masterly ‘Report on Manufac- tures’ passed unheeded here. Later statesmen of intellectual briliiancy, of lucid understanding which permitted of no self- deception, and a political creed that stressed the funda- mental equality of all citizens, did nothing more than im- provise economic measures to stave off the day of reckoning. Those who now have to meet its demands apprehend the need of a social justice, the prolonged delay of which adds to the menace of its issues. Nor is it surprising that some propositions have been made for its attainment which are as impossible as the redistribution of the solar system. En- deavors to achieve the sudden transformation of a neglected industrial system by the utterance of second-hand platitudes have resulted in further disappointment. Reason and right are not permanently changed, however, by times of social yeast and fermentation; and these are sometimes useful to stir up the stagnant thinking of those by whom enthusiasm for social equity is seldom well received. The laws of commerce no ruler and no system can break. They are despotic, changeless, as old as the act of barter between man and man. The economic circle describes its course through indifference and agitation, after which the world again returns to its own. Meanwhile there cannot be too many staunch advocates of the good will and fair play which are as requisite for industrialism as sunlight for the sprouting seed. The opposing tendencies, of capital and labor 26 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE ~ are balanced by justice, not by almsgiving, which creates some of the miseries it relieves, but by no means relieves all the pauperization it creates. Yet the fury of their debate might be checked if both sides would practice amity and moderation. As it is, they often remind one of a caustic criticism of Landseer that he painted his men to look like dogs, and his dogs to look like men. The assumptions that capitalists are bloated “spiders of hell,’’ and that workers are infamous conspirators against the public welfare, are almost criminal when injected in a highly inflamed quarrel. Why should these contestants become impersonal and non-moral under provocation, or act as though they were no longer human beings but symbols of their respective factions? Yet it is very probable that the majority are committed to what they deem equitable. And the more one knows of employers and employees as a body, the more one admires their social constancy. They carry on the gigantic and necessary tasks of nations and of the world, and since the last war, they have done additional wonders for reconstruction in many lands. The maturer treatment of industrial problems will be found in a kindlier spirit, in give and take, in experiments not always insured against reversal. They will not be solved by men who deem themselves invariably right, and take their stand upon a fictitious rectitude, any more than by men who defend wrong positions with transparent casuistry. Owner- ship is not an unforgivable sin; profitable trading which serves the community does not necessarily brutalize society any more than suitable work degrades the worker. Com- mercial exchange, and the right to produce or to sell what is produced are inseparable from the health of a community. One of the obstacles to the growth of social compunction and justice is the intrinsic caution of human nature. Men themselves are the intractable element in reform. They dislike change, and require something more than heated or even verifiable impeachments before they can be induced to act against the existing order. The late war set aside, for the THE TWO VOICES 27 time being, their innate conservatism. It increased the self- respect of the laboring classes, and gave their claims a place and presentation they had not known before 1914. Fences were broken down, industrial groups were fused, social ideals and methods were synthesized. Whatever may be the ultimate economic forms adopted by civilized States, many of them will date, in my judgment, from the first quarter of this century. One could predict their speedier settlement if the artisan were not so often estranged from his task, and the employer from his responsibilities. ‘The age of industrial in- nocence, when the workman put his personality into his work, and insisted that it should excel all similar work, has given place to an age of mechanism, which often dehumanizes him. The deliberate underestimation of capitalism has been offset by the failure of Marxian Socialism, which is now being rejected by many of its former intellectual adherents. The re- action is not confined to Marxian Socialism. The most severe censors of Socialism in general are disillusioned people who lately professed it. But though capitalism will not be abolished until some sufficient substitute has been provided, the defense of some of its worst practices should cease. The stand made against the twelve hour day by Bishop Francis J. McConnell and his associates of all the Churches, was a di- rect and irrefragable appeal to the public conscience which did succeed beyond a peradventure. The idea of wealth as mere wealth, and the fear of what it may do, no longer weigh un- duly with enlightened leaders of the Church. Capital and la- bor should be recognized as copartners, not competitors. The wage-earner’s proportion of the profits should be paid to him, and he should also be willing to bear his share of the losses. Agriculture requires a land-owning as well as a land-tilling yeomanry. The peasant classes in democratic nations should be merged into propertied classes and given an interest in the State. A home-owning proletariat through a more equitable distribution of industrial proceeds would be a strong and lasting fortress for society’s general protection. These 28 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE changes are either imminent or in process. The social order we know is as certain to disappear as medieval feudalism or seventeenth century monarchism. But it would be a lasting reflection upon Church and State if its disappearance should be attended by the violence which retards everything for which men greatly hope." The laborer, skilled or unskilled, is the living material out of which a better social organism will have to be built. States, therefore, will have to provide for contingencies ahead, and widen their intelligence, their sympathies, and their policies to include those contingencies. It is also one of the responsibilities of capital to make labor attractive, to upraise and dignify its duties so that they shall not appear forbid- ding, and to do this with a regard for what is right, but without a suggestion of the detested odors of patronage or compulsion. The value of the humblest toiler as an hon- orable servant of the common weal has not been adequately signalized by society at large. His deferred promotion in public esteem to at least as high a level as that given to the man-at-arms cannot be brought about too soon for the sanity of social relationships. Nor should it be forgotten that in these discussions the last word belongs to the voice of hu- manity, and not of legislation.” V Aggressive war is universally conceded to be the worst diabolism that terrifies mankind. Its outrages and monstros- ities exceed nearly all others combined. Its latest outbreak verified Milton’s line: “Who overcomes by force hath overcome but half his foe. ”’ 1% The program for Social Justice of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America clearly states the essentials of that justice. It should be read by Christian ministers and laymen. 17 Cf. ‘The Church and Industrial Reconstruction,” by The Committee on the War and the Religious Outlook; ‘‘ The Return of Christendom,” by A Group of Churchmen, with an introduction by Bishop Gore; ‘‘ The Christian in Social Relationships,’’ by Dorr F. Diefendorf; ‘‘A More Christian Industrial Order,’’ by Henry Sloane Coffin; ‘‘Citizenship and Moral Reform,” by John W. Langdale. THE TWO VOICES 29 It degraded the combatants who fought for a conspiracy against civilization, and it did not ennoble all who fought against that conspiracy. Human relationships were dis- solved; friend and foe were hedged about on their better side by its ferocious abominations. Its irreparable material and spiritual injuries became manifest once the furious exaltation of battle was exhausted. Commercial derangement, financial chaos, political confusion and moral anarchy followed as its aftermath. Many millions of lives and nearly two hundred billion dollars’ worth of material were flung into its maw within four years. Yet notwithstanding these unprecedented losses of soul and substance, recovery from them has scarcely set in before other wars and their more deadly engines are projected. The sword which has already stabbed the world with many wounds that have not healed still darts and gleams through persistent mists of hate. But why repeat these warnings and denunciations? Because men cannot easily be indoctrinated with a sufficient hatred of war. Itisa parasitical pursuit, yet it absorbs all other pursuits. It is an avoidable wickedness, yet it obtains in all lands, on all seas, and in the skies above. Its futility as an arbitrative method is notorious, yet preparations for it persist. Nothing is exempt from its service which human ingenuity can devise. It is likely to continue until nations renounce the belief that other nations are to be regarded as either amicable or hostile. Amicability or hostility are not the last words of an inter- national philosophy. Racial interests cannot forever endure the impositions they express. Many ask why wars are waged either for friends or against foes; why they should survive the far nobler imperatives of civilized beings? Forms of thought and sentiment, far above these pre-scientific prim- itivisms, press the question: must brave hearts and young lives remain at battle’s cruel behest, leaving sterile man’s love of life and woman’s entreaties for compassion? The madness of needless war is traceable to the antagonism of two historic principles—the one Pagan, the other Chris- 30 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE tian—and both exclusive of each other. Mr. Kidd has shown that the primal contention of Paganism was the right of phys- ical prowess to conquer, and to keep what it had conquered. Fitness to survive was the fitness of the fighting male; faith in force was evolved out of his aboriginal pugnacity. Every- one and everything paid tribute to the known ability for war. Upon it were based the imitative obedience of children, the subjection of women, the security of domestic life, and later, of the State. It received unquestioning support from reli- gion, moral ideas and social customs. Even Jehovah was a man of war. The bald assertion that it never was and never could be an agent of human progress is too extreme. Wars of an emancipating or defensive character should be carefully distinguished from those which are wantonly aggressive. Perhaps it may be said that those wars are moral in them- selves which redeem conditions worse than themselves. The resistance to the rape of Belgium’s neutrality is a capital instance of this kind of war, and our Civil War may also be included in the same category. But the impulse to combat- iveness has attained a perfection of ways and means which jeopardizes the actual existence of civilization. The former sport of kings has become a game far too costly for nations. Man’s control over his natural environment has almost blotted out the survival values of war, or made them an eloquent propaganda for peace. We have to strive, not for the extermination of the combative instinct, but for its direc- tion against the treacheries and passions that breed war, and in behalf of the righteousness without which a warless world would be a whitewashed world. The voices of Faith and Fear are again heard here: one asking for moral and physical disarmament, the other for military strength to enforce the national will. Both must be rightly understood if the political State is to affect anything better than a temporary truce. By wise counsel upon estab- lished lines of guidance, it may support international lawful- ness and order; and this will be its policy if its rulers view THE TWO VOICES ol dispassionately the worst iniquity of our time. But the remedies at their disposal are at best empirical. No political organization can create in individuals or in society that sur- render to the Eternal Will which is the source of earthly justice and tranquility. The reason for this is, as Viscount Morley remarked long ago, that “the political spirit is the great force in throwing love of truth and accurate reasoning into a secondary place. The evil does not stop there. This achievement has indirectly countenanced the postponement of intellectual methods, and the diminution of the sense of intellectual responsibility, by a school that is anything rather than political.”’ > The proposals of the State are too often shaped by fortuitous circumstances. Behind their mirage which flatters fallacious hopes is an impotence that has been repeatedly laid bare in crucial hours. No administration ean lift human nature above itself, or submit its rebellious qualities to the divine law. Backward nations raise more troubles than they settle, and are overborne by their sheer multiplicity. Where is there in the Europe of today the man or even the group of men equal to the solution of the problems which the recent war alone has created? For the enforcement of that divine law and the solution of these problems mankind will have to turn to the Evangel of God, lodged for the past nearly two thousand years in the ageless citadel of armed conflict. A religion that condemns violence and substitutes for it race fellowship can be no other than the irreconcilable foe of physical supremacy. Chris- tianity’s dramatic challenge of Pagan militarism has not been fully realized by peoples accustomed to it as the oldest of despotisms. They are practically unaware of the incipient deliverance already accomplished for them. It seems too good to be true that war has encountered a power to which it must lower its crest. Yet from the day of Christ’s birth the boasted might of the gods of battle began to wane. No period nor State, however bellicose, has been free from His 18 “On Compromise,” p. 136. 32 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE governance. Despite official Christianity’s humiliating con- cessions to Paganism, the spirit and teaching of its Founder have slowly undermined war’s frowning battlements, adorned though they are by the votive offerings of all nations. The antagonism of Christianity in this connection would have been far more pronounced but for the wretched complacency of professedly Christian States.¥ The former semi-sacred invocations to battle which princes had to make or abdicate, are forever beyond the realm of unanimous approval. An utter loathing of war actuates many of the best minds of the age. They view it, not as a recurrent biological necessity, nor as a sort of Malthusian scheme for relieving the earth of its superfluous population, but as the worst entail of racial barbarism. Three impressive modern assemblies have voiced this growing feeling. The first was the Conference at Vienna in 1814, after the Na- poleonic struggle had devastated Europe and Asia for eight- een years. It met as a college of monarchs and their minis- ters, who believed that God’s mandate was on them to find the terminus for military measures in a holy brotherhood of kings reigning by divine right. The second Conference convened at Versailles with the mandate of the world upon it for much the same end. The third met in Washington at the call of President Harding and undertook the more modest but practical programme of restriction of naval armaments. Comparisons between these assemblies would be invidious here, but the one irrefutable conclusion from their respective deliberations is that nations will have to choose between legal or conciliar adjudications of their justiciable disputes, and their eventual displacement as civilized and civilizing States. Few responsible persons plead for an internationalism which wipes out States in wiping out their armed differences. The idea of a super-State is not acceptable to the twentieth 19 Cf, Neville S. Talbot: ‘‘The Modern Situation’’ in ‘‘ Foundations,” edited by B. H. Streeter, p. 19 ff. THE TWO VOICES 33 century mind. It is patent that the Byzantine type of internationalism, without form and void, attached to no particular country, and with no specific duties and obliga- tions, is a theoretical unity repugnant to the Western na- tions. Nor does the example of Mohammedanism, which makes some pretensions to internationalism, move those nations to suppress the patriotic instinct.?? But it can be made the nucleus for more inclusive and benevolent associa- tions. Itis thefirst business of the Christian Church to trans- form it, as a nucleus, into anactual and living center for peace. Granting that the undertaking has risks, and that total disarm- ament might defeat its object, surely proportionate disarm- ament, according to the growth of comity among nations, in- creases the likelihood of peace as a power organized in justice. If the arbitration principle underlying the three historic Conferences mentioned has done no more than puncture the sophistry that war is inevitable, this in itself would have been their sufficient compensation. Should statesmen, however, desist from the further advance of peace interests, the psychology of conflict will recover from its temporary set back, and reassert itself in future generations for which the horrors this generation has witnessed will be as a tale that is told. The sight of fresh means to do ill deeds is, as Sir William Harcourt was wont to say, all too likely to make ill deeds done. ‘To avert this catastrophe, moral as well as material causes for war must be incessantly attacked. If offensive war is forced upon mankind by militant nations, the truly Christian Powers will have to combine against them. This duty devolves upon English-speaking States, whose natural and acquired resources have an incontestable superiority over those of any other civilized countries. Such resources in their advanced economic development are the first line of defense, yet the wars that needlessly destroy them break the States that wage them. 2 Cf. Ameer Ali, Syed: “‘ The Spirit of Islam,’’ Chapter VII. ‘“ The Political Spirit of Islam,” p. 268, ff. ; 34 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE The will to peace is with us, but it is a long way from paramountcy. The bickerings of competitive trade, or dis- putes about valuable natural products, spheres of influence, concessions, and territorial privileges have weakened that will. Recent events and utterances warn us that the fuel for another conflagration is being accumulated, which the torch of a solitary blunderer may ignite. Concerted action, such as was suggested by Dr. J. H. Jowett, and is now em- bodied in ‘‘The World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches,” must be increased in stringency and extent.”*! It should be completely organized and its policies made known if the unclean will to conquer is not again to defile Christendom. Zealous intentions against that will are entirely insufficient unless they are consolidated in strategic action. The right of the Christian Church to summon nations to a truce of God was splendidly exercised by the Medieval Pontiffs. It should not be allowed to lapse by Protestantism’s default. At all times, and in all places, it is our bounden duty to leaven world-society with the knowledge that not insensible weapons, but corrupted hearts are the burden of the issue between war and peace. We understand that disarmament largely depends upon the sense of security. But to be told by a professional British soldier of reputation, that human nature will not change, and therefore wars will always be; that though the desire of man is for peace, the law of life is war; that life lives on life; and that we might as well attempt to damp down Erebus with a duster as attempt to control man’s aboriginal instinct for blood-letting by either syllogism or agreement, leaves every Christian without the excuse that he does not clearly com- prehend the gravamen of this whole matter. Here he listens to the two voices: the voice of reasoned righteousness plead- ing for justice and tranquility; and the voice of armed 21Cf. J. H. Jowett: ‘‘ What Has the Church of Christ to Say?” and ‘What Will the Churches Do?”’ in “ The British Weekly,’ September 7th and 21st, 1922. THE TWO VOICES 35 violence insisting upon the naturalness and necessity of legalized homicide. VI Secularism is the pervasive temper which hardens in habits and customs that separate individuals and society from life’s deepest meanings. Its concrete forms include whatever in religion, art, letters, trade and the totality of human affairs cannot be connected with spiritual ideals. The purer purposes of enlightened hearts are usually dis- paraged by the secular mind. The malady is virulent and widespread. A strange inability to appreciate the values of existence is symptomatic of its infection, which can be detected in some policies of the Church as well as of the State. Its flow is haphazard, following the fashion of the hour, with no beata urba of the saint’s adorable vision to attract it. Western peoples are peculiarly susceptible to its contagion. Whereas in the East religion and life go together, and the Oriental dwells by himself in an inner world where truth is what he likes to think it is, the Occidental is usually enclosed from birth in a material fabric which imprisons him, as the men of the Cave were imprisoned in Plato’s “Republic.” The material progress of European and American nations has interfered with their consciousness of eternal things. One is often made sadly aware of the absence in them of a knowledge and a reality truer and more real than those of mammoth cities, cliff-like buildings, railroads that rib con- tinents, and ships that navigate every ocean. These gran- diose temporalities encumber as well as aid modern society; the self-realization of souls is sadly bewildered by their dis- tractions. It should be remembered that a great deal has happened for man’s spiritual emancipation since Plato’s “Republic” was written. Christianity has shed light upon the things of earth, and thrown their pretensions into bold relief. Gross customs have been refined; standards of human action made 36 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE more conformable to divine ordinances. The sacred knowl- edge that nerves the spirit, dissolving life’s sensuous bonds, and upraising it to a plane above that of the Greek philos- opher’s speculations, is now disseminated everywhere. Ex- pressions of a loftier religious consciousness, ideals that outsoar thought, religious experiences too fugitive for full articulation, characterize man’s best moods, inform his con- viction of right, and elevate his worship. We should not underrate these allies of his.higher selfhood, nor hesitate to employ them against the miasma of secularism. Yet the present plight of the world, without a poet, a philosopher or an acknowledged religious or political leader, shows us, in the words of President Nicholas Murray Butler, that “‘the fresh voices of the spirit are stilled, while the lust for gain and for power endeavors to gratify itself through the odd device of destroying what has been already gained or accomplished.” Even those who resent these strictures are more or less aware that the mechanism of modern life has outrun its moral and intellectual capacity, that some brightness has gone out of it and left it drab, that some virtue has disap- peared and left it feebly querulous. The incantations of professional joy-makers cannot hush the strident com- plaints voiced by an age which has reached the point of secular saturation. How often its erroneous ideas and malicious customs have been put to shame. Yet nothing short of a cataclysm could persuade their devotees to abandon them. Much abortive thinking which is as prejudicial to progress as are the super- stitions of non-Christian peoples is inspired by the secular habit. It stresses nationalism as the assessor of human effort, and individuality itself as so much available stuff for the apotheosis of the State. A country’s riches, expansion, material benefit and pride are the articles of its creed, too often implicitly accepted by the mass. Rudolf Eucken, who afterwards became the dupe and tool of imperialistic frenzy, had previously confessed that nothing could save us THE TWO VOICES od from being the puppets of a soulless State, unless we dis- covered and exerted the power to maintain the life of the soul against all attempts at encroachments.”” The iniquity he first pitied, then embraced, is also nurtured by Bolshevism. Both these social abnormalities, Imperialism and Soviet- ism, are conspicuous examples of the extremes of sec- ularism: the one blasphemes Deity, the other renounces Him. Both are forged at opposite ends of the same heresy, which first withholds his elemental rights from the individual, and then pulverizes his independence under the pretext of pro- moting the good of its favorite group. I shall not discuss any other manifestations of the secular malady, except those found in the political realm. Concur- rently with democracy’s development in lawfulness, its prob- lems of first rate importance are before us. The Protestant Churches, which only recently gauged their magnitude, as yet offer little that is practical for their solution. Behind the carnival of unsafe pleasures and the dissolution of numerous social ties which antedated the war, is that blind belief in the State which refuses to admit its inherent limitations, and uses vivacious terms in asserting its omnipotence. Its trust in political organizations as God’s instrumentalities for world reconstruction culminated at Versailles, where it also met its Waterloo. There the sanguine hopes and expecta- tions stayed upon diplomatists were rudely dispelled, and those who had been exalted beyond measure were cast down to the depths. Whatever they could or could not have achieved, it is now evident that the torn ligaments of civiliza- tion’s ideals will have to be healed by other hands than theirs. Until half a century ago secular politicians were overshadowed by poets, scientists and ecclesiastics. It was then an open question whether men of learning or men of faith should hold the center of the stage. But while they wrangled, politicians forged to the front, and under the impetus of a few very able statesmen, captured the popular #2 Cf. ‘‘Life’s Basis and Life’s Ideals,” p. 359, f. 38 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE imagination. Their slightest variations of personal condi- tions or their partisan shifts have hitherto formed the staple of the news.”