BV 4501 .C6 
 
 
 
 
 Cobb, William 
 
 Henry, 
 
 1846- 
 
 1923. 
 
 
 
 
 The meaning 
 
 of Christian 
 
 iin 4 +" V 
 
 
 
 1 
 
THE 
 
 MEANING OF 
 
 CHRISTIAN UNITY 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM H. COBB 
 
 There's a wideness in God's mercy 
 Like the wideness of the sea. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY 
 
 PUBLISHERS 
 
Copyright, 1915 
 By THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY 
 
PREFACE 
 
 A time when half the Christian world is in 
 discord that threatens destruction is a good 
 time to search earnestly for the foundations of 
 concord. Other foundation can no man lay 
 than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. 
 
 I purpose to ask, and to try to answer, two 
 questions about Christian Unity; what, and 
 how. The method of the book is not that of 
 formal logic, but that of induction, which 
 gathers the facts as it proceeds. The results, 
 in briefest compass, are given here at the out- 
 set, and the reader who takes no interest in 
 such a treatment may have the satisfaction of 
 laying down the book with the preface. 
 
 Christian unity is the life of God in the 
 lives of all his children. 
 
 The way to attain it is by the diligent use 
 
 of the means of grace. 
 
 William H. Cobb. 
 
 Boston, April 9, 1915. 
 iii 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Since God is the Father of all men, all men 
 are brothers, even though they know it not, 
 and even though they know him not. Since 
 God is love, we ought also to love one another, 
 and thus become worthy children of our 
 Father. These are Christian truths, and the 
 ideal they set before us is Christian unity, a 
 conception as much broader than what is com- 
 monly called Church unity as the Lord's 
 prayer is more catholic than the prayer of the 
 Pharisee in the temple. We seek in vain for 
 the key to Christian unity until we realize the 
 relation of God to man and that of man to his 
 brother man. 
 
 A leading obstacle to Christian unity is the 
 popular habit of apprehending God as a great 
 man up in the heavens, instead of as the Great 
 Spirit working everywhere. The former no- 
 tion gives birth to unconscious prejudices, as 
 
vi Introduction 
 
 delicate, but yet as effective, as the cords that 
 imprisoned Gulliver among the Lilliputians. 
 That sublime song in the opening chapter of 
 the Bible: 
 
 So God created man in his own image, 
 In the image of God created he him, 
 
 is not to be reversed and belittled by man's 
 attempt to create God in his image. But this 
 is the inevitable result of limiting the Infinite 
 and localizing the Omnipresent. The South 
 Sea Islander invests a senseless fetish w^ith his 
 ow^n passions ; the Mohammedan projects into 
 the sky the Fate which makes or mars him; 
 the Jew, called to be an apostle of Divine 
 liberty to all mankind, has too often narrowed 
 his mission from inclusion to exclusion, and 
 shaped his Creator accordingly; and even so, 
 Judaism in the Christian Church beholds in 
 its God the lineaments of Cephas or Apollos. 
 Putting asunder what God hath joined to- 
 gether, it refuses to believe in a universal 
 brotherhood to match a universal fatherhood. 
 Sectarian lines are like the radii of a circle, 
 and these are intersected by a smaller concen- 
 
Introduction vii 
 
 trie circle.^ For at the present moment, every 
 so-called denomination of Christians is prac- 
 tically two denominations ; each division of the 
 army of the Lord divides again into two parts, 
 dominated respectively by spirit and form. 
 Within the outer circle of Christendom lies an 
 inner circle, the company of those, however 
 the sectors are named, who face the centre, 
 looking to Christ for their orders ; the rest face 
 one another and perpetuate ''our unhappy di- 
 visions." The hopeful feature is that in these 
 latest generations the smaller circle is rapidly 
 growing larger and its radii are growing 
 fainter; so that those fragments of the body of 
 Christ that give prominence to form are far 
 less influential than was the case a century ago. 
 And yet they belong to the body; the centri- 
 petal tendency is the stronger even in them. 
 Indeed, there is some force in the contention, 
 which we shall have to meet, that all Chris- 
 tians agree in certain essential forms as well as 
 in an essential spirit. Earnest efforts are be- 
 
 1 The coincidence with the diagram on p. 219 of Bishop 
 William M. Brown's Level Plan of Church Union is purely 
 accidental. 
 
viii Introduction 
 
 ing put forth to secure a general expression of 
 concord in a few doctrines of the historic 
 creed and in the two main historic sacraments. 
 But the question arises, Where then shall we 
 find room for such a saint as John Woolman, 
 for instance, and for the Quakers as a whole? 
 The writer neither belongs to that fellowship 
 nor shares its peculiar views; but as every 
 friend of Christ is a Christian, and is known 
 by his fruits, no one can deny the Christianity 
 of the Friends. We could better afford to 
 lose all the theology of the Schoolmen than 
 the Quaker poet's hymns : 
 
 "Immortal Love, forever full." 
 *'Dear Lord and Father of mankind." 
 *'0 Love ! O Light ! our faith and sight 
 Thy presence maketh one." 
 
 It might be replied that these Friends as well 
 as other Christians must be educated into ac- 
 ceptance of those essential forms which belong 
 to the true ideal of Christian unity; but the 
 following treatise ventures to deny the major 
 premise of that argument. It attempts to 
 show that there are no such essential forms; 
 
Introduction ix 
 
 that Christian unity is independent of all 
 forms, and lies below them like primitive rock 
 below the later deposits. It would be wrong 
 to assume at the outset the point to be proved ; 
 this Introduction asks only for an open mind, 
 in view of the importance of the main thought 
 of the book, provided It can be established. 
 
 Turning away now, in appearance only, 
 from the theme in hand, we do well to ignore 
 for the moment the distinction between sacred 
 and secular, and to fix our thought upon the 
 vast complexity of the world in which we have 
 our being. It is customary to write Nature 
 with a capital N, and to designate it by a fem- 
 inine pronoun ; but Christians do not really be- 
 lieve in such a mythological goddess. It is 
 Our Father who 
 
 Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze, 
 Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees. 
 
 The one hundred and fourth Psalm sums 
 up a miscellaneous catalog embracing (among 
 other objects) rocks and waters, herbs and 
 grass, birds and conies, lions and men, — with 
 the exclamation, ^'Jehovah, how manifold are 
 
Introduction 
 
 Thy works!" Everything except sin is His 
 work; this much, at least, is true in the theory 
 of evolution, that the manifoldness of God is 
 expressed in a constant progress of creation 
 from simplicity to variety. The science of 
 man, like the science of things, discloses the 
 same law. It would be futile to expect hu- 
 manity ever to return to simple savagery ; mod- 
 ern life, the life of the family, of society, of 
 business, of art, of literature, of science, of 
 politics, of religion, is far too rich and full to 
 be surrendered. The one God manifests him- 
 self in these and other ways, every one of them 
 belonging to the Kingdom of God, and this 
 plain fact brings us back at once to our sub- 
 ject. To illustrate it from the field of poli- 
 tics; President Wilson has been attempting 
 to administer the government of the United 
 States on Christian principles. One need not 
 accept his political theories while admitting 
 (as prominent opponents have frankly admit- 
 ted) that his motto in dealing with compli- 
 cated relations both at home and abroad is 
 the Christian motto, "we seek not yours but 
 
Introduction xi 
 
 you." The fact that Christ will reign in 
 politics when, and not before, that spirit per- 
 vades all the nations of earth, is simply axio- 
 matic. Take another illustration, from the 
 field of literature. The book of fiction that 
 seems to have been most widely read in Amer- 
 ica during the last two years is ''The Inside 
 of the Cup." The reason is not far to seek. 
 The book is full to overflowing of a genuine 
 love for humanity. Testing it by that word of 
 our Lord: 'Whosoever shall do the will of 
 my Father in heaven, the same is my brother," 
 we realize that it rings true, and sounds a note 
 in harmony with the gospel, while yet it stands 
 apart from organized Christianity if indeed 
 it does not openly oppose it. Here then is 
 such another problem as was presented by the 
 Quakers. Like causes produce like effects, 
 up and down the whole range of human na- 
 ture. Christian unity must comprehend the 
 beating of the people's heart. That which 
 lies deeper in us than creeds and rituals is 
 stirred most profoundly by the Christian spirit 
 as manifest in politics and in literature. It 
 
xii Introduction 
 
 is a spirit which finds us, as Coleridge said of 
 the Bible. Those friends who are striving for 
 the formal and confessional unity of the 
 Church may perhaps secure the addition to 
 their number of a few millions or even a few 
 score millions of believers ; but what have they 
 for the great world of humanity outside their 
 fold, for the hundreds of millions who are 
 made kin by one touch of nature? Appar- 
 ently they would relegate these to the nebulous 
 spaces, the external segments of Christendom, 
 whereas that place (as we aim to show) be- 
 longs to form and not to spirit. John said, 
 "He foUoweth not us"; but Jesus said, "He 
 that is not against us is for us." 
 
 We proceed at once to consider "The Mean- 
 ing of Christian Unity," a subject which falls 
 naturally into two parts, doctrine and duty. 
 For the first, we seek to learn the mind of the 
 Master; for the second, we ask how to embody 
 his spirit in everyday living. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Preface iii 
 
 Introduction v 
 
 PART I. THE TEACHING OF CHRIST 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I The Cardinal Precept 3 
 
 II The Lord's Prayer ii 
 
 III Parallel Teachings 26 
 
 IV The Underlying Harmony of Christ's 
 
 Teachings 42 
 
 PART II. OUR CONSEQUENT DUTIES 
 
 I The True Point of View 61 
 
 II The Home 72 
 
 III The School 89 
 
 IV The Calling 105 
 
 V The State 125 
 
 VI The Bible 141 
 
 VII The Local Church 161 
 
 VIII The Catholic Church 180 
 
 IX The Kingdom 204 
 
 X Retrospect 221 
 
 Index 237 
 
 xiii 
 
PART I 
 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 THE CARDINAL PRECEPT 
 
 A GOOD book which ought to be better known 
 is entitled The Central Teaching of Jesus 
 Christ (London, 1892).^ It is not super- 
 seded by Swete's recent discussion of the same 
 portion of Scripture (London, 1913). Dr. 
 Bernard finds that teaching in the gospel of 
 John, chapters thirteen to seventeen, and he 
 makes it very clear that this teaching is really 
 central, for it closes Christ's teaching in the 
 flesh and leads on to his teaching in the spirit. 
 When we consider on the one hand the Ser- 
 mon on the Mount and on the other hand the 
 apostolic epistles, it is manifest that there is 
 a wide diversity of doctrine between these 
 two groups. The gospel of John (to regard 
 not its date but its content) is the bridge 
 that unites them, and these five chapters, espe- 
 cially, make the whole teaching continuous. 
 
 1 By Thomas D. Bernard, author of The Progress of Doctrine 
 in the New Testament, the Bampton lecture for 1864. 
 
 3 
 
4 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 The doctrines of the person of Christ, of faith 
 in him, of the Holy Catholic Church, and 
 many another, which we find in the epistles in 
 a form somewhat developed, are present in 
 germ in the discourses of the last evening. It 
 is equally plain that the culmination of the 
 whole is reached in that wonderful prayer 
 which takes up into the most holy place these 
 weak disciples and includes them and all other 
 followers of Jesus in one goodly fellowship. 
 "Neither for these only do I pray, but for 
 them also that believe on me through their 
 word; in order that they may all be one; even 
 as thou. Father, art in me, and I in thee, that 
 they also may be in us ; that the world may be- 
 lieve that thou didst send me." Certainly 
 this prayer of Jesus is a teaching of the loftiest 
 order; it is a program as well as a prayer; and 
 if noblesse oblige it binds all who name the 
 name of Christ to a sacred duty. The duty 
 we shall consider hereafter; it is the doctrine 
 that is before us now. There is a call here to 
 Christian intelligence; "understandest thou 
 what thou readest?" 
 
The Cardinal Precept 
 
 It would be of merely curious interest to 
 take up and discuss, one by one, the different 
 conceptions that have been held of what 
 Christ meant by the unity for which he made 
 request of his Father. We are all indebted to 
 the German commentators for patient and ex- 
 haustive researches into the history of inter- 
 pretation; but few Americans will take the 
 time to follow out all these mazes, and the 
 book I am writing makes its chief appeal to 
 practical people. Let it suffice to offer a 
 brief summary in the form of contrasts. The 
 passage refers either to the whole world or to 
 a part of it. If to the whole world, then 
 either (a) actually or (b) ideally. If to a 
 part, then either (c) to Christians as distinct 
 from the world, or (d) to Christians as acting 
 on the world. These four possibilities we 
 will take up in order. 
 
 A. Christ declares the actual unity in him 
 of all living souls, past, present, and future. 
 
 This was an early form of the doctrine com- 
 monly known as Universalism. It taught that 
 the redeeming grace of our Lord Jesus Christ 
 
6 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 is actually possessed by every member of the 
 human race. This doctrine is regarded by 
 some as a fatal error, by others as a glorious 
 truth. It is neither to be condemned out of 
 hand, from prejudice against heresy, nor to be 
 embraced at the start, from enthusiasm for 
 humanity. No one can deny the grandeur of 
 this conception, a whole world actually and 
 already redeemed by Christ the Saviour. 
 The truth of it is sought to be established 
 by various lines of argument, but at pres- 
 ent we are concerned with the seventeenth 
 chapter of John, and it lies on the surface of 
 that passage that "the world" is in manifest 
 opposition to the disciples for whose unity the 
 Saviour prays; the two cannot coincide with- 
 out a great strain, not to say twist, of interpre- 
 tation. The world knows not God (verse 25) 
 and hates the disciples (verse 14), who are not 
 of the world (verse 16). The passage may 
 well be consistent with that other and preva- 
 lent form of Universalism which adjourns to 
 the future the unity of the race in Christ, but 
 
The Cardinal Precept 
 
 hardly with the theory of a unity then and 
 now present. 
 
 B. Humanity as a whole is in Christ 
 ideally, as the oak is wrapped up in the acorn. 
 
 No one would say that the oak is actually 
 in the acorn, much less that the entire popula- 
 tion of all the generations of mankind was 
 literally present in the first man. But as the 
 seed of Adam develops into all the races and 
 kindreds of the globe, so (it is said) Christ is 
 the seed of a new humanity, a humanity per- 
 fect and universal in the idea of God from 
 all eternity. When Jesus prays that all may 
 be one, it is the ideal humanity which he has 
 in mind. 
 
 This philosophical conception harmonizes 
 well with the Greek speculations that have 
 swayed Christendom through the greater por- 
 tion of the Christian era. They played an 
 important part in the earnest controversies 
 of the schoolmen, but they have little practical 
 value today. Fifty years ago a few the- 
 ologians were still contending that the generic 
 
8 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 race was in Adam, and that the generic race 
 is in Christ, but our own generation is soundly 
 converted to the specific rather than the ge- 
 neric view, to men and women on the earth, 
 as opposed to an ideal humanity in the air. 
 Jesus himself was a brother man of the order 
 of the Good Samaritans, not a Platonic phi- 
 losopher, and it is safe to say that those who 
 find a metaphysical race-unity in this chapter 
 of John, read it into the text artificially in- 
 stead of drawing it out naturally. 
 
 C. The passage refers to the elect, a 
 definite number known to God and set to 
 testify against a hostile world. 
 
 This theory is consistent with itself, and 
 with the phrases already quoted from our 
 chapter; compare also verse 9: 
 
 "I pray for them ; I pray not for the world." 
 
 It is SO easy and natural an interpretation from 
 the standpoint of human pride and bigotry 
 that its long prevalence is not to be wondered 
 at. But its days are numbered if not over; 
 the Christ of the gospels has been exalted 
 
The Cardinal Precept 
 
 in all the power of his redeeming love, and the 
 Christian consciousness simply refuses to 
 adopt the narrow conception which this Cal- 
 vinistic theory favors. As an exegesis of our 
 cardinal precept, though it may seem to be 
 favored by a few expressions in the context, it 
 shatters against others of a large and liberal 
 scope; as verse 21, ''that the world may be- 
 lieve," verse 23, ''that the world may know." 
 We come then to 
 
 D. The program of Christ is the transfor- 
 mation of the whole world by a united broth- 
 erhood. This differs from (a) and (b) as a 
 dynamic differs from a static force. That 
 which (a) declares to be a fact appears to (d) 
 a desirable goal. And are we not bound to 
 confess, even in the judgment of charity: 
 "we see not yet all things put under him"; 
 "there remaineth yet much land to be 
 possessed"? 
 
 That which (b) holds as a concept of the 
 mind becomes with (d) a task to be achieved; 
 note the phrases just quoted: "that the world 
 may believe," etc. And is not the latter view, 
 
lo The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 rather than the former, in harmony with the 
 Gospels, the Acts, and the Epistles? Just as 
 brotherhood differs from warfare, (d) differs 
 from (c) ; while it was true in Christ's day 
 that friendship with the world was enmity 
 with God, it was not to be so always, for Christ 
 himself foresaw the spread of his gospel over 
 all the earth. 
 
 It is the mark of a narrow theory to account 
 for some of the facts in hand ; it is the mark of 
 a true theory to account for all the facts in 
 hand. When we thrust this conception of 
 Christian unity that we have called (d) in 
 among other great teachings of Christ, it will 
 be seen whether or not it groups them about 
 itself in harmony and order. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE lord's prayer 
 
 It is a good custom, in some of the churches 
 where the invocation is closed with the Lord's 
 Prayer, for the leader to make very definite 
 the point of transition to that prayer; for 
 otherwise the congregation is apt to leave out 
 the first two words; and these I am inclined 
 to regard as the best of all. How catholic 
 they are! It was a Jew who taught us to say 
 "Our Father," but Gentiles also can plead: 
 "Doubtless thou art our Father, though Abra- 
 ham be ignorant of us and Israel acknowledge 
 us not." Mohammedan children can join 
 from the heart in saying, with Jewish and 
 Christian children: "Our Father, who art in 
 heaven." And surely no Christian will pre- 
 tend that when we step outside the circle of 
 these three great religions which already ac- 
 knowledge the one Heavenly Father, there is 
 any barrier of his raising that would forbid 
 
 IX 
 
12 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 the appeal to his fatherhood from any child 
 whom he has created in his image, or that, 
 would justify such exclusiveness on the part 
 of any disciple. We rise on the wings of that 
 simple word Our, and the prospect covers 
 the whole field of humanity, and kindles hope 
 in a vital unity of all our race in God the one 
 Father. We see new depths of meaning in the 
 word so often lightly spoken, "fellowmen" : 
 
 ''For so the whole round world is every way 
 Bound with gold chains about the feet of God." 
 
 But leaving these general considerations, 
 we do well to examine the separate petitions 
 and to consider what it is that we pray for in 
 each. (Cf. Maurice, The Lord's Prayer, 
 London, 1870). 
 
 Hallowed be thy name. 
 
 Primitive prayers are such as those rejected 
 by Solomon at Gibeon (I Kings 3:11); 
 prayers for long life, and riches, and the life 
 of one's enemies. Not so naively, but yet as 
 effectually, modern man is wont to put self 
 first and foremost in the things he seeks from 
 God. The point to be noticed here is that 
 
The Lord's Prayer 13 
 
 self, under whatever disguises, always divides 
 men, while the first petition of the Lord's 
 Prayer unites them. If I ask for the life of 
 my enemies, and they ask for mine, and both 
 prayers are granted, the world is on its way 
 to destruction. To covet my neighbor's goods 
 is as plainly divisive. There are only two 
 kinds of people in the world ; those whose chief 
 desire is to get and those whose chief desire 
 is to give, the dividers and the uniters. The 
 one power that is adequate to keep us stead- 
 fastly in this latter class is the vision of the 
 true God, whose name is Love. In the hal- 
 lowing of that name, we are lifted as by a 
 celestial tide, and floated away from all that 
 is selfish and narrow and low; the impulse 
 to get is melted out of us ; the governing pur- 
 pose of life becomes godlike, that is, loving; 
 and we see with new eyes — with our Father's 
 eyes — the members of his great family. The 
 most opposite classes and conditions of men 
 meet in this petition; on the one hand, it 
 voices the aspiration of the sublimest mystics; 
 on the other, it is painfully pronounced in the 
 
14 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 last breath of the street waif whom Dickens 
 has drawn for us in the character of poor Joe. 
 Our Lord, at the day of judgment, will say 
 to those of us to whom he can say it truth- 
 fully: "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto 
 one of the least of these my brethren, ye have 
 done it unto me." And that is to hallow his 
 name and the name of his Father. 
 
 Thy kingdom come. 
 
 At the time of this writing, there is deep 
 and wide-spread attention, throughout our 
 land, to the things of the kingdom of heaven. 
 From far and near come the good tidings that 
 pastors and churches of every name are ex- 
 horting one another to lay aside every weight, 
 and look up to God for his blessing, and 
 gladly spend and be spent to win souls to 
 Christ. It is difficult to keep pace with the 
 triumphs of the cross of Christ at home and 
 abroad; and every advance is marked by the 
 breaking down of middle walls of partition, 
 and by the pervasive spread of Christian 
 brotherhood. The kingdom of God is right- 
 eousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. 
 
The Lord's Prayer 15 
 
 When Paul wrote those words, Rome was rul- 
 ing the world with a rod of iron; Paul's words 
 are no more contradicted by the recent out- 
 burst of militarism in Europe than by the his- 
 tory of his own time. ^Torce and right rule 
 the world; force till right is ready." He is 
 faithful that promised: the kingdom and the 
 greatness of the kingdom shall be given unto 
 the people of the saints of the Most High. 
 Any man with a conscience ought to know that 
 war is contrary to the kingdom of God, and 
 that peace is the fruit of the kingdom. It was 
 well for America to celebrate the first hun- 
 dred years of peace with her ancient foe, on 
 the longest frontier in the world. The Chris- 
 tian hosts of every land march on together to 
 gain the world for him whose right it is to 
 reign. And we must not forget to measure 
 our success by the standard which Christ him- 
 self has supplied in the next petition of his 
 prayer: 
 
 Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven. 
 
 Nothing less extensive than the earth, noth- 
 ing less intensive than the will of our Father 
 
1 6 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 in heaven, can interpret his kingdom. We 
 might divide the world into two classes on an- 
 other principle from that mentioned before, 
 namely into those whose ruling motive is ''Thy 
 will be done," and those whose ruling motive 
 is ''My will be done." We must be honest 
 enough to acknowledge, however, that from 
 the Christian standpoint this division does 
 not separate the sheep from the goats. For 
 all sincere religion is grounded on self-renun- 
 ciation; Brahmanists and Buddhists give more 
 perfect examples of such a surrender than 
 Christians. But everything depends on the 
 noun represented by the pronoun Thy. Who 
 is this that demands supremacy over my will? 
 Goodness and greatness alone will not author- 
 ize it; if the angel Gabriel makes such a claim, 
 I can match my immortality against his, while 
 he himself must confess, "I am thy fellow- 
 servant." We are fellow-servants of whom, 
 then? of the dark and stern powers which the 
 sinful imaginations of men have projected 
 into the heavens as their gods? of the empty 
 Nirvana of Buddhism, or the equally empty 
 
The Lord^s Prayer 17 
 
 Substance of Pantheism? Nay, rather, we 
 must assume that all who are praying the 
 Lord's Prayer with us have begun at the be- 
 ginning, have learned Our Father's name and 
 learned to hallow it. It is as foolish as wicked 
 to be rebellious children when Love is at the 
 head of the family. With sweet and glad 
 submissiveness we yield our wills to the King 
 of Love, our Shepherd. 
 
 Yet this is not all of the petition, and resig- 
 nation is the least part of it. "In earth as it 
 is in heaven" is a summons to the fullest and 
 purest activity of which a soul is capable. 
 "In earth" tells us that the field is the world; 
 "in heaven" holds up the loftiest conceivable 
 standard as the goal for all the populations of 
 that field. It is Christian unity which is 
 aimed at in this petition of the Lord's Prayer; 
 it is Christian people who are the agents 
 through whom the Lord is to realize his ideal ; 
 an ideal imperfectly attained until you and 
 I are in harmony with our neighbors, and also 
 with our enemies, and also with the races that 
 we have despised, and also with the poor that 
 
1 8 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 we have slighted. What a solvent for every 
 social problem that presents itself to us! 
 ^^How do they feel about this in heaven?" 
 As in heaven, so in earth. 
 
 Give us this day our daily bread. 
 Political Economy, sometimes called the 
 dismal science, would deserve that name if it 
 fell to exploiting the weak and poor for the 
 sake of the rich and strong. When we reach 
 the word us in the petitions of the Lord's 
 Prayer, the question presses: "how many of 
 us?" Is it to be the fittest who survive or is 
 mercy to rejoice against judgment? Chris- 
 tianity reaches its social climax in the motto: 
 "We then that are strong ought to bear the 
 infirmities of the weak and not to please our- 
 selves." Each petition of the prayer links 
 back to the opening address,^ and so when we 
 pray we say : ^^Our Father, give us this day our 
 daily bread." Here are three pronouns in the 
 first person plural and all must be co-exten- 
 sive; but how seldom we realize that! We 
 
 lA familiar hymn by Rev. Charles G. Ames, beginning 
 "Father in heaven, hear us today," brings this out finely. 
 
The Lord's Prayer 19 
 
 are catholic enough in theory to admit the ref- 
 erence of the word our to all humanity; but 
 in practise do we not often mean: "Give our 
 family their daily bread"? Praying thus, we 
 put asunder what God hath joined together. 
 Not long ago, our hearts were stirred by a 
 sore famine in Japan. This last year we have 
 sent great shiploads of food to relieve famine 
 in Belgium. At almost any time, there is a 
 sore famine in India. At almost any time 
 there is keen suffering somewhere in our 
 homeland for want of bread. Well may our 
 hearts bleed at the gaunt and ghastly forms of 
 distress among the children of our Father in 
 the four quarters of the world; well may each 
 of us bear them in his arms of faith, and iden- 
 tify himself with them, and present them at 
 the throne of grace, saying: '^Our Father, give 
 us our bread. Thou hast all power, and thy 
 name is Love. Touch with divine compas- 
 sion the hearts of Christian people, that they 
 may be Christians indeed, and may share with 
 these multitudes who faint and are scattered 
 abroad like shepherdless sheep." 
 
20 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 No one can pray that prayer sincerely with- 
 out trying to help. There is no dispute about 
 Christian unity among those who are working 
 together for the relief of God's poor. 
 
 The prophet tells of a famine, not of bread' 
 but of the word of the Lord. The hunger of 
 the soul is the direst need known to our poor 
 human nature. One who prays the Lord's 
 Prayer will be fervent in supplication for the 
 prodigals who have only husks to eat. He 
 will cry: ^^Thou art the bread of life; Lord, 
 evermore give us this bread!" One who 
 looks on the faces and hears the voices of men 
 who but a little while ago were famishing 
 miserably in sin and shame, but who have 
 tasted of the bread of life and are rejoicing 
 in the Saviour of the world, will find it better 
 to see and hear them than even to read the 
 same things in Harold Begbie's books. The 
 absolute oneness of these ransomed souls with 
 their refined Christian teachers is a cross- 
 section of the great cable of love which is 
 stretching around the world to bind together 
 all the children of God in Christian unity. 
 
The Lord's Prayer 21 
 
 And forgive us our debts as we forgive our 
 debtors. 
 
 Embedded in the Lord's Prayer we seem to 
 encounter the rule of three. Divine and 
 human forgiveness are compared and even 
 equated. If repetition of the formula had 
 not blunted our perceptions, the result w^ould 
 plunge us into hopeless gloom. It makes the 
 case worse when we realize that this is not 
 a statement but a prayer; so be, instead of 
 so are, our debts to his pardon; that is 
 imprecating perdition upon ourselves. The 
 Lord, who taught us the prayer, willeth not 
 that any should perish; it must be that we 
 have failed to understand him. And no mar- 
 vel; for as the heavens are higher than the 
 earth, so are God's ways higher than our ways. 
 The average man is an exacter, not a forgiven 
 He holds his fellow-men to every obligation; 
 he marks their trespasses and believes it manly 
 to resent them. The Psalmist asks : *'If thou, 
 Lord, shouldst mark iniquity, O Lord, who 
 should stand?" and then he adds very beauti- 
 fully: ^^but there is forgiveness with thee." 
 
22 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 That average man has been wresting the 
 Lord's Prayer, saying in spirit if not in words: 
 ^'my Father, forgive me my debts." Had he 
 opened his heart to the surging of the Holy 
 Spirit, the sins against himself would have 
 coalesced with his own, and like the high 
 priest of Israel he would have sent them all 
 away into a land of forgetfulness. There is 
 no praying this prayer if we determine to 
 abide in isolation; ^^forgive us" means "for- 
 give all sinners everywhere." It is just be- 
 cause God is love that he delivers us from our 
 selfish prayers and forgives us far more than 
 we forgive. The Holy Spirit in us leaves no 
 room for unforgivingness; and here the paral- 
 lel in Luke will clinch the truth: "Forgive us 
 our sins; for we ourselves also forgive every 
 one that is indebted to us." Is it not clear 
 that thus we keep the unity of the Spirit in the 
 bond of peace? 
 
 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver 
 us from evil. 
 
 It is customary to divide this into two peti- 
 tions in order to make out the sacred number 
 
The Lord's Prayer 23 
 
 seven; but we must not charge our Lord with 
 tithing mint, anise and cummin. There is no 
 good reason for stopping short of the full sen- 
 tence. The previous petition related to the 
 past, this relates to the future. The past we 
 cannot blot out, but infinite mercy can make 
 it as though it had never been. That mercy 
 we implore; and it alone can shield us for the 
 future, delivering us from staining its clean 
 leaves, keeping us from temptation and from 
 all evil, whether or not we regard it as summed 
 up in a personal head. God leads us, and 
 temptation is in the way; but we pray that he 
 will not "bring us into," and leave us under, 
 its power; '^nay, rather," that he will deliver 
 his darling from the power of the dog. Our 
 wills are weak as water, but he is almighty; 
 our wills are ours to make them his. It was a 
 true feeling in the ancient church which led 
 to the insertion just here of the doxology from 
 I Chronicles 29: 11. 
 
 Does not every Christian feel, when he of- 
 fers this closing petition, that he is joining 
 with all God's children ever3rvvhere? Temp- 
 
24 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 tation is common to all; all have sinned and 
 come short of the glory of God. Evil has put 
 upon all men the ugly mark of the beast. 
 When God pours upon us the spirit of grace 
 and of supplication, w^e become intercessors. 
 In our small measure, we are made partakers 
 of the sufferings of Christ, w^ho bore upon his 
 soul the burden of the sins of the w^orld. In 
 his spirit we put up our common prayer: 
 "That it may please thee to bring into the way 
 of truth all such as have erred and are de- 
 ceived: we beseech thee to hear us, good 
 Lord." "That it may please thee to have 
 mercy upon all men : we beseech thee to hear 
 us, good Lord." "Lead us not into tempta- 
 tion but deliver us from evil : for thine is the 
 kingdom and the power and the glory forever. 
 Amen." 
 
 When this petition, and when the Lord's 
 Prayer as a whole, shall be offered everywhere 
 in sincerity and truth, Christian unity will be 
 an accomplished fact. In however miscellan- 
 eous a congregation the Lord's Prayer is about 
 to be offered, the exhortation has its fullest 
 
The Lord's Prayer 25 
 
 force: let us unite in prayer. And since 
 prayer is the highest form of divine service, 
 all v^ho are one in prayer are one in God. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 PARALLEL TEACHINGS 
 
 A. The Beatitudes. We can be brief here, 
 confining ourselves to two or three examples, 
 for the intimate relation of the Beatitudes to 
 the Lord's Prayer has long been a common- 
 place of exegesis. 
 
 When the man who is proud of his own 
 achievements enters the school of Christ, 
 he is sent to the lowest child's class; he has 
 to begin with the alphabet: ''Blessed are 
 the poor in spirit." A proud Christian is as 
 inconsistent as a square circle. Now the 
 bearing of this upon our general subject is 
 plain. It is the very nature of pride to sepa- 
 rate; it is the very nature of humility to 
 unite. It is not true that if all men were 
 proud, all would stand together; for each 
 
 proud man is a lonely iceberg in a desolate 
 
 26 
 
Parallel Teachings 27 
 
 sea. But it is true that if all were humble, 
 all would stand together. Each would vie 
 with each in seeking his neighbor's good; each 
 would esteem others better than himself; and 
 all would unite in giving glory to God; it 
 would be the unity of heaven. Although 
 therefore it looks at first like restriction when 
 Jesus confines his new society to the poor in 
 spirit (Matt. 5:3; "the kingdom of heaven be- 
 longs to them"), it is in truth the fullest com- 
 prehension; for it gathers together all men on 
 the platform where God made them to stand ; 
 not abasing them, but lifting them up to the 
 plane of the seraphim, who veil their faces be- 
 fore Our Father. From this viewpoint, the 
 only obstacle to Christian unity is the pride 
 that contradicts the very essence of Chris- 
 tianity. 
 
 The Beatitudes run through the whole 
 gamut of the Christian virtues, and end on 
 this same ground-tone (verse 10: the kingdom 
 of heaven belongs to them). This is because 
 the humble, who seek not their own, but give 
 all the glory to God, are identical with those 
 
28 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 who will endure persecution rather than lower 
 the standard of righteousness. 
 
 Described in other terms they are the pure 
 in heart, and they see God. The promise 
 here, though put in the future tense, is not re- 
 stricted to future time ; it is true here and now, 
 and it is an eternal truth. To take a parallel 
 case: suppose it is said, "if you are faithful, 
 you will please God" : that means not only in 
 the heavenly hereafter but all the way thither. 
 So here: the pure in heart always see God, and 
 no one else can see him, save dimly through a 
 clouded medium. As is the earthy, such are 
 they also that are earthy; and as is the heav- 
 enly, such are they also that are heavenly. 
 There is no Pharisaic exclusiveness in this, for 
 the door to purity of heart is open to all, and 
 Christ is the way. While all the children of 
 Our Father must pray, "forgive us our debts," 
 the inspiring hope waves like a banner before 
 all: "As we have borne the image of the 
 earthy, we shall bear the image of the heav- 
 enly." 
 
 Our Lord Jesus has found and provided the 
 
Parallel Teachings 29 
 
 sure way to bring all humanity into one broth- 
 erhood; its success he foretells in still another 
 beatitude. ^'Blessed are the meek: for they 
 shall inherit the earth." Among the many 
 causes for astonishment at Jesus, when he had 
 ended the Sermon on the Mount, none was 
 more overwhelming than this promise to the 
 meek. The words, to be sure, were in an an- 
 cient psalm, but in Christ's time they were not 
 taken seriously either by the leaders or by the 
 common people. The meek were every- 
 where trodden down and despised. It was 
 power and success that were glorified; the 
 popular hero was the fierce zealot who would 
 break the Roman yoke by force. Only a 
 dreamer could have imagined that the meek 
 were to conquer the earth; but this dreamer 
 was prepared to wait; in our day, to those who 
 look below the agitated surface, the world is 
 growing towards his dream, and that conquest 
 has become probable, even judging the future 
 solely by the past. Longfellow, in the Saga of 
 King Olaf, caught the vital issues of the con- 
 flict. 
 
30 TKe Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 "I am the war-god; I am the thunderer. 
 Meekness is weakness, Strength is triumphant. 
 Thou art a god too, O Galilean ! 
 And thus single-handed Unto the combat, 
 Gauntlet or gospel, Here I defy thee." 
 
 The answer to the challenge is heard in the 
 voice of St. John, the beloved disciple. 
 
 "It is accepted, The angry defiance, 
 But not with the weapons Of war that thou wieldest ! 
 Peace-cry for war-cry! Patience is powerful; 
 Stronger than steel Is the sword of the Spirit; 
 Greater than anger Is love, and subdueth." 
 
 Many plans for Christian union have been 
 put before the Christian public, only to prove 
 ineffectual ; Christ's own plan, on the contrary, 
 is thoroughly feasible; a union in the spirit of 
 the Lord's Prayer and the Beatitudes. Jesus 
 Christ is the same, yesterday and today and 
 forever; thus we have the best reason to ex- 
 pect that all his teachings will be found har- 
 monious with those already examined. This 
 expectation is justified when we pass to 
 
 B. The Parables. The seven in the thir- 
 teenth chapter of Matthew are often called 
 distinctively the parables of the kingdom of 
 heaven. The truth is, however, that the same 
 
Parallel Teachings 31 
 
 name may be fitly applied to the score and 
 more found elsewhere. It is also true that 
 both these and those appeal to no special class 
 or race or time; they are as universal as the 
 Beatitudes and the Lord's Prayer. 
 
 Consider for a moment the parables of 
 grace, such as the three that form the fifteenth 
 chapter of Luke. In the West as naturally 
 as in the East we sing, ^'I was a wandering 
 sheep." In the twentieth century as in the 
 first, hearts are melted by the love that goes 
 out into the mountain; indeed, the human 
 heart was never made to resist the persistent 
 battery of that yearning, divine love. Unity 
 is lacking to the flock of Christ, if ninety-nine 
 tribes of men are gathered into it but one re- 
 mains unreached; ^'other sheep I have," ^'them 
 also I must bring," ^'there shall be one flock, 
 one shepherd." Unity is more palpably lack- 
 ing to the diadem of Christ if nine races, like 
 silver coins, form a broken circlet about his 
 brow, broken because one is lost; the diligent 
 search must go on till the cry ascends : "rejoice 
 with me" — "When beneath Messiah's sway, 
 
32 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 Every nation, every clime, Shall the gospel 
 call obey." 
 
 What shall we say, then, of the family of 
 Christ when the ratio is one to one? when a 
 full half of humanity are still among the husks' 
 and the swine? To chatter about ceremonies 
 and vestments, dogma and polity, instead of 
 heeding the summons of the Master: "Follow 
 me, and let the dead bury their dead"; "Go ye 
 into all the world and preach the gospel to 
 every creature/' is to be fiddling while Rome 
 is burning. 
 
 Turn from the parables of grace to those of 
 judgment. On the surface, these may seem 
 quite out of harmony with the universality of 
 the gospel. But when we dig below the sur- 
 face, the all-embracing love of God shines in 
 them like the gleam of gems in a mine. If 
 divine judgment has ever loomed up threaten- 
 ingly, it is in the story of the barren fig-tree. 
 Yet Jesus is the vine-dresser, and the Jewish 
 nation is only one tree in the great vineyard, 
 which is his kingdom; and the plea of the in- 
 tercessor is effectual in warding off the threat- 
 
Parallel Teachings 33 
 
 ening doom. He who bade us love our ene- 
 mies set us a royal example, for the type of the 
 vine-dresser found its antitype in the cry from 
 the cross: 'Tather, forgive them." Let the 
 reader ask his ov^n heart if it be not true, that 
 herein v^e have the universal solvent that can 
 melt all humanity and blend it together into 
 one brotherhood that will crown our Jesus 
 lord of all. I cannot resist the temptation to 
 quote at this point from another of the good 
 books which ought to be better known, James 
 Stirling's recent volume, Christ's Vision of the 
 Kingdom of Heaven, (London, 1913. p. 
 
 **What was the plain, literal message of the vine- 
 dresser's Intercession to those who first heard this parable ? 
 It was that Jesus Christ had prayed for the whole nation, 
 and that Its period of probation had been prolonged in 
 answer to his intercession and his work. The people 
 amongst whom Jesus lived and moved were ignorant of 
 the Divine edict of removal; but they were also ignorant 
 of the other truth that he whom society avoided had 
 by his prayer stayed the execution of the sentence. There 
 is pathos in the mother praying for her sleeping child; 
 there is deeper pathos in the Redeemer's intercession be- 
 tween a slumbering nation and the sentence of judgment. 
 How often may the prayer Xet It alone' have risen from 
 the Redeemer's soul, on the cold mountain, In the lonely 
 night, or when town and city repulsed his overtures of 
 love with rage and scorn!" 
 
34 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 Yet more plain and convincing is the lesson 
 of those parables which depict the expansion 
 of the kingdom of heaven under such figures 
 as that of the seed growing secretly, that of the 
 mustard seed, and that of the leaven. Confin- 
 ing ourselves to the last, it is easy to refute 
 once more that ancient perversion (still clung 
 to by a few) which sees in the leaven the image 
 of a corruption that is to fill the church of 
 Christ until the whole mass has become so de- 
 generate that the Lord himself will descend in 
 the clouds of heaven to gather his elect out of 
 the sinking ship. Sufiice it to say negatively, 
 that this view can no more be proved from the 
 fact that leaven is elsewhere an image of sin, 
 than the lion of the tribe of Judah, in the 
 fifth chapter of Revelation, can be proved 
 identical with the roaring lion in the fifth 
 chapter of I Peter; and positively, that the 
 mustard seed and the leaven are manifestly 
 twin parables of the kingdom of heaven ; and 
 even as the one represents the marvellous 
 growth of that kingdom as visible to the out- 
 ward eye, so the other most naturally sets forth 
 
Parallel Teachings 35 
 
 the invisible power of the kingdom to pene- 
 trate and transform the whole mass of human- 
 ity. It is the leaven, not the meal, to which 
 Jesus likens the kingdom of heaven. This 
 natural exegesis is vindicated by the conquests 
 of Immanuel in human history. On the one 
 hand, the corn of wheat that he planted has 
 brought forth abundant fruit in the hundreds 
 of millions who call him Lord; on the other, 
 the thoughts of the human heart, the judgments 
 of the mind, the passions of the soul, the cus- 
 toms of the race, age by age (for the swirling 
 eddies of the surface do not mark the trend 
 of the age-current) are becoming transmuted 
 and elevated into conformity with the mind of 
 Christ, even as leaven transmutes and elevates 
 dough. The parable of the leaven is a sure 
 word of prophecy, fulfilling itself in the past, 
 and to be fulfilled progressively till the king- 
 doms of this world become the kingdom of our 
 Lord and of his Christ. 
 
 A passing reference is due here to two im- 
 portant books: Dr. Storrs's Lowell lectures, 
 ^The Divine Authority of Christianity Indi- 
 
36 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 cated by its Historical Effects"; this shows 
 what has been; and Canon Fremantle's Bamp- 
 ton lectures, *'The World as the Subject of Re- 
 demption" ; this shows what is and is to be. 
 
 C Separate sayings, A single thread con- 
 nects all these pearls, namely, that word of the 
 Samaritan woman : '^This is indeed the Christ, 
 the Saviour of the world." 
 
 (i) / must be about my Father's business. 
 Many would say that since we are consider- 
 ing the teachings of Jesus, we should leave out 
 this first recorded utterance; for it was spoken 
 when he was twelve years old, without the least 
 intention of ''teaching." But in any case it is 
 an admirable motto for all disciples to adopt 
 and follow, and it has had, and will have, no 
 small part in the saving of the world. The 
 modern insistence on permeating business with 
 religion and religion with business is alto- 
 gether praiseworthy, and it issues, like a 
 stream from a fountain, out of this same conse- 
 cration of all to God, wherein Jesus led the 
 way, teaching by example. The word ''busi- 
 ness" is used here in no technical sense ; indeed, 
 
Parallel Teachings 37 
 
 Jesus did not use it at all. What he said was 
 '^the things of my Father." It was almost as 
 though he had said, ''I belong to my Father." 
 It is strange that so many people take credit 
 to themselves for giving a tenth of their in- 
 come and a seventh of their time to God's 
 business, not perceiving that the other nine- 
 tenths is borrowed money, the other six- 
 sevenths borrowed time. Even to say with 
 Peter, ''See, we have left all and followed thee ; 
 what shall we have therefore?" is equivalent 
 to saying: ''If we have left all, how much 
 have we remaining?" The only true position 
 to take is the frank acknowledgment that not 
 one of us has a right to say mine of any posses- 
 sion. We may go about some earthly busi- 
 ness; we must be about our Father's business. 
 And since he has made us all to differ, a mo- 
 ment's reflection shows that any lower govern- 
 ing purpose in life than Christ's leads to con- 
 stant clashing of wills, while the pursuit of 
 this purpose results in a world like the solar 
 system, with a maximum of variety blending 
 in harmonious unity. 
 
38 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 (2) Follow me and I will make you fishers 
 of men. 
 
 Jesus said this to his first disciples ; he says 
 it still to all his disciples. When Andrew and 
 Peter, James and John, began to follow him, 
 the leaven began to work in the lump; or, 
 which is the same thing, the net began to en- 
 close a multitude of fishes. Even in our own 
 day there are as good fish in the sea as ever 
 were caught, and they will be caught, for 
 every year the disciples are gathering them in 
 by hundreds of thousands, "pure fish to sweet 
 life enticing." ^ Some one explains why fish- 
 ing rather than hunting has furnished us with 
 Christian emblems by remarking that the 
 hunter drives his game, the fisherman draws 
 his game. Now that our Lord is ascended on 
 high, it is not by the exercise of miraculous 
 power, but through the ministry of us, his 
 humble fishermen, that he fulfils his great 
 promise: "I, if I be lifted up from the earth, 
 will draw all men unto me." He has found 
 the secret of winning all the world into union 
 
 1 From an early Christian hymn. 
 
Parallel Teachings 39 
 
 with one another, by first drawing them into 
 union with himself. 
 
 (3) // is more blessed to give than to re- 
 ceive. 
 
 This is that word of Jesus which is pre- 
 served to us in Paul's address to the Ephesian 
 elders; it is significant that we are bidden to 
 remember it, for it runs athwart the tendencies 
 of the natural man. The most obvious reason 
 why the world of today is out of harmony, is 
 that men strive to get rather than to give. 
 *Trom whence come wars and fightings among 
 you? come they not hence, even of your lusts?" 
 It is a childish notion, that if people could 
 inhabit a beautiful place called heaven, and 
 have their every desire gratified, they would 
 be perfectly happy. Jesus knew human na- 
 ture better. It is true, we sometimes use the 
 word happiness to denote these pleasures of a 
 lower order that flow in upon us, but in that 
 case we must keep clear the distinction be- 
 tween happiness and joy which Dr. Bushnell 
 made so plain. Joy is a synonym for the bless- 
 edness of which Christ here speaks; it is the 
 
40 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 wellspring that constantly overflows in giving, 
 and by that very act refreshes the giver's heart. 
 What w^ould happen if we were all givers ; not 
 by impulse but by deliberate plan? Why, we 
 should give the best we have; the knowledge 
 of salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. 
 We should be eager to bestow freely the pearl 
 of great price which we have so freely re- 
 ceived. If A would not take it from B, he 
 might from C; thus, by and by, the earth 
 would be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as 
 the waters cover the sea, and the hearts of all 
 would beat in unison with the heart of Christ. 
 
 (4) Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. 
 
 The Jews have always been wont to recite 
 as the fundamental precept of their law that 
 passage in Deuteronomy which is called the 
 Shema from its opening word: ^^Hear (He- 
 brew, shema), O Israel; the Lord thy God is 
 one Lord; and thou shalt love the Lord thy 
 God with all thy heart," etc. But it required 
 an insight of genius that could pierce through 
 a multitude of ceremonial precepts to their 
 kernel, and it required the boldness of him 
 
Parallel Teachings 41 
 
 who taught with authority, to place beside that 
 sacred Shema as its co-equal and fellow this 
 law of love to the neighbor. "And who is my 
 neighbor?'' asked a certain lawyer, wishing to 
 justify himself, that is, to justify his exclusive- 
 ness. Now the point of Christ's answer, in the 
 story of the Good Samaritan, is that according 
 to custom, which is stronger than law, the Jews 
 of that day were having no dealings with the 
 Samaritans. Christ turns the lawyer's ques- 
 tion end for end, bidding him ask rather: "to 
 whom can I be neighbor?" teaching him to 
 bind up the wounds of his bitterest foes, and 
 thus interpret love in terms of life. 
 
 Our age applauds the coupling together of 
 these two great commandments; and better 
 still, it has caught from the Lord Jesus the en- 
 thusiasm of humanity. That spirit will con- 
 quer — is conquering — the world, and just so 
 fast and so far as it prevails, the world becomes 
 one; there is neither Greek nor Jew, circum- 
 cision nor uncircumcision. Barbarian, Scyth- 
 ian, bond nor free; but Christ is all and in all. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE UNDERLYING HARMONY OF CHRIST'S 
 TEACHINGS 
 
 Still another of the good books which deserve 
 to be more widely read is The Prophets and 
 the Promise} Not ''promises," for Professor 
 Beecher shows that one great promise runs 
 through the entire divine revelation. The 
 content of that promise is the proclamation of 
 God's kingdom, culminating in Jesus Christ, 
 its anointed king. At Emmaus, our Lord 
 began from Moses and all the prophets, and 
 interpreted to the disciples in all the Scrip- 
 tures the things concerning himself. The 
 original promise to Abraham, that his seed 
 should bring blessing to all nations, is in con- 
 stant development throughout the Old Testa- 
 ment. The seed of that promise reaches its 
 
 1 By the late Willis J. Beecher. It is, for substance, the 
 Stone lectures given at Princeton Seminary in 1902-3 and pub- 
 lished in New York in 1905. 
 
 42 
 
The Harmony of Christ's Teachings 43 
 
 perfect flower in the life, death, and resurrec- 
 tion of Jesus Christ. As all previous history 
 looked forward to this king of the world, so 
 the growth of his kingdom rules all subsequent 
 history. As in the old dispensation, so in the 
 new, the sins of men are ever thwarting and 
 deferring the consummation of God's king- 
 dom, but the one eternal promise shines 
 through all, like the bow in the cloud. It can- 
 not be shaken; it abides forever. As Paul 
 puts it in his letter to the Ephesians, God has 
 made known to us the mystery of his will, ac- 
 cording to the good pleasure which he pur- 
 posed in his Son, unto a dispensation of the 
 fulness of the times, to sum up all things in 
 Christ, the things in the heavens and the things 
 upon the earth. 
 
 There we read the meaning of Christian 
 unity, expressed most tersely yet most pro- 
 foundly. In Christ it centres ; from Christ it 
 radiates; all who are in Christ are in Christian 
 unity. 
 
 Reverting for a moment to the cardinal pre- 
 cept, let us listen to one whom all schools like 
 
44 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 to quote (Godet's commentary on John 
 17:21): 
 
 ''The question is not only, as is often supposed, of the 
 union of Christians among themselves, but above all, of 
 the union w^hich is the basis of this, that of the body of 
 believers with Christ, and through him w^ith God him- 
 self. This sublime unity it is, v^hich Jesus in w^hat fol- 
 lows contrasts with that of the world. 'That they also 
 may be (one?) in us.' The idea . . . does not impera- 
 tively require this word (one). It is by being in Christ, 
 and through him in God {'in us'), that believers find 
 themselves living in each other. That which separates 
 them is what they have of self in their views and will; 
 that which unites them is what they have of Christ, and 
 thereby of the divine, in them. It is clear that this dwell- 
 ing of Christ, and therefore of God, in them, is the work 
 of the Spirit, who alone has the power to cast down the 
 barriers between personalities without confounding them.'* 
 
 We have been considering the teachings of 
 Christ by selected samples; cutting them off 
 perpendicularly, so to speak, and noting the 
 identity of their structure, whether in the 
 prayer which the Lord himself prayed, or in 
 the prayer which he taught to us, or in the 
 Beatitudes, or in the parables, or in certain 
 isolated sayings; each and all set before us the 
 great ideal, that even as our Master is one in 
 the Father, so all the world is to be one in 
 him, according to the promise given to the 
 
The Harmony of Christ's Teachings 45 
 
 father of the faithful. Our thought will now 
 take a horizontal direction, and pass through 
 the main body of Christ's teaching in Mat- 
 thew, following the clue just gained, the idea 
 of the kingdom of God. 
 