> There are present indications, however, that the public is somewhat weary of its misplaced adulation. The amazing disclosures during the last decade of the inepti- tudes and misdemeanors of statecraft have had a sobering reaction upon nations. But some of its buoyant spirits survive every deluge, and though here and there one disap- pears in the turbid waters, a dozen successors bob up. They outbid bishops, missionaries, theologians, scientists, explorers and philosophers, when it comes to publicity and popular influence. We know full well that many of them are of the best quality; have stainless honor and a praiseworthy useful- ness. We also know that some leaders of international reputation have only to be stripped of their togas to uncover their native mediocrity. Nevertheless, they represent what democratic sovereignty often prefers, and serve to supplant the ethical and intellectual superiority it is rather prone to suspect.24 | Sensible people are never indifferent to the necessity for effective politics. and politicians, but their recent attitude toward international affairs has often been little short of disastrous. So far from easing the travail of the world or of affording it some sort of moral control, they have seriously injured its higher interests. We should learn from these lamentable shortcomings of the State and its officials never again to render unto Cesar the things which are God’s. If you would not thresh grainless straw do not search in politics for what is not there. We are neither to censure faithful public servants because they are not thaumaturgists, nor repeat the offense of many churchmen by lowering the claims of Christianity to meet political requirements. The State can seldom, if ever, do anything better than support the 23 Cf. Principal L. P. Jacks: ‘‘ The Degradation of Policy,” in ‘‘ Realities and Shams,” p. 74 ff. “4 Cf. Viscount Bryce: “ Modern Democracies,’”’ Vol. II, p. 112, ff. THE TWO VOICES 39 Christian ethic. Political systems, whether autocratic, oligarchical or democratic, will be judged in history by their adherence to the Eternal Order which authorizes that ethic. The perpetuity of that Order is the secret of the rise and fall of empires and republics. Nor has it changed an iota since the morning of the race, when earth seemed nearer to heaven than now, and the lawgivers of the olden time somehow managed to obtain larger appropriations from its wisdom. Assuredly they defined the essentials of political morality in codes and discourses which after times have neglected at their peril. For whatever else a living and growing State takes on or leaves off, it cannot relinquish the principles of these ancient prophets and sages without a speedy reaction toward weakness and eventual decay.”° Not only clergy- men, but many politicans and statesmen are convinced that secularism has shot its bolt. Their acquaintance with human likes and dislikes and with the variations of society assures them that unless nations as well as individuals are re-schooled in spiritual ideals, the outlook for the white race is ominous. They need, as the late President Harding said, ‘‘the touch of the finger of God”’ existent behind all laws, before the good they have dreamed or willed, has even a semblance of reality. The voice of the Church has too often been stifled because “the high proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard.”’ The voice of the State too often has been raucous with a secu- larism which proposes little that is not liable to deteriora- tion and even to degeneracy. If these two voices are to blend in the kingdom of the new humanity, the Christian clergyman, who should be the model patriot, must bestir himself. You wish that the New Testa- ment’s architecture of the social fabric could become and remain an actuality, as did the magical palace which Solomon caused the genii to build for the pleasure of Queen Balkis. You visualize the strength and loveliness of the Gospel’s 25 Cf. ‘‘ Fhe Legacy of Greece,’’ edited by R. W. Livingstone. A volume of brilliant essays. 40 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE ideals, and how exquisitely they harmonize with those of Israel’s seers and with human needs. Surely their appeal should have been heard above the clamor of hate and faction; they should have purified the human heart of its heathen antagonisms at home and abroad. Yet reflect that though forgotten by others, scarcely recalled at intervals by the preacher himself, the Gospel of God for the race is never temporal, always eternal. ‘‘The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,’’ becomes a fortress aflame because the Author and the Perfecter of our Faith forgets nothing. Life’s purposes are in His grasp, and they will be attained when men make them their own. SECOND LECTURE PAST AND PRESENT “Then in such an hour of need Of your fainting, dispirited race, Ye, like angels, appear, Radiant with ardor divine! Beacons of hope, ye appear! Languor is not in your heart, Weakness is not in your word, Weariness not on your brow. Ye alight in our van! at your voice, Panic, despair, flee away. Ye move through the ranks, recall The stragglers, refresh the outworn, Praise, re-inspire the brave! Order, courage, return. Eyes rekindling, and prayers, Follow your steps as you go. Ye fill up the gaps in our files, Strengthen the wavering line, Stablish, continue our march, On, to the bound of the waste, On, to the City of God.” MatraHew ARNOLD: Rugby Chapel. SECOND LECTURE PAST AND PRESENT Patriotism not enough to redeem the evils of the age—The need of greater devotion to Justice and Peace—The relation of the white race to other races—National prominence in history has perils of its own — Individual character the requisite of social progress — The demand for~...> some modern equivalent of the Medixval Church — Politicians are sometimes more responsive to religious ideas than intellectuals — The lack of sympathetic comprehension in literary and academic coteries — Churchmen’s complaints against Institutional Religion — Orthodox devotees to arbitrary theories — The perspectives of history are an aid to correct appraisals of the present —- Its annals as a part of the spiritual education of the race — Its lessons teach that nations are woven into one web — Historic examples of the survival of the fittest — Biography is the open door to history — Benefits of the study of State and Church in the light of their own past. Tue all-black and the all-white method of judging the past makes its periods either all wheat or all tares. Thus the War has caused many to speak as though it ended in an irreversible verdict for eternal wrong, and those who went into it with clean hands to end it were equally guilty with those who plotted and precipitated it. Others refer to the Victorian Age as one of self-seeking materialism projected upon calamitous lines. The politics of Central Europe, and, to a lesser degree, those of Britain and North America are described as agitated by greed, hatred and hypocrisy. It is also urged that the catastrophe which fell upon the age was at once its condemnation and penalty. So much for the artist who thinks in sepia and paints in unrelieved blackness “sweat-shops, conscienceless capitalists and human bond- age.”’ Those of the white school ask us to admire com- manding figures of the period, aristocratic rulers in every realm, moving in the serenity of which Tennyson was the 43 44 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE singer. An impartial historian, Lecky, gives it as his opinion that no country was ever better governed than Britain between 1832 and 1867. Most Americans would also say the same of Lincoln’s America: an interval, be it observed, marked by our Civil War, and by the goading of Britain’s manual workers into successful revolt against penury and starvation. ‘Those who would live hopefully should not accept the black or the white interpretation of history. Half the charm of history, and far more of its truth, consists in its infinite shadings, contrasts, high or low lights, and paradox- ical situations. When clothed in the blue distance it takes on a somewhat deceptive beauty, but microscopically scru- tinized, its minor phases are misleading, and its repellant features exaggerated. True, its last decade has been disas- trous, but need we always enlarge on that? Is not the defeat of the arch-criminals against civilization an alleviating con- sideration? If the Chauvinists won in 1914, and the long expected ‘“‘Day”’ came, they are not now boasting of their victory. It cannot be denied that nearly all nations were under a morbid tension before that year. What ensued may be praised or blamed, but much that preceded it puts any faith in diplomacy or statesmanship fiercely to the test. The “uwnreasoning progress of the world” was full of material successes, but its international problem was prodigal of their destruction. The British Premier said the other day that the nineteenth century held its head high and that our century is paying the price. Perhaps it would be as near the facts to say that the pre-war world masked very treacherous con- duct behind its proprieties. Its heartless chase for power, territory, and commercial supremacy brought armaments to the front, and made war appear necessary and just, as the militarists desired it should. Affairs were handled in such a manner that under the crushing load of huge armies and navies, economic sacrifices, and recurrent political crises, the beginning of hostilities would be welcomed as a relief from PAST AND PRESENT 45 continual suspense. In reading the statements and apologies of the men chiefly responsible for this grand delusion, one’s main reaction is a feeling of their ignominy, and of the gullibility of those whom they delivered to desolation. Their portraits are drawn in the first chapter of the Book of Proverbs. They “hated knowledge, and did not choose the fear of Jehovah;”’ now they must ‘“‘eat of the fruit of their own way, and be filled with their own devices.” 4 We are told that pious moralizings about these events and personalities get us nowhere. Nor does it serve the purpose to be always reminding nations of their selfishness and rage. Why are they thus distracted? The reply is because they have been deliberately over-stimulated upon their baser side. The practice of drugging a race horse for a burst of speed which leaves it the winner but foundered, illustrates the processes of a patriotism that instills ill-will and jealousy of other peoples. This is the revenge which the past takes on the present, and there are no nations that can plead entire innocence or immunity. When their guides and teachers are more willing to believe in peace than in war, I, for one, submit that the nations will gladly respond to the belief. Edith Cavell’s patriotism cannot be questioned, but her dying words, ‘‘Patriotism is not enough,” will outlive every other memory of her life except the way in which she left it. The ulterior motives of an unmoral love for one’s country give rise to those popular sins that must be rebuked. For this cause the writers of the Bible suffered many things, and some of them witnessed for it with their blood. There will be no real betterment of international relations until the issue is clearly defined. Its definition and the defense of the right against patriotic impulses, require a far greater devotion to pure equity than has hitherto been shown when such impulses were aroused. The enormous waste of life and treasure which has not solved these acute problems, nor resulted in any really con- 1 Proverbs I. 29, ff. A6 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE structive policies, is not the whole story. Behind material losses, the collapse of currencies and the inflation of prices, is the collapse of credit. These in their turn are trivial when compared with the social disruptions and moral degradation in which they originate. Yet the folly and futility of war will never cease because of these losses, although it may be halted for a time when the world realizes deeply that the life of civilization depends on the continuity of peace. But the impulse to war will have to be exterminated by something more powerful than economic or social arguments. It has left a standing bequest of old feuds revived, new ones started, and the cupidity of nations excited afresh. The spiritual energy which should expel these complexes has not been experienced as yet, except in isolated individuals and groups. A truculent peace like that of Eastern and Central Europe, increasingly dark with antagonisms, restive, unwilling to disarm, and almost sure to end in conflict, agitates a Christen- dom half awake, disorganized, liable to a return of the thing which it dreads, and yet invites. Its diplomacy, notwith- standing the glamor which surrounds its trained exponents, is merely an expression of a single nation’s opinions backed by force. The changed attitude of Asiatic races and of the Orient as a whole, adds to the dangers sensed by students of world affairs. Personal observations made in China, Japan and India, the three principal countries of the farther East, con- vince the traveller from the West that the prestige of his race is at a very low ebb. The pacific character of the Chinese people, and the remarkable ascent to power in peace and war of the Japanese, are very contrasted phenomena, but they contribute to the increase of Oriental dominion. What may occur in the near future has ominous meanings for Christianity. Oriental dominion over Asia could not be established at this time without injuring the educational and evangelizing institutions which are the sources of a better life for that continent. Political or philanthropic PAST AND PRESENT 47 measures which mitigate the peril not only of war between nations of our race, but of war with the countless millions of other races, cannot be advanced too rapidly, especially by Great Britain and the United States. Should such hostilities ~ come, these two Powers would probably sustain the brunt of conflict. Hence, great as are the responsibilities of other Western nations in the Orient, those of the English-speaking nations are infinitely greater. Lord Grey’s dictum that humanity must make peace or perish has but to be viewed, with Asia and Africa as its vast backgrounds, to give it very grave significance. Racial antipathies let loose on such a scale as they would supply, and armed with the material equipment of modern war, may outstrip the moral deter- minations of any age. Professor John Burnet, in the last of the Romanes Lectures, is apprehensive that modern civilization is breeding bar- barisms which will destroy it. Already, like the Greeks, many thinkers place the golden period in the past, and re- gard oscillation rather than progress as the law of history. There are, it is said, present portents of a nature similar to those which signified the downfall of the Roman State. Two cardinal differences, however, separate our Western world from its parent, the Greco-Roman world upon which the night descended eighteen centuries ago. First, the scientific mind makes it possible for small but well equipped bodies of men to control large numbers. This possibility, in its turn, renews despotism in Russia, and institutes the direct politi- eal action that has overthrown constitutionalism in Italy. Second, the territorial areas of ancient civilization, which were very much less than those of modern civilization, were largely confined to lands adjacent to the Mediterranean basin. It has also been pointed out that the frontiers of the Greco- Roman States were perhaps not sufficiently strong in their defenses against the invading hosts of Cimmerians and Scythians, Gauls and Teutons, Germans and Asiatic tribes, which periodically broke through the pale and finally cap- 48 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE tured Rome. But it was the inherent weakness at the heart of the Empire that betrayed it to its assailants. We have no such barbarian world to encounter, yet unquestionably there are races on the other side of the globe which could be very threatening to the Western peoples, if they took on the scientific learning that has made Japan a formidable inter- national factor. We have only to probe a little more deeply into current events to see from what humiliation and im- potence some of those races are slowly emerging. It behooves scholars and statesmen, therefore, freely to circulate the sound ideas that counteract the credulity of race prejudices, and to warn Americans who harbor them against their debilitating influence. Educators should select and train young men and women in the duty of dis- pelling patriotic ignorance, and of developing in Christian States that spirit toward non-Christian races which makes for unity and co6peration.” It would be the supreme satire of history if, after the Western nations had weakened them- selves beyond recovery by their internal quarrels, they were vanquished by the Eastern nations which they have held in tutelage. But one course, in my opinion, can arrest the decay of their beneficial sway in the East. If the English- speaking peoples, separated though they are by geographical conditions and by some idiosyncrasies, shall prove capable of a mutual comprehension and sympathy at present unat- tainable elsewhere, they may find their lasting service and their own safety in protecting the world against the fate which I have suggested.® We are informed that by common consent these nations have won a leading place in history, and so have drawn to themselves the attention of annalists and of mankind in general. But we are also informed that leading places are exposed to particular perils and that impartial students of 2Cf. D. J. Fleming: ‘‘ Contacts with Non-Christian Cultures.’ 3 Cf. C. H. Pearson: ‘‘ National Life and Character,” for a full discussion of the race problem. PAST AND PRESENT 49 humanity have no marked predilections for one nation or group of nations over others. ‘‘Mankind in general” is a vague allusion. The congested and helpless multitudes of Oriental lands know far less of us as we are, or of what we intend and accomplish, than we know of them, which is little enough. “‘Common consent” is also a misleading phrase. The success of Christian nations which have had duration of effort in non-Christian territories is produced by their ethical realities and by missionaries of the New Testa- ment Evangel, whether lay or clerical, who engraft its, teach- ings upon the native mind in practical ways. The plain tale of their doings puts down stupid objections to what has been a first class undertaking of good-will and pacification. They are the pioneers of deliverance from what has been described as one of the saddest tragedies of recorded time — the wide separation between the East and the West. They strive for brotherhood and amity, and what they quietly achieve, contemptible though it seems to some, may yet enable the historic centers of Christian culture to resume that place in world affairs, which is commensurate with their strength and their opportunities. To them we must look, and not to the steam-roller methods of goose-stepping, bemedalled militarists, or the exploitations of avid traders, for the freeing of men and nations from the disabilities that hinder the world’s progress.* It remains to be said that progress at home or abroad is impossible apart from individual character. Political, diplomatic and socially reformative efforts must rest upon the personal virtues which insure national and international rectitude. Those who ignore the divine regeneration of humanity cannot postpone the divine judgment, still less avert it. Religion, rightly interpreted as the original source of all liberty, as the freedom to do as men ought to do, as the soul of knowledge, as the fount of ideals which prevail over 4Cf. Edward GC. Moore: ‘‘ West and East,’ for a competent discussion of the missionary aspects of this question. 50 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE the sharpest separations of color and blood, has in it racial unities which can be made concrete in Christianity. ‘‘On the other hand,” to quote the illuminating words of Dr. W. T. Davison, one of the clearest and most gifted exponents of the Christian Faith, ‘‘it is almost universally recognized that religion in the future must be broader, richer, and more comprehensive, if it is to command the allegiance of coming generations. It must be wide as life itself, taking as its province truth, beauty and goodness of all types, in all their manifestations. If religion is to sway all aspects and depart- ments of human life — social, political, economical, national and international—as surely it ought, its message and guidance must be as wide and various as its claims. Ideas must be widened, channels of feeling and sympathy deepened and enriched, all forms of activity controlled and directed, purified and uplifted, man himself must become more of a man in every stage of development, through the indwelling power of the Highest of all, inspiring, inhabiting, and in- forming all.” ° This is the religion that links the parent to the family, the family to the State, the State to the world, and the world to God. Whether men support it from conviction, or only from interest, it verifies the assertion of a Puritan patriot that, despite its formal divergencies, such religion is the first business of a free State and of States bent on free- dom. Anglo-Catholics elucidate some principles upon which social reconstruction should be founded, and boldly insist that we unequivocally tell the world, civilization can only be reorganized on a definitely religious basis. They demand some modern equivalent for the powerful control of the Medieval Papacy; they ask for a Church which embraces all the activities of life, and is hostile to nothing except the absolute rejection of Christian authority. An evident dis- quietude that many will appreciate prompts this request. 5 “* Hopes and Needs of a New Era’ in ‘‘ The London Quarterly Review,” July, 1928, p. 14 f. PAST AND PRESENT 51 But surely those who make it forget that theocracies, whether monarchical or democratic, precipitated upon unwilling peoples, are all too seductive to ardent religionists of a type. Yet as we shall see, theocracies have planted Common- wealths and protected their liberties. For what is at one stage of human development a short cut to outward rule, may be at another stage the expression of a profoundly spiritual impulse. We should not summarily dismiss these proposals until we have attempted to provide an efficient method for Christianizing the modern State. It is a truism that popular sovereignty has ceased to be a religion, since political and ecclesiastical governments are alike too often ruled by minorities. Its further reproach is that democracies are swept off their feet by oligarchies and also by demagogues, who have mastered the tactics of cajol- ing the people. Yet the system which is flexible enough to produce the demagogues, blocs, classes and groups that pose as its chosen embodiments, is also flexible enough to take what advantages they offer and then promptly get rid of them. Government by the people is still on probation, but it has the saving grace of belonging to the people, and when they choose to assert their rights, it becomes all sufficient on the spot. Its tenacity as a system is not a forced ap- pearance, but a natural growth arising from the public will.® We must deal wisely with that will as it actually is, as well as urge that it be what it ought to be. The little gods of part truth and part convenience, and their prophets of straw, whom the people have worshipped, are laid low; albeit many worshippers grope in fear and darkness because their cher- 6 There is a coronation of the President of the United States, which is as real and as impressive as that of a European King or Emperor. True, there are no costly robes or elaborate ritual connected with the ceremony; and yet the swearing in of Calvin Coolidge by his aged father, the light of a farm- house oil lamp being the sole illuminant, was an occasion so reverently con- ceived by the American people that the emotions aroused are as deep and lasting as if the oath of office had been taken in Westminster Abbey, pref- aced by the fanfare of trumpets, and} associated with the glitter of the Court. 52 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE ished conventions have been ruthlessly assailed. If, as we are told in behalf of this disillusionizing process, reality pre- vails at last, and the hypocrisy which infected the Victorian period does not infect ours, perchance it is also true that we have not so many virtues to simulate. Unaccustomed in- dependence is almost sure to err, yet it is better than a fettered social life. We must anticipate its excesses, in which each person figures as a separate entity, with separate habits and a separate end, without identical necessities or aims. Uncouth propensities for flirting with the impossible or the dangerous will distort public manners. The bizarre, the blatant, the questionable, will characterize the habits of knaves and fools. Grotesque developments in religion, morals and politics will flourish, comparable to the mythical tree Igdrasil, which drove its roots into Hades and spread its branches across the skies. Those for whom sorrow and death are negligible, provided they afflict others, will be oblivious to the ‘‘swollen stream of tears which is always falling darkly through the shadows of the world.” Not- withstanding these abnormalities, history teaches that what Burke termed ‘‘the eloquence of eternal principles,” cannot be silenced. Deep and formative influences, resembling those of Nature which have raised man out of the dust, he knows not how, are always at work. The secret river of God which brings to earth, ‘‘Authentic tidings of invisible things; Of ebb and flow, and ever-during power; And central peace, subsisting at the heart Of endless agitation,” sweeps through the present as it has swept through the past. Its divine currents are always ready to break again into the world when men and women are ready to let them irrigate their hearts. PAST AND PRESENT 53 Il Evidently the theological student of this age has to choose between truth and ease, between love of reality and love of repose, between resolute search and the soft serenity that defeats it. Pious generalities which are the product of dizzy ideas, or consoling sentiments that evaporate at the crucial point, do not meet his requirements. He must blend in his preaching the intellectual qualities of the thinker with the vision of the seer, and remember that even the best good sense which rejects the inspirational values of the ideal will presently falter. There is nothing novel in this alternative between reality and repose. The thinkers of Greece and the prophets of Israel faced it fearlessly. They inquired beyond their actual knowledge for its transcendent sources with results beneficial to all. But no sooner do we heed Goethe’s familiar exhortation, *““Choose well, the time is brief, yet endless,’ and push for- ward toward the unseen, than an earth-bound rationalism bids us stay where we are. Sensational psychology, not without its occasional glances at flesh worship, and a closet philosophy oblivious to the fact that life seldom, if ever, travels on pure reason alone, interpose their veto on our belief in the supernatural. They are not to be taken too seriously, since religion can rely upon man’s native response to its appeal. Nor is there any actual waste of the spirit of the race in their interferences. But the modern world has not received from educated individuals who have the leisure and the capacity to think, the light and leadership which it had a right to expect. In this matter not a few intellectuals have fallen below the level of the much abused politician. He, at any rate, cannot be accused of supposing that politics has the trick of perpetual motion any more than mechanics. He has his faults and vices, as have those whom he repre- sents, and of whom he is usually typical. But he is not besotted by theories which insist that regenerated politics 54 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE can be manufactured like a suit of clothes. He thoroughly understands that the wicked who are slaves by their own compulsion rebel in vain. He would about as lief order a new flesh and blood body for a Hottentot as offer him a Hamil- tonian Constitution for his tribe’s adoption. He knows, as we know, sometimes better than we know, that it is only in the souls of men and women that a nation’s strength and wisdom are woven, that the emancipated spirit is the citadel and palace of an enlightened State. When reformative or religious instincts are aroused, and move with gathering momentum, he is among the first to realize that a change is overdue. If these popular awakenings are bound up with conscience and morals, his alacrity to acquiesce in them is usually the more unmistakable. Moreover, his bearing toward the Church is nearly always respectful, and in most cases reverent. He esteems her spiritual traditions because he is conscious of their salutary control over the masses, and although he can seldom revive these traditions, he favors their revival. There have been capital examples of statesmen whose services to religion have imparted fresh dignity and honor to the State, to the nations and to mankind. In brief, few public men are unaware of the people’s prevailing faith in a righteous God. Nor is their knowledge of this belief at all inconvenient for major politics. Without it the national fiber is relaxed, and political action is apt to be low-minded and circumscribed. In perilous times a godless State fed upon materialized notions becomes a hotbed of villainy, and is deprived of the moral certitudes that justify sacrificial exer- tions. These facts help to explain the dissolution of once powerful social organizations, and convey their solemn warning to those that are still intact. If the politician may be said to steer his course by the inevitable, the intellectual whom we have in mind takes delight in opposing it. When he is asked to aid in extricating his fellows from the labyrinth in which they wander, he either assumes an air of anxious immobility, or continues to pursue PAST AND PRESENT 55 his highly specialized and speculative tendencies. The lack of spiritual affinity between him and those whom he looks down upon as vulgarians is indicated by the slang word “highbrow,” with which the latter have dubbed him. Not- withstanding that there is a larger audience for every variety of vice or virtue than there has ever been, he remains aloof from what he calls the mob, and thanks God, if there be a God, that the product of his brains is not intended for pop- ular consumption. He seldom if ever sees the crowd, since his gaze is fixed on authors whose cynical appreciations and warped judgments are purely ephemeral, and have little or no perceptible relation to literature. He agrees that we should possess culture, ideas, and chosen spirits responsible for both. But these must be selected from the cults that scorn the multitudes. Whatever they generally disbelieve is true, whatever they generally believe is false. He might have been a Christian in the times of persecution, but he is almost certain to reject the Christianity that built the cathedrals. Now that the flood gates of democracy are wide open, the torrents of life pouring out from them are abhorrent to his view. He asserts that all knowledge worth distributing can only be realized in its fullness by the few. Another species of this genus cultivates the will not to believe at all. He treats religion in an icy fashion, is reluctant to admit its good, refers to it with a supercilious accent or else in derogatory terms, and if pushed to a preference, chooses Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius as his mentors.’ Pro- fessional academics and authors of this description are at zero in a time like ours, when sympathy and comprehension mount up in the scale of appreciation, and hospitality of mind is welcomed. ‘‘The London Spectator” insists that the ability to enter into our neighbor’s moods and circum- stances is respected as in itself a sort of talent, and some who 7I well recall visiting a church in London, noted for its advanced theology, where the minister who conducted the services said, in announcing the first lesson: ‘‘ We shall read a selection from the second chapter of James Anthony Froude’s ‘Short Studies on Great Subjects,’ volume one.” 56 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE are incapable of it, are careful to pose as sympathetic. Ignorance of these pertinent ideas is bad enough, but ig- norance of Christianity, as Christ taught it, is very much worse. When intellectuals abuse their opportunities by severing the spinal cord of religious belief, through which civic and moral welfare function for all, they are open to justifiable rebuke. Their spiritual negativism and intel- lectual snobbery are repudiated by the large majority of teachers, authors and essayists. The plain citizen also resents their procedure and is unmoved by reasonings which leave his higher being and its purposes in the air. He is not so hemmed about by philosophic doubts as to be oblivious to his spiritual lineage. He knows that no intelligence, however well proportioned; no breath of mentality, however cogent, can take over the sovereignties of the moral sense, or perform the tasks allotted to the soul’s highest intuitions; and he also knows that the convictions by which men live do not come by speculative reason.2 One can imagine a symposium of philosophers, scholars and physical scientists exchanging opinions and confidences before ordinary individuals. Per- haps their differences, which are legion, if not reconcilable, might be accommodated. Yet should the teacher of re- vealed religion, whom some intellectuals deprecate as un- suited to the needs of living men, intrude in that diversified parliament of talents, and ask; ‘“‘ What theory is in the saddle now, and where will it ride?’”’, their deliberations would be lost upon outsiders unless the spiritual ideal was mounted. The rarest learning, the purest reasoning, the cleverest logic are but the elaborate triflings of a paganism at bay unless they are united to ethical and religious aims.? What is more, modern pagans gamble with treasures they are supposed to 8 In a recent inquiry upon “ Civilization in the United States,”’ by thirty Americans of this type, no reference was made to religion. 9 Wittenstein, whose “* Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,”’ with a preface by Bertrand Russell, is one of the significant essays of the times, confesses that “ ethics are transcendental’: and that “‘ the solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time.’”’ We might not agree as to the meaning of the italicized word, but it suggests the failure of naturalism. PAST AND PRESENT 57 safeguard, if their conclusions are at odds with the common heart and the common conscience. When those pontifical purveyors of original notions fall foul of each other, Christianity comes into its own. One among them, who has recently turned traitor to his literary coterie, charges its members with dullness and even hypoc- risy. Their productions, he says, are shorn of tenderness, beauty and wisdom. The critic in question is a politico- social radical, who can be, as we know, a very serviceable person. But he hints that if his fellow radicals, who usually describe Christianity as an intellectually commonplace and morally exhausted creed, were only honest with their readers, they would confess themselves charlatans and pretenders. What is worse, he dares to insinuate that some of these progressive spirits secretly lean toward traditional beliefs, and that their denunciations of orthodoxy, as the scarlet sin of the mind, are no more than a gesture. They are to be re- garded as literary adventurers who make or break their idols at the instigation of caprice or imitation. We are not concerned with the truth or falsity of this arraignment. But it suggests that religious ordinances which are obnoxious to such sceptical extremists do not of necessity stand or fall at their fiat; and that the problems before us are not to be solved by the pundits who would dispatch historic Chris- tianity to the rear. Yet this statement should be protected against the growing tendency to substitute the narrowest creeds for the spirit and teachings they imperfectly express, or to elevate the limitations thus made to the rank of the spirit and teachings themselves. To the closed door of every age there comes a knocking at judgment’s midnight hour. Unless the household within has a better plea to submit than is given by those whom we have described, its prospects are not particularly bright. The real intellectual danger of today is not from religion, even when it is inert, controversial or barren, but from the emo- tional impulses or deranged states of mentality to which 58 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE many writers are liable. Fixed ideas, suspicious or senti- mental moods, judgments that become vendettas, out- bursts of passion, and libels upon the historic Faith of love and righteousness are forms of moral insanity which are more detrimental to society than its physical diseases. Some clerics, who consider it a crime to hide their light under a bushel, are disposed to find fault with Christianity and the Church. One of them inquires if the well intentioned and loyal constituencies which preachers have visualized are real or imaginary. He believes they are the latter, and that those who recommend Christianity to this generation will collide with an intrusive paganism which has neither the cultural nor the spiritual values of the classic type. ‘The Church, he affirms, has been barely holding her own, but flattering herself that whenever she makes an affirmation in behalf of faith and morals, the people would at once respond. Demos was supposed to be on the Lord’s side, and to such purpose that there was more religion outside the Church than inside. If the last statement yields scanty comfort to professed Christians, the explanation accompanying it is still less consolatory. Its author states that there has been a sudden subsidence in the ageless tradition the masses have held in respect to the Church, which has shaken her from top to bottom, and alienated them from their own past, making them too glaringly conscious of their present for her benefit. Do they not need to cherish what is contemporary, since no generation has been so entirely cut off from its predecessors? The notion that such a severance is impossible is derided as a parvenu among ideas. Another cleric tells us that there is very little popular demand for the ethic of Christianity, to say nothing of its theology. Its very sentiments, the dregs of which were once found in novels, ballads and melodrama, have been completely drained away. If so wholesale an abstraction of religion had actually taken place, the dominant moral ideals and inspirations of mankind would have been lost to it. The hope of progress, the possibility of progress, PAST AND PRESENT 59 and the fact of progress, which are of the bone and sinew of the Christian Evangel would likewise have disappeared. But this is one of the imaginary catastrophes that never happen.!° Philosophers, historians, biologists, theologians of the tra- ditional or liberal kind will have much to say about its probability or otherwise, yet the final appeal will not be to them. The latest accessions to the Protestant Churches in America and Great Britain, which are the largest they have enjoyed for some years, seem to indicate that they have a fighting chance which should induce their detractors not to report their end prematurely. A further indication that the race is plastic in the hands of its Maker is perceptible in the mystical possibilities derived from the doctrines of science itself. Something more than mere knowledge is involved in men’s reactions to them. Not only philosophic but religious implications, which must be courageously ex- plored, are evident in the recent discoveries of organized knowledge. Those who believe that humanity can be re- moulded by God may be heartened or again dismayed by the findings of pessimism; but they will submit their hopes and fears alike to the test of life itself. They are conscious that the Church has not only outlived the late War, but a thousand wars before it. Despite the febrile condition attributed to her by her numerous opponents, she will outlive the passing world for which she is God’s priestess. Faith, hope and charity have survived, as St. Paul assured us they would; they are resurgent in her and in mankind, and the Divine Will sustains their interaction. Nevertheless, declamatory malcontents insist that though Christianity and to a lesser extent, the Church, may exercise some authority over individuals, they are weaker than a bruised reed in the world at large. This view is held by the 10 We remember that in Russia the Bolshevists decided to kill the Church and bury it. Having accomplished this, as they thought, and paid the under- taker, the evidence goes to show that we shall see a resurrection there, not from the grave, but from a temporary obscurity. 60 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE advocates of super-orthodox beliefs, who, assuming for the Bible an infallibility which it never had, announce a cat- aclysmic ending for our age. Their attempts to compress the infinite philosophy of Christianity within a hard and fast literalism disfigure Evangelical doctrine and bring an undeserved reproach upon its adherents. They rely for their interpretations of the cosmos and of man upon Scrip- tures of an apocalyptic sort, the burden of which is mainly applicable to the conditions under which they were written. The Christian economy, as construed by them, is rent asunder by an immovable antagonism between the sovereignty of our Lord and that of Antichrist. In their treatment it becomes either all mercy or all vengeance, either a heaven precip- itated into an impossible earthly state; or a hell too universal, materialistic, and useless to be credible to reverent adorers of the Divine Goodness. God’s clemency and wisdom toward widely different ages and races are placed by them beneath the jurisdiction of an arbitrary power. Everything in crea- tion is explained under the duress of a sixteenth century theory of Biblical perfectibility and in accordance with a few Scriptural announcements of contemporary disasters. In behalf of this theory, itself the dubious product of a stormy period, organized knowledge is excoriated, social progress is pronounced a sham, and the world is sentenced to an almost worse doom than that decreed either by scientific materialism or philosophic pessimism. Millions of devout but mistaken men and women who have found personal deliverance from sin in the Gospel, risk their religious sanity and wholesome- ness in these speculations, and in grinding theological axes for the fray. Although history has poured contempt upon their theories, from Apostolic days until now, these persist as an output of that state of mind which is fervid but forever closed. They are liable to the taint of Pharisaism, and prone to reserve a sparsely populated Paradise for themselves. Such Judaizers of the modern Church exist feebly when she is prosperous, but usually revive in her sorrows. Like other PAST AND PRESENT 61 and larger associations of the orthodox, they seem utterly unaware of the discredit which has come upon much creedal religion, since experimental science began to contribute to the progress of mankind.1! The discredit cannot be removed by threats and fulmina- tions. Nor can the majority of the American people who are today unchurched, be brought to a sense of their Christian duty by the insistence upon fixed standards of belief that are’ no longer final. Those who propose to restore creedal religion should do so without fear of fundamentalists or of extreme liberals. It must be reéstablished by Christian thinkers who reject the opinion that theology is undermined: in whom the spirit and content of religion are set on finding clearer and more comprehensive formulations of the Faith; and for whom the requirements of the religious consciousness are guaranteed by the spirit and writings of the New Testa- ment. The theology they derive from their research may be historical, psychological or humanistic, but it should at least be Christian theology. (Strictly defined, there is no Protestant nor Catholic truth in theology, labels that are erroneous and misleading, but simply truth, as Christ revealed it.) It should insist upon the purity of motive and of conduct, which is well pleasing to the God whom the prophets declared, and our Lord incarnated. It must beware of the alloy of excessive speculation found in the gold of much past and present theology. It must remem- ber that while there is a difference between the religious and the philosophical standpoints, they always intersect, and are mutually helpful, and also that what their intersections produce is to be proved by its ability to develop higher ideals and more righteous living. 