 In 4: 17 we read that Jesus began to preach 
 — that is, to announce as a herald — : "the king- 
 dom of heaven is at hand." Now the king- 
 dom of heaven is precisely the kingdom of 
 God, whose promise had illuminated the ages 
 from Abraham down. If one takes the slight 
 trouble to look up, in a concordance, the refer- 
 ences in the New Testament to "the kingdom 
 of heaven" and "the kingdom of God," he can- 
 not fail to perceive that these two are one. 
 Humanity, lost by sin, redeemed by Christ, 
 constitutes the kingdom of heaven, or of God. 
 This kingdom is the subject of the next three 
 chapters of Matthew, the Sermon on the 
 Mount, which includes the Beatitudes and the 
 Lord's Prayer, already examined. The iden- 
 tity of the kingdom with the promise that 
 pervades the Old Testament is established 
 by 5: 17-19, and the main theme of the ser- 
 
46 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 mon is announced in 5:20: *^Except your 
 righteousness shall exceed the righteousness 
 of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no 
 wise enter into the kingdom of heaven." 
 Jesus had to tear down the old house to replace 
 it with the new; or, to use his own figure, the 
 new wine would burst the old wine-skins. 
 The kingdom of formal ceremonies and 
 whited sepulchres must yield to the kingdom 
 of truth and love. Hence the contrasts that 
 follow in chapter 5 : '^it hath been said," '^but I 
 say" — culminating in verses 43-48, which set 
 God's all-embracing love over against Phari- 
 saic exclusiveness. Hence the contrasts in 
 chapter 6, between hypocritical alms, prayers, 
 fastings, and the inner life of the spirit, that 
 seeks first God's kingdom (verse ^3,) ^i^d trusts 
 in him for all things needful. Hence, in 
 chapter 7, the golden rule, and the final con- 
 trasts between the broad and narrow ways, the 
 good and corrupt trees, the builders on the 
 sand and on the rock. It is plain that the ap- 
 parent harshness of these contrasts is only the 
 beneficent surgery of the great physician, who 
 
The Harmony of Chrisfs Teachings 47 
 
 is trying to save the scribes and Pharisees 
 themselves as well as their victims; for he is 
 revealing the Father, who maketh his sun to 
 rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth 
 rain on the just and on the unjust. Three 
 well-known little books by J. Oswald Dykes ^ 
 give an excellent resume of the teaching of the 
 Sermon on the Mount, from the standpoint of 
 the kingdom. 
 
 Matthew 8 and 9 record chiefly a group 
 of miracles, but these make an opening for 
 *'the good news of the kingdom" (9:35), 
 which is preached to all, with compassion for 
 all. We in this missionary age have learned 
 to interpret 9:37, 38 by that other word of 
 Christ, ''the field is the world." Matthew 10 
 gives Christ's instructions to his first messen- 
 gers, as they began the work which we con- 
 tinue, the work of going into all the world, and 
 preaching the gospel to every creature. 
 Freely they had received it, freely they were 
 
 2 The Beatitudes of the Kingdom. (New York, 1872.) 
 The Laws of the Kingdom. (New York, 1873.) 
 The Relations of the Kingdom to the World. (New York, 
 1874.) 
 
48 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 to give it (verse 8), making proclamation like 
 their Master: ^'the kingdom of heaven is at 
 hand" (verse 7). 
 
 A dozen bare statements of the universality 
 of this gospel would not impress our hearts 
 like the touching w^ords in verse 29 : "Are not 
 two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of 
 them shall not fall on the ground without your 
 Father." The exception made of the Samari- 
 tans (verse 5) was simply in order to save 
 them; these prejudiced disciples would only 
 have repelled them. Jesus himself won a 
 whole city-full of them, and so did the apostles 
 after Pentecost. 
 
 In chapter eleven, the scales fall from the 
 eyes of John the Baptist, and the blessed "who- 
 soever" sent to him (verse 5) chimes well with 
 the invitation to all that labor and are heavy 
 laden, which closes the chapter. All Chris- 
 tian history proves that they who heed Christ's 
 "Come unto me" come to each other thereby. 
 
 Chapter twelve begins by translating into 
 practical life the contrasts of the Sermon on 
 the Mount, and ends with another gracious 
 
The Harmony of Christ's Teachings 49 
 
 "whosoever," which gives one of the clearest 
 expressions of the universality of the kingdom : 
 "whosoever shall do the will of my Father 
 who is in heaven, the same is my brother and 
 sister and mother." 
 
 Chapter thirteen brings us back to the seven 
 parables, of which we took that of the leaven 
 as a sample. That the eye of Christ swept 
 over all classes and conditions of all men in 
 all time is manifest w^hen we reflect that the 
 truths of geometry are no more general in their 
 application than the truths of this chapter. 
 The people who are typified here are our 
 neighbors; wx meet them every day. The 
 quiet assurance with which the Son of Man 
 shows himself as revealer of the Father's work 
 in all creation has in these parables but one out 
 of many illustrations. For as Trench said so 
 well : ^ "The world of nature is throughout 
 a witness for the world of spirit, proceeding 
 from the same hand, growing out of the same 
 root, and being constituted for that very end; 
 and the question suggested by the angel in 
 
 3 Notes on the Parables, p. 13. (New York, 1872.) 
 
50 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 Milton is often forced upon our medita- 
 tions: — 
 
 'What if earth 
 Be but the shadow af heaven, and things therein 
 Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?' " 
 
 Chapter fifteen affords a signal instance of 
 the universality of the gospel by the story of 
 the woman of Canaan, whose faith ''wrung a 
 yea from Christ's seeming nay," and occa- 
 sioned a notable lesson in the training of the 
 twelve. In chapter sixteen, the keys of the 
 kingdom of heaven are given to a humble fish- 
 erman, and by inference to every faithful con- 
 fessor. We read just afterward, ''whosoever 
 shall lose his life for my sake shall find it," that 
 is, shall find eternal life in the kingdom of 
 God. The next group of sayings is in chap- 
 ters eighteen and nineteen, which throw back 
 light on Christ's answer to Peter's confession. 
 The humble spirit, that of a child, is the key 
 to the kingdom of heaven. Not all men can 
 be great, but all can be lowly, and all are in- 
 vited, with another whosoever, 18:4. The 
 lost sheep meets us here again, and the Father 
 
The Harmony of Chrisfs Teachings 51 
 
 wills not that any should perish (18:14). 
 The Lord of the kingdom of heaven is present 
 in any two or three (verse 20) who meet any- 
 where on earth in the name of Jesus. The les- 
 son of universal forgiveness which we found in 
 the Lord's Prayer is expanded into a parable 
 (verses 21-35) . In 19 : 14 Jesus calls to him- 
 self all little children; ^^for to such belongeth 
 the kingdom of heaven" (Am. R.V.) . Such a 
 childlike spirit comes hard to the rich 
 (19: 23), but they are not excluded, for with 
 God all things are possible (verse 26). 
 
 In chapter twenty, every man in the market- 
 place is hired, and the welcome is as hearty to 
 the Gentile, who comes late, as to the Jew, 
 who comes early. The same grace to the 
 despised and rejected appears more emphat- 
 ically in chapter 21:31, 43. So in 22:10 
 the invitation to the feast, which is the king- 
 dom of heaven (verse 2), gathers all in the 
 highways, both bad and good. Chapter 23, 
 verse 8, is the gospel in a nut-shell: ^^One 
 is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are 
 brethren." Christ has to clear away obstacles 
 
52 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 in order to build; therefore the scribes and 
 Pharisees are terribly denounced in this 
 23d chapter, not as men but as obstructers 
 (verse 14) : they shut up the kingdom of 
 heaven against men. This attitude of theirs 
 however is not to continue forever; the heart 
 of Jesus yearns over them (verse 37) and he 
 foretells their conversion (verse 39) . Bunyan 
 drew the right inference in "The Jerusalem 
 sinner saved." 
 
 Chapter twenty-four looks on to the final 
 stage of the kingdom of heaven; it contrasts 
 the rise and fall of nations (verse 7) with 
 the good news of the kingdom, which is 
 for the whole world (verse 14). Compare 
 26:13: "wheresoever this gospel shall be 
 preached in the whole world." Chapter 
 twenty-five gathers all the nations before the 
 Son of Man (verse 32) and shows how to 
 unite them all in him (verse 40). The con- 
 demnation that follows may be not so much 
 an infallible prediction of a hopeless future, 
 as a timely warning, in well-known apocalyp- 
 tic pictures, against neglect of the only name 
 
The Harmony of Christ's Teachings 53 
 
 under heaven given among men w^hereby we 
 must be saved. 
 
 The great teachings recorded in Matthew 
 end with the commission (28:18-20) from 
 the Son of God, who has all authority in 
 heaven and on earth, and who bids his follow- 
 ers go and make disciples everywhere, relying 
 on his presence over all space and through all 
 time. In that promise is the firm base and 
 the sure hope of a Christian unity that is to 
 embrace the whole world and transform the 
 ruins of the fall into the city of the living God. 
 
 The brief gospel by Mark consists of action 
 rather than teaching; nearly all the teaching 
 occurs also in Matthew; an exception is the 
 beautiful little parable of the seed growing 
 secretly (4: 26-29). Its lesson is plain and is 
 constantly verified throughout the ages: — 
 though it be a Paul that plants, or an Apollos 
 that waters, it is God alone that gives the in- 
 crease; therefore let us rest in the Lord, and 
 wait patiently for him, and fret not ourselves 
 because of evil-doers. ''So is the kingdom of 
 God." 
 
54 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 The gospel by Luke is the gospel of human- 
 ity. Its catholic tone lies upon the surface, 
 and is brought into clear light by all exposi- 
 tors. The parables of grace in chapter fifteen, 
 of the vine-dresser in chapter thirteen, of the 
 good Samaritan in chapter ten, we have al- 
 ready examined; but the other parables also 
 have the same wide scope, which is some- 
 times expressed plainly, as in i8: 14; 14: 11: 
 "every one that exalteth himself shall be hum- 
 bled; but he that humbleth himself shall be 
 exalted." 
 
 A book by James Stirling, already referred 
 to, makes it evident that each one of the para- 
 bles belongs to the teaching of our Lord con- 
 cerning God's kingdom.^ 
 
 It is often asserted that the gospel by John 
 has almost nothing to say about the kingdom 
 of heaven ; but if this particular phrase is lack- 
 ing, the idea certainly is not. We must not 
 tie down the meaning of a great thought to a 
 single form of expression. Besides the fun- 
 damental word to Nicodemus : Except a man 
 
 4 Christ's Vision of the Kingdom of Heaven. (London, 1913.) 
 
The Harmony of Christ's Teachings 55 
 
 (i. e., any man) be born again, he cannot see 
 the kingdom of God, we have the term ''all 
 men," as in i : 7 — ''that all men through him 
 might believe," which is exactly what we have 
 found to be the goal of the kingdom of heaven. 
 
 Another expression, and a characteristic one, 
 is "the world," for with John the message of 
 salvation is as broad as the human race. God 
 so loved the world (3: 16) that he gave his 
 only begotten Son; (3:17) "that the world 
 should be saved through him." So in 4:41 
 — "this is indeed the Saviour of the world;" 
 and in 6: 33 — "the bread of God is he which 
 Cometh down from heaven and giveth life unto 
 the world." 
 
 A similar thought, with a varied expression, 
 meets us in 7: 17. "If any man willeth to 
 do his will, he shall know of the teaching"; 
 that is a platform broad enough for all the 
 world to stand on and find themselves in 
 Christian unity. Chapter 8, verse 36, pre- 
 sents the same truth from still another angle: 
 "If the Son therefore shall make you free, 
 ye shall be free indeed." Note also that 
 
56 The Meant Jig of Christian Unity 
 
 tender phrase in 10: 16, "other sheep I have," 
 etc., which reveals the purpose of Christ, the 
 path he means to tread, so long as one sheep 
 is straying from the fold. 
 
 And now we reach the point from which 
 we started; the great central teaching of 
 chapters thirteen to seventeen. The Holy 
 Spirit is to take up and carry on the work of 
 Christ, convicting '^the world" (16: 8). The 
 mutual love enjoined by the new command- 
 ment is to be a badge of discipleship that "all 
 men" will recognize (13: 35). 
 
 The more this law of love is studied, the 
 more evident it becomes that God, who is 
 love, has made all men in his image (however 
 sin has obscured it), and that love is the great 
 magnet which alone can draw men back to 
 God and to one another, resolving most re- 
 fractory substances, melting stony hearts. All 
 true religion is founded on love; all forms of 
 duty are summed up in love, which is the ful- 
 filling of the law. Mark Hopkins's text-book 
 of ethics ^ has been tested for several decades 
 
 ^ The Law of Love and Love as a Law. New York, 1869. 
 
The Harmony of Chris fs Teachings 57 
 
 by thousands of college men and a great mul- 
 titude of other thoughtful people. Few who 
 know it would be disposed to deny that it sets 
 forth the mind of Christ. 
 
 We may summarize the main teachings of 
 Jesus in a few sentences. Every man, as the 
 child of our Father, is salvable. The Son of 
 God, who is the perfect expression of the 
 Father's will, is seeking to save every man. 
 The Holy Spirit's working in the followers of 
 Jesus Christ is exactly what is meant by the 
 kingdom of God, and also by Christian unity; 
 these two agree in one. This unity is the pres- 
 ent possession of all Christians, and the poten- 
 tial possession of all men. Organizations of 
 Christians, whether local, national, or world- 
 wide, we have not found alluded to in the 
 main teachings of Jesus; they neither add to 
 nor subtract from Christian unity, which is a 
 fruit of the Spirit alone. How many and 
 what organizations Christians will naturally 
 develop is a question of practise, not of doc- 
 trine. 
 
 Christian unity is a thing of degrees, vary- 
 
^8 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 ing from what chemists call a trace up to the 
 fullness of godly concord. It prevails more at 
 any time and in any place, or it prevails less, 
 just in proportion as Christians are with more 
 or less singleness of heart working together 
 with God. Whether each individual soul 
 that ever lived on earth will finally work to- 
 gether with God, is a speculative question, out- 
 side the main teaching of Jesus. But the 
 cheering truth belongs to this teaching, that 
 on the great whole. Christian unity is to pre- 
 vail increasingly until the will of God is done 
 in earth as it is in heaven. 
 
 Here ends the first part of our discussion, 
 which simply expands the first sentence of the 
 Introduction. The second part of the road 
 we are to travel is longer and much more diffi- 
 cult; but it simply expands the second sentence 
 of the Introduction. 
 
PART II 
 OUR CONSEQUENT DUTIES 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 THE TRUE POINT OF VIEW 
 
 If some reader, who is curious only about 
 practical results, ignores the first part of this 
 book, and glances through the following chap- 
 ters, he will be properly disappointed; what- 
 ever force they possess rests on the foundation 
 already laid. That foundation is either true 
 or untrue, rock or sand ; if the latter, the whole 
 structure goes by the board, as it should. In 
 this respect, a lecturer has the advantage of 
 an author; the audience cannot look ahead, so 
 as to pick and choose among his teachings. 
 But on the other hand, this advantage belongs 
 to an author, that he is secure from interrup- 
 tions. If the first part of this book had been 
 read in a social gathering, accustomed to a 
 free give and take, it would have been greeted 
 with many expressions of astonishment, impa- 
 tience, or scornful contempt. 
 
 "Do you not know that you are building castles in the 
 air? What we wane is something practical. You might 
 as well tell people 'be good and you will be happy' as 'love 
 everybody.' " 
 
 6i 
 
62 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 *'Do you not know that you are hopelessly behind the 
 times? Have you not so much as heard of the current 
 movements for federation and organic unity among the 
 churches?" 
 
 **Are you aware that there Is such a science as biblical 
 criticism? No one would guess it from your citations." 
 
 "Do you not know that leading biblical scholars put 
 the emphasis of Christ's teaching on the apocalyptic side, 
 which you have neglected?" 
 
 "That which you call central is drawn from the fourth 
 gospel, which receht authorities reject as over against the 
 Synoptists?" 
 
 "That the Christian religion Is only one out of many 
 ethnic faiths that are treated of In the science of Compara- 
 tive Religion?" 
 
 "That the claims of Christianity to universal acceptance 
 are flatly contradicted by the great war among Christian 
 nations?" 
 
 "That your assumed goal, the unity of the race, de- 
 pends on the progress of humanity as a whole, not on the 
 exegesis of texts?" 
 
 To all which it would be pertinent (and 
 perhaps impertinent?) , to answer with Elisha : 
 ''Yea, I know it; hold ye your peace." The 
 objections are plausible, and the questions 
 they raise are fair ones which will receive at- 
 tention as we proceed. But the direction in 
 which we are to proceed may as well be indi- 
 cated frankly at the outset. The point of view 
 occupied by some advocates of church unity 
 fixes our gaze upon certain breaches and rents 
 
The True Point of View 63 
 
 in the ecclesiastical body. Eloquent things 
 are said about these lamentable gaps and 
 bleeding wounds, inflicted by the sin of schism. 
 Naturally, with such a diagnosis, the rem- 
 edy prescribed by those surgeons consists 
 of plasters; when the wounds are drawn 
 together, the bleeding will cease, and with 
 careful nursing the patient will recover. 
 There are other advocates of unity who see 
 the superficial nature of this reasoning. If 
 A is conscientiously opposed to B, in doctrine 
 or practise, he will tolerate him none the 
 more when A's church and B's church are 
 externally clamped together. Make the basis 
 of union whatsoever you please, and try it, 
 during the next decade, on the churches of 
 Irish Orangemen and Irish Romanists! We 
 need not cross the Atlantic, either, to find as 
 invincible race prejudices and class prejudices, 
 in the face of which a declaration of church 
 unity would be the hollowest mockery. 
 Hence this second class of physicians would 
 prescribe an internal remedy, a dose of ecclesi- 
 astical self-denial. ^'Let us emphasize," they 
 
64 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 say, ^'the things wherein we agree; they are far 
 more important than our differences. Let us 
 summon a world conference of all kinds of 
 churches, and in friendly companionship, 
 each ready to surrender unessential points, let 
 us work out a basis of reunion, acceptable to 
 all." 
 
 As to this project, there is a danger not to 
 be overlooked. Since the gathering must be a 
 representative one, and not so large as to for- 
 bid deliberation, the same thing is likely to 
 happen that has happened so often both in po- 
 litical and in religious conventions. Measures 
 are adopted, in the enthusiasm of an as- 
 sembly, that are received but coldly by the 
 rank and file of the bodies represented. 
 A recent instance in point was the attempt 
 to unite three denominations of American 
 Christians, at Nashville, in 1906. The union 
 had been discussed for years, and it was 
 thought next to impossible to agree on a 
 doctrinal basis, but when such a basis was 
 presented, it was instantly and unanimously 
 adopted by the delegates. Every one said and 
 
The True Point of View 65 
 
 believed: 'This is the Lord's doing and it is 
 marvelous in our eyes." Yet all that pains- 
 taking work w^as repudiated, and those bodies 
 have never come together to this day. 
 
 There are other physicians who differ from 
 those just mentioned as radically as allopath 
 from homeopath. They too would summon a 
 world conference to unite all the churches, but 
 on another basis. ''If you are going to reduce 
 these churches to their lowest terms," they say, 
 "in order to find a common denominator, you 
 will emasculate all that is characteristic and 
 significant in each. Every one of them has 
 contributed something to Christendom, and 
 has something valuable to contribute to the 
 Church Catholic. We all should recognize 
 each as belonging to the body of Christ. Let 
 our watchword be addition, not subtraction; 
 a rich comprehensiveness, not a pale decoc- 
 tion." See, for instance, a pamphlet just 
 issued: "The Object and Method of the 
 World Conference" (Gardiner, Me., 1915). 
 Such a gathering seems to be a step in the 
 right direction, though not the most important 
 
66 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 step to be taken, a step also which belongs to 
 the future, and is by no means to be hastened. 
 This last point is made prominent by the chief 
 advocates of the conference. A vast deal of 
 preliminary work is necessary, and is being 
 attempted; no such ecumenical assembly 
 should be looked for, they think, for years to 
 come. And this plan, like the other, conceals 
 a subtle danger. What if some of these rich 
 additions shall prove to have come from with- 
 out the fold of Christ, instead of from within? 
 What if they are even contrary to his mind and 
 will? With a great sum obtained we our de- 
 liverance from ecclesiastical tyranny. "For 
 freedom did Christ set us free; stand fast, 
 therefore, and be not entangled again in a yoke 
 of bondage." While it is false humility for 
 the foot to say "Because I am not the hand I 
 am not of the body," it is insolent arrogance 
 for any member to say to any other, "I am thy 
 head." This matter will be examined more 
 fully in the chapter entitled, "The Catholic 
 Church." 
 I believe there is a fundamental error in all 
 
The True Point of View 67 
 
 these remedies. They lay the chief stress 
 upon visible union between existing bodies, 
 whereas the thing to emphasize is an invisible 
 thing, not union but unity. Bishop Rhine- 
 lander of Philadelphia has put this so well (in 
 the Holy Cross Magazine, April, 191 1), that 
 I cannot do better than to quote some sentences 
 from his presentation of the subject. 
 
 ''Union for the strength that Is in it ; unity for the life 
 it gives; these are two very common and perfectly fa- 
 miliar 'social motives.' And they are different motives. 
 Friendship is a different thing from partnership. Friends 
 are naturally partners and often partners are friends. But 
 still the two words stand for two distinct relationships. 
 Friendship means sharing all chief things in life for the 
 sole joy of sharing. The sharing of life and its posses- 
 sions is not a side issue, but the very heart of friendship. 
 Unity is its end and aim. Unity really exhausts its mean- 
 ing. Partnership, on the other hand, means not cor- 
 porate life but common work. It means co-operation 
 with other people for the sake of getting something done 
 in a speedy, gainful, or effective way. Partnership exists 
 because there is strength in union. 
 
 ''In our religious life, we are seeking either for union 
 or for unity, all our various or varying Christian social 
 institutions being witness. Christians, on the one hand, 
 combine for the strength that comes from union. There 
 are services to be maintained; there are obligations to be 
 met; there are good works to be done; there are pro- 
 grammes or creeds to be upheld. None of these things 
 can be done adequately, unless an adequate number of 
 people unite to do them. So 'congregations' or 'societies' 
 
68 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 or 'churches' are formed, that these desirable results 
 may be achieved by the strength that comes through 
 union. 
 
 "On the other hand, Christians are drawn, or grow, 
 together simply as Christians. Whether in the family, 
 or in the congregation, or on the mission field, their re- 
 ligion means a corporate life rather than a co-operative 
 work. Such Christians may in their turn 'co-operate in 
 Missions' and spend all their united strength to 'evan- 
 gelize the world,' but always, and in everything, it is 
 fellowship, or unity, they seek; more fellowship and more 
 unity because they are bound to be dissatisfied till all the 
 race is one." 
 
 My own point of view, while in harmony 
 with that just cited, would make it more defi- 
 nite in two particulars. First, Christian unity 
 is a present fact, actual in all Christians, po- 
 tential in all mankind. Whenever we speak 
 of it as pertaining to the future, as an ideal, or 
 a goal, or a task to be achieved, it is a larger, 
 more comprehensive unity that is meant. 
 But, as the apostle tells us : ^^he that hath the 
 Son hath life"; and as our Lord tells us: ^'he 
 hath passed out of death into life." Where 
 there is life there is hope; and where there is 
 any degree of the life of Christ among Chris- 
 tians, there is just the same degree of Christian 
 unity. For things that are equal to the same 
 
The True Point of View 69 
 
 thing are equal to each other. Christian 
 unity is the life of Christ, implanted by the 
 Holy Spirit in his disciples (see page 57). 
 This is the doctrine ; and the duty thereon con- 
 sequent is not difficult to deduce. 
 
 For secondly, I believe it to be a mistake to 
 attempt to promote unity from the top instead 
 of from the bottom. The natural order of 
 progress seems to be indicated in the second 
 great commandment of the gospel. Christian 
 neighbors are to form a more perfect union, 
 not by their church constitutions, but by the 
 love of Christ constraining them to love one 
 another as each loves himself. Then the 
 leaven is to work in thousands of little com- 
 munities, scattered over all the earth. Then 
 the same spirit of love will cause these tiny 
 clusters, here a few and there a few, to blend 
 and coalesce. Local limits are passed, racial 
 prejudices are melted down, national bounda- 
 ries are overleaped, all barriers are burned 
 away by the ardent flame of love, which burns 
 on till the whole world is a fellowship of 
 brothers in Christ the elder brother. 
 
yo The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 I am not describing the past growth of 
 Christianity, except in its initial stages. We 
 all know how soon this simple program of 
 Jesus was frustrated by the pride of man, 
 which counted a nation conquered for Christ 
 when its kings and princes had received water 
 baptism; which sacrificed brotherhood to the 
 lust of power, and righteousness to creeds and 
 ceremonies; which built up rival dominions, 
 as uncouth as the image in Daniel's vision, and 
 called them churches of Christ And some of 
 these same churches of Christ (God save the 
 mark!) are identical with nations now in 
 deadly strife; it is churches like these that 
 some people suppose are to be invited to come 
 together and vote themselves the body of 
 Christ. What a sacrilege! There is no 
 Christian unity, except the love of Christ in 
 the hearts of his disciples. Love is light, and 
 we are to let it shine in all the relations of 
 life. If any one thinks this unpractical, he 
 should study the alphabet of Christianity and 
 learn how utterly unpractical is anything that 
 leaves it out. It is precisely its practical ap- 
 
The True Point of View 71 
 
 plication which comes next in order. A man 
 might climb a ladder, kicking out each round 
 behind him as he goes up, and then call from 
 the top to his neighbor: "come up hither," but 
 he would call in vain. Many people have im- 
 bibed the notion that the teachings of Christ 
 are as impossible to put in practise. When 
 they hear any one of those trumpet calls to the 
 spirit, like "Blessed are the pure in heart," 
 or "Hallowed be thy name," they admit that 
 here is a glorious ideal, and that // everybody 
 would live up to it, this world would be a 
 Paradise, but they ask how this can be ef- 
 fected? There are helps, I reply, right at our 
 hand, in the common relations of everyday life. 
 We proceed to investigate some of the uncon- 
 ventional means of grace. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE HOME 
 
 That is where charity begins, and charity is 
 love; he who bade us love our neighbors as 
 ourselves surely expects us to bestow that grace 
 upon our nearest neighbors, even them of our 
 own household. 
 
 Some characters in fiction are as well known 
 as most characters in history. One of them 
 is Mrs. Jellyby, with her eyes fixed on Borrio- 
 boola Gha, and her house (not a home) beg- 
 garing description. How Dickens would 
 have enjoyed girding at the right Reverends 
 and the wrong Reverends, if he had caught 
 some of them proposing a convention for unity 
 in the church universal, while they were no- 
 torious for making their own homes unhappy. 
 The case is supposable; and even the hypothe- 
 sis is sufficient to confirm our contention that 
 
 little duties precede great ones; that the flame 
 
 ^2 
 
The Home 73 
 
 should burn, brightly and quietly, at our own 
 hearth-stones, before we try to kindle a great 
 blaze to be reflected in the front pages of the 
 secular newspapers. It was Dickens, by the 
 way, who gave to the boys of an American 
 schoolship a motto quite germane to the whole 
 subject before us: *^Do all the good you can, 
 and don't make any fuss about it." 
 