11 Cf, 8. J. Case: ‘“* The Millennial Hope ’”’; Oscar L. Joseph: ‘‘ The Coming Day ”’; H. F. Rall: ‘‘ Modern Premillennialism and the Christian Hope.” 62 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE Il Let us turn now to what Dryden calls, ‘“‘The firm perspective of the past,” where speculations are under bonds, and events have been followed by intervals sufficiently wide to verify their mean- ing. Another poet, Lucretius, one of the noblest in Roman literature, in a fine figure speaks of the detachment of view necessary for those who would rightly use that perspective. He depicts the marshalling of the warriors on the plain, the gleam of their burnished arms, the fiery charges of the horses that shake the ground. But on the far-off heights above, all the scouring legions seem motionless, and the confusions blend, as it were, in one steady sheet of flame. This aloofness does not mean that we should treat the past as a refuge from duty, but as a storehouse of the ripest expe- rience available for the discharge of duty. It prevents us from overrating the importance of the present, and teaches us that no outward show of movement is of much conse- quence when compared with the changeless principles behind it. The more thoroughly we explore the latitudes and longitudes of Time, in which the regenerating winds of the Spirit have blown as they listed, the more certain we shall be that those winds still blow. The records of Church and State are an unfenced expanse where, almost without excep- tion, the relation and witness of Christianity to the Divine Order can be recognized to advantage. Bishop Mandell Creighton reminds us that the theological and philosophical phases of the Faith, its connections with nations and the world, and the creeds which have shaped its various policies, are part and parcel of the religious education of the race. The consequences of the Emperor Constantine’s conversion, the significance of the controversy between Nicwan bishops and their adversaries, the outcome of the General Councils of Constance and Trent; Augustinianism as St Augustine PAST AND PRESENT 63 evolved it, Lutheranism according to Luther, the Presbyterian and Puritan systems as Calvin and Cartwright conceived them, or Methodism as Wesley led its triumphant march, are subjects deserving our closest scrutiny. The judgments upon Church or State that persist are those founded upon the continuous experiences of their life in successive ages. Judg- ments upon them inspired by mere reaction from what is happening, often relax our hold on lasting realities, and are as ephemeral as other contemporary judgments from which they, in turn, react. Surely we have had our fill of both kinds. Wherever we concentrate in history, whether it be upon the immemorial associations of Jerusalem, Constantinople, Rome or Geneva; as Christians, we should visualize the wealth of our religious heritage; as churchmen, we should feel at home; as citizens, we should observe the chequered progress of the State. The reasons for the present significance of all institutions embodying Christian truths, or for their varied but indestructible elements, can never be fully under- stood by those who refuse to study their origin and growth. Nor will the narrow and confusing dogmatism of sectarian opinion be displaced by a truly catholic doctrine unless men venture beyond the confines of their respective denomina- tions. The Reformed Churches must learn that Rome always has stood for ideals far greater than Protestantism has ever appreciated; and Roman Catholics must learn that Protestantism has been the charter of the soul’s freedom in Christ. No priesthoods or prophetical orders, no sacramental or theological teachings, no concepts of holiness or oneness, no movements of reform or returns to ancient ways have existed in the past that did not convey lasting benefits to humanity. The assertion of the thirteenth century Mediz- valists that Christ was the Lord of lords, and the plea of the sixteenth century Reformers that man’s approach to his Maker should be untrammelled, have issued in the further- ance of the Gospel. If there is to be in our day an abandon- 64 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE ment of provincial religious structures in behalf of a larger, truer temple of God as the home of all nations, Christianity will be best applied to that end by those teachers who know its annals, and are baptized afresh in its spirit. What in history, sacred or secular, so called, is to us vague and formless, should be vivified. For, valuable as are the records of the Church because they tell us of God’s manifes- tation to men, and of their rejection or acceptance of Him, the history of the State is scarcely less valuable. It em- phasizes those human and natural elements of life which have a sacredness all their own. The scholar who toils diligently in both realms will frequently find them without frontiers. He will be amply rewarded if only by his increasing con- sciousness that Church and State shall eventually be united in the Kingdom of God here on earth. The priestly systems of Asia, the intellectual glories of Greece, the military and legal imperialisms of Rome, the spiritual authority of the early Christian Church, the Papal government of Cathol- icism, the development of modern States under Protestant- ism, and the industries, policies, philosophical or religious developments that characterize these States, Churches and periods, are at your disposal. The ground is well prepared, the materials are more than plentiful, the ages containing them are veined with life. They need but the harmony and unity which the student should bring to them, to show him the wonderful activity and variety of the entire evolution. If we do not have to exclude from our sympathetic interest any department of history, neither do we have to consort with degrading memories of lives that were never really lived, or of deeds which should never have been done. Of course we shall encounter the worthless and the immemora- ble; the gifted minds that were recreant; the liars and the cowards whose infamies blister human records. But neither these, nor the parasites, the bullies, the sharpers and the scoundrels of bygone days need trouble us. We are not to be too much engaged with princes who betrayed the State, with PAST AND PRESENT 65 prelates who betrayed the Church, or with politicians who fawned for place and power. They are intended for our warning, not for our intimacy, and should be left in the quarantine to which they belong.” Jn the words of Frederic Harrison: “If history has any lessons, any unity, any plan, let us turn to it for this. Let this be our test of what is history and what is not, that it teaches us something of the advance of human progress, that it tells us of some of those mighty spirits who have left their mark on all time, that it shows us the nations of the earth, woven together in one purpose, or is lit up with those great ideas and those great purposes which have kindled the conscience of mankind.” These evidences of a common design governing the whole historic structure add to the attractions of the subject. The economic or constitutional aspects of the State, and the teachings that have endowed the Church with her rightful claims upon humanity, are almost without exception a consistent development. To take a further example, the numerous alignments and sects of modern Christianity did not drop out of space, but emerged, each in its own succes- sion, from one preéxistent Divine Society. Most of them did not imagine themselves to be leaving the Church, but preserving her against her enemies or cleansing her of her evils. Their breaches have widened or narrowed during the lapse of centuries, yet neither the Roman nor the Greek Catholic, the Anglican nor the Protestant Communions, have escaped the original Church which promulgated the Faith and produced the Bible, to which they alike appeal. !* Plainly, few things, if any, that have been cease to be; they 12 The penchant for large tomes dealing with ‘‘ Bad Men” and “ Bad Women” is more marked in Europe than in America, but both continents can do without the product. To get at the facts contained in these biog- raphies it is necessary for authors to breathe the air of moral cesspools: and only readers with morbid tastes could possibly endure narrations which are made up of intrigue, adultery and murder. 13° The Meaning of History,” p. 11. 14C0f, W. G. Peck: ‘‘ The Values of the Sacrament. An Essay in Recon- struction.” 66 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE only undergo changes. There will be no new world in the sense of sudden and immediate novelty. Foolish animadver- sions of things past, foolish exaltations of things present, foolish expectations of things future, are ever with us; the last, perhaps the most pathetic of the three. All, as George Saintsbury reflects, have been encouraged by the omnipres- ent reaction of a great war. But none could domineer over men’s ideas so easily were they more deeply versed in what has been. | History reminds us at every stage of the shining virtues which are often found with distressing vices in the same human character. It shows us that some of its priceless values have been obtained in desperate conditions. Thus ancient Greece, from a fairly inclusive viewpoint, has been compared to ‘‘a giant dreaming of freedom while locked in the arms of a courtesan slave.” An intellectual and ethical eminence, entirely foreign to her surroundings, unknown to previous or after ages, gave her during the fifth century B. C. an un- equalled drama, poetry, philosophy, political ethic, and art. Out of the Greek mind at its climax came the creative light without which heat is useless; to which men like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek masters contributed their full quota. It seems impossible, as ‘‘The London Spectator” comments, that a nation so justly celebrated was degraded by savagery, unbridled lust and slavery. Yet its under- world was a Saturnalia of hideous depravities, and the wickedness now uncovered in it challenges belief. The social order rested upon human bondage; the City-States violated the tenets of their philosophers by making ceaseless war upon each other. Unnatural vices were practised; even human sacrifice was suggested as the best ‘‘medicine”’ for an ailing commonwealth. Citizens who met to hear and discuss the sublime tragedies which still echo in men’s ears were themselves a sort of corporate tragedy.© The curious self- 16 Cf. W. Warde Fowler: ‘‘ The City-State of the Greeks and Romans,’’ Chapters IX and X on the internal and external causes of decay. PAST AND PRESENT 67 sufficient groups which listened to the greatest thinkers of the race, or watched the building of the Parthenon as the crown of Attic splendor, were only one remove from the heathen tribes they despised. What could be more remote from classic Greece than naked primitivism? Nevertheless they lived side by side. Evils and infamies best left unde- scribed were in proximity to the allegiance to reason, the reflective breadth and clearness of statement of the Greek mind at its best. One is almost driven to the conclusion that it was an extraordinary episode, preparatory for the Great Teacher who spoke a dialectal form of the Greek language, and for the deliverance of His message in those cultural forms which insured its acceptance beyond the boundaries of Judaism. In Christ and in Johannine Christianity, a pu- rified, ennobled Greece lived again, and distributed her gifts to mankind in the Faith that owes much to her.'® IV If it seems to you that the flagrancies of our age almost excuse every former period of wrong doing, look back, not to antiquity, but to the Europe and America of your nearer ancestors, when history was made in iniquitous as well as in righteous ways. The eighteenth century is the immediate precursor, save one, of our own. Because of great revolu- tions in politics and social theories, the world of today makes the world of yesterday unreal and remote. The student feels that it is as distant as the Renaissance, and in numerous aspects, not nearly so attractive. Philanthropy had an infrequency which made it singular. The Decalogue went out of fashion. The social virtues fell into abeyance. Mark Pattison describes the era as “‘one of decay of religion, licentiousness of morals, public corruption, profaneness of language, —a day of rebuke and blasphemy .. . an age destitute of depth and earnestness; an age whose poetry was without romance, whose philosophy was without insight, 1 Cf. C. Ackermann: ‘‘ The Christian Element in Plato.’’ 68 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE and whose public men were without character; an age of ‘light without love,’ whose very merits were of the earth, earthy.” Since this sweeping verdict was pronounced in 1862, we have learned to understand the eighteenth century better. We know that despite its sordidness, it was not and could not have been wholly corrupt. Agents and forces of purification are always present in every society, however debased and degenerate that society may be, though often too far below the surface for their presence to be detected by the superficial observer. Yet beyond question the disorders of civilization during the years included in Pattison’s survey were far-reaching and obstinate. National character was such as to make belief in a constitutional government impossible. The wise political instincts now attributed to English-speaking peoples, and their actual establishment of civic stability are much more recent than is usually supposed. Levity, selfishness and turbulence were prevalent. The reign of the Puritan saints was succeeded by the revels of the Stuart and Hanoverian sinners. The profligates of the Restoration produced a progeny almost worse than themselves, whose refined but cynical brutalities it would be difficult to exaggerate. The highest elements in human existence were frittered away; conduct ran in wrong channels; conscience was prostituted ; then indeed was “Time a maniac scattering dust, And life a fury slinging flame.”’ 38 Monarchs and nobles of the Continent displayed a callous- ness which took no account of the occasional famine prices of food, of the starvation of the plain folk, or of the high rate of infantile mortality. Land owning barons and gentle- men of quality regarded the nameless hordes on whom they 17 Mark Pattison: ‘‘ Essays,”’ Vol. II. p. 42. 1% Cf. The Author’s ‘‘ Three Religious Leaders of Oxford,” pp. 240 ff. PAST AND PRESENT 69 relied for everything as their servile creatures. Religious zeal was denounced as a species of madness. The skepticism which infected universal society became skeptical even of itself. Liewdness and debauchery corroded the social de- pendability of the peasantries who imitated their superiors. Pompous bishops and pluralist parsons, who seldom fed their flocks, lingered in places and followed pursuits forbidden to the cloth. Victimized by poverty, disease and drunkenness, the people resorted to lawlessness. The severity of criminal codes, which in Britain alone made more than one hundred offenses punishable with death, and used sign posts for gibbets, could not repress theft and murder, nor maintain public order and safety. Society became a melancholy wreck: the despair of the moralist and the legislator. Carlyle thundered against the century, and said its one decent act was to blow out its own brains in the French Revolution. Yet from this degraded period emerged those spiritual forces that revived the Church, and set up representative democ- racies in Great Britain, France and the United States of America. It shows that the growth of civilization, the spread of knowledge, the habitual reverence for law and order, and for all social essentials, have usually sprung from great individuals. ‘They transformed this era, they ended its anarchies, they upheld the State, they breathed new life into an expiring Faith, they lifted the curse which had fallen on a hapless age. For it was the age of Wesley, of Washing- ton, of Johnson, of Jefferson, of Burke, of Hamilton, of Pitt, of Marshall, of Fox, and of Franklin: men who were magis- trates of God in their respective realms. Christianity itself is the foremost example of this habit of the past to bring forth meat out of the eater. Nor was it ever so conclusively demonstrated as in the most important movement of Time. It would be difficult to reduce the hu- man beginnings of our religion below their actual levels of helplessness and insignificance. As a supernatural Faith it was repudiated by the Jews among whom it originated. 70 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE The death of its Founder was entirely too casual to excite any comment from the Romans or the Greeks. His teach- ings were not known by contemporary scholars and think- ers, and by only a few of the poor and the lowly to whom He communicated them. What followed on this non- apprehension of the world’s supreme Figure is to be discussed in later lectures. But the discussion will be valueless unless we learn from it that these strange admixtures of utmost evil and utmost good, of veritable feebleness and omnipotence, are not excluded from our own or from any other time. It is erroneous to suppose that the ages of faith which produced saints and heroes are closed to us, or that those saints and heroes belonged to a more divine type, living in a far less oppressively human environment than ours. From the philosophic standpoint such conceptions are void of historic content, arbitrary, and mischievous. As a matter of fact, the world of the Apostles was an infinitely viler world than the one we know. Yet it sufficed for them as ours ought to suffice for us. St. Paul’s letter to the Romans testified that they knew the worst and believed the best about it; they saw its damning iniquities, but they also foresaw its dawn- ing glories. ‘Their contemplation of those immutable prin- ciples which sustain society convinced them that the Creator’s Love and Wisdom had invested too heavily in man to forsake him. Can we not conform our outlook and approximate to theirs? According to our trust in them and in Him Whom they obeyed, be it unto us! That trust will at least get an even chance if we keep an eye upon the comedy of men’s indiscriminate condemnation of this half-way house which they inhabit. Of course the race will outgrow it, but it will not do so by demolishing it. Fox said of Burke that he was an exceedingly wise man, but wise too soon. If so great an intellect as Burke’s was sometimes at the behest of his imagination, truly we have need to watch against the in- 19 Cf, §. Angus: ‘‘ The Environment of Early Christianity,’’ Chapter III. PAST AND PRESENT 71 solence of our ill founded fears or hopes. I am not of those who contend that the open expression of truth is seldom practicable. On the contrary, its suppression deadens life. The brave avowal of sincere beliefs is our indefeasible obliga- tion. But they should be well meditated, rightly stated, constantly revised, and compared with the consentient be- liefs of an authoritative nature. He who avows them should always be able to detect the needs of the hour and the signs of the times. After these precautions have been taken, it is often the case that what is loosely phrased, “‘the spirit of progress,’ is an imponderable which eludes the shrewdest efforts to discern it. An open door to history is in the biography inseparable from it, since if persons rather than events attract us, we eannot get at them without knowing their surroundings. What is more, there is a meaning in which those persons are the past we really know. Its temper, its tendencies, and its aims are incarnated in them. Nothing is more Hellenic than Plato and his “‘ Republic,” or more medieval than Hildebrand and his theocratic autocracy. If the Renaissance found its diplomatic voice in Machiavelli and its cultured voice in Erasmus, it also found its religious voice in Luther and Calvin. The England of the New Learning lived in Shake- speare, in Jonson and in Marlowe. The England of the Reformation reached its military climax in Cromwell, its poetical climax in Milton, and its political climax in Lord Somers and John Locke. Revolutionary France was pre- figured in the Encyclopedists—in Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau. The constitutionalism of our Republic is best understood by mastering the leading conceptions of Wash- ington and those of the statesmen who served with him; and Lincoln remains, as he is likely to remain, the ideal per- sonalization of representative democracy. The general course of nations as well as their outstanding personalities, and what they have loved or hated, lost or won, their peculiar bent, or specific contributions to man- 72 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE kind, appear in the history of Church and State. Their importance for the theological student surpasses that of ephemeral volumes of sermons, or of sectarian discussions that are not based on primal realities. Although these two organizations have long monopolized the social structure, their harmonious codperation is still an indefinite prospect in all Christian lands. Numerous and weighty reasons sup- port the contention of scholars and statesmen that their true balance has not been struck, and not a few maintain that its adjustment is the problem of problems to which competent thinkers should address themselves afresh. The State with which the Apostolic Church had relations was the most efficient social organization known to mankind before the Christian era, and it was then at the high point of its efficiency. When our Lord was accused of endeavoring to make Himself a King, His judge, Pontius Pilate, Proc- urator of Cesar in Judza, represented the Chief Magistrate of a nominal Republic which ruled the western world. The conflict begun by that trial, and by the creation of the Divine Ecclesia in the midst of that Republic, has by no means subsided. The relaxation of religious and domestic disci- pline, the tyrannies of scientific, literary or ecclesiastical hierarchies, the exactions of temporal power, the illicit developments of individualism, and the excessive claims of social groups lend weight to the conclusion that restraint is still a necessary art of government. The majority of nations needs a more enlightened guidance than their traditional methods afford, better protection from selfish greed within and without their jurisdiction, and a steadier help toward practical betterment. The study of the State in the light of its own past, is rein- forced in democracies by the argument that they do not give men and women that equality of economic opportunity which is the logical sequence of political equality. Their social development falls short of the goal here named. Earlier ideas that all persons were equal in character, intelligence and PAST AND PRESENT 73 ambition are negatived by the evidence of humanity itself. There is an irremovable distinction between an impossible natural equality, and an attainable political equality. The theory that men are created free and equal is relegated to the lumber room of decrepit notions which flourished in an agitated time. It is exceedingly doubtful if the leaders of the American Revolution ever held the theory in the sense often attributed to them.”? Be this as it may, when strictly inter- preted, its inevitable outcome is a Socialism which violates the best political instincts of freedom-loving States, Their choicest products are leadership, and the conceptions and policies of leadership. These alone insure social progress, and they are usually found, not in the majority, but in the one or the few. The wise words of Sir Henry Jones are worth recalling in this connection: ‘‘ The road to ruin for an ignorant and selfish democracy is far shorter than for any other kind of misgovernment; the fall is greater and the ruin more complete. There is no builder of the common good who builds so nobly and securely as a wise democracy, and there are no hands which destroy so hopelessly as the hands of the many.” 7! Yet democratic States evince a growing belief that the industrial movements which have revolutionized modern life, require the extension of the principles of right and justice, to include equality of economic opportunity. How far that extension can be made by secular governments without a regeneration in the moral and religious habits of the people, is a matter we shall have to notice later. Unquestionably, the modern limitation of government to political affairs has removed formidable obstacles from the path of popular rights and duties. But will its expansion to cover industrial and kindred affairs maintain or abolish the individualism upon which nations, and most of all, democracies, very much depend? Experience teaches that the moral control of the 20;Cf. Viscount Bryce: ‘‘ Modern Democracies,”’ Vol. I. pp. 48, 60. ff. 21‘*The Principles of Citizenship,”’ p. 73. 