 What is to become of our Christian homes? 
 A man lately died who did what one man 
 could to stem the downward drift. I refer to 
 Dr. Samuel W. Dike, founder of the New 
 England Divorce Reform League, which soon 
 took on a national scope. Thoughtful by na- 
 ture, deeply read in all branches of the new 
 science of Sociology, he early saw and felt the 
 strategic position of the home for the solution 
 of our leading social problems. He was fond 
 of saying: '^the question is not what we can 
 do for the home, but what the home can do 
 for us." He had distinct and clear-cut plans 
 for using the ministry of the home in the sal- 
 vation of the world. And yet the response to 
 his efforts was discouragingly small; he was 
 
74 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 as the voice of one crying in a great wilder- 
 ness. ♦ 
 
 "Truths would you teach, to save a sinking land? 
 All shun, none aid you, and few understand." 
 
 Dr. Dike published no books, but he was a 
 diligent sower of the seed out of which books 
 are made. Those who are familiar with his 
 lifework will recognize my indebtedness to it 
 in some of the pages that follow. 
 
 Many who would assent to the familiar 
 lines : 
 
 "Home's not merely four square walls, 
 Though with pictures hung and gilded," 
 
 fail to perceive that home also exceeds the 
 sum of the people who compose it. That sum 
 would be the same if each of these individuals 
 was confined to a separate room of the house; 
 but home is society, and Christian unity is the 
 unity of society. After centuries of too ex- 
 clusive dealing with individuals, Christianity 
 is returning to its primal proclamation: ^The 
 kingdom of heaven is at hand." It is waking 
 up to realize the duty and the glory of leaven- 
 ing all human society with the spirit of our 
 
The Home 75 
 
 Lord. It lays hold eagerly of every power 
 that it can utilize to further this comprehen- 
 sive purpose; but as yet it has made scant use 
 of that modest but mighty ally, the home. 
 One needs only to look at the home — not an 
 impossibly perfect one, but such as w^e may 
 see all around us, — to perceive its divine adap- 
 tation to such an end. Probably most of the 
 readers of this book had their birth and early 
 training in a Christian home. If any such 
 reader should attempt to untwist and separate 
 from his life the contributions made to that 
 life by his childhood's home, he would find it 
 a difficult feat; they are not like the strands of 
 a cable, but like the tissue of a living organ. 
 The analogy might be followed in some detail. 
 It is great Nature, or to speak more justly, it 
 is our Father, that weaves the mysterious web 
 of physical tissue which becomes the building 
 and repairing force, the conservative and at 
 the same time progressive element, in the 
 whole structure of the human body. From 
 this view-point, how thoroughly modern is 
 the One Hundred and Thirty-ninth Psalm. 
 
76 The 'Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 *'Thou didst form my inward parts; thou didst knit me 
 together in my mother's womb. My frame was- not hid- 
 den from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously 
 wrought in the lowest parts of the earth." 
 
 Now the home is the living tissue of society, 
 the place where, by subtle and hidden proc- 
 esses its very fabric is originally woven. 
 Home is the fountain of our life-powers dur- 
 ing their whole activity, the salt that preserves 
 and the tonic that restores them. Character is 
 the normal, specific product of the home; and 
 character is what all the world is sighing for. 
 When your character began you cannot tell 
 with any definiteness ; but how and why it be- 
 gan is more easily said. You were enswathed 
 in the atmosphere of a home, and you were 
 breathing, as the breath of your daily life, its 
 spiritual principles, habits, and ideals, long 
 before you came to distinct moral conscious- 
 ness. 
 
 In Bushnell's Christian Nurture, there is a 
 striking chapter, expounding a striking text. 
 The text is Jer. 7: 18 — ^The children gather 
 wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the 
 women knead the dough, to make cakes to the 
 
The Home 77 
 
 queen of heaven, and to pour out drink-offer- 
 ings to other gods, that they may provoke me 
 to anger." The theme is the organic unity of 
 the family, and the argument is that of Paul, 
 w^hen he would provoke his ov^n people to 
 jealousy by the example of the Gentiles. 
 Everyw^here, outside of Christianity, families 
 go together, in their thoughts, w^ords, feelings, 
 and acts, as they have done from the founda- 
 tion of the world. Christian families cannot 
 escape this law, if they would; precepts that 
 go counter to the family spirit and practise 
 are words cast upon the winds. But they 
 ought not to escape it if they could, for God 
 is in it; his covenant is with these households 
 unto a thousand generations. That covenant 
 is being fulfilled in the everyday life of a 
 Christian home. 
 
 When we set memory at work upon our 
 childhood, we recall certain outlines; the ex- 
 perience of manhood fills them out; and 
 so, though the processes of Christian nur- 
 ture are out of sight, some of its results are 
 clear. We need not try to add another to 
 
78 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 the many definitions of religion; but our own 
 "experience of religion" — not in the technical, 
 but in the true sense — came first to us through 
 the training, of home. It was a mother, per- 
 haps, who taught us to say "Our Father," and 
 we began to feel dimly that the great God was 
 like father and mother both. Dependence 
 was an element in this feeling, trust was an- 
 other. The correlative ideas of obligation 
 and obedience dawned upon consciousness 
 naturally from the repetition of home duties, 
 and were purified and elevated into the sphere 
 of worship. There was family government in 
 the home; childhood's faults were dealt with 
 faithfully but kindly; patience had her perfect 
 work, and forgiveness followed close upon re- 
 pentance. Thus great vistas were opened, 
 giving new views of the loving-kindness of 
 God. Hope, the star of childhood, led us into 
 invincible optimism, and helped our parents 
 to make the eternal home of the blessed a real 
 thing to us. The Bible came to us first in solu- 
 tion, by the medium of pictures, and of stories 
 that had been predigested for home consump- 
 
The Home 79 
 
 tion. The services of the sanctuary were 
 doubtless wearisome and largely unmeaning; 
 small wonder if we complained and kicked 
 against them; but long before we went to 
 church, the home had trained us to submit to 
 unwelcome discipline; and after all, the ser- 
 vice was only family worship indefinitely ex- 
 tended. We can realize now, if we could not 
 then, what inward springs of character we 
 should have lost, if the holy time had been al- 
 ways spent in playing with other children. 
 
 Moreover, life is not summed up in wor- 
 ship, nor in what is commonly known as re- 
 ligion. In the true home, the unseemly di- 
 vorce between sacred and secular is unknown. 
 Both in the daily plays and in the daily tasks 
 of the home, some of the finest fruits of char- 
 acter are being slowly matured. Children 
 train one another, in wholesome and effective 
 ways, to courage, activity, endurance, vigor, 
 perseverance; to hones.ty, courtesy, truth, jus- 
 tice, fidelity; to self-restraint, self-respect, re- 
 gard for others, affection, reverence. Mean- 
 while, they are not only watched, but encour- 
 
8o The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 aged and nurtured in faith, hope, and love, by 
 a Christian father and mother. When the 
 spirit of the home is the spirit of Christ, the 
 whole family, as a social unit, is growing up 
 in all things into him who is the head, even 
 Christ. What is this but the supreme type of 
 Christian unity, the kingdom of God in minia- 
 ture and sample? 
 
 The pessimist interrupts us here with his ac- 
 customed wail. There are no such families, 
 he says, in the present generation, and there 
 will soon be no families at all. The world is 
 given up to hotels and boarding-houses, where 
 children are undesirable citizens. The auto- 
 mobile and the golf-links have destroyed the 
 Sabbath. The feverish pressure of business 
 leaves no time for home training; and as for 
 home discipline, the new commandment is in 
 full force: ^'parents, obey your children." 
 The divorce courts break up a yearly increas- 
 ing multitude of homes ; the enhanced cost of 
 living and the growing fascination of worldly 
 pleasures make young married people more 
 and more reluctant to bring children into the 
 
The Home 8l 
 
 world. At one pole of society is the rich 
 man's palace, at the other the poor man's dive; 
 neither is a home. 
 
 Truly, this indictment gives us matter for 
 serious reflection and stimulus to needed re- 
 form. But why should our friend the pessi- 
 mist hold his little corner of experience so 
 close to his eyes that it shuts out the great 
 world? Our country looks small on the map 
 of the globe; but by the census of 1910 there 
 are 20,255,555 families in the United States. 
 Let us grant that there is not a single absolutely 
 flawless home among them; but let it be 
 granted on the other side that five in a hun- 
 dred, at the lowest calculation, are genuine 
 Christian homes. Who can estimate the leav- 
 ening power of a million Christian homes in 
 America? 
 
 While I write this chapter, a letter comes 
 in from a young layman in Beirut, Syria, in 
 answer to one I had sent on the occasion of 
 the death of his mother, who was my friend. 
 ^'She was a great blessing to her children," he 
 writes. ''How often I have thought of my 
 
82 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 rich heritage in my parents ; they did not leave 
 much money or property, but the blessed 
 memory of God-fearing lives and the seeds of 
 righteous living planted in their children. 
 There is a fresh incentive for us to honor her 
 by continuing the noble work she tried to do." 
 
 The other children of that mother are wit- 
 nessing for Christ in America, in China, and 
 in Turkey. Could the history of that one 
 family be written, it would open up to view a 
 thousand streams from the river of life that 
 have made glad the city of our God. But the 
 history of such a family is never written, save 
 in the book of life; the Lord knoweth them 
 that are his; their life is hid with Christ in 
 God. 
 
 The pessimist has called renewed attention 
 to certain evils with which we are grappling 
 and must long grapple, but on the main ques- 
 tion he simply has no case. There is force, 
 however, in the complaint voiced by some of 
 the most thoughtful Christians of our time, 
 that the family is being subjected to severe 
 pressure from various directions. Now that 
 
The Home 83 
 
 nearly all lines of industry are open to women, 
 a strong temptation is felt in many households 
 of the poor, to add to the family income by 
 utilizing the outside toil of the wife and 
 mother. Sometimes this pressure comes from 
 the husband, sometimes from the wife herself. 
 The question: ^What is to become of the 
 home meanwhile?" is dismissed as too ab- 
 stract, or, if put concretely, 'What will be- 
 come of the children?" it is solved through the 
 good offices of neighbors or neighborly socie- 
 ties and social settlements. Too often, in the 
 face of stringent laws, the labor of the children 
 themselves is extorted. The evil in another 
 shape assails families somewhat higher in the 
 scale. Not only are the professions and vari- 
 ous forms of clerical service open to women, 
 and eagerly sought to secure independence, 
 but economic considerations lead an increas- 
 ing number of men to look dubiously upon 
 marriage, and either to defer it as long as 
 possible, or to stay content in bachelorhood. 
 
 There is a further obstacle to which we can- 
 not shut our eyes. It is that the present tactics 
 
84 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 of the churches tend to neglect or to push aside 
 into an inferior place, the perennnial ministry 
 of the home. We have been dominated for 
 more than half a century by a continued insist- 
 ence on public meetings, and on miscellaneous 
 societies, banded together for every good pur- 
 pose under the sun, but calling people away 
 from the home, and leaving to the latter but 
 slight time and force for its proper work. 
 The late Dr. Daniel Merriman ^ puts this 
 none too strongly. 
 
 "Curiously enough, the church is yielding itself to this 
 craze for organization, and in yielding, is itself a chief 
 sinner against its own birthright and mission; for instead 
 of fostering to the utmost the family and home, in whose 
 strength, purity, and beauty its own strength is bound up, 
 it is creating in and around itself a multitude of organ- 
 izations which distract attention from family life and the 
 home. We need to take care that we do not pull down 
 God's work and put contempt upon his methods with one 
 hand, while we are perhaps intent on doing his work by 
 magnifying our own contrivance with the other." 
 
 The situation calls for a form of self-denial 
 that is quite peculiar. Benevolently inclined 
 persons ought to refuse firmly the temptation 
 
 1 In a paper read at Minneapolis, October, 189a. 
 
The Home 85 
 
 to perform a whole round of good works 
 which can be carried on better in the family 
 circle, and they ought to use persistent urgency 
 to stir up the homes of the people to return 
 to their legitimate functions. Dr. Dike has 
 condensed the philosophy of this matter into 
 a single pungent sentence: ^ 
 
 "It is a sociological crime to let alone a torpid social 
 institution because you can more easily do its work else- 
 where than awaken its sluggish forces." 
 
 The question comes back upon us, then, — 
 ^What is the special ministry of the home, as 
 one great department of the kingdom of 
 God?" The answer is that its chief work is 
 to show forth the love of God and the love 
 of man, in the natural relations of wedded life, 
 and in the nurture of children from their birth 
 up. Every child is robbed of its birthright if 
 it never has the experience of a loving home. 
 Jacob Riis, in his excellent book ''The Peril 
 and the Preservation of the Home^' ^ men- 
 tions an interesting series of experiments be- 
 
 2 Report on the Family, p. 18. Boston, 1907. 
 
 3 The William S. Bull lectures, pp. 22, 23. Philadelphia, 
 1903. 
 
86 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 gun in New York in 1899. I take pleasure 
 in quoting his vivid language. 
 
 "It was an old scandal in our city that practically all 
 the babies in the Foundling Hospital died there. I say 
 scandal, not in the sense that any one was to blame. They, 
 tried hard enough. Men are not monsters, to see a de- 
 fenceless baby die without trying to help it. In the worst 
 Tammany days, we had herds of Jersey cows on Randall's 
 Island kept expressly for those waifs. Everything was 
 done that pity and experience could suggest, but nothing 
 availed. The babies died, and there was no help for it, 
 until four years ago, when a joint Committee of the State 
 Charities Aid Association and the New York Association 
 for Improving the Condition of the Poor, took them o£E 
 the hands of the city authorities and put them in homes. 
 The first year after that, the mortality among them fell to 
 a little over fifty percent, the second year it was just be- 
 )^ond thirty percent, and the fourth, which was last year, it 
 had fallen to ten and seven tenths percent, a figure quite 
 below the mortality among all the children two years of 
 age in the whole city. And the experience in Brooklyn 
 was just the same. What did it mean? It meant this, 
 and nothing less, that these children had come at last to 
 their rights; that every baby is entitled to one pair of 
 mother's arms around its neck; that its God-given right 
 is a home." 
 
 Incidentally, this narrative shows us two 
 things ; first, that there are a great many homes 
 so thoroughly Christian that they are willing 
 to take in and nurture even the waifs of so- 
 ciety; what multitudes more there must be 
 that are trying to give Christian training to 
 
The Home 87 
 
 their own flesh and blood! Again, we per- 
 ceive here one of several indications that the 
 pendulum has begun to swing back from the 
 crowded city to the open country. The last 
 two decades have furnished many solid mo- 
 tives, well fitted to arrest the rush to the great 
 centres of population, and to restore to the 
 country its proper share in the world's life. 
 This tendency works directly in the interest of 
 pure and orderly homes. 
 
 It is the business of the Christian church, 
 and of all who love our Lord, to promote in 
 every way the planting and reclaiming of the 
 largest number and the highest quality of 
 Christian families. It is the business of these 
 families, in their turn, to send out into the va- 
 ried energies of the kingdom of God a con- 
 stant stream of well-trained youth, ardently 
 loyal to the King, and faithfully co-operating 
 with each division of his army to bear the ban- 
 ner of the cross to victory. To secure a nomi- 
 nal Christian unity with the home left out 
 would be a calamity; the work would have to 
 be done all over again. But the beneficent 
 
88 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 activity of the home carries with it the 
 heavenly harmony of all God's people every- 
 where; and so we regard the home as lying at 
 the very foundation of all the divinely ap- 
 pointed means of grace. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE SCHOOL 
 
 At this point, it may be well to give heed to 
 the reader who has been waiting patiently to 
 file an objection. 
 
 "You have been mounting a hobby," he 
 complains, "and riding, as fast as possible, 
 away from your subject. An essay on The 
 Home, with the phrase ^Christian Unity' 
 lugged in here and there, is a very different 
 matter from the task demanded by the theme; 
 namely, a discussion of the question how the 
 whole people of God, scattered throughout all 
 lands, and torn by internal dissensions, can re- 
 gain the unity of the apostolic age. And now 
 you evidently intend to put forth a few lucu- 
 brations on the school, the shop, and what 
 not." I respectfully plead guilty to that in- 
 tention, and not guilty to the main charge; 
 asking the courteous objector to note the state- 
 
 89 
 
90 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 ment in the Preface, that the method of this 
 book is inductive, not logical; and also the 
 claim in the Introduction, that society, busi- 
 ness, politics, etc., are embraced in the king- 
 dom of God; and also the phrase at the close 
 of Part II, Chapter I, ^'unconventional means 
 of grace." Later, we shall have a few chap- 
 ters on conventional means. What the objec- 
 tor seems to desiderate is a great ecclesiastical 
 movement, visible to all men, and heralded by 
 a cosmopolitan press; what the present writer 
 earnestly seeks to aid is an inward, spiritual 
 movement, known of God rather than men, 
 reaching down to the roots of everyday life, as 
 unobtrusive as the air we breathe, and as use- 
 ful. When we were studying the theory of 
 the subject, in Part I, it was observed that al- 
 most any of the precepts of Christ which we 
 examined were sufficient, if universally fol- 
 lowed, to secure Christian unity; here in Part 
 II, the practical question is constantly before 
 us; what will induce men to obey those pre- 
 cepts of our Lord? The first answer has been 
 already given: conserve and multiply Chris- 
 
The School 91 
 
 tian homes. The practical difficulty is urged : 
 "but multitudes of children never know such 
 homes" ; and the practical answer is now ready 
 in a second means of grace, Christian schools. 
 These cannot take the place of homes, it is 
 true, but they can do immense good. Even 
 when children have had ideal home training, 
 they ought to meet those who lack it, in the 
 great arena of the common school, the child's 
 mirror of the world of men. ^ I know that 
 ■much can be said in favor of an exclusive 
 home training, which would shelter the loved 
 children from contact with the rough-and- 
 tumble of the outside world, and especially 
 from contact with its wickedness. I know too 
 the moral flabbiness that often results from 
 such an exclusive policy. Jesus Christ was a 
 great democrat. Christian parents ought to 
 pray his prayer after him: "I pray not that 
 
 1 Compare Comenius, The Great Didactic (Keatinge's edi- 
 tion), p. 216. "When a tree cultivator, in his walks through 
 woods and thickets, finds a sapling suitable for transplanting, 
 he does not plant it in the same place where he finds it, but 
 digs it out and places it in an orchard, where he cares for it in 
 company with a hundred others. And therefore, as orchards 
 are laid out for fruit-trees, so also should schools be erected 
 for the young." 
 
92 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 thou shouldst take them out of the world, but 
 that thou shouldst keep them from the evil." 
 Let us look in on one of our public schools 
 in session. There is no family unity here, nor 
 even race unity. The Italian jostles the Pole ; 
 the Slovak mingles with the Swede; the boy 
 of pure Saxon blood sits beside a negro boy, 
 (for this scene is not laid in the sunny South). 
 Over the school-house waves the American 
 flag, and under that flag the experiment is be- 
 ing tried of moulding and training these rest- 
 less children of restless races into good Ameri- 
 can citizens. I should say, the experiment is 
 being repeated for the ten thousandth time. 
 We are always confident of its success; for we 
 know of no way of judging of the future but 
 by the past. Note yonder Russian Jewish 
 maiden, whose dark eyes are fixed on the 
 teacher as intently as if she would devour her 
 very spirit. She is to be another Mary An- 
 tin; she will prove that this school is no fail- 
 ure, whatever the future has in store for the 
 two or three score of other pupils. If we 
 could visit this same class a few years farther 
 
The School 93 
 
 on in their course, we should be struck by their 
 harmony rather than their diversity. Ameri- 
 canization has become triumphant; the for- 
 eign born hold their heads just a little higher 
 than the native born, but all are singing to- 
 gether with a will : 
 
 "My country, 'tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty." 
 
 iWhat of the children of the poor, and 
 especially those that had no home advantages? 
 The common school is their paradise; if par- 
 ents desire to keep any of them at home now 
 and then, they beg and plead to go to their 
 teacher. 
 
 What of the children of the rich, and espe- 
 cially those that had no home discipline? 
 Their parents have daily cause to bless the 
 school drill, that keeps the children in sub- 
 jection to rightful authority. Without it, they 
 would almost certainly make a wreck of life; 
 with it, they are growing not only into habits 
 of order and application, but also into a 
 hearty, democratic comradeship with all their 
 schoolmates, in an atmosphere that applauds 
 
94 TKe Meaning of CJiristian Unity 
 
 whatever is manly, and laughs down all aristo- 
 cratic pretension. Hear them sing again : 
 
 "Then let us pray that come It may, 
 
 As come it will for a' that, 
 
 That sense and worth, o'er a' the earth, 
 
 May bear the gree, and a' that. 
 
 For a' that, and a' that, 
 
 It's coming yet, for a' that, 
 
 That man to man, the warld o*er 
 
 Shall brothers be for a' that." 
 
 I think too little is usually made of the dis- 
 ciplinary value of school athletics. Often, 
 ambitious boys enter the field, with eager pas- 
 sions that have never brooked submission to 
 any kind or degree of authority. The only 
 child of rich parents, for instance, may hith- 
 erto have been monarch of all he surveyed, 
 and his right there was none to dispute. At 
 his own sweet will he has let his angry passions 
 rise; — but as soon as he appears on the play- 
 ground, he finds himself no longer a king but 
 only a pawn. His value is precisely that of 
 his digital unit, which no ciphers can multi- 
 ply; he has to play the game for all he is 
 worth. The first act of insubordination, 
 whether by open rebellion, or by mere neglect 
 
The School 95 
 
 of the proper team-play, is instantly met by 
 proper discipline; and after a few such les- 
 sons, the boy learns his place and co-operates 
 heartily with the rest. The habit of implicit 
 obedience will stay by him through life — 
 which is a magnified play-ground — and will 
 stand him in good stead. 
 
 It must not be supposed that the unity that 
 results from education is obtained by the sup- 
 pression of individuality, by the knocking off 
 of the precious crystalline structure that marks 
 the peculiar development of this or that orig- 
 inal mind. What really takes place is pre- 
 cisely the contrary, as the very word education 
 testifies. To bring these rare qualities into 
 the light, and under the mastery of their nomi- 
 nal possessor, this is the teacher's calling, and 
 none is more glorious. It is not uniformity 
 that results from the process of education, but 
 the harmony of many instruments of diverse 
 quality and pitch. The two conceptions are 
 no more alike than a symphony in Albert Hall 
 is like the clang of the London streets, or its 
 analogue that Arthur Hallam found so irk- 
 some: 
 
96 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 "But if I praised the busy town, 
 He loved to rail against it still, 
 For 'ground in yonder social mill 
 We rub each other's angles down, 
 And merge,' he said, 'in form and gloss 
 The picturesque of man and man.' " 
 
 If the critic persists that, after all, the school 
 is a mill that takes the raw material of child- 
 hood and polishes it into smoothness, I admit 
 that there are schools — and schools. In my 
 limited observation as a teacher, and again as 
 a superintendent of schools, I have sometimes 
 seen this repulsive grind, which substitutes in- 
 ducation for education. But in the first place, 
 there is a true as well as a false grinding, and 
 its very object and result is to bring out indi- 
 viduality; witness the diamond, which none 
 but the expert would recognize, but for the 
 polishing of its brilliant faces. And in the 
 next place, when we examined the Cardinal 
 Precept (Part I, Chapter I), we found that 
 Christian unity is not an attainment but a goal. 
 The perfect school is as rare as the perfect 
 home ; but in each case we search for the true 
 ideal, and then try to make it potent in actual 
 life, assured that it will prove itself an engine 
 
The School 97 
 
 of mighty power in the great business of mak- 
 ing the kingdom of God triumphant in human 
 affairs. What would Christian unity be with 
 education left out? An ignorant enthusiasm, 
 that w^ould soon spend itself. To build that 
 stately temple for eternity, we must delve 
 patiently, year after year, at its vast founda- 
 tions that are out of sight. In ninety-nine 
 cases out of a hundred, the teacher's work is 
 unrecorded and unnoticed, while the warrior's 
 praises are sung by poets and orators; but 
 when we come to ask their relative value to 
 human society, we are ashamed to speak of 
 them in the same breath. One destroys and 
 the other builds; one exterminates, the other 
 perpetuates. One is hostile to the kingdom of 
 God ; the other is its trusty ally. 
 
 This last statement will not pass without 
 question. Is it true, after all, that education 
 is Christian, or even religious? Are we not 
 careful, especially in America, to keep it color- 
 less, to guard its religious neutrality? It is 
 true that our laws and customs have sought to 
 establish this impracticable neutral ground; 
 
98 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 the attempt has led to perpetual turmoil, but 
 the best educators are beginning to see day- 
 light through the darkness, now that the true 
 nature of education is better understood. On 
 the specific point which occasioned much of 
 the controversy, that of requiring that a few 
 verses of the Bible should be read at each 
 school session, the agitation has been utterly 
 needless; the issue ought never to have been 
 raised. Some teachers whom I have known 
 have met this requirement with a legal com- 
 pliance, coupled with an irreverence of man- 
 ner most injurious to the religious impression 
 that was sought by the statute. *'What you 
 are," says Emerson, ^^speaks so loud that I can- 
 not hear what you say." ^ 
 
 On the larger subject of the relation of the 
 state to religious education in America, there 
 exists a wide but not a hopeless divergence of 
 opinion. The plan which is perhaps most 
 characteristically American consists in a divi- 
 
 2 Compare George A. Coe in the Cyclopedia of Education, 
 Vol. V, p. 147. (New York, 1913.) ''It is a matter of common 
 knowledge that German classes in 'religion' are often formal, 
 perfunctory, and anything but religious, because the teacher 
 lacks religious motive," 
 
The School 99 
 
 sion of labor that commits religion to the home 
 and the church, education to the state. At the 
 opposite extreme is the contention of the Ro- 
 man Catholics that this theory of education is 
 like the play of Hamlet with Hamlet's part 
 left out. Religion, they hold, is the most im- 
 portant part of education, and religion cannot 
 be taught by the state, only by the church. If 
 the state taxes all citizens to support its god- 
 less schools, it ought to subsidize the church 
 schools. Between these extremes is a thought- 
 ful and probably growing multitude, who be- 
 lieve that by following either of these policies 
 something would be lost which it is highly im- 
 portant to retain. For on the first plan, there 
 is a vast number of children whom the home 
 and the church never reach with religious 
 training; the home, because it has neither the 
 time nor the ability; the church, because it 
 cannot compel attendance on its meetings. 
 To let these children grow up without such 
 instruction is a cruel deprivation, not only to 
 them but to the state, in which this untrained 
 element becomes a continual menace. And 
 
lOO The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 on the other plan, both the state and the child 
 suffer from an unwholesome cleavage of the 
 population on the line of religious convictions 
 or even prejudices, which unavoidably be- 
 come accentuated to the detriment of all con- 
 cerned ; for when the children of any commu- 
 nity are educated away from each other, there 
 is little likelihood that the community itself 
 will become united and strong. So a third 
 plan proposed is to set apart certain school 
 hours each week, when the school authorities, 
 in co-operation with the parents, shall secure 
 the religious instruction of Jewish children 
 by their Rabbis, of Catholics and Russians 
 (Holy Orthodox) by their priests, of Protest- 
 ants by their pastors, of others by ethical in- 
 structors, etc. Whether different school- 
 rooms should be used, or the children should 
 be sent to their churches, synagogues, etc., is an 
 unessential detail; in the former case, the pres- 
 ent habit of many children to look slightingly 
 on religious, as compared with secular, educa- 
 tion, would be corrected; in the latter case, 
 the sacred associations of the sanctuary would 
 
The School lOl 
 
 have their appropriate weight. But in either 
 case, (and this is no unessential detail), the 
 whole educational endeavor would develop a 
 true organism, in which (according to Kant's 
 felicitous definition), each part is at the same 
 time the means and the end of all the rest. 
 
 I confess, I expect far less benefit from the 
 few hours devoted to religious instruction than 
 from the constant and unconscious absorption 
 by the child of the teacher's own personality. 
 The true remedy for godless schools is to put 
 out of their teaching force any man who 
 would read the Bible flippantly, any woman 
 whose heart is in fashion and folly. Such an 
 exclusion follows naturally and inevitably 
 when we have found the right answer to the 
 question from which we have been digressing. 
 ^^Is education religious or not?" They who 
 have the right to answer that question with 
 authority are the recognized masters in the 
 field of education, from Comenius in the 
 seventeenth century, through Pestalozzi in the 
 eighteenth, and Froebel in the nineteenth, to 
 Montessori in the twentieth. 
 
I02 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 Let us examine a few significant extracts 
 from these writers. 
 
 Comenius, The Great Didactic, page 218. ^ 
 
 *'The following reasons will establish that not the chil- 
 dren of the rich or of the powerful only, but of all alike, 
 boys and girls, both noble and ignoble, rich and poor, in 
 all cities and towns, villages and hamlets, should be sent 
 to school. 
 
 *'In the first place, all who have been born to man's 
 estate have been born with the same end in view, namely, 
 that they may be men, that is to say, rational creatures, 
 the lords of other creatures, and the images of their 
 Creator. All, therefore, must be brought on to a point 
 at which, being properly imbued with wisdom, virtue, and 
 piety, they may usefully employ the present life and be 
 w^orthily prepared for that to come. God himself has fre- 
 quently asserted that with him there is no respect of per- 
 sons, so that if, while we admit some to the culture of the 
 intellect, we exclude others, we commit an injury not only 
 against those who share the same nature as ourselves, but 
 against God himself, who wishes to be acknowledged, to 
 be loved, and to be praised, by all upon whom he has im- 
 pressed his image." 
 
 Pestalozzi, Swan Song, § 139, page 274.^ 
 
 "As the method of the development of the faculties by 
 elementary education is based on love and faith, it must 
 necessarily lead to Christian thought, sentiment and ac- 
 tion. Of course religion of itself does not turn out a 
 merchant, a tradesman, a scholar, or an artist. But it 
 grounds, develops, and fortifies the frame of mind which 
 
 ^Keatinge's edition. (London, 1896.) 
 
 * Quoted from Pinloche's Pestalozzi. (London, 1902.) "Ele- 
 mentary Education" is what he calls his system. The italics 
 are his. 
 
The School 103 
 
 elevates, sanctifies, purifies, and makes truly human in its 
 inward nature the calling of the merchant, the trades- 
 man, and every other calling. . . . All means of quicken- 
 ing the power common to all men which do not start from 
 the spirit and the life of our inner divine being, but from 
 the sensual impulses of the flesh and blood of our animal 
 selfishness, are not elementary. It is the complete har- 
 mony of elementary education with Christianity which 
 also distinguishes it from the spirit of the age." 
 
 Froebel, Education of Man, § 62, page 94.^ 
 
 ^'Nature, as well as all that exists, is the declaration 
 and revelation of God. Everything that exists has its 
 foundation in the revealing of God. Everything that 
 exists has its foundation and existence only through the 
 life abiding in God. ... It is possible for the Christian 
 only, for the man with Christian thought, life, and effort, 
 to come to a true conception and vivid recognition of 
 Nature ; only such a man can be a genuine naturalist. It 
 is possible for man to approach to a true knowledge of 
 Nature only when he is consciously or unconsciously, dimly 
 or clearly, a Christian ; that is, when he is penetrated with 
 the truth of the one living power of God working in all 
 things; when he Is filled with the one living spirit of 
 God, which Is in all things, and to which he Is himself 
 subjected, through which all Nature has Its being and 
 existence, and through which he Is In a condition to per- 
 ceive this one spirit in Its being and its unity, in the small- 
 est phenomenon, and in the sum of all the phenomena of 
 Nature." 
 
 Montessori, The Montessori Method, page 
 
 ''Let us try to enter Into the minds and hearts of those 
 first followers of Jesus as they heard him speak of a king- 
 
 ^ Jarvis's edition. (New York, 1886.) 
 ® (New York, 1912.). 
 
104 ^^^ Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 dom not of this world, greater far than any earthly king- 
 dom, no matter how royally conceived. In their sim- 
 plicity they asked of him, 'Master, tell us who shall be 
 greatest in the kingdom of heaven?' To which Christ, 
 caressing the head of a little child, who, with reverent 
 wondering eyes, looked into his face, replied, 'Whosoever 
 shall become as one of these little ones, he shall be greatest ' 
 in the kingdom of heaven.' Now let us picture, among 
 those to whom these words were spoken, an ardent, wor- 
 shipping soul, who takes them into his heart. With a 
 mixture of respect and love, of sacred curiosity and of a 
 desire to achieve this spiritual greatness, he sets himself 
 to observe every manifestation of this little child. Even 
 such an observer, placed in a classroom filled with little 
 children, will not be the new educator whom we wish to 
 form. But let us seek to implant in the soul the self- 
 sacrificing soul of the scientist with the reverent love of 
 the disciple of Christ, and we shall have prepared the 
 spirit of the teacher. From that child itself he will learn 
 how to perfect himself as an educator." 
 
 Strange to say, both Froebel and Pestalozzi 
 have been ignorantly supposed to have been 
 hostile to Christianity. Whenever we find 
 as we sometimes do, a teacher who holds 
 that education and religion should be kept in 
 separate compartments, it would be well to 
 send him to school to the great masters of his 
 art. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE CALLING 
 
 After the home, the school ; after the school 
 the work. The normal man, however, does 
 not leave the home; he founds a family of his 
 own ; and though he may leave the school, his 
 education is continued and never completed. 
 Thus the kingdom of God grows like a tree, 
 ever assimilating new material. 
 
 The terms work, labor, industry, business, 
 profession, are scarcely comprehensive enough 
 to cover the department of human life which 
 we are to consider next. If not in themselves, 
 yet in their implications and associations, they 
 have a divisive tendency, as seen in the phrases 
 ^'working classes," ^'labor problems," "indus- 
 trial occupations," "business competition," 
 "professional jealousy." Besides, they em- 
 phasize the active side of the subject; but if we 
 
 105 
 
lo6 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 seek the whole truth, we shall find that a man 
 is acted on before he acts ; he is called into the 
 vineyard before he labors in the vineyard. 
 The good old Saxon word "calling'' — a much 
 better word than its fashionable equivalent, 
 "vocation" — forbids leaving God out of the 
 bargain, whatever our business is. 
 
 I may digress long enough to make it clear 
 that this book is written for men who believe 
 in God, as most men do. Most men who 
 think they do not are merely in revolt against 
 an inhuman being up in the sky, who is still 
 sometimes preached as the God of the Bible, 
 but who is really as dead as the gods of Greece 
 and Rome. I ask renewed attention to the 
 statement at the beginning of Part II, that this 
 whole discussion falls to the ground unless 
 Part I is accepted; in other words, unless we 
 receive Christ's revelation of the God and 
 Father of us all, whose nature and whose 
 name is love. With one who really denies 
 this God, it is commonly of little use to rea- 
 son; what he needs is to come close to a real 
 Christian. I was greatly impressed when a 
 
The Calling 107 
 
 boy by a true story ^ of a young Irish lawyer, 
 who would declaim by the hour against 
 Christianity, on the ground that England, the 
 oppressor of his country, was a Christian na- 
 tion, but who finally said to the Christian who 
 had been trying to win him : ^'You spoke of 
 examples of religion in private life. Let me 
 tell you, the example of my old aunt has been 
 a demonstration to me. Satan cannot shake 
 it." I could give more than one such instance 
 from my own pastoral experience, and the 
 leaders of the "Men and Religion Forward 
 Movement" could supply them by the score. 
 There is no good reason why reasonable men 
 should shut their eyes to such facts. 
 
 But to return from this digression: each of 
 us ought to regard his own calling, and every- 
 body's calling, as an unconventional means of 
 grace. This completely reverses what poli- 
 ticians call the labor problem; instead of ask- 
 ing "what can we do for labor?" the question 
 becomes: How can the calling of the lab- 
 orer, or that of the employer, or that of any 
 
 1 The first in the series called "A Pastor's Sketches," by I. S. 
 Spencer. (New York, 1851, p. 58.) 
 
io8 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 one else, advance the kingdom of God? 
 Practically, to be sure, we shall come out at 
 the same point as all honest men reach, so far 
 as every form of injustice and tyranny is con- 
 cerned ; the glorious King whom we serve will 
 use us as a rod wherewith to smite the oppres- 
 sor, whether it be an oppressive church mem- 
 ber that evicts his poor tenants or an oppres- 
 sive labor-union that mobs a faithful work- 
 man. 
 
 Let us try to get a fair view of the whole 
 situation, remembering that here, as every- 
 where, the field is the world. A quotation 
 from one of the greatest poems ever written 
 will make a good starting-point. 
 
 "If I have despised the cause 
 
 Of my man-servant or my maid-servant, 
 
 When they contended v\^ith me; 
 
 What then shall I do w/hen God riseth up? 
 
 And when he visiteth, what shall I answer him ? 
 
 Did not he that made me in the womb make him ? 
 
 And did not one fashion us in the womb?" - 
 
 No one knows the age of this poem, but at 
 any rate, it is thousands of years older than 
 
 2 Job 31:13-15. 
 
The Calling 109 
 
 we are, while yet it is so fresh and modern as 
 to come upon us with startling force. The 
 passage cited gives all the main elements of 
 our own social and industrial problems; jus- 
 tice and injustice, service and responsibility, 
 humanity and brotherhood. Here too are the 
 very characters of our everyday drama, the 
 laborer, the employer, and the third party, so 
 often left out of the reckoning, God. The 
 reader should not brush aside the analogy, 
 with the impatient thought that there is a wide 
 difference between that ancient civilization 
 and our own ; between the simple, pastoral ex- 
 periences of an Eastern sheikh, and the com- 
 plex questions of today. For the author of 
 this wonderful book was by no means ignorant 
 of civic and industrial problems on a great 
 scale. He knew the cities of Egypt and the 
 mines of Arabia. From out of the populous 
 city men groan, he cries (24: 12, R. V.), and 
 the cry would make a good motto for a trade- 
 union journal. The context is a vivid picture 
 of cruel power reducing the poor to their low- 
 est terms. See Strahan on the passage, as cited 
 
no The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 below.^ And the author had felt the contrast 
 between this thronging life and the utter deso- 
 lation of the miner (28:4). 
 
 "He sinketh a shaft far from the habitations of men, 
 he is forgotten of those who walk above, he swingeth 
 suspended afar from men." 
 
 I quote from the version of Samuel Cox 
 (London, 1880), who adds: 
 
 "these mines, with their shafts, working apparatus and 
 smelting-places, are to be seen to this day in the very- 
 condition in which they were left by the Egyptian, work- 
 men four or five thousand years ago; the very marks of 
 their tools being so fresh and sharp in that pure dry 
 atmosphere, that more than one traveller has felt, while 
 looking at them, as though the miners had but knocked 
 off work for a spell, and might come back to it at any 
 moment." 
 
 I have purposely given these details, in or- 
 der to show that human nature is the same in 
 all ages, and especially in order to lift us out 
 of our own surroundings, that we may give 
 diligent heed to the great teaching of that 
 book. Job was a capitalist, an employer 
 of labor. When we are reasoning with his 
 
 3 The Book of Job Interpreted, by James Strahan. Edin- 
 burgh, 1913. (Page 215.) "Still another class of unfortunates 
 — poor, scantily-clad day-laborers, starving in the midst of 
 plenty, because their rapacious masters — the 'sweaters' of an- 
 cient times — refuse, though corn and oil and wine abound, to 
 give them a living wage." 
 
The Calling iii 
 
 class, we do well to hold him up as an ex- 
 ample. His employees had a ''cause," and 
 dared to maintain it before him, and when he 
 answered, they answered back, ''contended" 
 with him. He never "despised" their cause 
 by claiming that he had nothing to arbitrate; 
 for he knew and felt the force of the rule of 
 three. "As my servants are to their master, 
 so am I, God's servant, to my master." And 
 then he reasoned a fortiori, from less to 
 greater. "The two ratios of this proportion 
 are vastly unequal after all. My laborers and 
 I are of one blood, for God hath made us so; 
 from the womb up, we are measured by the 
 level of a common humanity. But I and my 
 Creator! how could I meet him in judgment 
 if I had despised my brother instead of being, 
 as I have been, my brother's keeper?" The 
 application to our time does not vary in prin- 
 ciple by a hair's breadth if instead of a single 
 laborer it is a committee of laborers who main- 
 tain their cause. Every capitalist should 
 listen to the sublime thunder-peal of another 
 great poet (Isa. lo: 1-3) : 
 
112 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 *'Woe unto them that turn aside the needy from jus- 
 tice, and rob the poor of my people of their right, that 
 widows may be their spoil and that they may make the 
 fatherless their prey! And what will ye do in the day of 
 visitation, and in the desolation which shall come from 
 afar? to whom will ye flee for help? and where will ye 
 leave your glory?" 
 
 D. L. Moody said that there was a great 
 desert in the middle of most people's Bibles; 
 meaning what we call the minor prophets. 
 If those who uphold the tyranny of our pres- 
 ent industrial order would like to see them- 
 selves in a mirror and to know what God 
 really thinks of them, let them read and pon- 
 der those few pages. 
 
 We gain less, however, by denouncing men 
 who have been caught in the meshes of an evil 
 system, than by bringing the system itself to 
 the touchstone of Christ's teaching, which is 
 the standard in this entire discussion. The 
 system is huge and hard and cold as an ice- 
 berg; but the Sun of Righteousness will dis- 
 solve it by a single penetrating ray. 
 
 "One Is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are 
 brethren.'* 
 
 Words could not be simpler than these that 
 
The Calling 113 
 
 were dropped into the ears of a few fisher- 
 men; but their line is gone out into all the 
 earth, and the world is being tested and trans- 
 formed by them. The program of Christ, as 
 we saw in Part I, is the transformation of the 
 whole world by a united brotherhood; this is 
 the meaning of Christian unity. Since all 
 power in heaven and on earth is given to 
 Christ, it is only a question of time when his 
 kingdom will be dominant. We can speed 
 it on, if we belong to the capitalistic class, by 
 regarding ourselves as employers not of labor 
 but of laborers — an apparently slight but 
 really vast difference. We have the steward- 
 ship not so much of machines as of men; and 
 just as we should be uneasy if our brothers in 
 the flesh, our mothers' own children, were 
 working for us at wages too low to give them 
 decent subsistence, and were housed in unsani- 
 tary tenements; so, as soon as our eyes are 
 opened, we cannot tolerate such conditions 
 among these brothers in the spirit. At great 
 cost, if need be, to ourselves, we shall bear one 
 another's burdens, for by such bearing and 
 
114 ^^^ Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 sharing we fulfil the law of Christ; and hereby 
 we know and show that we are his disciples. 
 
 Now the sword of the Son of Man has two 
 edges (Rev. i : i6) ; it is equally sharp against 
 unfaithful employers and unfaithful work- 
 men. When we reason with the latter class, 
 it is important to put them on their guard 
 against such bitter criticisms of those more 
 favored in life as will blind them to the 
 finger of God that points out their own duty. 
 '^How will thou say to thy brother, Let me 
 pull out the mote out of thine eye ; and behold, 
 a beam is in thine own eye?" Working-men 
 will hasten to assure us that the mote belongs 
 to them and the beam to their oppressors; but 
 Jesus intended each of us to hold his own 
 faults so close to the eye of conscience that 
 they would look larger than the faults of his 
 neighbors. Look at envy, for instance, which 
 should never be confounded with emulation, 
 its exact opposite. Emulation is a noble 
 passion, since it strives to excel by raising it- 
 self; envy is a malignant passion, since it 
 Strives to excel by pulling down others. It 
 
The Calling T15 
 
 should suffice to call attention to the singular 
 stupidity of envy. Why should we envy any 
 man his debts? Each dollar and each other 
 item in the inventory of the man wt envy is 
 simply an obligation to render service to God 
 and humanity. 
 
 Again, God requires truth in the inward 
 parts, honesty and fidelity in work. If some 
 human organization requires dawdling, 
 sloppy, inefficient work, if it goes so far even 
 as to counsel fraud and sabotage, it takes no 
 great amount of common-sense to see which 
 authority is superior. The portrait of that 
 private soldier who disobeyed his commander 
 to obey his king hangs in the gallery of heroes 
 (II Samuel 18:9-12). 
 
 We may sympathize to the full with the 
 hardships and sufferings of the toiling mil- 
 lions; but we are never to do evil that good 
 may come. The manly way, Christ's way, is 
 to do right and take the consequences. ^^It 
 is never right to do wrong and never wrong 
 to do right." 
 
 Such generalities may have been all that 
 
Ii6 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 Christianity could have contributed to the so- 
 lution of the labor problem a generation ago; 
 but meanwhile the evils of the whole indus- 
 trial system have grown acute, and righteous 
 public sentiment is slowly advancing to the 
 point of determining to mend or end it. 
 There can be no question that it is able to do 
 either of these things, when it is sure which 
 is right; for the Almighty God does not live 
 in the sky but in the hearts of his children; 
 and in our age he reveals himself most fully 
 in righteous public sentiment. If those 
 whose chief end is to maintain the claims of 
 either capital or labor are shortsighted enough 
 to antagonize that sentiment, they are simply 
 sawing off the limb they sit on, between them- 
 selves and the tree. And this they will do 
 if they perpetrate injustice while clamoring 
 against it; they should meditate on that word 
 of Gamaliel : ^'lest haply ye be found even to 
 fight against God" (Acts 5 : 39) . The way to 
 fight with God is to contend for universal 
 brotherhood, for the rights of man as man; 
 the way to fight the devil's own battle is to 
 
The Calling 117 
 
 try either to crush out the entire capitalistic 
 class, after the program of the mis-called In- 
 dustrial Workers of the World (for "work- 
 ers'^ read "warriors") or else to crush out all 
 trade unions and labor federations, and thus 
 deprive the workingmen of their one chance 
 to rise. 
 
 Plain words should be spoken to a sluggish 
 Christian public, whose indolent sympathies 
 have gone too often to the capitalistic side in 
 these industrial contests because the subject 
 has not been thought through. The phrase 
 "the open shop" has a large and liberal sound; 
 "the closed shop" seems narrow and exclusive. 
 It is proclaimed as though it were a mathe- 
 matical certainty that any man has the right 
 to work for whom he pleases on such condi- 
 tions as both parties please to make. Not 
 only is this not axiomatic, it is not even true. 
 It is a special case under the larger untruth 
 that any man has the right to do what he 
 pleases. That is blasphemy against the king- 
 dom of God, which is a social kingdom, a 
 solid, with three dimensions; first, no man is 
 
ii8 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 to live to himself; second, every man is to love 
 his neighbor as himself; third, every man is 
 to love God with all his heart. Perfect lib- 
 erty is only found in perfect obedience to 
 those precepts (see Ps. 119: 45; I Cor. 7: 22). 
 Let us see how this works out in prac- 
 tise. The memory of men now living covers 
 almost the whole enormous industrial ex- 
 pansion caused by ever new inventions of 
 machinery, and an ever growing concentra- 
 tion of capital. This development has been 
 so sudden and so vast that the great world of 
 toilers has been caught between the upper 
 and the nether mill-stone; for whether busi- 
 ness is carried on by fierce competitions or by 
 gentlemen's agreements, in either case the 
 huge volume of wealth produced rolls stead- 
 ily (the bulk of it) into the coffers of the 
 few who direct the work or invest their 
 capital in it, while the army of laborers 
 who have the larger share in production 
 do not succeed in gaining a fair share of the 
 product. I say ''the larger share" and "a 
 fair share" advisedly, in opposition, first to 
 
The Calling 119 
 
 those who claim that the wage-workers pro- 
 duce the total product (for there is no such 
 thing as a scissor; it takes the two blades to 
 cut) ; in opposition, next, to those who claim 
 that distribution is equitable as it now is ; for 
 such are living in a fool's paradise, deaf to the 
 thunder that mutters all around the horizon. 
 Most men who think as well as feel perceive 
 and admit that the present system or lack of 
 system which has prevailed in the main for 
 the last century leaves the individual work- 
 man helpless. His whole life is literally in 
 his own hands ; there is but a step between him 
 and death every day; and as he usually has 
 (and ought to have) a family to support, that 
 step involves their lives as well as his own. 
 In the old days when a man was jack at all 
 trades, he could turn his hand to this or that, 
 and eke out a support somehow. We have 
 changed all that by our intricate division of 
 labor; helplessness is not too strong a word to 
 express the condition of a laborer out of em- 
 ployment. The sensible and hopeful solution 
 is being attempted, all over the world, slowly 
 
I20 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 and on a large scale. Men group together in 
 organizations, and seek to substitute collective 
 for individual bargaining. Wise employers 
 see not only the justice and fairness, but also 
 the good policy of this plan, and are gradu- 
 ally coming to adopt it. As a consequence 
 in many industries, wages are rising and the 
 condition of workmen is improving. A little 
 steady thinking shows that this project can 
 succeed only when the men stand together; if 
 individuals break away and accept lower 
 wages or longer hours, healthful progress is 
 checked. 
 
 On the other hand, bargaining is bargain- 
 ing, and it sometimes overreaches itself. Just 
 as a child tries to grasp more oranges than it 
 can hold and loses them all, the unions have 
 often put their claims higher than business 
 will bear, and after a stubborn strike they 
 have had to be content with lower wages. 
 This was a frequent experience in the past; so 
 frequent that the power of capital was much 
 strengthened by these struggles, and wealth 
 tended still more rapidly to consolidate in 
 
The Calling 121 
 
 fewer and fewer hands. At the present time, 
 organized labor is coming to a clearer under- 
 standing of what can and what cannot be 
 obtained; and it is capital that surrenders 
 oftenest. But the waste in all these trials of 
 strength is enormous; it is like nothing so 
 much as the waste of war, to which it is often 
 compared; and this waste is so needless as to 
 be truly lamentable. For it is as clear as the 
 noonday sun that the best interests of both 
 sides are served when they help each other 
 rather than when they fight each other. No 
 reasonable workman can expect a man who 
 has spent thousands of dollars and years of 
 time in making his brains capable of grap- 
 pling with the intricacies of a great business 
 to get less out of the business than he has put 
 into it. It is equally true that no employer 
 can expect his men to pinch their families 
 down to want and suffering in the face of the 
 abundant resources of America. If it is 
 claimed that there is not enough for all, the 
 claim cannot be allowed for a moment. 
 Looking back fifty years, we see that the 
 
122 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 wealth of America has increased many times 
 faster than the population. Where has this 
 wealth gone? Partly to able-bodied people 
 who work neither with hands nor head; and 
 this is all wrong; if any will not work, neither 
 should he eat. Partly to faithful workers in 
 every calling; and this is all right; the laborer 
 is worthy of his hire. But a very large part 
 of it has been absorbed by '^undesirable citi- 
 zens," financial magnates and kings of vast 
 estates and colossal trusts, as unmoved by the 
 misery of their neighbors as Dives in the 
 parable. This evil will never be settled until 
 it is settled right. What has been absorbed 
 can be reabsorbed. Great bodies move 
 slowly, but the great body of Americans have 
 become thoroughly persuaded that though the 
 heavens fall, justice must be done to all classes 
 in our brotherhood, and they will find or 
 make a way to secure it. A few years of 
 equitable taxation would puncture the swol- 
 len fortunes and lift the submerged tenth out 
 of the slough of despond. Whether the land 
 tax, advocated so ably by Henry George, or 
 
The Calling 123 
 
 some even more comprehensive and effective 
 plan will commend itself to our fellow-coun- 
 trymen, who hold the solution in their own 
 hands, time will soon disclose. Meanwhile, 
 the fact that each of us has a calling bears dis- 
 tinctly on the problem before us. 
 
 For it must not be supposed that factory 
 owners and workers are alone concerned; we 
 are all in the same body politic; if one mem- 
 ber suffers, all the members suffer with it. 
 Nothing in America can long resist the 
 aroused force of public opinion; even the 
 liquor traffic, though so strongly intrenched 
 in a popular appetite, is losing ground every 
 year. The question raised a few pages back, 
 ''how can my calling promote the kingdom 
 of God?'' we are to answer by throwing our- 
 selves heartily into the struggle for the eco- 
 nomic enfranchisement of our fellow-men. 
 Many of them have already won out to a fair 
 degree of comfort in their lives and homes. 
 Others we can cheer by our personal touch, 
 by making our convictions known, by stirring 
 up friends, by agitation through the press, by 
 
124 ^^^ Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 strict fairness and honesty in all our own deal- 
 ings, and by preaching in season and out of 
 season the worth of man as man. Most 
 Americans mean to do what is right when 
 they ascertain it; and though the problems of 
 society are many and complicated, there is no 
 justification for pleading that fact against the 
 plain duty of uniting all friends of righteous- 
 ness in a crusade against unwholesome tene- 
 ments, starvation wages, occupational diseases, 
 child labor, and direful poverty. Where 
 strife has failed, brotherhood will win. 
 
 It is only fair to say, in concluding this 
 chapter, that one of the easiest things in the 
 world would be to compile long lists of books 
 and articles advocating all sides of the subject 
 treated. The chief reason why I do not pre- 
 sent such a bibliography is that I believe it 
 will be of more benefit to my readers to think 
 than to cram. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE STATE 
 
 Antaeus, says the fable, was a Libyan giant, 
 offspring by Neptune of Terra, the earth. 
 Whenever he was thrown in wrestling, he 
 merely fell upon the bosom of his mother, 
 whose touch caused him to leap up with fresh 
 vigor. 
 