74 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE people’s work and pleasure is a hazardous and difficult task for the political State to assume. Though the present revolt against the frightful increment of veritable heathenism which disgraces professedly Christian nations is widespread and clamant, the contention as to whether the temporal or the spiritual powers, or both conjointly, shall purge the general situation of its social abnormalities is now before us daily. Those who insist upon the absorption of Church and State in the Kingdom of God have little support from the modern State. The Church and the nation are no longer coexten- sive, and the theocratic identification that once prevailed in them does not obtain in law. The Jewish ideal that there is no severance between the divine and civil rule, is set aside today by legal precedents derived from the Roman Empire and from the Reformation. These precedents are strength- ened by memories of the hardships and humiliations in- flicted upon the State by the once powerful Medieval Church. There was no comprehensive religious organization similar to that of Israel in the Roman world. Even single cities such as Rome, Athens, or Ephesus, were religiously separate. Nevertheless, a strong minority of Christians and non- Christians in civilized States favor their recognition of reli- gion, because they have lost faith in the theory of society’s inherent progress. Man’s conquest of his natural environ- ment, his enactment of better laws, and his execution of equal and speedy justice, will not, in the opinion of numbers of thoughtful people, satisfy his aspirations for reform. These, as they view the situation, are seriously impeded by political and national barriers against which the religious temper of Europe and America is vehemently moved. A great deal that is offered in defense of those barriers by publicists and statesmen is looked upon as archaic and mischievous sentimentalism. Psychologists and_ biologists, who ridicule what they describe as the empty platitudes of a shortsighted patriotism, have their own specifies. Yet their PAST AND PRESENT 75 scientific estimates of social betterment are no more ac- ceptable to theocratically disposed men and women than are those of the political empirics.” Christians who believe that the Kingdom of God must be built here and now by His omnipotent and saving grace, vouchsafed in response to human sin and human faith, are inclined to ask for the spiritualization of all politics. But the far larger number who believe that Christianity is more true than practicable, cling to the scepter of secularism, and reject the Cross of sacrificial renunciation. It is abhorrent to them that the State should be in the dust, even to serve the God of all nations. Enough has been said to vindicate the attempt of honest-minded Churchmen to penetrate behind Protestantism and Catholicism, and find in their common origin the things that shall make for their peace and their effective human service. Should the Churches prefer the non-communicative isolation which has hitherto been their fetish, the charge of these vital human interests which I have named may be taken over by destructive forces with lam- entable consequences. There are indications that the strug- gle for their control is between a Socialism of varying degrees of religious belief or non-belief, on the one hand, and Christian fraternity on the other. Those who are pledged to the latter should remember that the moral values of society emerge, not by preachment and debate, but by squarely meeting their conditions. If the Church is to meet them, she must not only proclaim good will, but augment her social control in behalf of its diffusion. Society, as we find it, is infinitely distant either from an abandoned depravity or a spotless holiness. It is composed of human beings such as we are ourselves, who are in the process of becoming, either for better or for worse. They are susceptible to religious over- tures; they have primary, secondary, and even tertiary re- quirements that call for that manifold wisdom of God which 22 Cf. Albert Schweitzer: ‘‘ The Decay and the Restoration of Civiliza- tion,” chapter IV; and, “* Civilization and Ethics,’ chapters X XI and XXII. 76 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE His Ecclesia is supposed to have and to administer. Their spiritual and social movements, past and present, are re- vealed in the unfoldings of Church and State. And since the latter is the senior of these two all-inclusive human associa- tions, to it we turn first for our instruction in well-doing. THIRD LECTURE THE GROWTH AND PURPOSE OF THE STATE ‘‘Like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind.”’ SHAKESPEARE: The Tempest, Act IV. Scene I. 151 ff THIRD LECTURE THE GROWTH AND PURPOSE OF THE STATE The genesis of the State — Its evanescent forms — A perfect State is imaginary — The Home as the source of the State — The formation of the Clan and the Tribe — Their traits as organizations — Tribalism and nationalism in Oriental Empires — The City-States of Greece — Their great service to human associations — Rome’s constructive political genius — The autocracy of the Classic State — Plato’s Ideal State — There is no break between ancient, medieval and modern States — The Greek period akin to our own — Mediavalism’s fascina- tion due to a reaction from modern Intellectualism — The social organ- isms subordinate to the Church — Charles the Great and his imperial system — The Feudal States — Chivalry as a Christian cult — The golden Thirteenth Century — The beginnings of Parliamentary rule — The prevalence of the national State in ecclesiastical internationalism — The sources of American democracy. THE genesis of the State is hidden in the dim prehistoric voids of the past. Its development has been compared to that of a vast primeval forest. It looks like a thing unsown, always living, always dying and renewing its life from age to | & age. ‘‘No one has planned and no one has planted it. But ‘ it has its laws of growth all the same, and its own grave grandeur. Every individual within it, struggling for his own life, and reaching up towards the sunlight, contributes not only to the variety but to the vast unity of the whole. The statesman, the philosopher, the preacher, the legislator, the judge, the soldier, the maker of tools, the tiller of the soil; the wise and good in every degree, nay, the foolish and wicked, by their negative experiments have for successive generations shed their lives like forest leaves to make the black soil on which our social institutions grow.” ! It awaits every human creature at his birth and commandeers the resources of his 1Sir Henry Jones: ‘‘The Working Faith of a Social Reformer,” p. 17. 79 80 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE conscious life. Its summary process excites protests from individualists who assert that State control cannot be wisely adapted to personal rights. Its annals show that there has been no theory of such control that did not have conspicuous limitations. Hopeful experiments were comparatively short lived; the best constitutional provisions proved to be but temporary conveniences. The problems of political rule are renewed in every fresh development of civilization; many have withstood all previous efforts for their solution. Yet without the State men cannot cultivate their intellectual and spiritual faculties. Their habits, occupations and desires are not well qualified unless they are subordinated to its authority. ‘They did not choose it, but it chose them, de- creed their outward manner of being, and laid its burdens upon them. ‘Their welfare is inconceivable apart from its training and partnership in mutual coéperation and loyalty. What the relation of the politics of the State is to those of the Eternal Order is frequently debated. Without doubt it arouses an absorbing devotion almost comparable with those offered to the historic religions of the race. Yet patriotic passion is by no means invariably associated with the laws of supreme righteousness, and its separation from them has been the source of evils which impartial historians feel bound to condemn. The disparity between patriotism and justice has given rise to much moral and religious literature. It can only be lessened by the increasing realization in advanced States of a world commonwealth that has to be gradually evolved out of a purified and exalted race-consciousness which is now steadily advancing. Visioned spirits who foresee a universal State in which the Highest Will shall reign and prosper, are not to be chided for their want of patriotism. Far otherwise; their conviction that the State is an emanation of one supreme ordination for mankind is preservative of its life and power. Portrayals of the perfect Commonwealth are found in Hellenic and Hebraic writings, which, in turn, have exercised THE GROWTH AND PURPOSE OF THE STATE 81 a lasting influence upon later idealistic authors. Their optimistic tone pleases the majority; even those who regard them as dreamers delight in their dreams.2 Nor can we afford to dispense with many ideals of the State which are at present inoperative, since some which were formerly regarded as impossible of realization have forced their way into general acceptance. Yet society is so constituted that it quickly resents the interference of ideals with its inherited proclivities. The strenuous opposition to the Eighteenth Amendment of the American Constitution is an example of this resentment. It has no validity in reason. Science, education and good morals have outlawed the use of in- toxicating liquors as unnecessary even in moderation, and dangerous in excess. Nevertheless, the element of theoretical excellence which the amendment presupposes traverses some very human inclinations. Proposed Utopias will have to encounter these inclinations which will not be put down without resistance. No system of the doctrinaire that is so far ahead of the average citizen as to be out of his sight can do much more than challenge his lethargy. The majority of them, vague though benevolent, have hitherto failed to hasten the tardy growth of the State in moral character and resolution. For many centuries, however, it was reverenced as the arbiter of ethics and religion. Its social and political prin- ciples included those of a loftier kind, and governed all alike. This domination surpasses in duration that of all other cor- porate bodies of mankind. The venerable guilds of trade, intercourse, art; even the brotherhoods of ecclesiastical beliefs and usages, are juveniles before the age of the State. They have had a prolonged tenure and a wide range in society, and determined much of its thought and action. But their antiquity and strength appear recent and subor- dinate in the light of those possessed by the State. 2Cf. ‘ More’s Utopia,” translated into Modern English by G. C. Richards, where the value of such idealizations is discussed at length. 82 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE Notwithstanding its immemorial alliance with humanity, another existing institution is prior to the State in point of time, and superior to it in sacredness. The household was the first association of individuals; within this original unit, as Aristotle said, social order, affection and obedience were first generated. Its members were made one by the ties of consanguinity, which held them in an unbreakable bond. Implicit submission to parental authority was the first nexus, not only of dwellers under the domestic roof, but of the various organizations subsequently derived therefrom. In the stern school of the aboriginal home, made imperative by the need of food and shelter, were taught the lessons of social conservation that underlay the general welfare. Its occu- pants shared their gains and losses. Its religions instructed them in self-sacrifice for the sake of the family. Those per- sons alone were virtuous and honorable who best fulfilled their domestic duties. Their gods were the divinities of the hearth, the fold, the field, the forest, and the chase. They guarded the home, led the clan or the tribe in war, and protected them in peace. Nothing within the narrow range of primitive ideas was free from patriarchal supremacy, and the recognition of rights and their obligations which it en- forced has since been verified by experience. So closely were responsibilities related under this primal jurisdiction that the sin of Achan was viewed as a family offense; its guilt and its punishment fell not only upon Achan himself, but upon his immediate relatives.® When several families coalesced in the clan, its allegiance was given to the eldest male descendant, whose seniority in some instances had to be qualified by ability for leader- ship. Chieftainship required skill in battle, shrewdness in debate, and tactfulness in the settlement of internal disputes. Right choice of hunting grounds, successful sowing and har- vesting of crops, clever manipulation of superstitious beliefs and customs, were the principal demands of the position. 3 Joshua VII. 16 ff. THE GROWTH AND PURPOSE OF THE STATE 83 When two or more clans united the tribe was formed. No one tribe admitted that another was its superior except under compulsion; all asserted their independence, if necessary, by force of arms. The traits of family life, interdependence, helpfulness, heroism, antipathy to outsiders, persisted in tribal life, and eventually became the characteristics of the embryonic State. They prevail now in civilized as well as uncivilized nations; their vestiges are discernible throughout human society. What little we know of the prehistoric races is greatly to their credit. In a world of glaciers, moraines, morasses, jungles, impassable deserts, seas and mountains, where monstrous creatures swarmed, these earlier men and women waged and won a desperate struggle for existence against almost insuperable odds. Were our knowledge of their achievements as complete as that which we have of those of leaders of after ages, possibly the latter would have to give place to these brave primeval heroes who gained a precarious foothold on the planet. The more facile world in which we live was begotten by their exertions. To their indomitable perseverance, their courage, their alertness against imminent and deadly perils, the modern man owes not a few of his salient virtues, as well as the basis for his conquest of Nature. I] There are numerous hypotheses concerning the connection between tribalism and the nationalism, such as it was, of Oriental empires. But the systematic arrangement of facts which establish or seem to establish that connection has yet to be made. It is fairly certain that City-States existed in the Tigris-Euphrates valley. The earliest known kings of that region were not the rulers of countries, but of cities; of Kish, of Asshur, of Lagash, of Nippur, of Ur, and of 4Cf. W. Goodsell: ‘‘ A History of the Family as a Social and Educational Institution”; Mathilde and Mathias Vaerting: ‘‘ The Dominant Sex ’”’; A. R. Wadia: ‘‘ The Ethics of Feminism’; W. F. Lofthouse: ‘* Ethics and the Family.”’ 84. CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE Babylon. The City-States of Greece were probably an inheritance from these localized kingships. Yet to demon- strate that they were is beyond our present knowledge. Indications also prevail that Greece borrowed her mytholog- ical cults from the Orient, but to prove this is, again, a very difficult matter. Scholars who can deal directly with the widely diiferent literatures of the Orient, and at the same time command the infinite resources of Greek history and letters, are exceedingly rare.- Those who are busy recovering the scattered remnants of Oriental life have had little time for tracing the movements of life and thought in the Hellenic peninsula. Whatever migrated from Orientalism and found a more hospitable home among the Greeks was transformed to suit their ideas and conditions, and therefore is not readily recognized. ‘Take as a concrete instance the relative posi- tions of sun and moon in mythology and religion. Among the Eastern Semites the moon outranked the sun, but it is just the opposite in Greece. The value of the moon’s more tranquil light to dwellers in tropical climate is obvious. It gave them opportunities to resume activity in toil, and espe- cially for travel. But in temperate climates the sun’s heat ceased to be an enemy and the moon became by so much less a friend. The truth is that we are only at the beginning of a better understanding of the relation between the Orient and Greece, and an extended period of research awaits the learn- ing which shall correlate them. Considered as dynastic despotisms, the empires of Egypt, Assyria and Babylon make a notable exhibit in man’s ad- vance beyond tribal affiliations. But they magnified his idea of patriarchal absolutism in a monarchy which had few restraints, and his idea of the defense of the clan in military States that lived and died by the sword. Knowing much more than was formerly ascribed to them, they ac- complished far less politically than could be reasonably ex- pected of them. One of their fruitful reactions was an indirect stimulus of those prophecies of Israel, which showed that THE GROWTH AND PURPOSE OF THE STATE 85 tyrannical conquerors could not quench man’s desire for a higher righteousness or for social justice. But the hankering after personal sovereignty enshrined in the pomp and cir- cumstance of Egyptian potentates who drove abroad in chariots bestudded with precious stones, while millions of their slaves and captives died of starvation, or under the lash, is yet latent in the Oriental breast. Hierarchical priest- ism was often either actually identified with the throne or else allowed to dictate its personnel and its policies. Magnif- icent princedoms, like those that still linger in the feudatory provinces of India, formerly obtained in nearly all Asiatic tribes and peoples. Imperial dynasties were ensphered in an aura of sacred mysticism. One of the most cherished titles of the Pharaohs was “‘Son of the Sun,” borne by each succes- Sive sovereign from the Fifth Dynasty downwards. In the endless line of dim monarchs who reigned in Egypt, and who leave little impression upon the modern mind, one solitary figure was remarkable for his idealism. Akhnaton, Pharaoh from B. C. 1875 to 1358, was one of the earliest human found- ers of a purely religious doctrine. His monotheism, second only to that of Christianity for nobility of conception, was formulated in an era of gross superstition. When the world was committed to war as an end as well as a means, this enlightened prince preached peace; practiced honesty, simplicity, and frankness; and exemplified the domestic virtues. He gave to womanhood and child-life a reverence seldom paid them till many centuries later. His spiritual ascriptions, hymns, and rituals compare favorably with those of the Old Testament. The art which he stimulated surpasses that of earlier Greece. His phenomenal personality, as delineated by Mr Arthur Weigall, is a striking comment upon the Scripture that God has not left Himself without a witness at any period.° But such a ruler was then as one born out of due time. Those who preceded or followed him were of an entirely 5 Cf. ‘“* The Life and Times of Akhnaton.”’ 86 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE different kind. Obsequious courtiers and glittering retinues enhanced their sway, which was reverenced by the multi- tudes, who believed that monarchs were the sons and daugh- ters of Heaven. As in the case of China and Japan, royalty was too holy and exalted to be seen by its own subjects. The Czardom of Russia retained some traces of this king- worship to the last, and the late Dowager Empress of China was one of its fairly complete modern embodiments. What reflexes Eastern races have had toward self-government are due, in the main, to their intercourse with Western races. Conceptions of democracy have not passed beyond the experimental stage in Continental Asia, native Africa, and the provinces of the Nearer Kast. Should they do so, the change will probably entail some social convulsions, after which the practical realization of real democracy may long remain problematical. It was in Greece that the City-State arose to give mankind a type of government, which neither ancient tribalism nor Oriental despotism could even imagine. The Hellenic penin- sula witnessed a historic intellectual setting of the State made by idealists and philosophers who appealed to reason in behalf of justice, and blended racial sentiment with the irrefutable principles of that justice. They upraised govern- ment from autonomy to isonomy: from rule according to one’s own law to rule according to equal law.® The rational being of the State was lucidly defined and political methods devised for its operation. Alien peoples eventually accepted its ostensible benefits, and the spread of its laws and edicts checked provincial tendencies. Pessimists who are per- suaded that the race is at the mercy of envenomed instincts which drive it on a downward course, will be puzzled to ex- plain the marvellous intervention made in behalf of humanity by classic Greece, to which I have referred elsewhere. For if some of its projects were ‘‘embossed froth,” far more were quick with high intelligence and civic force. Few questions 6 Cf. B. Bosanquet: ‘‘ The Philosophical Theory of the State,’’ p. 4. THE GROWTH AND PURPOSE OF THE STATE 87 have since occupied the political, philosophical, or artistic mind that were not Greek in their origin. The thinkers, builders, sculptors and statesmen of that nation bequeathed to posterity not only its parent metaphysic, its most moving drama, its permanent examples of architecture, but also some of its best political ideas. By the last bequest civiliza- tion has been enriched beyond comparison. The Greek mind made swift and true reactions to human organizations and struck their balance equitably. Nor were they left sus- pended in a metaphysical trance. The Greek language lent itself to every practical political measure. Its simplicity, conciseness and expressiveness in a certain sense created, almost as much as they connoted, some leading concepts of human rule and governance. It was impatient of twistings and embellishments; compact with a vitality of meaning that made excesses abhorrent to the Greek. The suavity and moderation of speech which suit the direction of visible institutions were its native qualities. It had the appositeness and pertinency befitting the most intrepid and cogent political reasoners of any age. Gravity and distinction be- longed to it. It gave utterance to civic instincts and argu- ments which hitherto had been devoid of expression. It was the speech of freedom and of right.’ Rome’s statesmen inherited from those of Greece. Cicero and Seneca alike emphasized the natural equality of the human family. For them the Commonwealth was the affair of all the people who composed it: a gathering of the people associated under a common law and enjoying a com- mon weal. They urged that the bond of justice must be maintained between rulers and ruled, and Seneca anticipated Christian teaching by insisting that the slave was of the same nature as his master, and even capable of conferring benefits upon him. But these enlightened ideas, which go far beyond those of some Greek political philosophers, could not avail against the Oriental despotisms which infected 7Cf. ‘‘ The Legacy of Greece.’ Essays edited by R. W. Livingstone. 88 CHRISTINAITY AND THE STATE Rome after her conquest of the Eastern Empire. Her chief strength lay, not in the enlightened principles of solitary thinkers, but in her solidarity and practical sagacity. She subdued and long held inviolate what Gibbon describes as “the fairest portion of the earth, and the most civilized por- tion of mankind.”’ Her constructive genius in jurisprudence and in colonization, in the founding of cities and the rule of alien peoples, is still before us in every reputable court of law of every well administered modern State. Not only the broken pillars of the Forum, but the deserted fortresses on the Empire’s farthest frontiers; the arch at Treves, the Temple of Claudius at Colchester, ‘‘the White City” be- neath the Wrekin in Shropshire, Hadrian’s Wall on the Scottish border, and innumerable other memorials per- petuate the valor blended with wisdom of Rome’s imperial- ism. The peace she imposed by its dominion, though con- stantly interrupted by the wars imposed on her by her great domains, was a spacious interlude in which modern civiliza- tion, law and citizenship began to be. They were never afterwards entirely forfeited. But the dignity and elevation Rome bestowed on them, once obscured, were not restored until after the lapse of centuries. Neither her legal nor her military monuments are so likely to dominate the future intelligent mind as are the political concepts of Greece. They admonish us that if States would live in the after developments of society, they must subordinate their tem- poralities to their ideals. These have to be restated, at- tached to actual conditions, and involved in the flow of human life which survives the nations that originated them. It is a hard saying for the patriot, and yet a true one, that great Commonwealths, like great characters, find their lastingness, not in themselves, but in what they contribute to the aggregate of human good. They will perish, but their contribution will remain, and by its values they will ulti- mately be judged. Orientals, Greeks and Romans alike agreed that the entire THE GROWTH AND PURPOSE OF THE STATE 89 field of human thought and action was the property of the State. Greek colonies, however, were completely independ- ent from the first. No other ties save those of sentiment and interest existed between them and their planters. Yet what strong ties these can be was exemplified by the cohesion of the British Empire under the strain of the World War. The one exception was Athens, whose colonies, like those of Rome, were replicas of the mother State. Domestic, economic, social and religious concerns were altogether at the will of the State. Roman law allowed no unlimited right of associa- tion and its violation was regarded as equivalent to treason. One of the chief causes of the persecution of Christianity was not, as is so often supposed, religious intolerance, but im- perialism’s jealousy and its suppressive instinct for all possible rivals.