 Each department of human life belongs to 
 the kingdom of God. It has sprung from his 
 creative fiat, and being renewed by his con- 
 tinual Providence, it is invincible to all its 
 foes ; against whom there is a common talis- 
 man for the Home, the School, the Calling, 
 the State: — '^if it be of God, ye cannot over- 
 throw it." 
 
 The State is of God. We distinguish be- 
 tween the State and the administration, which 
 often misrepresents it even to caricature. 
 
 125 
 
126 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 The administration is a tangible thing; the 
 State is a spiritual thing. Governments de- 
 rive their just powers from the consent of the 
 governed, whenever the voice of the people 
 is the voice of God; for justice is his voice, 
 and (notwithstanding the abuse of this Scrip- 
 ture) the powers that be are ordained of God. 
 The mediaeval notion that the ruler is the 
 State {Vetat, c'est moif) is being shattered 
 into fragments by the terrible war in Europe. 
 The so-called great powers have massed 
 against each other huge murderous armies 
 
 "disgorging foul 
 Their devilish glut, chained thunderbolts and hail 
 Of iron globes." (Paradise Lost, VI 588-590.) 
 
 What they cannot destroy is the State. 
 What they will probably destroy is autocracy. 
 Never was there a clearer case in history of 
 vaulting ambition overleaping itself. The 
 enormous cruelty, together with the shocking 
 futility, of these sacrifices to Moloch, can 
 hardly fail to work out the deliverance of hu- 
 manity from the nightmare of war. God 
 grant it may be soon! I make no claim 
 
The State 127 
 
 to the gift of prophecy, but I was glad to 
 note at the outset of the struggle the drift of 
 thoughtful minds toward the conclusion that 
 alike in Russia, Austria, and Germany, the 
 pyramid of government, which has been anx- 
 iously balanced upon its point from time im- 
 memorial, is at last to be '^broad based upon 
 the people's will." 
 
 "One probability stands out so clearly as almost to 
 wear the guise of a certainty. It is that this war is to be 
 followed by immense popular upheavals. These will take 
 the form of determined protests against militarism, and 
 also against autocratic government. The vast, half artic- 
 ulate masses will no longer consent to be thought of as 
 merely food for cannon whenever their besotted rulers give 
 the signal for carnage." — New York Evening Post, 
 August 13, 1914. 
 
 *'As long as any nation or any sovereign in Europe re- 
 tains the power or the will to devastate an unhappy neigh- 
 bor as Germany has done to Belgium, or to plunge a con- 
 tinent into war without warning, as Austria has done to 
 Europe, so long is any peace in the real sense of the word 
 a social impossibility. . . . 
 
 This monstrous grov/th of militarism must fall if civil- 
 ization is to endure. It is falling now, and the more com- 
 plete and costly its death-throes, and the more of dynastic 
 jealousies and 'divine' rights it pulls down and buries with 
 it, the freer will the field be for the growth of a real peace 
 which can only have its roots in the brotherhood of man." 
 — The Churchman, August 15, IQH-^ 
 
 1 Twenty-five years ago, Woodrow Wilson compressed these 
 doctrines into a sentence of six words: "Monarchies exist only 
 by democratic consent." (The State, Boston, 1889, p. 609.) It 
 
128 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 However high the probability of such fore- 
 casts, we have to admit that they stop short of 
 certainty. But there is one certainty in the 
 future; that the kingdoms of this w^orld are 
 to become the kingdom of our Lord. That 
 abutment stands firm, and it indicates the di- 
 rection of the bridge over which civilization 
 is to pass. Kings and empires come and go, 
 but the word of our God shall stand forever. 
 
 Now the phrase which closes the quotation 
 just given from the Churchman, "the broth- 
 erhood of man," is synonymous with "the 
 kingdom of God," as we have seen in the first 
 part of this book. It follows that the bridge 
 which extends from the point where we now 
 stand to the goal of history must be built on 
 the lines of universal brotherhood if it is to 
 connect with the only pier that can make it 
 secure at its farther extremity. To attempt 
 
 is remarkable that Franz Oppenheimer's recent book with the 
 same title (Indianapolis, 1914), proceeding on wholly different 
 lines, comes out at so similar results. "The 'State' of the future 
 will be society guided by self-government" (p. 275). "This 
 has been the path of the suffering and of the salvation oi hu- 
 manity . . . from war to peace, from the hostile splitting up 
 of the hordes to the peaceful unity of mankind, from brutality 
 to humanity, from the exploiting State of robbery to the Free- 
 men's Citizenship" (p. 290). 
 
The State 129 
 
 its construction at any other angle would be 
 to commit the folly of the man in Luke 6 : 49, 
 who without a foundation built his house 
 upon the sand. The bridge of conquest, for 
 instance, can never reach the abutment of 
 God's consummated kingdom, nor can the 
 bridge of tyranny, or the bridge of selfish am- 
 bition. It may be objected that this is to 
 paint the future in the rainbow colors of what 
 we hope for, and to shut our eyes to the evi- 
 dence of what we see all about us. I grant 
 the force of the objection, and admit that my 
 faith is the substance of things hoped for, the 
 evidence of things not seen. But this is a 
 hard-headed, common-sense faith; the faith 
 that the architects of the future are not going 
 to be such dunces as to attempt a zigzag 
 bridge instead of projecting a bee line to the 
 goal. This faith is confirmed by sighting 
 back along a few prominent piers in the past 
 march of civilization. There is Magna 
 Charta, which lifts the meadows of Runny- 
 mede higher than the Himalayas. Never has 
 there been since, and never can there be again 
 
130 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 in England, a King John with his whims to 
 tilt against English freedom. ''No freeman 
 shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised 
 of his freehold, or liberties, or free customs, 
 or be outlawed, or exiled, or any otherwise 
 destroyed, nor will we pass upon him, nor 
 send upon him, but by lawful judgment of his 
 peers, or by the law of the land. We will sell 
 to no man, we will not deny or delay to any 
 man, justice or right." 
 
 Four hundred years later another compact 
 was struck, which exalts the Mayflower till it 
 dominates all the dreadnoughts of all the 
 navies. Mr. Bancroft has something to say 
 about that abutment.^ 
 
 ''The Pilgrims were Englishmen, Protestants, exiles for 
 religion, men disciplined by misfortune, cultivated by op- 
 portunities of extensive observation, equal in rank as in 
 rights, and bound by no code but that of religion or the 
 public will. . . . They formed themselves into a body 
 politic by a solemn voluntary compact" (which he then 
 quotes, and proceeds) : — ''This instrument was signed by 
 the whole body of men, forty-one in number, who with 
 their families constituted the one hundred, the whole 
 colony, the 'proper democracy' that arrived in New Eng- 
 land. This was the birth of popular constitutional liberty. 
 The middle age had been familiar with charters and con- 
 
 2 History of the United States, I, 308-310. 
 
The State 131 
 
 stitutions but they had been merely compacts for immuni- 
 ties, partial enfranchisements, patents of nobility, conces- 
 sions of municipal privileges, or limitations of the sover- 
 eign power in favor of feudal institutions. In the cabin 
 of the Mayfloiver, humanity recovered its rights, and in- 
 stituted government on the basis of 'equal rights' for the 
 'general good'." 
 
 In this last sentence, wny does Mr. Ban- 
 croft say that humanity recovered instead of 
 J/jcovered its rights? For a partial answer, 
 we look back thousands of years to another 
 signal monument of history. Though so re- 
 mote, it is plainly visible. It is Mount Sinai 
 in Arabia. 
 
 "For special ends, not here necessary to detail, God pro- 
 posed to be the civil ruler as v^rell as the tutelar Deity of 
 the Hebrevi^s, and was formally accepted as such by the 
 popular voice. A constitution or platform of government 
 was also proposed and formally adopted, and a solemn rati- 
 fication of the whole and inauguration of the government 
 occurred. ... In this one instance only has God assumed 
 such a relation. And in this, he so sanctioned and re- 
 garded popular rights, that he admitted the sovereignty 
 of the Jewish people, and would not himself take the rule 
 over the nation except by their express consent. Had the 
 nation refused to accept the offer, it would have been the 
 sin of ingratitude and contempt of such distinguished 
 favor, but not the crime of rebellion against political sov- 
 ereignty. Here, a thousand years before the time of Peri- 
 cles, is the most ancient and valid recognition of the rights 
 of popular freedom. We can better afford to lose all the 
 examples of free institutions in Greece and Rome, than 
 
132 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 this one divine acknowledgment of the sovereign right of 
 a people to determine their own form of government." ^ 
 
 Two points suffice to determine a straight 
 line, but we have found already five points in 
 the same straight line along the causeway 
 of progress. They are Sinai, Runnymede, 
 Provincetown, the present moment, and the 
 great consummation. It must be conceded 
 that there have been a multitude of deviations 
 from this line of progress, for ^'men will not 
 go right till they have tried all possible ways 
 of going wrong." The causeway is washed 
 on either side by a surging gulf, strewn with 
 the wrecks of people and peoples that have 
 built on other foundations, from Pharaoh's 
 host to the impending wreck in Europe. But 
 the hour is coming when even the militant 
 Germans will find shelter under their own 
 true proverb: 
 
 "Der gerade Weg ist der beste." 
 
 We are better able now than before to an- 
 swer the question that has been pressing upon 
 us: ^What is the State?" It is humanity 
 
 3L. p. Hickok, A System of Moral Science. (Boston, 1887.) 
 
The State 133 
 
 organized for government. Translated into 
 popular speech out of Kant's philosophical 
 definition of an organism (see page loi), the 
 State is the brotherhood of mankind. The 
 question what is a State? requires a different 
 answer, a reference to a division of humanity 
 into populations, each owning allegiance to a 
 central authority; or, as in the United States, 
 to a subdivision of such a division, for exam- 
 ple, the State of South Dakota. There are 
 still wheels within these wheels, city govern- 
 ments and town governments. All these are 
 to be considered as means of grace; we are 
 concerned vdth them here in their relation to 
 the kingdom of God. Let us begin with the 
 inner circle, municipal government. 
 
 I select for illustration two cities which are 
 very far apart, while yet their likenesses are 
 as important as their differences, the cities of 
 Jerusalem and Philadelphia. They are sep- 
 arated, it is true, by more than a hundred de- 
 grees of longitude, but it is latitude rather 
 than longitude that signifies. Put them 
 equally far apart, one in the arctic zone, the 
 
134 ^^^ Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 other in the torrid, and we should not think 
 of comparing them. As, however, there are 
 only eight degrees^ difference of latitude, the 
 climatic, conditions are similar. Both cities 
 are extremely warm in summer; on the other 
 hand, I have never felt so raw a March wind 
 in Philadelphia, as that which penetrated to 
 the very marroW on the day I left Jerusalem. 
 It may be claimed that the difference of ori- 
 gin and character separates these cities far 
 more effectually than that of position on the 
 map. 
 
 "Jerusalem belongs to far antiquity; she lives on her 
 past an^d moulders within her ancient walls. Her own 
 people are ground down in hopeless poverty and misery, 
 under the heel of an alien race of conquerors, who spurn 
 all rights but their own. Philadelphia is thousands of 
 years younger, the birthplace of liberty and the home of 
 freedom, where all men are equal; a city of law and or- 
 der and of the highest civilization, throbbing with the 
 life of to-day, and reaching out with hope to greet the 
 morrow." 
 
 It is evident that this hypothetical speaker 
 has never gone to Jerusalem. If he had, he 
 would have seen a modern city which long 
 ago overflowed its walls, and which annually 
 stretches out farther into the open country; a 
 
The State 135 
 
 city with banks and hotels, libraries and sci- 
 entific institutions; with five post-offices, and 
 twelve consulates, and railroad and telegraph 
 facilities. As to law and order, is it wise for 
 Philadelphia to boast over other cities? Not 
 until time has proved that the present wave of 
 reform is more dependable than that of 1906. 
 In the matter of race domination, is it seemly 
 for her to throw stones at Jerusalem? Per- 
 haps she would be better employed in ponder- 
 ing another of the good books that ought to be 
 better known: The Philadelphia Negro, a 
 Social Study, by Professor W. E. B. Dubois.^ 
 This is a large octavo of more than five hun- 
 dred pages, a cool, scientific collection of facts 
 that cannot be contravened, leading up to the 
 inescapable conclusion: "The situation is a 
 disgrace to the city — a disgrace to its Chris- 
 tianity, to its spirit of justice, to its common- 
 sense. What can be the end of such a policy 
 but increased crime and increased excuse for 
 crime; increased poverty and more reason to 
 be poor; increased political serfdom of the 
 
 * Published in 1899 by the University of Pennsylvania, 
 
136 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 mass of black voters to the bosses and rascals 
 who divide the spoils?" 
 
 The last count in that indictment has a di- 
 rect bearing on the subject of this chapter, 
 The State. Jerusalem can teach us here, as 
 Job taught us on the industrial question, 
 Philadelphia, it is true, rang the bell v^hich 
 proclaimed liberty throughout all the land — 
 a direct corollary from the brotherly love of 
 her founder; but where did she get that prin- 
 ciple? It was in the temple courts of Jeru- 
 salem that a Great Prophet put forth, as the 
 core and summary of all law between man 
 and man, an utterance which rose in the night 
 like a silver star that will never set: 
 
 ''Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." 
 
 Here is the only, and at the same time the 
 perfect, solution for the political problems of 
 the city and the state, the nation and the 
 world. Deist though he was, Jefferson testi- 
 fied that he derived his practical conceptions 
 of civil liberty from the actual working of the 
 doctrine of equal rights in a little Baptist 
 
The State 137 
 
 church in Virginia, where all were members 
 one of another. 
 
 We are searching, in every case, not for a 
 "problem" but for a help; a means for the 
 diffusion of the gospel of brotherhood. 
 When Christianity was young, the cities of 
 the Roman world were a potent help to that 
 diffusion. It was a sound and rational in- 
 stinct — not to add, an inspiration from above 
 — which led Paul and his fellow-apostles to 
 centre their efforts in the great cities, where 
 neighborhood was most manifest, where the 
 leaven would work most effectually, where 
 Roman law was supreme, where the civil pol- 
 ity itself was often a means of grace. Men 
 in our day of like fidelity and equal concen- 
 tration of purpose, men like General Booth 
 and Dr. McAll and Jacob Riis, who can say 
 ''this one thing I do," have achieved results 
 not only in penetrating the darkness of great 
 cities with the light of love, but in making 
 these very cities effective engines for the 
 propagation of the truth as it is in Jesus. 
 
 The principle being the same, we can leap 
 
138 . The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 logically from the local view to the world 
 view. The voice from heaven that cried 
 when Jesus was born: "on earth peace, good 
 will toward men," sounded the reveille to a 
 sleeping world. The world awoke and 
 laughed the message to scorn. Governments 
 made themselves merry over the new gospel, 
 or killed and burned the peacemakers. Both 
 the principle and the policy of universal 
 peace were never more scornfully derided by 
 the powers that hold the front of the stage 
 than at the present moment. ''Look," they 
 say, ''at the alacrity with which the multitudes 
 who had been declaiming against war sprang 
 to arms when the tocsin sounded." True, but 
 the mills of God grind slowly! It was with 
 reference to similar circumstances that our 
 Lord proclaimed, "the end is not yet." Out 
 of the turmoil will emerge a new heaven and 
 a new earth. It is impossible for the strong 
 man of the parable to prevail against the 
 stronger than he; force is not so mighty as 
 brotherhood. 
 
The State 139 
 
 **A reborn race appears — a perfect world — all joy! 
 War, sorrow, suffering gone — the rank earth purged." 
 
 There have been times when Christian civi- 
 lization seemed much nearer its doom than it 
 seems in 191 5. But when the enemy came in 
 like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord lifted up a 
 standard against him. If we would accustom 
 ourselves to walk by faith instead of by sight; 
 if we truly believed in the God who is not in 
 the empty void we call the sky, but who moves 
 in a mysterious way through the very heart of 
 mankind, we should feel no alarm at the spec- 
 tacle of the raging nations. Rather should 
 we read therein the speedy triumph of that 
 democracy which spells humanity, and the 
 speedy overthrow of that fiendishness which 
 thinks to settle truth and right by human 
 slaughter. We should take the celestial view 
 of the present distress: ^Wo to the inhabit- 
 ers of the earth and of the sea! for the devil 
 is come down unto you, having great wrath, 
 because he knoweth that he hath but a short 
 time/' (Rev. 12: 12.) 
 
 Let us boldly accept the challenge of the 
 
140 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 god Thor, and rejoice in the national democ- 
 racy already achieved as an earnest and fore- 
 taste of the world democracy that is to be. 
 
 "For mankind are one in spirit and an instinct bears along, 
 Round the earth's electric circle, the swift flash of right or 
 
 wrong ; 
 Whether conscious or unconscious, yet Humanity's vast 
 
 frame 
 Through its ocean-sundered fibres feels the gush of joy 
 
 or shame ; — 
 In the gain or loss of one race, all the rest have equal 
 
 claim." 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE BIBLE 
 
 We pass from the unconventional means of 
 grace to things more commonly considered to 
 be such means. And first the Bible. 
 
 This is an age that questions everything, 
 and nothing more freely and frequently than 
 the divine authority of the Christian Scrip- 
 tures. It cannot be denied that much danger 
 and damage are incurred in connection with 
 the criticism of the Old and New Testaments; 
 but great will be the astonishment of the peo- 
 ple who commonly make this complaint when 
 they learn that it is they, and not the critics, 
 who are to blame, and who are in danger of 
 incurring and inflicting the damage. Among 
 the best friends of the Bible are its critics, 
 while those who object to criticism are friends 
 well-meaning, but injudicious. Their error, 
 which resembles that of Uzzah, is due to one 
 or both of two causes ; ignorance of what criti- 
 
 141 
 
142 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 cism is and want of acquaintance with the 
 critics. Beginning with the latter, I present 
 a bit of testimony. It has been my privilege, 
 as well as duty, to know personally the lead- 
 ing biblical critics of America for the last 
 thirty years, besides a number who belong to 
 other countries. They have no horns nor 
 hoofs, but are Christian gentlemen. The one 
 thing which best characterizes them as a class 
 and as individuals is their sincere devotion to 
 the truth. One of the ablest and most level- 
 headed of them, who has lately gone to his 
 reward, I counted among my warm friends; 
 Professor Willis J. Beecher, whom I have 
 mentioned in another connection (page 42). 
 Among the reasons why our country is not 
 likely to be swept away by irreverent and 
 irrational notions about the Bible, one of the 
 chief is the great bulwark which Professor 
 Beecher raised, in the thorough training of a 
 whole generation of ministers and other stu- 
 dents, by his courses of biblical criticism in 
 the weekly issues of the Sunday School Times. 
 That remark involves the other count of the 
 
The Bible 143 
 
 indictment, ignorance of what criticism is. 
 It is nothing more nor less than commonsense 
 judgment, either about the Bible or any other 
 subject. Critics come honestly to the most 
 diverse and opposite results, but criticism it- 
 self is a set of processes, not of results; these 
 processes are perilous only to those who are 
 afraid of the truth. To illustrate by begin- 
 ning where we are all agreed : the book known 
 as the Bible did not, as a book, come down out 
 of heaven. Moreover, there is no great man 
 in the sky to hand down even a portion of it. 
 I remember well with what a start I once 
 awoke to realize the fact that I no longer be- 
 lieved that a man named Moses climbed a 
 mountain and received directly from the 
 hands of some one named God two heavy 
 stones, written by the literal finger of this 
 same God. 
 
 "But does not the Bible say, distinctly and emphatically, 
 that the ten commandments were written by the finger of 
 God?" 
 
 Indeed it does; and Emerson says, as dis- 
 tinctly and emphatically, that the shot fired 
 
144 ^^^ Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 at Concord was heard round the world. As 
 a matter of fact, it was not even heard at 
 Winchester, only ten miles away. What is 
 true to fact may be false to truth. The em- 
 battled farmers did make themselves heard 
 around the world, and the ten commandments 
 are God's own law. Be on your guard 
 against what Professor Beecher calls "the 
 baby-story theory of the Bible," It con- 
 ceives, for instance, that the Israelites, when 
 they had come out of Egypt, marched back 
 and forth for forty years through a barren 
 desert, in solid column like a Salvation Army 
 regiment, and that they were fed only on 
 bread from heaven with an occasional quail. 
 The truth probably is that they were scattered 
 all over an immense pasture land, whereon 
 their cattle subsisted, while they subsisted on 
 the flesh and milk of their cattle as well as on 
 the manna ; the latter being a sign, not a sine 
 qua non. 
 
 It should be remembered also that the word 
 critic means judge, not advocate. Too many 
 would-be critics are judge-advocates, the em- 
 
The Bible 145 
 
 phasis falling on the second word of the com- 
 pound. Some of them are never so happy as 
 when they think they have put the biblical 
 writers ^'in a hole," by fathering upon them 
 the above and similar baby-story theories. 
 The writers of the Old Testament were 
 mostly prophets or men of prophetic spirit. 
 They have their own theory of IsraePs na- 
 tional development, a theory which is rever- 
 ent, consistent, and reasonable. The judge- 
 advocate school of critics has an entirely 
 opposite theory, which some other critics con- 
 sider irreverent, inconsistent and unreasona- 
 ble. The position of the former class of 
 critics should be met, not by denouncing them 
 as atheists and casting them out of the church, 
 but by answering their arguments, which are 
 often strong as well as plausible. 
 
 One of the neglected good books — the best, 
 I think, on this especial phase of the question 
 — is called The Early Religion of Israel} A 
 singular "result of criticism" is that no thor- 
 ough-going answer to it has ever been 
 attempted, so far as I know. 
 
 ^ By Professor James Robertson. London, 1892. 
 
146 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 What now is the Bible? It is so precious 
 that we cannot bear to have it abused and 
 misrepresented, as though it were a sacred 
 fetish, instead of a living voice. The Bible 
 is a growth, a library. God is in it and man 
 is in it. When its writers penned their great 
 truths, God was not outside of them, but 
 was closer than breathing, nearer than hands 
 and feet; he was in their very minds. On the 
 other hand, it is not to be denied for a moment 
 that God was at the same time infinitely above 
 them. German critical scholarship has given 
 terse expression to the need of blending in one 
 the thought of God's transcendence and that 
 of his immanence; denying the former, we 
 land in pantheism; denying the latter, in 
 deism. The every-day Christian believes in 
 God's providence, and so is in little danger of 
 deism; no more will he forget the divine 
 transcendence if he prays every day: ^'Our 
 Father, who art in heaven." 
 
 Biblical criticism, like any other, is either 
 lower or higher. The former has respect to 
 the true reading of passages (for instance, 
 
The Bible 14,7 
 
 John 1:18, ''the only-begotten Son," or ''God 
 only-begotten") ; the latter goes back of the 
 text to sources and circumstances (for in- 
 stance, what can we learn about the previous 
 prevalence of the idea of a divine begetting?). 
 Now this last procedure belongs to the realm 
 of science, and it need not and should not con- 
 cern the average Christian at all. When he 
 reads in Eph. 5 : 2, "Walk in love, as Christ 
 also loved us, and gave himself for us, an 
 offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet- 
 smelling savor," he understands this call, and 
 resolves to follow Christ by walking in love, 
 even to sacrifice. When some higher critic 
 tells him that this idea of a sweet-smelling 
 savor goes back to the statement in Genesis 
 that Jehovah smelled the sweet savor of 
 Noah's offering, and that that goes back to the 
 Babylonian account of the deluge, which re- 
 lates that the gods scented the sacrifice and 
 came flocking around it like flies, his indigna- 
 tion knows no bounds; he straightway pro- 
 nounces a curse upon the higher critics and 
 all their works. But that critic is on a par 
 
148 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 with another, who maintains that joining the 
 hands in marriage is a relic of the savage cus- 
 tom of seizing a wife from the enemy; and 
 he is on a par with still another, who holds 
 that human love itself is a development from 
 brute passion. The true answer in each case 
 is, ^What of it? If the flower grew out of 
 the mud, it was born of the sunlight as truly." 
 It is not the remote origin of love but its pres- 
 ent essence that most concerns us. We know 
 that love is life, and that mere passion is the 
 death of love. Let the sociologists go on in- 
 vestigating the origin of marriage,' while we 
 ever keep the vow and covenant we have 
 truly made with our wives. Let critical sci- 
 ence delve freely into the dim traditions of 
 pagan ceremonies, while we believe and are 
 sure that sacrificial devotion cannot be ac- 
 counted for by that mud ; hereby perceive we 
 love, because he laid down his life for us. 
 
 We are indebted to the so-called destructive 
 criticism for destroying some religious cus- 
 toms that were foolish or worse. It was once 
 believed — and there are still many who will 
 
The Bible 149 
 
 assent to the proposition if it is stated in gen- 
 eral terms — that the precepts of the Bible are 
 as binding on us as they were on those to 
 whom they were first given. But when we 
 begin to particularize, they draw back at 
 once. All over Christendom, two or three 
 centuries ago, the very explicit command, 
 *^Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" was 
 obeyed with strict fidelity; as a result, hun- 
 dreds of innocent people, especially on the 
 continent of Europe, were executed without 
 mercy. Their blood cried out against this 
 barbarity, but cried in vain for many a long 
 year. Biblical criticism shows that that stat- 
 ute has no standing in our age. 
 
 Unintentional cruelty on a small scale was 
 manifested by our fathers when they steeled 
 their hearts, and continued to ply the rod, be- 
 cause they had read in the book of Proverbs, 
 "Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let 
 not thy soul spare for his crying." But the 
 scholarly critics who produced the Revised 
 Version give the true translation : "do not set 
 thy heart upon his death." In my boyhood, 
 
150 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 it was a common thing for a devout person to 
 open the Bible at random, expecting to put 
 his finger on a passage which would bring a 
 special revelation to him. But this is to use 
 the Bible not as a means of grace but as a 
 game of chance. Akin to that undignified 
 searching of Scripture, because resting on the 
 same false notion that all parts of it are God's 
 message to us, was the practise (still some- 
 what prevalent) of reading the whole Bible 
 through, a chapter at a time, in family wor- 
 ship. A fellow-student, in my college days, 
 gave an effectual illustration of the absurdity 
 of this custom. We were spending a Sunday 
 at a farm-house in the country, where it was 
 the law of the house that each member of the 
 family, including the stranger within the 
 gates, should read in turn at prayers. The 
 regular progression had brought up for that 
 day the seventh chapter of Numbers, with its 
 eighty-nine verses, giving twelve repetitions 
 of the same series of offerings. All these 
 were deliberately read through, and as there 
 happened to be six readers, my comrade, 
 
The Bible 151 
 
 whose wit exceeded his reverence, had to state 
 just a dozen times that '^his offering was one 
 silver charger, the weight whereof," etc. He 
 improved the opportunity by putting an ac- 
 cent of gentle surprise on the word his, as 
 though each tribal chief had brought some- 
 thing new. 
 