® Dean Inge asserts that in the modern State we find only the corporate existence of idiwrns, but that the classic State laid claims to the rights and offices of the modern éxk\nola. He also shows how the better side of Greek life suffered under Plato’s successors, who did not even follow the best light obtainable from physical knowledge. Their luxuriant mythology was the raw material of both poetry and science; but it became, for the most part, non-moral, and could not instil in the citizens the virtues resulting from faith in a universal moral sovereign. For ethical guidance they looked not to priests and temples, but to senates and legislators. Their flexible conception of State supremacy, unmoderated by any exclusively religious beliefs, was fur- thered by these leaders of classic antiquity, who left nothing to the discretion of the individual. His existence was de- clared valueless in itself; only as it served the might of the 8 The typical Greek colony was neither in origin nor development a mere trading post. It was or it became a “ polis,’’ a City-State, in which was re- produced the life of the parent State. Cf. Encyclopedia Britannica; Vol. XII. Eleventh Edition, Article: ‘*‘ Greek History.”’ 9 Cf. Herbert B. Workman: ‘“ Persecution in the Early Church,’’ Chapter III, ‘‘ The Causes of Hatred,’’ p. 105, ff. 90 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE State was it worthy of attention. Politics was the sole and the indivisible authority; citizenship the sacred calling and the seat of all prerogative. None could contend against a semi-omnipotent organization which assumed that the passengers were made for the ship and not the ship for the passengers. No opening was left from which any rebel could defy the enclosures of the State or draw a line across its activities. The spiritual education of the people, the relief of the helpless, the freeing of the slave, the cravings of man’s higher nature, obtained nothing from an institution which regarded humanity as mere material for the sustentation of its life and authority. What the bondsman was in the grasp of his owner, the owner was in the grasp of the State. Two closely related elements are perceptible in this theory. First, the State was viewed as an end in itself, to which the individual was an accessory; and, second, since the State was co-extensive with human life, it followed that sooner or later it would regard its own regnancy as far more important than the welfare of the citizen. This theory has been suffi- ciently tenacious to withstand every subsequent attack upon it, and many millions of men and women have died within the last few years to impress upon the world its fatal consequences. What has been stigmatized as Prussianism is the scarred and battered descendant of the far past, with numerous ~ indorsements from rulers and legalists of widely separated times and nations. They insisted that the highest social developments could only be reached by making the State supreme, and the individual the acolyte of its supremacy. In ancient as in modern days the theory survived all changes. Monarchy, oligarchy, aristocracy, democracy are familiar forms equivalent to the rule of the one, the few, the select, or the whole body of citizenship. But though these forms appear and disappear, they do not materially affect the absolutism of the State. The nations, then as now, were composed of those who inherited the same traditions, spoke THE GROWTH AND PURPOSE OF THE STATE 91 the same language, and adhered to the same laws and cus- toms. But the State, omnicompetent in human life and affairs, like Tennyson’s brook, ‘‘goes on forever.” 1 Its greatest exponent of antiquity was Socrates, whose name is still worth an armed host in its behalf. He con- tended that one’s country was higher and nobler than the individual, his parents, or any other of his ancestors. The reverence of men of understanding and the approval of the gods were fixed upon the State, which the Greek philosopher personalized and addressed in the speech of entire acquies- cence and of homage. Her punishments should be suffered in silence, and her commands as implicitly obeyed as though they proceeded from a divine source. If they seemed to be unjust, the citizen should endeavor to change the mind of the State, failing which he was bound to execute her policies and endure her penalties without murmur or protest. Socrates, however, voiced the sentiments of an exclusive caste of male slave-owners, whose ideas of social order assumed the natural inequality of human society. Their theory was supported by Aristotle, who regarded slavery as a necessity for the higher forms of civilization; an opinion echoed by John C. Calhoun and his party in the middle period of the nineteenth century. When Aristotle inveighed against democracy as an evil form of government, the type he visualized was that of an incensed and disorderly mob assembled for mischief, without the directing reason essential to wise measures, or to their calm deliberation. He often suggests but never solves the prob- lems arising from the relations of individuals and groups to the State. ‘‘And even if we reckon greatness by numbers,”’ he says, ‘‘we ought not to include everybody, for there must always be in cities a multitude of slaves and sojourners and foreigners; but we should include those only who are 10 ‘* Phe People,’’ a later term elevated by ethical usage, and brought in to signify the aggregate of population living under one political organization, was originated by the wider sympathies of genuine commonwealths. It shows correspondence with the psychical entity of nations, and foreshadows a world fraternity which advanced political thinkers desire, 92 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE members of the State, and who form an essential part Opti gis These aristocratic views were opposed by the Stoics and Epicureans, who regarded them as a scandal upon human nature, and leaned towards the assertion of man’s personal rights. The moral teaching of the Stoics that there were in every individual certain spiritual realities which should be respected; that his intellect, his freedom, and his equality were birthrights beyond the jurisdiction of the State, par- took of a religious character, and supplied one of the classic proofs of the folly of framing an indictment against human nature. They advanced enlightened social ideas, altogether absent from the Socratic theory, that have since been con- firmed by the verdicts of civilization. But thinkers like the Stoics and the Epicureans are a small minority in this world. Thought works too slowly and while it grows the people perish for lack of knowledge. Further, it must be conceded that Socrates expressed the gist of Greek beliefs, and that these beliefs were vital to the continuance of the State as it was then constituted. He argued that since none could be an end in himself in a ruling society made up of a minority of slave owners, all must be its contributory agents. For once the unity of the structure was impaired, it was exposed to the fanaticism of demagogues, who, beneath the guise of patriotism, were intent on promoting their selfish contriv- ances. ‘These conclusions have large meanings for modern nations. To us, with our ideas, no right seems clearer than the right of men to think and speak as they please about political matters. But the extreme interpretation which Socrates and Aristotle placed upon the State’s control over the individual was at least rational. They averred that what men of character and ability doubted about would be held as doubtful. Dogmatic formulas would be disbelieved or dis- regarded. Politics, which was for them the rule of life, and i“ The Politics of Aristotle, ’’ translated by Benjamin Jowett. Book VII. Chs. IV-V, p. 214 ff. THE GROWTH AND PURPOSE OF THE STATE 93 the sanction of law and authority, would dwindle into a set of variant opinions. Practice would be made dependent upon expediency, and the State would be left jettisoned, without certainty about its nature or its obligations. It exists, as we know it, to conserve the individual’s rights, to encourage his initiative, and to aid him in the discharge of his responsibil- ities. Though some contradictory forms of modern com- munism are, to a given degree, a revival of the Socratic doc- trine, the idea of individuality is very differently construed now, and placed in more striking contexts. Yet its independ- ence is never to be looked upon as synonymous with license. Personal choice and the will to do as one pleases are restrained on every side by the requirements of the social order, and are subsidiary to the welfare of that order. I have said nothing about Plato’s vision of the Ideal State, which properly belongs to the literature of lost Utopias. Nor is it probable that he believed his ideal could be realized in human society. The ethic which always exceeded religion in the concepts of Greek philosophers prevailed in Plato’s dream. It is more valuable for its gravity and loveliness than for its practicability. In the ultimate, man’s intellec- tual and moral development is the decisive factor in the character and benefit of the State, and this development is impossible without a reasonable religious faith. For want of it the authority of Greek and Roman States waned and then vanished. Yet what peoples they were! What a sense of the beautiful, the serene and the just was their’s! What laws and literatures they bestowed upon us! If modern inquiry shows that heredity, environment, climate, diffused intelli- gence, the spread of commerce, and personal gifts or at- tainments directly affect the well-being of the State, do not ancient nations remind us that its soul is religion? One wonders if they could have perished had this truth been known and heeded by their great leaders. 94 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE Ill The differences between the provinces upon which Greece or Rome set their seal, and those that lay beyond their boundaries, are plainly perceptible in medieval and modern States, and. forbid those divisions of history which are usually artificial in proportion as they are precise. There has been no actual break between classic and medieval civilization, nor between Medizevalism and Modernism, but only intervals of depression varied by occasional revivals. Race continuity persisted; even a certain continuity of culture made itself felt, and the fact of these continuities should mould our con- ceptions of the Middle Ages. When we speak of them as ‘“‘ourblind,”’ as pagan eras, or as ‘‘the dark cavern,’ we but pamper a prejudice incapable of correct historic estimates. Granted that the medieval writers know no Greek, yet they established a literature of their own. The poetry of Chaucer, “The Book of Divine Doctrine”’ by St. Catherine of Siena, St. Francis’ ‘Canticle of the Sun,” the translations of the venerable Bede, the Chronicles of Matthew of Paris, the learning and instructions of Abelard, the story of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,”’ have nothing particularly purblind in them. Succeeding eras are nearly always severe in their verdicts upon those immediately preceding them. The attitude of some contemporary intellectuals toward the Victorian au- thors and publicists is a case in point.’ There is a strong probability that those of the Renaissance were as grossly unfair to the medieval artists and scholars. Assuredly they were not lacking in moral or spiritual insight. Clairvaux and Cluny, Paris and Oxford, did not send out the radiant light of Greece, but they sent out the divine light of Christianity. The medizvalists are charged with not being classical or 12 Fashions in things intellectual are as real and as potent as they are in women’s dress. A few years ago Neiizsche was all the rage. He was a terrible fellow! Today he is remembered only in snatches, THE GROWTH AND PURPOSE OF THE STATE 985 artistic, yet they built Chartres and Lincoln. Giotto showed what the period could do in painting, and Dante was its august interpreter in poetry. Its saints and mystics read after a greater Teacher than Plato, and its seers were nearer to His Spirit and power than were some of the savants of the New Learning. Doubtless medieval teachings were often intellectually poverty-stricken; and, as a consequence, the ancient ways of civic life became degenerate in due time. It was a period of extremes, of humility and pride; of love and hate; the ideal and the actual were often far removed from each other. Yet its climacteric in St. Francis and in St. Ber- nard, whose fame has been somewhat dimmed by that of St. Francis, showed that in religion, at any rate, it was no longer in a state of transition from the antique, but had attained a spirituality wholly its own and one reflected by after times.® This kind of spirituality finally determines the fate of States. Thoughtful people may be thankful for their relation with Greek and Roman ancestries. Statesmen and _his- torians may obtain from them in the critical moments of society those examples and precedents, rules and methods, that serve the present age. Yet in men’s highest moods they confess that the needed guidance for individuals and for nations is not to be had from classic thinkers and rulers. The torch of knowledge can be rekindled in Athens, as can that of human justice in Rome. But for the light within that comes from beyond, inquiring minds repair to the Hebrew prophets and the Christian Apostles: ‘‘As men divinely taught, and better teaching The solid rules of Civil Government In their majestic unaffected style, Than all the cratory of Greece and Rome. In them is plainest taught, and easiest learnt, What makes a nation happy, and keeps it so, What ruins kingdoms and lays cities flat.”” (Paradise Regained) 13 Cf. H. O. Taylor: ‘*The Medieval Mind,’ Vol. I. Chapters XVIII and XIX on Saint Bernard and Saint Francis, p. 408, ff; Chapter X XI, ‘‘ The Spotted Actuality,” p. 487, ff. 96 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE The hold which Medixvalism has gained upon some artistic and religious groups today is not to be ascribed to the fascina- tions of Gothic architecture, or of Sir Walter Scott’s novels. Nor is it rightly explained as a recrudescence of superstitions and symbolisms repudiated by scientific intelligence. Its strength lies where it always lay, in the craving of men and women for authoritative certainty about religion and their own souls. Life is soon over, death is impatient, some fixed beliefs seem essential as to their meanings here and hereafter. Such beliefs, Medizevalism, despite its errors and faults, pro- fessed to give, whereas much Modernism bids us have cour- age in our darkness, or faintly glimpse the larger hope. However unthought or unstudied any system of a social or religious character may be which ends this suspense, it will make a powerful appeal to certain temperaments. Again, the recurrent life forces that ebb but to flow again bring with them reversions to the past. Intellectual wisdom emanates from Greece; political wisdom from Rome; faith in the unseen is vibrant everywhere in the Middle Ages. Why should not they draw men and women back at crucial moments? Nothing in them addressed mentality alone. The consciousness of Church and State related itself in every way to religion and to Deity. Spiritual belief and duty seemed more simple then than they seem now. Certain childlike qualities making him unaware of that vastness of the universe which has burned the modern man’s sense of noth- ingness into his very soul, never fell away from the medizval man. Conscious communion with God often took on the semblance of sense perception. ‘The apparent testimonies of an invisible realm which have become shadowy to myriads of our time were then intensely realistic. Modern unfamiliarity with medieval life exaggerates its charm, just as the archaisms of an older poet’s verse give it a prestige it does not wholly deserve. Yet for those who are not absorbed by outward things excursions into its tranquil regions have their reward. The dearth of modern religious THE GROWTH AND PURPOSE OF THE STATE 97 life in certain directions causes many to feel that, though the people of the Middle Ages doubtless were dirty, ignorant and miserable, they made trial of their times as we have not done of ours, and possessed some gifts and graces which this age could use to advantage. The mysteries that stirred their souls are no longer mysteries to us; some indeed are infantile puerilities. But the verities they steadfastly believed are not entombed, as too many imagine, in the cathedrals and monasteries of continental Europe, Great Britain and Ire- jiand. Not even Dante’s poetry, retrospective though it was, gave complete expression to the medizval mind. Behind his epic, as behind lordly minsters and sacerdotal observances, there was a theology, a philosophy, a ritual, a polity, which subordinated the social organism in Church and State to the Christian doctrine. Perhaps this surrender to a religion so backward in learning was unwise; assuredly it was uncondi- tional. But though we affirm our possession of that religion in purer forms, it has not triumphed in Modernism as it did in Medizevalism. The intellectual ugliness, political dis- honesty and international malpractice of some modern and demoralized nations arise in large measure from their revolt against changeless spiritual laws. This revolt in turn is due to that lack of religious authority, the want of which de- stroyed an ancient civilization in some respects superior to our own. It is therefore requisite in dealing with Mediszvalism’s grotesque admixtures, its virtues and its vices, that we should recognize in it the ever present spirit which dedicated outward things to religious purposes. Nor did its leaders invariably suppose, as some modern thinkers have stated, that religious formulas solve religious problems — an as- sumption contradicted by the difficulties which multiply in the face of its superficial treatment. They knew that those problems originated, not in doctrines and theories, but in life’s factors, and that they could be solved only by dealing directly with those factors. The statement applies to the 98 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE theocratic State of Medisevalism. Had it not enforced its dictates upon all and sundry, it could hardly have survived its hostile environment. This enforcement is not discounted by railings against its legitimacy. Its large-hearted and level-headed consideration better becomes us than heated assertions of our own superiority. The Medieval State, as a part of the Church Universal, can hardly fail to have interest for every lover of State and Church. Let us study it un- embarrassed by present shibboleths, or by catchwords of the part enlisted against the whole, or by the sentiments of provincialism. IV The first obstacle the Middle Ages had to encounter was the social submergence and anarchy which followed the Fall of Rome. Not only normal and human, but abnormal and inhuman elements permeated the results of that event. How far the victorious Teuton was better than the defeated Latin is not a settled question. But it is a settled question that the European peoples who had been ruled by Rome have been the progenitors of modern civilization. There is no space to discuss here in detail the clans and kingdoms that emerged from the debris of her destruction. Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Saxons, Alemanni, Bavarians, Lombards and Vandals — each group had its place and part in the gradual evolution of the Medizval State.‘4 But the solitary and dominating figure arising out of the chaos of society was that of Charles the Great, who was a Christian king before he became the belated successor of pagan Emperors. His grandfather, Charles Martel, had already lessened the power of territorial bishops, by assuming sovereign rights over their appointment and deposition. The second son of Charles Martel’s son Pepin, Charles, fell heir to domains 14 Cf. R. W. Church: “ Beginning of the Middle Ages’; H. B. Workman: “ The Foundation of Modern Religion’’; André Lagarde: ‘‘ The Latin Church in the Middle Ages”; F. J. Foakes Jackson: ‘‘ An Introduction to the History of Christianity, A. D. 590—-1314.”’ THE GROWTH AND PURPOSE OF THE STATE 99 extending from the Bohemian frontier to the Atlantic ocean, and from the North Sea to the Alps and the Pyrenees. His compact with the Papacy sanctioned its canon law, and surrendered the administration of the Church to the hi- erarchy, reserving to him the temporal power. This he held as its over-lord; the benefices of the bishoprics remained at his discretion, and his capitularies regulated much of the rule of the Church.” But far more important than these arrangements was his self-elevation to the primacy of Christendom, in which the Pope was spiritual Emperor, and Charles a secular Pope. Europe then became a Papacy in religious matters, and a feudalistic State in civil affairs. Lord of the ecclesiastical hierarchy whose ideal was a Christian Republic, patron of the Holy See, master of mighty armies, Charles, despite his want of education, combined love of law and a deep regard for justice with a superb gift of organization. He was at once a conservative and a reformer, a soldier and a philan- thropist, a loyal churchman and a resolute foe of clerical usurpations. The Christmas Eve of the year 800 is the date of the death of the old world and of the birth of the new. During High Mass in the Basilica of St. Peter’s on that historic night, the Pontiff placed on the Emperor’s head the diadem of the Cesars, and saluted him as ‘Charles, the most pious Augustus, crowned of God, great and peace giving Emperor.’ After the interruption of centuries of comparative barbarism, the Church again found herself in possession of a world-wide power." 15 Cf, ‘‘ The Cambridge Medieval History.”’ Vol. II. Chs. XIX and XXI. 16 In number the men who promoted the scholarly interests of the Car- lovingian period were few, and fewer were the places where they throve. There was the central group of open-minded laymen and churchmen about the palace school, or following the court in its journeyings, which were far and swift. Then there were monastic or episcopal centers of education as at Tours, or Rheims, or Fulda. The scholars carried from the schools their precious modicum of knowledge, and passed on through life as educated men living in the world, or dwelt as learned compilers, reading in the cloister. But the rays of their enlightening influence were scanty enough in that period’s encompassing ignorance. 