 But enough of these examples of how not to 
 use the Bible; one sees at a glance that our 
 host might easily have chosen a real word of 
 God, that would have been living and power- 
 ful in the heart of that careless young man. 
 
 If it be granted that biblical criticism may 
 be a means of grace, it is clearer still that the 
 Bible itself may be a most powerful means 
 of grace.^ I take for granted the essential 
 factor of co-operation on the part of the stu- 
 dent, for even the Bible does not work by 
 magic; it takes two to make it work effectu- 
 ally. You are to work out your own salva- 
 tion while God is working in you. No such 
 lazy method as reading a chapter today and 
 
 2 The phrase ''the Bible as a means of grace" occurs re- 
 peatedly in Professor Ladd's excellent book, What Is the Bible? 
 (New York, 1888.) 
 
1^2 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 forgetting it tomorrow, or as reading here and 
 there at random, putting Chronicles on a level 
 with John, will make the Bible a powerful 
 means of grace. 
 
 But here I shall be reminded of Paul's 
 declaration (II Tim. 3: 16), "All Scripture is 
 given by inspiration of God." When a man 
 quotes that passage as a proof-text, he is at- 
 tempting to reason; it will not do for him to 
 deny this and say he is appealing only to faith. 
 The truth is, he advances two syllogisms. 
 First: "Whatever Paul says is so; Paul says 
 that all parts of the Bible are given by inspi- 
 ration of God; therefore they are." Second: 
 "Whatever is given by inspiration of God is 
 profitable for us; but we have proved that 
 every part of the Bible is so given; therefore 
 we shall be profited, whatever part we take." 
 The argument is as full of flaws as an tgg is 
 of meat. Neglecting other fallacies, note 
 that this is what the author of the epistle said; 
 Every God-breathed writing is also profitable 
 for teaching, etc. "First catch your hare"; 
 i. e., be sure you have a God-breathed writing 
 
The Bible 153 
 
 before you draw inferences from it. An elo- 
 quent barrister once exclaimed : ''You know, 
 gentlemen of the jury, we have the highest 
 authority for saying, All that a man hath will 
 he give for his life." His opponent proved 
 from the second chapter of Job that the 
 learned brother's highest authority was Satan! 
 Seriously, how can we distinguish what are 
 God's words in the Bible from what are not? 
 We cannot at all, in the case of every sentence, 
 but nothing depends on such an ability. The 
 Bible is to be taken not only in homeopathic 
 doses but in large portions, with an appetite 
 like that for our food (Job 23 : 12) . Look at 
 this same book of Job, where the sophistries 
 of the friends are sometimes met by Job's own 
 imprecations against God that reach almost to 
 blasphemy. And yet the great trend of the 
 book is intensely religious. The average 
 Christian has not the faintest conception of its 
 marvellous power; not because it is out of his 
 reach but because he has not absorbed it as a 
 whole. Even if he never reads the Bible 
 through, he ought to read the book of Job 
 
1^4 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 entire some Sunday afternoon. It will haunt 
 him through the week, and the next Sunday 
 he will read it again; and after he has read it 
 a few times, no one can persuade him that that 
 book was not given by inspiration of God. 
 An eminent college professor used to say that 
 one play of Shakespeare's read fifty times was 
 better than the whole series read once. I 
 verily believe that no reasonable being will 
 continue to shut God out of his life, when he 
 has read the book of Job fifty times. 
 
 Pass from Job to Jeremiah. The average 
 Christian calls him the weeping prophet, and 
 objects to ^'jeremiads." How far short he 
 falls of appreciating the statesmanship of that 
 man of God, that tower of strength in the day 
 of Jerusalem's crisis. One does not need to 
 go to the commentaries for this; it is all 
 plainly to be read in the book, the most inter- 
 esting autobiography I know. All the great- 
 est patriots of history — Dante, Mazzini, 
 Cromwell, Lafayette, Washington — would 
 rise up before Jeremiah and give him the 
 place of honor in their company. And how 
 
The Bible 155 
 
 the average man misapprehends the beautiful 
 little book of Jonah ; making it the subject of 
 unseemly jests because he is blind to its mes- 
 sage of divine grace. The very theme of the 
 book is that God loves the world; that he is 
 patient and full of compassion, not merely for 
 our set but for them that are far off. There 
 w^ere God-breathed men before there were 
 God-breathed writings. 
 
 If it were possible to summon a stout- 
 hearted unbeliever into a witnessing assembly, 
 comprising Jeremiah with all the goodly fel- 
 lowship of the prophets, Paul with all the 
 glorious company of the apostles, the authors 
 of the books of Job and Jonah with all the 
 inspired writers of holy Scripture, would he 
 not yield to their fervent appeals? Could he 
 fail to accept their united testimony: 'Sve are 
 God's ambassadors, as though God did be- 
 seech you by us?" If he heeded them not, 
 neither would he be persuaded though one 
 rose from the dead. And he has them all in 
 his own home. Suppose, instead, that he was 
 surrounded by the prophets of Baal and of 
 
156 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 Mohammed and of Buddha; what a descent! ^ 
 Herein we begin to perceive the unique maj- 
 esty of the Bible, but only begin to perceive 
 it. We have not yet made the great ascent to 
 its loftiest mountain peak. The bibles of 
 other religions have no Christ. The poet 
 Lanier found something to forgive in them 
 all, while the music of his fine alliteration 
 lingers in our ears: "thou crystal Christ." 
 The sweetest message of our Bible tells us that 
 God so loved the world that he gave his only 
 begotten Son to save it. Imagine every copy 
 of the Scriptures lost and all their contents 
 blotted out of human memory. There is one 
 thing that would not go, the conscience. A 
 good conscience is a trusty friend, but a guilty 
 conscience is the most terrible of enemies. 
 In the case supposed, we should see a hapless 
 world, lost in sin, gnawed by remorse, seeking 
 deliverance and finding none. As surely as 
 our Father's name is love, he would restore 
 
 2 In a company of biblical scholars, I heard a learned Arabist 
 declare that in all Mohammedan literature, to say nothing of 
 the worthless and wicked parts of it, there is not a single moral 
 or spiritual truth that had not been previously given in the 
 Bible; "it is all there," he said. 
 
The Bible 157 
 
 what we had lost; he would give us back the 
 Bible, to reveal to our inmost hearts his Son, 
 Jesus Christ the Redeemer, manifested to take 
 away our sin; and the whole earth would ring 
 with the chorus, Hallelujah! what a Saviour! 
 
 Thus far in this chapter, we may have 
 seemed to be turning aside from the main goal 
 of the book, but every step has brought us 
 nearer to it. The meaning of Christian 
 unity, and the true formula for securing it, 
 are now as clear as the daylight. For we can- 
 not be satisfied with any partial unity which 
 stops short of our whole fallen race. To 
 quote again the words of Bishop Rhine- 
 lander:^ ''always, and in everything, it is fel- 
 lowship, or unity, that Christians seek; more 
 unity, and more fellowship, because they are 
 bound to be dissatisfied till all the race is one." 
 
 When will the race be one? When, and 
 only when, it is one in Christ. This is the 
 practical task before Christians; and a prac- 
 tical way to accomplish it is to make the full- 
 est possible use of the life of Christ, for which 
 
 ^ See p. 68. 
 
158 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 the Bible is our only original source. Wher- 
 ever that book shines into the darkness of 
 heathenism, Christ makes conquests; some- 
 times with, sometimes without, the voice of 
 the living preacher. The soul that has been 
 groping in that darkness reads in the new 
 book: "Christ Jesus is made unto us wisdom 
 and righteousness, sanctification and redemp- 
 tion." He tries it and finds it true. He may 
 have been a follower of some ethnic religion 
 that contained a certain measure of wisdom; 
 but redemption he never had known. To 
 look into the faces of a group of Hindus, a 
 little before and a little after they have come 
 to Christ, is to see a marvellous transforma- 
 tion, a conclusive proof of the victory of grace. 
 God was the author of that grace and the 
 Bible was the means of grace. It will con- 
 tinue its peaceful and radical conquests until 
 the kingdoms of this world become the king- 
 dom of our Lord and of his Christ. And its 
 spread is intensive as well as extensive, per- 
 sonal as truly as cosmic. Not only is the 
 world the subject of redemption but the soul 
 
The Bible 159 
 
 is the subject of redemption. The kingdom 
 of heaven is like leaven as well as like a mus- 
 tard-seed. The Bible says there is a fullness 
 of the blessing of the gospel of Christ, and 
 says it of an individual. 
 
 "All my capacious powers can want 
 In thee doth richly meet." 
 
 Besides the reading of the Bible in large 
 portions, which I have recommended, it is an 
 excellent practice to choose each morning 
 some pearl of great price from the treasury of 
 the Word, and carry it with you throughout 
 the busy day. The Bible will give you steadi- 
 ness in the nervous tension of work, courage 
 when the heart sinks, sympathy when you are 
 in danger of passing a wounded brother un- 
 heedingly. If it does not always bring you, 
 as it brought Jesus, deliverance from the 
 fierce assaults of the tempter, still it has a 
 word for you even when you stumble and fall, 
 the word of repentance and forgiveness. 
 
 What the Bible will do for you it will do 
 for anybody and everybody. Because God is 
 in it, the God who loves the whole world, it 
 
i6o The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 is bound to conquer the whole world. The 
 great message of the Bible is the faithful say- 
 ing that Christ Jesus came into the world to 
 save sinners. It is worthy of all acceptation, 
 that is, it ought to be received by everybody. 
 When it is so received. Christian unity will be 
 complete. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE LOCAL CHURCH 
 
 On the Isles of Shoals, one sees at intervals 
 a simple white post with a wedge-shaped box 
 attached to it. The eye that is fascinated by 
 the glories of sea and shore on a September 
 morning would hardly notice it, but for a 
 cluster of five initials that stand for ^^United 
 States Life Saving Station." We recall the 
 famous inscription on the Eddystone Beacon, 
 *^To give light and to save life." That is 
 what a church of Jesus Christ is for. It is a 
 branch of the true Israel, fulfilling the proph- 
 et's word: 
 
 "For behold, darkness shall cover the earth 
 And thick darkness the people. 
 But the Lord shall arise upon thee 
 And his glory shall be seen upon thee. 
 And nations shall come to thy light 
 And kings to the brightness of thy rising." 
 
 The church exists not only to give light but 
 to save life. Life-saving is a lofty mission, 
 
 i6i 
 
1 62 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 by no means to be restricted to the salvage of 
 wrecks. It is the business of every church to 
 save the whole life, from infancy to age; the 
 whole life, in all its manifold powers, that 
 Christ may be all and in all. The church 
 comes into close, personal grip with its com- 
 munity, and transforms it, by working to- 
 gether with God. There was a time when 
 these very islands were addicted to gross 
 crimes and horrible vices. ^ Today you could 
 not find a more orderly community. The 
 stone church on the summit of Star Island is 
 a light-house of a higher type than the gov- 
 ernment institution on White Island, and 
 throws its beams much farther. The great 
 granite monument hard by the church com- 
 memorates the work of a faithful pastor. 
 Draw a line from this point straight across the 
 continent to California. If it were not in- 
 vidious to name them, mention could be made 
 of many a pioneer settlement along that line, 
 in the middle and farther West, which began 
 
 1 See Joseph Williamson's History of Maine or Celia Thax- 
 ter's Among the Isles of Shoals. 
 
The Local Church 163 
 
 with the devil's forces in full possession — 
 saloons, brothels, gambling dives. Then 
 came a little band of Christians w^ith their 
 brave sky pilot, who knew that Satan's seat was 
 there, but knew neither fear nor failure. Not 
 as the conqueror comes they the true-hearted 
 came. The struggle was none the less real 
 because it was not a warlike clash ; as in Long- 
 fellow's ballad,^ it was ^'Cross against corse- 
 let, love against hatred." But it is the nature 
 of darkness to fly from the light; over and 
 over again the frontier has been redeemed, the 
 spiritual desert made to blossom as the rose. 
 Those callow sophomores and sophomoric 
 professors who give a superior smile when the 
 Christian church is named, and think it the 
 height of manliness to scoff at religion, should 
 study the making of the great West. 
 
 The local church has many forms. It may 
 be a little company of Japanese laborers, 
 meeting together for a service of prayer and 
 consecration, then going out in sublime faith 
 to evangelize an interior village where Christ 
 
 2 See p. 30. 
 
164 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 has never been named. From such a spirit- 
 ual height, we descend through varying 
 grades of power, down to some country 
 church in America, with hardly faith enough 
 to keep up its mid-week meetings, and thence 
 a long way down to the city church on the 
 most prominent corner of the residential dis- 
 trict in Laodicea; a church that is strong in 
 the statistics of the Year Book and in Phari- 
 saic pride. Not a church in the world is so 
 good that it ought not to be better, or so bad 
 that it cannot be redeemed. 
 
 What ^'the local church" would mean if 
 things were as they should be, is the sum of 
 all the Christian forces in a local region, a 
 parish. That is the way Christianity began; 
 for example, in the two cities I have named, 
 Jerusalem and Philadelphia. The same is 
 true of the large city church of which I am a 
 member. For generations, it was the only 
 church in its community, the only one in a 
 radius of some miles. If the local church 
 had always kept this range of meaning, it 
 would be a much more potent means of grace 
 
The Local Church 165 
 
 among the many that are working together to 
 enhance the existent degree of Christian 
 unity.^ At present there are six churches in 
 our section of the city, all covering the same 
 territory. One of these is regarded as hereti- 
 cal in faith (Unitarian), another as heretical 
 in government (Papal), by each of the other 
 five. But Christian Unity is growing, as fre- 
 quent union services between the ^yq Prot- 
 estant churches show. 
 
 In my church's original parish are scores of 
 other churches; yet probably more than half 
 the population of the city never darken the 
 doors of any kind of church. It is evident 
 that here is a fitting occasion for reform 
 to begin, like charity, at home. Let us make 
 a closer diagnosis. The average church in- 
 vests, let us say,^ $6,500 in its plant, whose 
 doors are open for periods not exceeding 
 the equivalent of sixty-five days out of the 
 three hundred and sixty-five. It takes forty- 
 two members of the average church to add 
 one new member a year, and it takes sixty- 
 
 3 See pp. 58, 68. 
 
 * These figures are from D. C. Tremaine's Church Efficiency, 
 New York, 1911. 
 
1 66 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 four such churches to add one church a year. 
 The entire gain in the average church is less 
 than three members a year; a large number 
 of churches regularly lose instead of gain. 
 Of the gains, eighty-two per cent, come from 
 the Sunday School; a hopeful fact until we 
 ascertain another fact, that only fifteen per 
 cent, of the Sunday School membership fur- 
 nish any additions at all. What becomes of 
 the other eighty- five per cent.? To what pur- 
 pose is this waste? It is true, to be sure, that 
 the church is doing other good things besides 
 adding to its numbers; but its chief business, 
 according to its charter, is to make disciples 
 (Mat. 28: 19). If a cotton factory made an 
 equally poor output of cotton cloth, it would 
 be cold comfort to the stockholders to add up 
 the by-products ; they would institute a thor- 
 ough shake-up of methods. But when we 
 come to these in the case before us, when we 
 pass from diagnosis to prescription, the doc- 
 tors differ widely. Some of the proposed 
 remedies suggest the laboratory expert rather 
 than the experienced practitioner; they are 
 
The Local Church 167 
 
 put forth in general terms, whereas their effi- 
 cacy is very restricted in extent. Consider, 
 for example, the advice often urged so 
 strongly, that the church building should be 
 kept open, warm, light, and attractive, every 
 night in the year. ''That is when the young 
 people are free; that is when the devil gets 
 them; why not beat him at his own game? 
 If you don't succeed at first, it only shows that 
 you haven't made the counter-attraction 
 strong enough. No factory could succeed if 
 it was closed five days in six as your cold 
 churches are." 
 
 This is fine laboratory theory. Perhaps it 
 will be read with a grim smile next winter 
 by some faithful country pastor who has just 
 come home from a parish visit, having driven 
 two miles in the night through deep snow and 
 howling wind. He hears the storm rocking 
 the spire and rattling the blinds of the little 
 church on the hill above him, and even if he 
 is equipped with a telephone, he does not call 
 up the sexton to ask why he did not warm and 
 light the church in the hope of catching the 
 
1 68 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 young people. He turns to last winter's 
 diary, and easily counts on his fingers the 
 number of nights when the vestry could have 
 been filled with young people by any induce- 
 ment short of a turkey supper or a dance; 
 either of which would find its more conveni- 
 ent and appropriate place in the village hall. 
 Meanwhile he is smiling again at the utter 
 folly of saddling his people with such a mon- 
 strous expense as the plan proposes. It is like 
 the favorite remedies of some other eminent 
 physicians; hopeless save to the rich. 
 
 ^'But I," exclaims a sturdy revivalist, 
 "could have filled that church on the hill 
 whatever the conditions; church asleep or 
 awake, weather cold or hot, storm or star- 
 light. I have had crowds in the largest halls 
 in Canada when the mercury outside was 
 forty degrees below zero, and crowds at open- 
 air noon meetings in New Orleans when it 
 stood at a hundred in the shade." 
 
 This testimony affords a second example of 
 the wrong strategy which would solve a gen- 
 eral problem out of a very limited experience. 
 
The Local Church, 169 
 
 It is pathetic to realize the impossibility of 
 convincing our egotistical brother that much 
 greater crowds of real Christians than he ever 
 assembled would go a long distance out of 
 their way to escape his meetings. His meth- 
 ods are warmly commended by some good 
 people and heartily abhorred by others just as 
 good. On these lines, Christian unity is im- 
 possible, as the science of psychology shows; 
 men, and even women, are not all built that 
 way. It is a condition that confronts us and 
 not a theory. I admit that many able and 
 influential pastors are wont to urge upon all 
 churches the occasional employment of pro- 
 fessional revivalists ; but perhaps they will ad- 
 mit some exceptions, if they make themselves 
 familiar with the life-work of the late Dr. 
 Theodore L. Cuyler. His long ministry was 
 wonderfully fruitful in the wise use of evan- 
 gelistic methods ; but he was his own evangel- 
 ist, and he earnestly enjoined it on each pastor 
 to do the work of an evangelist and make full 
 proof of his ministry. 
 
 "The mission of the Church," says Rev. 
 
170 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 J. O. Ashenhurst,^ ^'is the building of man- 
 hood to the glory of God, and this cannot be 
 accomplished if the Church expends its ener- 
 gies in periodically ^getting up a revival.' 
 In order to reap the full fruit of evangelism, 
 the Church must enlist all its members, in- 
 cluding its latest converts, in helpful benevo- 
 lence, philanthropy and reform, as well as 
 earnest Bible study, and prayer-filled service 
 for the conversion of souls." 
 
 The sum of the matter is that the question 
 whether and when to employ a professional 
 revivalist is largely a question of local tem- 
 perament. 
 
 Books in abundance are current, setting 
 forth the duties and responsibilities, the perils 
 and bright hopes, of the local church, whether 
 in city or country. A good bibliography is 
 given by Ernest E. Elliott at the close of his 
 little brochure.^ From twelve to fifty vol- 
 umes are mentioned under each of five divi- 
 sions: Prayer and worship, Bible study, 
 
 5 The Day of the Country Church, p. 75. New York, 1910. 
 
 6 Making Good in the Local Church. New York, 1913. 
 
The Local Church 171 
 
 Missions and social service, Business effi- 
 ciency, Soul-winning efficiency. Many of 
 these writers in the two departments of social 
 service and soul-winning lay stress on the 
 sociable atmosphere of a church, and espe- 
 cially on the practise of greeting newcomers 
 and following them up. This I regard as a 
 third case of wrong strategy, illustrating the 
 illogical leap from particulars to generals. 
 Here is an earnest deacon who complains to 
 his pastor that a certain prominent person has 
 left the congregation because so few people 
 noticed him, and has joined a neighbor church 
 where he will soon be made a pillar. The two 
 officials concoct an appeal to the congregation 
 to be "sociable" after the next service and 
 thenceforth. Neither of them knows that an 
 equally prominent person attends their 
 church just because he likes to have strong 
 truth put before him and then to go quietly 
 home thinking it over, without being ever- 
 lastingly button-holed and diverted on the 
 way. He will disappear as quietly when that 
 appeal is given, murmuring to himself: "one 
 
172 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 more church of the holy gushers." Since 
 such opposite temperaments really exist 
 among us, efforts for Christian unity must be 
 broad enough to include both, and especially 
 to work with power upon the heart of the 
 deacon in question, till he becomes so utterly 
 free from the spirit of rivalry as to rejoice sin- 
 cerely in each success of his neighbors, the 
 h. g.'s. After all, sociability is such awkward 
 business for some of us that when we attempt 
 it we are more likely to repel than to win. 
 
 I will mention only one more of these mis- 
 taken generalizations. Nearly all the ''au- 
 thorities'^ agree that the way to cure the 
 admitted evil of over-churching, most disas- 
 trous in small country places, is by joining 
 two or more weak churches into one strong 
 one, thus saving expense, developing energy, 
 and removing the reproach of the godless. 
 If we only had some benevolent super-pope, 
 they say, he could effect this by edict; as it is, 
 we must keep up our arguments and persua- 
 sions until these feeble churches are ashamed 
 to stay apart. 
 
The Local Church '173- 
 
 The trouble with this theory in many cases 
 is that it forgets the peculiar composition of 
 human nature, which such efforts are apt to 
 rub the wrong way. My own experience is 
 so slight that I should not mention it except 
 to ask if it may not be typical. I once became 
 pastor of a small country church, from which 
 another small church close by had separated 
 many years before, on a personal controversy, 
 the subject of which had long since died. Six 
 days of every week, the people on both sides 
 mingled heartily in neighborly ways; the sev- 
 enth day they "worshipped the Lord" in hos- 
 tile bands. Not the ghost of a reason could 
 be given for continuing this division. The 
 situation was too absurd to be endured, and I 
 spent several years (with the advice and sup- 
 port of eminently practical church leaders 
 outside) in all sorts of plans to change it for 
 the better. Every such attempt, of w^hatever 
 kind, produced an immediate resurgence of 
 the old trouble and another stiffening of the 
 wall of partition. All these efforts were 
 merely the beating of resistible waves against 
 
174 ^^^ Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 an immovable iceberg. I am persuaded that 
 what we all ought to have done was to try to 
 live so near the Lord Christ that the iceberg 
 would have been gently drawn into the gulf 
 stream of his love. Then it would matter 
 little whether we were two bands or one, ex- 
 ternally. 
 
 It will be wise now to turn from methods 
 appropriate to some kinds of churches but not 
 to others, and to consider briefly such as apply 
 to all, such as are fitted to make all of them 
 helpful means to promote Christian unity. 
 
 Fixing the eye, then, as in similar cases, not 
 upon a perfect church but upon a good sam- 
 ple, we observe what it is doing. Horace 
 iBushnell somewhere calls the Sunday School 
 ''the greatest work in the world." The local 
 church we are looking at has a live Sunday 
 School. The Bible is its great text-book, and 
 whatever else is neglected, the spiritual truths 
 of the Bible are winningly presented every 
 Sunday, both from the superintendent's desk, 
 and in the familiar converse of teacher and 
 scholar. Little children and those of older 
 
The Local Church 175 
 
 years sing the great h^^mns of the ages and 
 learn the great words of our Lord. They are 
 taught what man is to believe concerning God 
 and what duty God requires of man. The 
 Christian work of fathers and mothers in the 
 home is not supplanted but beautifully sup- 
 plemented by this Christ-like agency; and 
 when there is no Christian home, or an inef- 
 fective one, the fish are often caught in that 
 gospel net which we call the Sunday School. 
 The Christian teacher in the day-school re- 
 joices in the co-operation of her faithful Sab- 
 bath ally; the most promising triple alliance 
 on earth is that between the home, the school, 
 and the church, in the field of Christian nur- 
 ture. The sheep are shepherded as well as 
 the lambs; one of the most hopeful signs of 
 the times is the success that has attended 
 steady and tactful efforts to gather into Bible 
 classes the men of the community who had 
 neglected public worship."^ When such a 
 Sunday School is out on the frontier, it is 
 
 "^ On this subject, see a very helpful chapter in Tremaine, I.e., 
 pp. 86-96. 
 
176 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 pretty sure to develop into a strong and active 
 church of Christ. 
 
 It is simply axiomatic that those who eat 
 the same spiritual meat and drink the same 
 spiritual drink will grow up in the unity of 
 the Spirit; hence if our generation bends its 
 energies to the work of planting and sustain- 
 ing more and better Sunday Schools, the next 
 generation will enter on a new heritage of 
 Christian unity. 
 
 Every good church, we may be sure, is 
 preaching the sound, pure gospel of right- 
 eousness and redemption, through its pulpit 
 ministries, and is gathering its members in less 
 formal ways for prayer and praise and Chris- 
 tian conference. Abundant suggestions for 
 the betterment of all these means of grace are 
 to be found in the standard books which treat 
 of homiletics and pastoral theology. But, as 
 we have already seen in the chapter on the 
 home, the life is more than meetings. The 
 demands of our age give strong and proper 
 emphasis to the life of the church in the 
 world; its aggressive work for and on human 
 
The Local Church 177 
 
 society. It is a mistake to suppose that this 
 department of activity concerns the city and 
 not the country; every church, of whatever 
 description, is called of God to use sanctified 
 commonsense as salt to season its own vicinity. 
 Take for instance what looks like a clear case 
 to the contrary, Tremaine's admirable chapter 
 on church advertising (1. c. pages 97-108). 
 It seems to be calculated only for the latitude 
 and longitude of a large city — until you re- 
 flect that the smaller the hamlet, the more 
 thoroughly notices are scanned, even when 
 they are only pasted on barn doors. 
 
 Now what is the good church as it faces the 
 world, the church as a social force? The 
 chief product of the church, as of the home, 
 is Christian character, something you can tie 
 to, something you can build on as on the solid 
 rock. Mr. Ashenhurst well says (1. c. page 
 
 33): 
 
 "The practical teachings of Christianity applied to the 
 social life of the community require business integrity, edu- 
 cation, culture, courtesy, neighborliness, co-operation, and 
 civic activity." 
 