100 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE Since the nations of Europe did not then exist, the im- perialism of Charles was the buttress of the rights of the State. How necessary its protection was became manifest after his death in 814, an event which let loose endless confusions that ran amuck for two hundred years. National sentiment was incipient in the crop of kinglets which sprang up in every province, and somewhat active in the higher clergy who undermined the authority of the Frankish Empire for the sake of their ecclesiastical privileges. Eventually, the follies of rulers, the gradual dismemberment of the system which Charles had established, and the decline of Papal authority left the great barons and prince-bishops free to do as they would. Some ruled well, others ill, but all ruled arbitrarily. Feudalism arose to pillage merchants, freeholders and peasants, to domineer over helpless mon- archs, and to clash with the episcopacy. The elevation of the nobility in the State degraded every other rank and condition. It seldom forgot its internal strifes, except when its members united to harass the Church or to oppress the populace. Self-constituted conquerors and military adven- turers prevented national expansion and prosperity through- out Europe. The Norsemen invaded and plundered Great Britain and the eastern coasts of France and Ireland. The Hungarians harried the Rhine Valley and camped under the walls of Capua. Saracenic armies garrisoned the seaport towns of Italy. Robber colonies infested the border lands of every State. The outcome of this turbulence was the setting up of royal dynasties as the symbol of State unity, and the restoration of the Empire under the House of Hohen- staufen. Monarchs who were nothing more than meek patrons could not keep the peace of Europe. A species of nationalism which had proved disastrous to political and religious unity, was now to be subordinated to the Holy Roman Empire in its renewed form. But the subsequent controversy between the Empire and the Papacy, to be presently related, ended a compact which had unified religion, THE GROWTH AND PURPOSE OF THE STATE 101 federalized Europe, given kingship a sacred character, embodied beneficial theories of the State and of the obliga- tions of nations. Those who complain of this alliance of Church and State should consider that the spirit of ageless paganism which dwelt in society, could not be expelled except by their united power. Theologians and priests insisted that the Church was not in the State, but the State in the Church, because she threw her influence into the scale of lawful authority against that of cut-throats and bandits. Men attached themselves to clerics whose minds were stored with the knowledge of the Scriptures and of the Latin Fathers. In the poverty of their own ideas, to whom else could they go? It was the Church which furnished rulers, statesmen, scholars, and supplied governmental methods that appear reactionary to the un- informed, but were a marked advance on anything else of the kind existing then.” Between the time of the first appear- ance of Christianity within the Roman Empire and that of its spread far beyond the Empire’s frontiers, its teachings had been dogmatically formulated in a Church which had in- herited the organizing genius of Rome. ‘This finished system, which claimed divine approval, was endowed with the sur- viving culture of a former civilization, and thus presented to the unsophisticated and unlettered peoples of Europe. It offered them supernatural aid, and a better knowledge and control of life than they had, or could obtain elsewhere. The manner of its presentation hastened its acceptance. Its missionary activities brought it numberless converts, whose loyalty to the Holy See, like that of generations to come, was assured and contented. Their’s was the attitude of felt ignorance before recognized wisdom; of obedient and affec- tionate children who worshipped the Church as the Mother of the State and of their individual and collective good. The social development of Europe was hastened by this imperial propagation of Christianity. For centuries the Northern as 17 Cf. Lord Acton: ‘‘ The History of Freedom,”’ p. 33, ff. 102 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE well as the Southern peoples were to be held in willing sub- mission to the constitution and forms of Medizvalism, which they had thus received. ‘They continued to revere the Roman source of Christian teachings, and to look with awe upon the sanctity and knowledge that encompassed them. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Feudalism was the corner stone of the State, the social system par excellence which maintained government, enacted legislation and administered justice. The only power capable of resist- ing its control was that of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and they collided when the progress of Feudalism in Teutonic States threatened the independence of the Church by sub- jecting her prelates to the secular princes. A word describing so remarkable a system is necessary at this point. The monarch was the sole land-owner; and dukes, counts, barons, knights, bishops or abbots took their title to the land, either directly or mediately from him. In return for their holdings they were pledged to render military service, and under cer- tain contingencies, monetary aid to the king as head of the State. His tenants had sub-tenants of their own, some of whom were freemen, but the majority bondsmen. Even the free cities of the Middle Ages, which were antagonistic to Feudalism, both in spirit and organization, were forced to compromise with it.® Like all social systems it is to be considered not only for its evil but for its good; for the difficulties it overcame, and the dangers it avoided. Its exactions were often softened by the introduction of Chivalry, which was grafted upon Feudalism by the Church. Although the ethic of Chivalry was in- trinsically militaristic it had its ameliorative side. Its influence has been exaggerated by romanticists who depict it as asking that flowers should always spring in its path to birth. It is to be understood as a beneficial, and for a time, a 18 Cf. © Foundations of Society ’’ by P. Vinogradoff in ‘‘ Fhe Cambridge Medizval History,’’ Vol. II. Chapter XX; and ‘“‘ Feudalism ’’ by P. Vinogra- doff in zd, Vol. III. Chapter XVIII. THE GROWTH AND PURPOSE OF THE STATE 103 vigorous attempt to apply some Christian precepts and typical masculine virtues to human conduct. It also brought into social relationships an ideal quality which still pervades them. Its precepts were no more universally obeyed than are those of the best kind today; but it rediscovered not a few gracious fellowships, and gave woman a moral status unknown to antiquity. Under its impulse, rough untutored warriors became urbane and gallant gentlemen who modified the turbulence that threatened the first feeble motions of nationalism. The story of Sir Lancelot idealizes the process. His geniality of soul, the shining qualities of his knighthood, the worshipful affection he bore for the advancement of right, and for the defense of his dearest one, are mirrored in the tale. Adventures in which other knights had found their undoing ended well for him, because of the love that shone high and clear over his quest. But for Chivalry, we probably should never have heard of Sir Lancelot, nor of the Beatrice of Dante, nor of the Laura of Petrarch, nor of Shakespeare’s Miranda, nor of Goethe’s Marguerite. Its adoration of the Virgin, although not equally helpful all round, was a religious source of its moral resolves; and its professed reverence for purity in woman was a protest against the pagan ideas which insisted on her static inferiority.” Between the years 1100 and 1500, the State gradually attained stability and power. Its vested interests and social efficiency increased apace. Religious and political progress was unhindered by the chaos that had ensued after the ruin of the Roman and Frankish Empires. It has been suggested that this was the constitutional period of English-speaking nations, and that the parliamentarians of the seventeenth century who reduced the royal prerogative, were reclaiming their former rights rather than asserting new ones. Some historians indorse the view that the Lancastrian dynasty 19Cf. G. G. Coulton: “ Five Centuries of Religion,’’ Vol. I, Chapters IX-XI on ‘‘ The Mother of God,” ‘‘ The Gospel of Mary,’ and ‘‘ Women and the Faith,” p. 138, ff. 104 CHRISTIANITY, AND THE STATE conceded precedents valuable to future democratic States. Others contend that these concessions have been over- estimated, and that Coke, Pym, Eliot, Hampden and their fellow patriots went beyond all Lancastrian precedents. We return from this digression to observe that for four hundred years, Europe enjoyed a comparative peace which the black magic of no Attila, Napoleon or Hohenzollern disturbed. For once in a millennium the dynasties, raised to power by statecraft or the sword, gave a respite to war-torn humanity. The political sciences outran those of armed violence, and consequent moral and religious advantages were gained during the late twelfth and the thirteenth cen- turies. The age of Aquinas, Roger Bacon, St. Francis, St. Louis, Giotto and Dante can be safely regarded as the most purely spiritual, most really constructive and most truly philosophical period of Medizvalism. Vv In every way it is borne in upon us that its society con- formed to no one type. The character and attainments of Englishmen, Germans, Frenchmen, Italians and other na- tions exhibited their usual diversities, which also differed from those of their Teutonic, Celtic, Gallican and Latin ancestors. Yet, as we have seen, they had some things in common, which have not been approved by all modernists. They are accused of a dry theology, of a useless metaphysic, and of monastic selfishness. But it is very doubtful if medieval progress was at any time paralyzed by two of the strongest and basest of human motives — greed and fear — as modern progress has been paralyzed by them. The prac- tices of the period, like those of our own, were never so good and seldom as bad as appearances indicated. When it drew near its end it gave birth in the great thirteenth century to Modernism. A phenomenal outbreak of religious devotion relieved the hearts made sick by hopes deferred. Behind its THE GROWTH AND PURPOSE OF THE STATE 105 vitalizing advance came the inventive fertility, imaginative wealth, and spiritualized ideas, upon which Frederic Harrison pours fervent praise. In statesmanship, he tells us, it can only be matched by comparing the age with that of Pitt and Burke, of Washington and Marshall. There was no discord in its development; kings, priests, prophets, poets, teachers, evangelists, artists and artisans were of one mind and pur- pose; and could knit together, according to one design, the symmetrical social fabric which was their chief ambition. Mr. Harrison’s statement that it cannot be called in any special sense the material, the devotional, the political or the poetical age, since it was equally and all of these combined, should perhaps be qualified. But doubtless its united belief and worship, its single code of manners, its uniform social discipline and education conferred upon the thirteenth century an honorable distinction far beyond that usually attributed to Medizvalism at any time. Those who deprecate the idea of solidarity in Church and State are not sustained by references to that age. It was blessed with unities that for a brief moment overcame men’s divisive tendencies. One Church, one sacred language, one accepted type of beauty, gave to the European peoples their current ideals of the good, the true and the esthetic. Albert and Aquinas had no peers in philosophic range till Descartes came. Roger Bacon was far more worthy of fame’s tribute than the Chancellor who bore his surname. These thinkers were not afraid of life. They could visualize its meanings and codrdinate its knowledge in some subjective systems which did not die till their work was done. The Universities, headed by Paris, were the centers of an eager culture, and the “‘schools”’ of the nations gave full stature to the Universi- ties..° Besides Paris, there were those of Oxford, Orleans, Toulouse, Montpelier, Cordova, Seville, Toledo and Bologna. Great cathedrals arose which still reveal to us more religion, 20 Cf. Hastings Rashdall: ‘“‘ The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages.”’ 106 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE more humanity, more individual and collective aspiration than the reading of many books about the century.”! Macau- lay, in spite of his utilitarian outlook, waxes eloquent, even for him, over its achievements. He likens them to mountain fastnesses out of which the largest rivers flow to fertilize the plains below. Its annals, he tells us, may seem sterile and obscure to the unobservant, yet in them are contained the secrets of present freedom and democracy. ‘Then and there, Christian Europe began to exhibit those saving merits which it has since in part retained, and which enabled it to colonize America and transmit civilizing forces to Asiatic and African lands. The political doctrines of the English State, which have preserved their identity through all successive changes, were for the first time clearly ascertained and stated. ‘Then first appeared with distinctness that Constitution of which all the other free Constitutions in the world are copies, and which, in spite of some defects, deserves to be regarded as the best under which any great society has ever yet existed dur- ing many ages. Then it was that the House of Commons, the archetype of all the representative assemblies which now meet, either in the Old or in the New World, held its first sittings. Then it was that the common law rose to the dig- nity of a science, and rapidly became a not unworthy rival of the imperial jurisprudence. ... Then it was that the most ancient colleges which still exist at both the great nation’s seats of learning were founded. Then was formed that language, less musical, indeed, than the languages of the south, but in force, in richness, in aptitude for all the highest purposes of the poet, the philosopher, and the orator, in- ferior to the tongue of Greece alone. Then, too, appeared the first dawn of that noble literature, the most splendid and the most durable of the many glories of England.” Not only in Britain, but also in the principal countries of 21 Cf. Frederic Harrison: ‘‘A Survey of the Thirteenth Century,” in “The Meaning of History,” p. 145, ff. Also James J. Walsh: ‘‘ The Thir- teenth: Greatest of Centuries,’’ pp. 1-17. 22“ History of England,’’ Everyman’s Library Edition. Vol. I. p. 21. THE GROWTH AND PURPOSE OF THE STATE 107 Europe the idea that culture and not race is the foundation of a second Statehood was advocated by scholars and teach- ers. It was a time of fusion, when the last traces of conquest temporarily disappeared beneath the rising tides of human consciousness. Even its sculptures are separated from those of the twelfth century by a wider gap than any that divides the two periods in law or in language. At the root of the matter, as touching law and constitution, those changes were made at that time which left future ages little to do but improve in their details. The political and social institutions of England, France and Germany gradually assumed those forms that characterize European and American nations today. The last six hundred years of their story were here marked off from the six hundred years that had gone before. No generalizations, however broad, can include the totality of world forces that operated in the thirteenth century. Nor are we to suppose that it was a solely creative period. Dur- ing its years the Eastern Empire fell beneath the arms of the Frank, and the Eastern Caliphate before the arms of the Mogul. The Western Empire suffered defeat by the Papacy, and the soldiers of the Cross were driven from the Holy Land. Nevertheless, whatever happened in “this age of wonder” or afterwards —- when wave after wave of change pounded over Europe, while Venice became the mistress of the Eastern seas and Florence stood out as the new type of democratic freedom, when the nominal kingship of the lords of Laon and Paris expanded into the broad realm of Philip Augustus and Philip the Fair— the temporal and spiritual gains of the thirteenth century enumerated here remained to its honor and for the lasting good of humanity.” Those who enter the Medieval State through the gateway of Chaucer’s joyous poetry or of Gothic architecture, may find it difficult to reconcile their gladness, grace and power with the physical and moral wretchedness of the European peasants and artisans. The uprisings of the Jacquerie in 23 Cf. E. A. Freeman: ‘‘ The Norman Conquest,” Vol. V. p. 439. 108 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE France and of the rebels of England’s south-eastern shires, apparently confute the eulogies the historians quoted be- stowed upon Medievalism. The explanation is that the re- vival of life and progress of the thirteenth century was fol- lowed in the fourteenth by an orgy of feudal misrule and violence. The Hundred Years War between France and England, the dismemberment of France, the Wars of the Roses, the distractions of Spain and the decadence of the Empire destroyed many of the fairest prospects of Europe. Until monarchs like Louis XI, Ferdinand V, Charles V, and the English Tudors suppressed Feudalism, it terrorized the State and kept the middle classes in subjection. Like the expiring Imperialism of our day, it took a heavy toll before it finally disappeared.?* VI The love of liberty as part of the universal good, which even the poorest serf felt, and the hate of liberty as a detestable innovation which animated his oppressors, were then as now, polar instincts in Church and State. For princes and prelates who were intent on their unity, and on that preserva- tion of loyalty to both which, as they conceived, determined the welfare of men and women in this world and the next, obedience was the first lesson of social progress. For those who were forced to obey, freedom was the first condition of any progress. Yet obedience was well worth learning, even though it required ages to make it an instinctive motor reac- tion. By the steady pressure of its authority the Medieval Church-State modified the very brain tissues of Christendom, inculcating habits of thought and psychic qualities which will endure as long as European and American civilization lasts. But the revolts of the longsuffering populace against the relentless discipline betokened its approaching end. *4 Cf. F. Melian Stawell and F. S. Marvin: ‘‘ The Making of the Western Mind,”’ Chapters XVII to XX, THE GROWTH AND PURPOSE OF THE STATE 109 Further, the changing geographical situation, and its re- sultant economic conditions, were inexorably stronger than the once all-powerful union of Papacy and Empire. Natural rights overturned monarchical, ecclesiastical and feudal supremacy. The reaction against unlicensed power began in the reign of Henry the Third of England, reached its high water mark in the fourteenth century, and did not recede until it had increased the independence of nations, and made wide openings for their existence as separate States. Not only the Jacquerie of France and the peasants who followed Wat Tyler to Smithfield, London, but the Albigenses of Languedoc and the Hussites of Bohemia were restive under a conservatism which had been too dearly purchased to be wisely catholic. ‘‘Poor men,” cried Wyclif, “have naked sides and dead walls have great plenty of waste gold”: a bitter cry indeed, and one into which, as Principal Workman comments, ‘‘half the Reformer’s social writings could be compressed.” In 1381 it looked as though the ardent hopes of the thir- teenth century had been extinguished in blood and fire. England and France were under the spell of militarism. Their governments were weakened by anarchy from below and by despotism from above. Religion sank into a decline which the break down of the monastic orders aggravated. Yet public order survived, and feudal princes and lords were taught to beware of their hitherto despised underlings. After the visitations of the Black Death, agrarian problems multiplied, and the rural populations showed an unwonted self-assertion. Serfdom began to die by general consent. Barons moved more cautiously among their dwindling pre- rogatives and claims, because they recalled the possibilities for reprisal that slumbered in the proletariat. The consti- tutional changes already discussed brought into the English State the Parliament, which was recruited from county families that had long been active in local affairs. The embarrassments of the Crown were the opportunities of 110 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE more liberal minded citizens. They remembered as English- men the prestige of the Saxon Witenagemot, and of the great Charter which had been wrung from King John, the abjest and least scrupulous of the Norman princes. Before the Parliament, of which they were the original members, had been in existence two hundred years as an institution, it had asserted its authority in a memorable manner. In spite of its then extremely limited representation, it deposed four monarchs, and conferred a legal title upon three new dynas- ties. Upon the Continent the quarrels of Pontiffs and Emperors which persisted intermittently for four centuries, resulted in the humiliation of both antagonists. Papalists and Imperialists strove for absolute authority only to invalidate it. Both were at last compelled to appeal to the peoples oi Kurope as the final court for its assignment, and they began to believe it would be a good thing to reserve it for them- selves. In the distresses of spiritual and temporal overlords who had brooked no rival, the civil and religious liberties of modern States were born. Guelfs who fought for the Papacy and Ghibellines who fought for the Empire, alike acknowl- edged a third estate destined to eclipse these ancient sov- ereignties. Once the appeal was taken, it released a flood of elucidations and propositions. ‘The large hearted giant of Scholasticism, St. Thomas Aquinas, showed with his accus- tomed penetration that laws derive their sanction from the nation, and are not binding without its consent. Marsiglio of Padua, whom we shall meet again as by far the ablest writer and apologist for the Imperialists, agreed in substance with the declaration of St. Thomas. Luther’s dramatic entry at the Diet of Worms in 1520, did not avert his condemnation by Charles the Fifth. But the Emperor’s edict was a temporizing measure of political exigencies which he could not overcome. Nor should it be forgotten that the Diet over which he presided also indicted the Holy See for its notorious evils. Since the Reformation, THE GROWTH AND PURPOSE OF THE STATE 111 the State has repeatedly deposed the Church in Catholic as well as in Protestant countries. Various reasons were given for her deposition, but the essence of all was that she tres- passed upon an ever growing State authority essential to nationalism. So the building of the modern State became the task of patriots and the goal of history. Even the doc- trine of the ‘Divine Right” of monarchy was little more than an impersonalization of State supremacy against the claim of international ecclesiasticism to rule the world. In England, France and Germany it wrought good as well as evil. Americans should deal gently with it, since the colonial settlements out of which their Republic originated, would have been humanly impossible had not the island kingdom of the Tudors set up housekeeping for itself. Always iso- lated, independent, and stubborn when aroused, England had never been as docile as Continental Catholicism desired, nor felt the need of Continental life for a federal rule. One of Henry the Eighth’s subservient parliaments proclaimed that monarch Head of the Church, not only to satisfy his degraded lusts, but also to insure the integrity of the State. He deserves no consideration, and his relation with Angli- canism has been a historic reproach that was widely mis- understood then as it is now. Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher, who denied the royal supremacy, which numerous other English churchmen only accepted under duress, went to the scaffold for their convictions. But the Crown and the Nation which the Crown represented were at last free to follow their own course. In France the legal authorities increased the absolutism of kingship in Church and State, establishing the Concordat of 1516 as their instrument for that purpose. Under the Houses of the Valois and the Bour- bons the Gallicanism of royalty supplanted that of the parliaments and the universities, practically placing the Church at the disposal of the monarchy. The framework of the parliamentary system of Spain which links together the fortunes of Church and State, is now the oldest in Europe: 112 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE In Germany and Geneva, Lutheranism and Calvinism based their theory of the State upon a natural rather than a political analogy, to which further reference will be made. All rule being derived from God, the State was the medium of the Church, and the Church the source of those ideals that are vital to the State. While civil in form, the laws of nations were sacred in origin. Protestantism gained princely ad- herents because their rights and claims throve upon that diminution of ecclesiastical prerogatives, which was hastened by the secularization of the Pontificate. In this rapid review it should be noted that the constitu- tional history of England, which directly affects that of all other English-speaking peoples, has been revised and cor- rected during the last fifty years. The idea of the Victorian historians that nearly everything equitable in political institutions is traceable to the primitive democracy of Teu- tonic ancestors, has been very much modified. The Barons at Runnymede and the Parliament convened by Simon de Montfort, were not endeavoring to regain the lost liberties which England owed to Hengist and Horsa. They were endeavoring to transform the absolutism of monarchy into a limited rule. This they succeeded in doing, and though the constitutionalism of the fourteenth and following centuries was at first feeble, and at after intervals almost non-existent, it paved the way for the Puritan Revolution which ended the Tudor type of Crown governance. From the accession of the Stuarts onward, the struggle between the royal preroga- tives and those of Parliament was compromised by the arrangement which gave the Crown the forms of power but reserved its realities for the Parliament. Some American conceptions of popular sovereignty were evolved out of the Puritan Revolution, others were obtained from the contact of the Pilgrims with Continental Protestan- tism in Holland. The French Encyclopedists played their part in the process, giving to Jefferson and the patriots who agreed with him not a few basic ideas of democracy. But THE GROWTH AND PURPOSE OF THE STATE 113 the inescapable atmosphere and traditions of a thousand years of Anglo-Saxon life and law are discernible in the leading ideas of our constitutionalists, especially of Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, Madison and Marshall. Other streams of thought and influence flowed into the life of this Repub- lic, and not all have been of equal purity.2> Vapid talkers, men of mere words, wind-bags, have too large a vogue Just now. The hopes placed upon them are destined to be dis- appointed. Their interpretations of the voice of the people makes it resemble the bleating of the sheep. The nation which has helped to lead the way of the world’s progress has come to the margin where other powerful States preceded her. Some of these, like Spain, chose wrongly and decreased; others, like Britain, chose wisely and increased. Upon America’s choice, and that of kindred peoples, depend, so far as one can foresee, the character and fortunes of the future State. ‘‘When half gods go the gods arrive,’ and we ean rest firmly in the faith that our well-intentioned citizens shall not want for a leadership worthy of the mission of this Republic. 26 Cf. Nicholas Murray Butler: ‘‘Building the American Nation.”’ At ene hein Mae Ae ae eee f Set fe PLAY, , ‘ A i / vs f) r fe SOY WEY Sel j Mo) J : tia Sener } ‘ ' i AE te Sac neta te Ba ‘ Tae ; i MAS | POSE 0 ae ; 1 oA lp } \ A nt . Abe 45 : Wi" 3% wIAY Le i ie | " ‘ NY a a Ray as a >? Ay ie { mkt ir Ate e ry Pa e 4 FOURTH LECTURE THE MODERN STATE Let us now praise famous men, And our fathers that begat us. The Lord manifested in them great glory, Even his mighty power from the beginning. Such as did bear rule in their kingdoms, And were men renowned for their power, Giving counsel by their understanding, Such as have brought tidings in prophecies: Leaders of the people by their counsels, And by their understanding men of learning for the people; Wise were their words in their instruction: Such as sought out musical tunes, And set forth verses in writing: Rich men furnished with ability, Living peaceably in their habitations: All these were honored in their generations, And were a glory in their days. Their seed shall remain for ever, And their glory shall not be blotted out. Their bodies were buried in peace, And their name liveth to all generations. Peoples will declare their wisdom, And the congregation telleth out their praise. Kcclesiasticus XLIV. 1 ff. FOURTH LECTURE THE MODERN STATE The Renaissance and the Reformation produced radical results in every walk of life — Erasmus and the Humanists need to be impartially ap- praised — The leaders of the sixteenth century were men of extraor- dinary caliber, peculiarly fitted for their tasks in that period of religious, social and political transition — Luther and Calvin — Lutheranism and Calvinism compared — The spacious days of Queen Elizabeth — The Puritan and Pilgrim testimony and the settlements in the New World — The misrule of George III, the American Revolution and Clive’s conquest of India — The uprising of European democracy, the industrial revolution and the rise of the modern State. The Reformation period, like the Victorian, was so crowded with major events and personalities, that the numerous volumes written upon it have ill-sufficed to do it justice. The ceaseless revolution of the world was then attended by a political and religious upheaval, the results of which still agitate our time. Many cherished habits of Medizevalism disappeared in the sixteenth century, while the phenomenal developments of thought and action which succeeded them, ushered in the Modern State and with it, scientific progress. Confined as we are to generalizations, it should at once be said that the secession of European States from Papal con- trol, was the last and most notable phase in the gradual decline of the majestic Church of the Middle Ages. Inherent causes would probably have brought about a disruption, even without leaders. The lessening empire of the Church continued after the .Reformation, not only in Protestant countries, but also in Catholic Austria, Spain, France and Italy. With the one exception of John Calvin, the reformers who rejected Rome’s spiritual jurisdiction were not unusually daring innovators in thought or action. We do not associate 117 118 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE with them the intellectual scope and depth of philosophers like Descartes and Spinoza, nor attribute to them the intrepid courage of the founders of the Dutch Republic. They re- mained orthordox in the Faith, and some among them modified their zeal for individual freedom when other Prot- estants whom they opposed, applied its principles for them- selves. Neither the creators nor the allies of the New Learning which preceded the Reformation, have always received the sympathetic treatment they deserved for their efforts to maintain an unbroken social organization. Firmly per- suaded as they were that nothing which had ever interested the human mind could wholly lose its vitality, they looked long, meditated deeply and acted cautiously before consent- ing to changes.! In the ferment of a revolutionary time when parties and interests were hostile to one another, and ancient institutions and opinions were fiercely attacked or obstinately defended, the quiet reasonableness and equable flow of Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) and his disciples were sure to be heavily discounted. Yet among these were judicious and dispassionate men whose neutrality was better fitted than heated partisanship to rightly determine the issues of the age. They felt that not a few ambitious schemes for the removal of notorious evils contained, in their excess, the possibility of even worse evils. At once reactionary and reformative, conservative and iconoclastic, fervid haters of superstition and fervid lovers of the verities it polluted, the Renaissance scholars could not outride the storm they had helped to arouse. ‘Theosophists tell us that Atlantis and Lemuria perished, because the immense magical forces which their inhabitants called up escaped their control. The Renaissance could not be thus destroyed. It “liberated the human intelligence and set men free to dwell in a world of beauty and of humane studies.”’ The Reformation which Cf. Walter Pater: ‘‘ The Renaissance,’ p. 37; also, ‘‘ The Cambridge Modern History,” Vol. I. Chapters XVI to XIX. THE MODERN STATE 119 followed it, ‘liberated the human conscience and set men free to act according to their own inward promptings and convictions.” * Each of the two processes of liberation, rightly viewed, assisted and supplemented the other. But the less fastidious Luther and the more logical Calvin outdid the sons of the Renaissance in the making of the modern State. Nevertheless, to say that the latter individuals were without wide influence; to deny their great value to society; to assert as some do that they were not inspired by laudable motives, is mere critical sansculottism. Erasmus and his fellow Humanists were worthy of their classic lineage as scholars and thinkers. They rendered permanent service to their own and after times; and may be even more beneficial in the eirenic days to come. With nearly every one of their translations and books some error was banished to the shades, some baseless claim muttered its anathema and fled. They replenished in many realms men’s scanty stores of truth, and evinced the merits of less biased minds in a whirl of reckless propaganda. We are drawn to them principally through Erasmus, especially during his visits to Holland and to England, and his residence in Basel. To him gathered the wits, scholars, teachers and university celebrities of Europe; some already famous, others candidates for fame.? His “Encomium Morie,” “Adagia” and ‘Col- loquia Familiaria,”’ had charmed every college and court with their amusing but telling allusions to grave subjects, their genial wisdom and piercing yet painless satire. Goethe insists that the improvement of the Church should have been left to men like Erasmus. Perhaps so, but how was he to get ? A. E. Zimmern: ‘‘ Personality in National Progress,’”’ in ‘*‘ The Coming Renaissance,’’ Essays edited by Sir James Marchant, p. 225. 3 Cf. Henry Osborn Taylor: ‘‘ Thought and Expression in the Sixteenth Century,’’ Vol. I. Bk. I, ‘‘ The Humanism of Italy,’”’ Bk. II, ‘‘ Erasmus and Luther.’’ Also ‘‘ Humanists,’”’ by Hugh Watt in ‘‘ Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics,’’ Vol. VI. p. 158, ff; E. M. Hulme: ‘‘ The Renaisance and Ref- ormation,’’ ch. XI, ‘‘ Humanism and Heresy’; L. Elliott Binns: ‘‘ Erasmus the Reformer, A Study in Restatement ”’; Preserved Smith: “‘ Erasmus, a Study of his Life, Ideals and Place in History.”’ 120 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE the power to which he was not born? The forces behind the impending revolution were too swift for his literary leisure. “‘While the grass grows, the steed starves.”’ His interests were divided; he had friends in every party; Clement VII made him a donation; the nuns of Cologne tempted his jaded appetite with sweetmeats; Archbishop Warham pre- sented him with the living of Aldington; and Bishop Fisher gave him a professorship at Cambridge. The favorite scholar of Europe, the brilliant but magnanimous foe of dying Medizvalism, he refused to take a stand like that of Sir Thomas More, with whom he had lodged, conversed and prayed at his suburban home in Chelsea. He was not built for a fray which meant the axe and the flame; nor could he any more consent to the overthrow of the Papacy than he could be silent about its sins. He hesitated to identify him- self with either faction, and admitted his hesitancy. ‘I seek truth,” he said, “‘and find it at times in Catholic proposi- tions, and at times in those of the Protestants.” It is not surprising that Protestants denounced him as a defaulter on the questions he had agitated, or that Catholics deplored him as a satirical rationalist whose learned jestings perverted faith and discipline. Nevertheless, the great fight for the intellectualism which saves faith from superstition, was fought and won before his death. Without men of his make up, though not of his quality, the protests of Luther and Calvin would have fallen short of their mark. The source of the humanities which he expounded was never apart from religion; always of its very essence. The loyal bond of “good letters” united him to the choicest spirits of the age. He was more than a consummate scholar, more than the friend and gossip of every select circle in Europe, more than the educator of a continent, more than a chastened me- digevalist; he was the high minded, sincere Christian who could not abide the beggarly traditions that had profaned the reasonableness of the New Testament Faith. His con- tribution to that Faith through his scholarship is mentioned THE MODERN STATE 121 later in these pages. He aided by its means the saner developments of Christianity in a time of rabid contro- versies. Nor were his contributions to politics less conspicuous. His conception of the ideal ruler when compared with ‘‘The Prince” of Machiavelli, reveals the mettle of the man, and also the gulf between the Latin and the Teutonic Renais- sance. The intrigues and assassinations recommended in cold blood by the Florentine as statecraft, had no place in the mind of Erasmus. He advocated a constitutional monarchy as infinitely better than absolutism, declaring that kings as the servants of their people should make the general welfare their chief concern. Taxes and imposts, he urged, should be as light as possible, and levied on luxuries instead of neces- sities. No war should be undertaken without good and sufficient reasons which commended themselves to wise and patriotic citizens. We have still to wait for a fuller realiza- tion of the excellent principles which Erasmus advanced under the most difficult circumstances, and which remain to his praise as one of the founders of an adequate domestic and international science of politics. His temper and message are admirably expressed in the following poem: ‘“When he protested, not too solemnly, That for a world’s achieving maintenance The crust of overdone divinity Lacked aliment, they called it recreance; And when he chose through his own glass to scan Sick Europe, and reduced, unyieldingly, The monk within the cassock to the man Within the monk, they called it heresy. And when he made so perilously bold As to be scattered forth in black and white, Good fathers looked askance at him and rolled Their inward eyes in anguish and affright; There were some of them did shake at what was told, And they shook best who knew that he was right.” 4 4Edwin Arlington Robinson: ‘‘ Collected Poems,’’ p. 193. 122 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE After Luther’s first brave stand against the Papacy, he economized his later reflections for practical or political ends, and by so doing became one of the chief personal sources of the complex Protestantism which includes within itself many various tendencies. These tendencies exist together regard- less of consistency. We are instinctively aware of them in those older factors of Church and State which prevail in contemporary society. It is in its struggle with those factors that what we call the modern world becomes conscious of its differences from the world of antiquity. Observe, in passing, a few of the differences as evidences both of the similarity and dissimilarity existing between those two worlds. It is a recognized axiom of democratic States that the civil and ecclesiastical powers shall exist separately. The State no longer entreats the spiritual sanction of the Church. Yet its theory that religion is the living source of civic life and duty is a tribute to the fact that part of the past always survives in the present. The supremacy of the State is no longer re- garded as denoting a collection of more or less unimpeachable qualities, but as an entity consisting of the highest possible conceptions of political wisdom and of the general welfare. Reason and justice limit that supremacy, and when they are violated it is jeopardized. In the absolutism of ancient States natural rights were unknown, and what liberty men had was identified with their citizenship. The Greeks could not conceive of a distinction between natural and civic rights; hence they knew nothing of private as contrasted with public law. The Romans separated these rights and laws in prin- ciple, but ignored them in practice. Man, as man, is now sacrosanct to a high degree; and his claim to fair treatment by the State makes humanity the starting point of its laws. These pregnant changes have ennobled human existence on every side. Its higher vocations flourish without any par- ticular concern for political or ecclesiastical imbroglios. Men of letters, artists, scientists, investigators, social reform- ers and intellectual radicals or conservatives pursue the THE MODERN STATE 123 tenor of their way, as Erasmus formerly but vainly wished them to do, immune to the tumult of political factions. As I have said, the pivotal fact of the Reformation, not wholly novel yet quite decisive, was the disengagement of the modern State from the federalizing internationalism of the Papacy.’ This is the verity of verities behind the expan- sion and freedom of life which is being discussed: the one great gain that must be stressed in any account of the modern State. A more enlightened attitude toward all classes of society signifies its comprehensive character. Nor can they be rightly reckoned lesser men who, although sometimes lacking gentleness, moderation and sobriety, were too con- stant in their love for reality to consent to the peace of the desert; to the negative peace which spells evasion, stagnation and death. The sixteenth century produced such characters beyond the ordinary, and it was their lot to abolish the last form of the ancient State in dissolving the Medieval State. The reconstruction of the modern State was necessarily left unfinished by them and is still in progress. Within a few years after the burning by Luther of the ““godless books of the papal decrees,”’ the provinces of North- ern Germany, Scandinavia, England, Scotland, the Dutch Netherlands and portions of Switzerland had each seceded from the Papal overlordship. Poland’s defection lasted for several years, after which she was restored to Rome by the enterprise of the Jesuits. The sovereignty of the Holy See was assailed in the hereditary provinces of the Hapsburgs; but the reigning dynasty and the landed aristocracy defeated the attack, and these provinces retained their fealty to Rome. Hungary’s characteristic independence kept the Genevan theology alive to divide the nation. In Italy and Spain the loyalty of their monarchs to the Papacy was assured from the first, and they quickly extinguished spasmodic efforts to end its rule. Hereafter, in Protestant States, the personnel, the revenues, the ritual, the administration, and even the creeds 5 Cf. Preserved Smith: ‘‘ The Age of the Reformation,” p. 743, ff. 124 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE of the Church were subordinated to the Civil Power, with which no super-State, ecclesiastical or imperial, was allowed to interfere. In this epoch-making transfer lies not only the gain of civil and religious liberty, but also the loss of Christian catholicity. The complete separation of European and American society into temporal and spiritual associations followed; and as a further sequence their constant bickerings and wars. ims The remoter causes of this transition period carry us back to the Wars of the Roses in England, to the repeated plagues _ of the Black Death in Europe, and to the decay of mon- asticism throughout Christendom. Yet one name must be mentioned at some length, since it suggests all that was at once most formidable and victorious in Protestantism as the parent of the modern State. Far exceeding the names of such monarchs as Charles VIII and Louis XII of France, Fer- dinand and Isabella of Spain, or Alexander VI, Julius II and Leo X in the Roman Pontificate, is the great name of John Calvin. Upon this solitary Frenchman of Picardy rested the gigantic burdens of intellectual Protestantism and of devel- oping nationalism. In a controversy that drove even sensible men to the last extremity, he had to uphold and forward the inspiring but more emotional onset of Luther. Throughout the negotiations and battlings which resulted in the genesis of the modern State, one perceives the courage, the strategy, the psychic force of the Genevan giant. Like Napoleon, he seemed to be, not aman, but a system. Yet he touched the hearts and captured the minds of the sternest, strongest race of colonizers and conquerors in the modern age, and shaped in them the one eee cana tyrannic thought that made All other thoughts its slave.” Nor could he have been the oracle of princes and their minis- ters, had not his endowments furnished a further proof of the THE MODERN STATE 125 doctrine that the extraordinary individual is the solution of problems otherwise insoluble. The civilization preceding that of the sixteenth century was based on a belief in a Divine Revelation, for which the Church was both the embodiment and the organ of its discipline. Troeltsch observes that nothing can overcome the influence of such 2 a belief when it is a realand Wnquestioned social factor. Implicitly to accept the teaching that the Divine Will is everywhere present and exactly defined, and that it has an infallible institution as its authorized agent, is to sever the Gordian knot at a single stroke. This entrance into human life of the laws, forces and aims of Deity deter- mines everything. Supreme. over all is the Lex Dez, composed of the Lex Moysi, the Lex Christi, the-Lex Ecclesie; and- including within its scope and meaning the Ler Nature. At their source these laws are an eternal unity, and it is only in sinful humanity that they diverge. Under the guidance of the Church their equivalence is to be restored, though conditioned by the continuance of original sin. The faultless logic and careful elaboration of this dogma were among the last efforts of Christian antiquity. In_theory_it lifted the authority of the Church to superlative heights, and invested it with an invulnerable defense in the common obedience to the State.°_ Calvin’s thorough intimacy with the theory was equalled by his belief that it could be demolished; and he marshalled his energies for that sole purpose. If the initial opposition to the Medizval Church came from a single monk in one of the smaller provinces of the Empire, the campaign which vanquished it in the northwestern States of Europe, was waged by one imperial mind from the city of Geneva. Calvin could hardly have dreamed of the triumph which awaited him as a young man of twenty-four, when he read an apology for evangelical views which so enraged the doctors of the Sorbonne that he had to flee from Paris. His “Insti- tutes of the Christian Religion,” the first text book of Prot- 6 Cf. Ernst Troeltsch: ‘‘ Protestantism and Progress,’ p. 9, ff. 126 CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE estant theology, was published in 1536, and translated by the author into French in 1541. The final edition which ap- peared in 1559, was five times as large as the first issue. In the year 1541, however, he had already relinquished the hope of literary leisure, and during September of the same year, established his home in Geneva, where he spent the remaining twenty-three years of his laborious life. There he became the personal focus of otherwise widely separated civil and religious interests. Frem~his.-brain_sprang the germinal ideas that were afterward developed in the political character of the leading nations of the West. His emissaries went from Geneva into England, Scotland, the Netherlands and across the border into France. The conceptual strength of his adamantine creed, as they taught it, was expressed _in es ce oe the Augustinian doctrine of Predestination, which supplied the answerof original Protestantism to the vital question: How can a soul be assured of its acceptance of God? It does not fall to me to discuss in its particular articles the theology of Calvin, or that of Luther and Zwingli, to all three of whom Augustinian Predestination, as they adopted it, was equally original and equally necessary. But Calvin went beyond the other two Reformers in making it the life blood of his religious thinking. He drew upon its assurance of the eternal salvation of the elect, for their support in his conflict with the Roman hierarchy and its powerful constituencies. Lutheranism, on the other hand, shrank from the relentless- ness of Calvin’s reasonings, and rebounded to those ideals of universal wisdom and love which pa his main doctrine. One’s sympathies are strongly engaged with the more humane teachings of German theology about this issue. It seems an inexplicable mystery of the history of Christian thought that the revival of Augustinianism in Calvin’s theory ‘of Predestination, should have overthrown medieval eccle- slasticism. The mystery is deepened for those who pay little regard to the work of theology in the making of States, THE MODERN STATE 127 by the fact-that_it was with the utmost reluctance the laity assumed an antagonistic attitude toward the old régime. Had not its scandals been too gross, its-oppressions-too un- — bearable, probably neither Luther nor even Calvin could have overthrown it.