178 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 Again, page 31: 
 
 "The Church assumes no temporal authority as lord of 
 the parish, but is rather the heart, supplying the life-blood 
 of the gospel to every member (of the community), and 
 inspiring the activities of moral and social progress. The 
 chief function of the Church is to impress the truths of 
 Christianity upon the life of the people and to infuse the 
 principles of the gospel into every popular movement. 
 The function of the Church is inspirational." 
 
 Yes, It is inspirational, and we may add that 
 the spirit which the true church inspires is 
 that of hearty, universal brotherhood. 
 
 Conceive such a local church as has just 
 been described, and as we all, I trust, have 
 known, and this time suppose its locus to be 
 neither city nor country, but a small village, 
 that revolves in all its activities on the axis of 
 a cotton factory. Employers and employed 
 are in harmony. Every inhabitant lives on 
 the factory, is proud of it, sings its praises far 
 and near. We climb a hill and look down on 
 the village at our feet. Here is the huge mill, 
 yonder the little church; there the humble 
 parsonage of the Christian minister, here the 
 stately palace of the cotton king. Try now 
 to realize the simple truth, that for every 
 
The Local Church ijc) 
 
 benefit that has its source in the factory, ten 
 have their source in the church; nay more, 
 that taking them singly, each gift received 
 through the hands of the pastor is as much 
 superior to each bestowed by the millionaire 
 as character is better than cotton. You will 
 be helped to see this truth if you simply imag- 
 ine the civilization to be heathen instead of 
 Christian.^ 
 
 It follows that the major tactics of Chris- 
 tian unity are to be found in fostering, puri- 
 fying, and multiplying everywhere, churches 
 of our Lord Jesus Christ, each one the pillar 
 and ground of the truth, the means of grace, 
 and the hope of glory. 
 
 8 Cf . Professor E. A. Park's great Convention Sermon, "The 
 Indebtedness of the State to the Clergy," the first in his volume 
 called Discourses. Andover, 1885. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 If a stranger in New York City, walking 
 with a friend past a well-known building, 
 should inquire, on reading the words Young 
 Men's Christian Association^ *^To what 
 church does that belong?" the answer might 
 be "to no church," or "to all the churches," 
 or "to the catholic church." There would 
 be a measure of truth in either answer but the 
 last would be truest. Observe, by the way, 
 that we sometimes diminish the size of objects 
 when we begin their names with capital let- 
 ters. "The Catholic Church" is a limited 
 company, while "the catholic church" is uni- 
 versal. The same question and answers 
 would apply to the headquarters of the 
 American Sunday School Union in Philadel- 
 phia; or again to the Y. P. S. C. E. in Boston, 
 whose catholicity appears already from the 
 
 fact that its initials, like Y. M. C. A., need no 
 
 i8o 
 
The Catholic Church i8l 
 
 interpretation. But we cannot assume with- 
 out challenge the meaning of the middle term, 
 *^the catholic church." 
 
 In the year 1910, a Commission was ap- 
 pointed to prepare a World Conference of 
 the Catholic Church. It has worked steadily 
 ever since; its product is large and valuable. 
 At a meeting of its advisory committee 
 (March 12, 1914), one of the eminent Bishops 
 on that committee advised his colleagues thus: 
 
 *'I think we ought to go right at work and get at a 
 rock-bottom understanding of what the Church is." "If 
 we can once get a grasp of what we can agree on as the 
 Church, I think we can follow it out." "If we can get 
 down first that we know ourselves what the Church is, 
 and begin to agree as to what grace is, and as to what the 
 functions of the ministry are, ... we have the basis on 
 which we can stand. The difficulty now is the shifting 
 foundation, and we want to get down deep at the founda- 
 tion to begin with." 
 
 The quotations are from page 30 of the Com- 
 mittee's report, and it appears from a careful 
 reading of the whole report that several more 
 years may well be spent in that special in- 
 vestigation. 
 
 "The Catholic Church comprises the whole company of 
 the faithful, who have received the blessed sacraments at 
 
1 82 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 the hands of consecrated men, who themselves received 
 them from others, reaching back in an unbroken chain 
 vi^hose first link is the holy apostles of our Lord." 
 
 That is one conception. 
 
 "The catholic church comprises all w^ho follow Jesus: 
 Christ." 
 
 That is another conception; and in this free 
 land there is no good reason why the subject 
 should not be freely discussed. Will the 
 reader please be patient with the destructive 
 criticism which must precede construction? 
 
 The other day I brought to Boston my 
 brother Lambeth, who has the cheerful hope 
 of uniting Christendom on the famous quadri- 
 lateral — bible, creeds, episcopate, and sacra- 
 ments. As we stood before the statue of 
 "Lincoln striking the fetters from the slave," 
 I exclaimed: "The Spirit of the Lord was 
 upon Lincoln when he proclaimed deliver- 
 ance to the captives ; when he let the oppressed 
 go free and brake every yoke." "You for- 
 get," said Lambeth; "Lincoln was unsound on 
 the Sacraments." We proceeded to the Pub- 
 lic Garden, a miniature paradise, and with 
 
The Catholic Church 183 
 
 gates, too, on the east, on the south, on the 
 west and on the north. At one of the east 
 gates, we looked into the grave, sculptured 
 face of Edward Everett Hale. ^There," I 
 said, ^'is a beloved pastor, who administered 
 the sacraments long and faithfully to young 
 and old. Multitudes have been led to Christ 
 by the book entitled In His Name; the 
 hearty fellowship of its author in every good 
 work is mirrored in the little book. If lesus 
 Came to Boston/' "He that is not with me 
 is against me," said Lambeth; ^'Hale op- 
 posed the Historic Episcopate." We walked 
 on to the south gate, where the statue of 
 Charles Sumner stands on its pedestal. "A 
 man after your own heart," I observed; "fed 
 week by week on the Episcopal service in his- 
 toric King's Chapel. Would that we could 
 hear again that inspiring voice, which pro- 
 claimed liberty throughout all the land, to all 
 its inhabitants, white or black. Would that 
 we could see again the hero, who was such an 
 inspiration to humanity." "Not to me," said 
 Lambeth, gruffly; "he doubted the Inspira- 
 
184 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 tion of the Scriptures." ''But yonder," I re- 
 plied, pointing to a west gate, "is a man who 
 had no such doubts. He published eloquent 
 tributes to the Bible. He was a venerated 
 preacher, who ministered the word and the 
 sacraments through a long life. When there 
 were few to defend the equal rights of all 
 men, he never quailed, but blazed a path for 
 Sumner and Hale and Lincoln. Surely you 
 will grant that the catholic church is well 
 represented here by William Ellery Chan- 
 ning?" "Channing!" cried Lambeth in hor- 
 ror, and I thought he would have crossed 
 himself; "why he wrote against the Nicene 
 Creed!" Then we took our way in silence 
 toward a north gate. "Here at last," said I, 
 "is the catholic church incarnate. Look at 
 that figure of the Good Samaritan. This is 
 a monument to Doctors Morton and Jackson, 
 discoverers of ether, that boon to uncounted 
 millions. The Spirit of the Lord was upon 
 them, because he anointed them to comfort 
 those that mourn, to give unto them the oil of 
 joy for mourning, and a garment of praise for 
 
The Catholic Church ^185 
 
 the spirit of heaviness." '^Morton — Jack- 
 son," said Lambeth thoughtfully. "I must 
 look them up, and I'll admit that they belong 
 in the Catholic Church, if I find that they ac- 
 cepted the Quadrilateral." 
 
 There are two loyal members of the Church 
 of England, who are public characters, and so 
 may properly be used as types. They live at 
 opposite ends of the earth; in this case, how- 
 ever, latitude does not count, for both were 
 born in England and graduated at Oxford. 
 So far as I know, they are equally faithful in 
 their work, equally devout, devoted, and 
 sound in the faith; but they hold contrary 
 views respecting the catholic church. Strip- 
 ping off their titles, after the manner of Car- 
 lyle in Sartor Resartus, we have remaining 
 the names of Wilfred T. Grenfell and Frank 
 Weston. At the sound of the first name, 
 every reader smiles a happy smile and ex- 
 claims: "Ah, yes! the missionary doctor." 
 At the risk of a severe reprimand from my old 
 friend "on the Labrador," whose modesty is 
 only equalled by his merit, I shall have to per- 
 
1 86 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 sist in using his name as a type. At the sound 
 of the second name, most readers give a blank, 
 inquiring look. So the title must be restored : 
 ^'Bishop of Zanzibar"; whereupon a few 
 readers smile a peculiar smile and exclaim: 
 "Ah, yes! Kikuyu." To be fair to both, we 
 should restore Dr. GrenfeU's title also, 
 C.M.G. This means "Companion of the Or- 
 ders of St. Michael and St. George,'' a dis- 
 tinction conferred only by the Sovereign of 
 England, the head of its Church, and be- 
 stowed only on men who have been eminent 
 in the service of humanity. Dr. Weston's 
 title came to him, by tactual succession, from 
 sundry ecclesiastics of the Dark Ages, and by 
 hypothetical succession from others still more 
 ancient. Thus he derives authority to sign 
 his name "F. Zanzibar." But Dr. Grenfell 
 is a bishop too; a real bishop with a small b} 
 A bishop is an overseer; and although the 
 diocese in question is extensive, embracing the 
 whole range of the Labrador with the adja- 
 cent coasts of Newfoundland, it is faithfully 
 
 iSee p. i8o. 
 
The Catholic Church 187 
 
 covered by this watchman of the Good Shep- 
 herd. He heals the sick, and binds up the 
 wounded, and preaches the glorious gospel in 
 the pulpit and out, on sea and land, and (be- 
 ing an official justice) he smites with the rod 
 of his mouth the wicked oppressors, even the 
 sharpers and rum-sellers who would batten on 
 the weaknesses or necessities of his poor peo- 
 ple. The Spirit of the Lord is upon him, and 
 great is his reward; a hundred fold now in 
 this present time, and in the world to come life 
 everlasting. Dr. Grenfell is not only a bishop 
 but a catholic (with a small c). He always 
 communes as a fellow-worker with any one 
 who loves the Lord Jesus Christ, whether it 
 be the Bishop of Uganda or the humblest 
 nurse-maid. Dr. Weston is a Catholic (with 
 a large C), and thereby hangs the little tale of 
 Kikuyu, a flourishing Scotch missionary sta- 
 tion in East Africa. In 1913 it held a feast 
 of tabernacles, when Christians of many 
 names warmed each other's hearts, and finally 
 celebrated together the Lord's Supper. 
 Among the celebrants was the Bishop of 
 
1 88 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 Uganda. Ay, there's the rub. For this was 
 plainly uncanonical, in the view of the Head 
 Christian of Zanzibar; who straightway 
 posted to England, charged his brother bishop 
 with heresy, and began the famous law-case 
 of Z versus U, before the Archbishop of Can- 
 terbury. ''There is no heresy as yet," said 
 His Grace. "Go thy way for this time; when 
 the chief captains shall come, I will know the 
 uttermost of your matter." But there were 
 wars and rumors of wars; and nation rose 
 against nation, and the end is not yet; perad- 
 venture Kikuyu shall be trodden down of the 
 Germans before the end come. 
 
 Let us now drop out of sight both Dr. Wes- 
 ton and Dr. Grenfell as individuals, and 
 consider their types; which of these two, 
 think you, was neighbor unto Christian 
 Unity? 
 
 The types are extreme ; may there not be a 
 true middle way between them? So thinks 
 our brother Arkansas, Bishop William M. 
 Brown.^ His major premise is that Church 
 
 2 The Level Plan of Church Union. New York, 1910. 
 
The Catholic Church 189 
 
 Unity will come when all bodies of Christians 
 recognize each other in perfect equality; his 
 minor, that those who hold the theory of grace 
 transmitted by apostolic succession should be 
 willing to bestow that grace freely on bishops 
 to be chosen by all other bodies; that these 
 other bodies should consent to choose their 
 own bishops, and then should freely receive 
 what is freely given. His conclusion is that 
 in a single generation the Catholic Church 
 throughout all the world would be a unit, and 
 then the world would believe in Christ, ac- 
 cording to John 17: 21. The argument from 
 that text will be noticed in another connection. 
 My only interest in the catholic church is 
 in its relation to God's kingdom, as a means 
 thereto, like the family or the calling. If I 
 have read the New "Testament right, I was a 
 bishop at divers times; if I have misread it, I 
 am willing to be set right. But there are 
 two parts of Dr. Brown's scheme that are sure 
 to fail. For first, he expects to persuade the 
 Roman Catholics to depose the Pope, in order 
 to unite with other Christians in electing a 
 
'190 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 super-Pope. Now the Catholics will never 
 consent to play Hamlet with Hamlet's part 
 left out. Unless we begin at the bottom, as I 
 propose, the only way to combine with them 
 is to begin at the top, as Dr. Brown proposes 
 to do, but on the Lambeth basis instead of his 
 own. 
 
 The other unworkable scheme of the 
 Bishop is his ^'national Church" of the United 
 States. In this country, that adjective and that 
 noun do not belong together, any more than 
 "blue death" or "holy war." The nation has 
 physical bounds which the church will not 
 respect. A criminal breaks over the line into 
 Canada; unless his offence is extraditable, he 
 is secure from our laws. But not from the 
 church, which he has taken along in the per- 
 son of his wife. She lays siege and captures 
 his soul for Christ by the powers of love and 
 sacrifice, which have prevailed since the days 
 of St. John and the robber. (I hope my 
 readers know the beautiful tale in Eusebius.) 
 
 Before passing from criticism to construc- 
 tion, let us turn once more to Bishop Rhine- 
 
The Catholic Church 191 
 
 lander, who has compressed into half a dozen 
 syllables a watchword for Christian unity that 
 waves like Excelsior before the Lord's host: 
 *Uill all the race is one/' Has he not, however, 
 put forth a loose dilemma; unity or union? 
 Why not try for both though emphasizing the 
 former? I labored -long over the Bishop's in- 
 genious illustrations before I saw their fallacy. 
 ^^Two men together can cut a tree down faster 
 than one man can cut it down alone"; that 
 shows what we mean by union. "Branches 
 broken from a tree will die"* that shows what 
 w^e mean by unity. But the illustrations fail, 
 because the work to which God calls us is to 
 sow seed, and we are one in spirit with the seed 
 sown, as Jesus declared : "that which is sown 
 . . . these are they." We should have been 
 sure, says Trench, to interpret the seed imper- 
 sonally, but for Christ's own explanation. 
 When the sower is alone, he sows in faith, be- 
 cause the life of Christ, which is the unity of 
 the Spirit, is in him; and when two or more 
 sow together, they have precisely the same 
 
192 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 Spirit, it is God that worketh in them, both 
 to will and to do of his good pleasure. Their 
 Christian union is at the same time, for the 
 same reason, and to the same degree. Chris- 
 tian unity. 
 
 The thought gives a natural transition to 
 the positive, constructive part of this chapter. 
 Without any claim to special wisdom on the 
 subject, I simply state my own belief, and try 
 to answer objections as they arise. ^'Since 
 God is love, we ought also to love one an- 
 other." ^'The catholic church comprises all 
 who follow Jesus Christ." No one, there- 
 fore, is in the catholic church unless he is 
 working for Christ; every such worker is in 
 it; and all who are in it are working together, 
 sowing the seed of the kingdom. This co- 
 ordination becomes more and more manifest 
 as the tides of the Spirit lift men above their 
 clannishness and selfish isolation. The clear- 
 est and at the same time the largest example 
 is the Federal Council of the Churches of 
 Christ in America. One who studies its man- 
 ifold labors cannot but be impressed with the 
 
The Catholic Church 193 
 
 fact that the Divine Spirit is working in it, 
 and that he works in unity as well as union. 
 There is not the slightest authority there of 
 Church over Church, or of all Churches over 
 one Church or individual. It was the Spirit 
 of Christian unity that drew them together be- 
 fore any union was formed. The activity of 
 the Council is greatly underrated if it is 
 thought to be limited to its national assem- 
 blies. One might draw that wrong inference 
 from the name ^^Council"; as a matter of fact, 
 there have been only two such meetings, one 
 at Philadelphia in 1908, the other at Chicago 
 in 191 2. But all through the intervening 
 years of each quadrennium, the Council is 
 busily at work, not only counselling, but help- 
 ing the weak to become stronger, and bring- 
 ing the moral and spiritual power of the 
 American churches to bear on various prob- 
 lems as they rise. This it can fairly do, be- 
 cause it represents at least thirty denomina- 
 tions and more than seventeen millions of 
 Christians. It was this Council, for instance, 
 that called on President Wilson to appoint the 
 
194 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 day of prayer for universal peace, and that 
 sent Professors Mathews and Gulick on the 
 peace mission to Japan. It was this Council 
 that was the organ of the catholic church 
 in 1908, when at its great gathering it de- 
 manded justice and equity between employ- 
 ers and employed, pledging the churches, so 
 far as it represented them, to stand for certain 
 definite things, like the abolition of child la- 
 bor and of the sweating system, for ''the most 
 equitable division of the products of industry 
 that can ultimately be devised," and the secur- 
 ing to every laborer of one day's rest in seven. 
 At the session of 191 2, these demands were re- 
 newed and others were added, such as uniform 
 divorce laws, the conservation of health, and 
 "the protection of the individual and society 
 from the social, economic and moral waste of 
 the liquor traffic." A very practical way in 
 which the Council becomes a continuous 
 means of grace is through the proffer of its 
 helpful advice when new fields are to be oc- 
 cupied, thus preventing the rivalry of denom- 
 inations, the overlapping of several churches 
 
The Catholic Church 195 
 
 where one is sufficient, and the far more seri- 
 ous and more prevalent evil of overlooking, 
 and leaving ungathered, fields v^hite for the 
 harvest. As to the general outcome and 
 promise of this movement, I quote the thought- 
 ful words of Rev. James H. Garrison, Chair- 
 man of the Council's committee on corre- 
 spondence. 
 
 "The value of this Federal Council is not to be measured 
 by the work which it has accomplished and is accomplish- 
 ing directly, large as it is, but rather by the atmosphere of 
 catholicity and fraternity which it is increasingly creat- 
 ing, in which all its constituent bodies are enabled to carry 
 on their work more effectively, and with greater and more 
 direct bearing on the common interests of the kingdom. 
 Religious leaders in all the churches are coming to see 
 that those w^ho best serve the kingdom of God best serve 
 their own church. It is now manifest to all that this 
 Federal Council is seeking, through the voluntary action 
 of its constituent bodies, to manifest the unity to which 
 we have already attained. The fact that federation may 
 not in our judgment fully meet the ideal of unity which 
 we believe the New Testament teaches, does not furnish 
 any reason for withdrawing from it our approval and co- 
 operation. God expects us to use what unity we have, 
 and it is through the use of that that He is to lead us into 
 a closer and more perfect union." A further account of 
 the Federal Council will doubtless appear in Dr. Ash- 
 worth's forthcoming book: ''The Union of Christian 
 Forces in America," announced by the American Sunday 
 School Union. 
 
 *'But how vague is all this," some one ob- 
 
196 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 jects, ''this 'atmosphere of catholicity and fra- 
 ternity.' There is no clear-cut, definite pro- 
 gram here. We make no progress on such 
 lines towards the One Universal Church 
 which is our goal. Where is the head of this 
 huge body?" 
 
 "There is none but Christ," I reply; "why 
 should there be?" This continual demand 
 for human headship rests on a false analogy. 
 When Jesus said "the field is the world" he 
 did not mean the military field, though the 
 iBible sometimes uses military figures. If we 
 have foes to fight we naturally desiderate cap- 
 tains and colonels and generals. But Christ's 
 kingdom is not of this world. When we find 
 that these "foes to fight" are just brothers to 
 win, we proceed to win them one by one, with- 
 out waiting for orders from any human su- 
 perior. Nor did Jesus mean, by the field 
 which is the world, the field of business; this 
 detects the flaw in Bishop Brown's parallel. 
 Because the trend of modern business reveals 
 the need of ever more and higher grades of 
 supervision and superintendence, he argues 
 
The Catholic Church 197 
 
 that the churches of Christ should be similarly 
 organized. But why? He would group 
 them into dioceses, each with its Bishop, and 
 these into national Churches, each with its 
 great Head, and all the nations of earth into 
 one Catholic Church, with some colossal mind 
 at the top to sway the whole. But why? 
 This looks more like an inclined plane than 
 a level, but let that pass. It may be best for 
 human welfare, though I doubt it, that all the 
 industries on our planet should be swallowed 
 up by one gigantic World Trust, but let that 
 pass also. Our Lord had no such image in 
 mind when he said: ^'Go, sow the field, 
 which is the world." We meet the objector's 
 question by asking: where is the head in a 
 field of grass? The sun rises upon it, and a 
 million tiny blades, tipped wath dew, shine in 
 its light. So let us shine; you in your small 
 corner and I in mine. 
 
 ''Still," pursues the objector, "you ignore 
 the Lord's sacerdotal prayer ih John 17:21. 
 The world cannot be converted until all the 
 people of God are brought together in one 
 body with one spirit; for the very object of 
 
198 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 this union is that the world may believe in 
 Jesus Christ." 
 
 Here we meet again the bald, mechanical 
 view of Scripture, as in the notion so current 
 in the days of our fathers that the millennium 
 cannot come until the Jews are restored to 
 Palestine. John 17:21 may well pray to be 
 delivered from its friends. One scarcely 
 reads a plea for Christian union or unity 
 which is not clinched by the argument just 
 given in quotation marks. 
 
 But when Jesus prayed for the eleven disci- 
 ples who stood or knelt around him, and for 
 you and me and all Christians, that all might 
 be one, in order that the world might believe, 
 it was brotherhood he sought; he was not re- 
 questing from his Father some magical trans- 
 formation in some distant age. The prayer 
 was answered first at Pentecost, when the 
 Holy Spirit of Unity was born in the disciples, 
 and the world did believe, in three thousand 
 representatives from the four quarters thereof. 
 Instead of eleven in unity there were multi- 
 tudes. By what means have these multitudes 
 
The Catholic Church 199 
 
 multiplied, down through the ages even to our 
 day, so that now, in the judgment of charity, 
 we count them by tens of millions? By the 
 Holy Spirit of love and sacrifice, is it not? 
 or is it by canons and decrees of councils? 
 These last have tended rather to strife and dis- 
 cord than to harmony and unity. How often 
 we hear pessimistic churchmen sigh for the 
 visible unity of the age of the great councils. 
 Were half the breath thus vainly spent de- 
 voted to sincere, heart-to-heart grappling 
 with the great unchurched. Christian unity 
 would advance by leaps and bounds. Very 
 slight and fragile was Christian unity in the 
 councils of Nicaea and Ephesus. Jesus was in 
 them not half so manifestly as in the labors of 
 William Booth and Jerry McAuley and the 
 humble men and women whom Harold Beg- 
 bie pictures. It is there that the royal ban- 
 ners forward go ; there we may read the mean- 
 ing of Christian unity. 
 
 Take the other side of the question, for the 
 sake of argument, and see where you come 
 out. I was brought up to believe that Roman 
 
200 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 Catholicism (popery, we called it) was anti- 
 christ, the scarlet woman, and the man of sin, 
 all rolled into one. I learned better when I 
 felt the Spirit of Christ in Catholic washer- 
 women, and in humble Catholic mothers who 
 pray and strive to lead their children to the 
 Lamb of God. Yet there are still millions of 
 Protestants who share my original sin, and 
 probably more millions over the line who hate 
 us as heartily as we ever hated them. They 
 are ready to fight to the death rather than join 
 their heretical enemies. Are they more likely 
 to be won by what is called a frontal attack 
 or by the leavening power of love and sacri- 
 fice? Behind Catholicism stands the Greek 
 Church. Ask it to forget its heroic past and 
 swallow filioque! you wave a red rag before a 
 bull. Attempts at external unity with these 
 two Churches must not lose sight, by the way, 
 of the fact that there are fifteen enormous can- 
 dles in the so-called Holy Sepulchre, only six 
 of which are in charge of those two churches. 
 The Armenian, Syrian, and Coptic churches 
 are ''on the level," with three candles each, 
 
The Catholic Church 201 
 
 while the Moslem guard makes strenuous at- 
 tempts to keep the peace among them all. As 
 is well known, a dispute between France and 
 Russia about the ^'holy places," was the imme- 
 diate cause of the Crimean war. Now sup- 
 pose these ^'Churches" and all the rest are 
 gathered by and by into one vast body. Is 
 this what the wicked world has been waiting 
 for? When the daily papers of London, New 
 York, and Chicago shall announce in great 
 headlines: ^'Ecumenical Ecclesiastical Un- 
 ity Assured," then, as by one consent, the 
 thieves and gamblers, harlots and thugs, 
 drunkards and swindlers, will yearn for con- 
 version, do you say? Why, they will not even 
 know what has happened, though they all 
 know the Salvation Army. If the headlines 
 are explained to them, they will only curse the 
 church; for it is not Christian disunity, but a 
 carnal appetite, that leads them astray. They 
 can be reclaimed as Five Points was re- 
 claimed, but never by formal movements that 
 begin at the top. 
 
 Whenever our old friend the pessimist fixes 
 
202 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 his lugubrious eye upon our unhappy divi- 
 sions, 
 
 "He turns of a sudden exceedingly pale 
 And sets himself down to weep and to wail." ^ 
 
 He might be thoroughly cured by putting him 
 at work in the slums with a noble Jew and a 
 godly Catholic. For after all he has a heart 
 that would be touched with the infirmities of 
 his brother Poles and Italians and Bohemians. 
 Ere long the blessed work would engage all 
 his energies, and he would become a new man 
 in Christ Jesus, feeling like Wilberforce when 
 he gave this answer to a pious friend who 
 asked "How is your soul today?" "I have 
 been so absorbed in those poor Africans that 
 I had forgotten I had a soul." There is a 
 rising tide of Christian unity which brings op- 
 timism to the faces of all who are working to- 
 gether with Christ. If the natural tempera- 
 ment of any such makes them look on the dark 
 side, they just look back a little way — say, a 
 century — at the poor little fringe of Chris- 
 tianity, mostly formal, which bordered then 
 
 1 From Saxe's "Pyraraus and Thisbe," 
 
The Catholic Church 203 
 
 the great, black mass of infidelity and hea- 
 thenism. Then they look around the horizon 
 of the present, and with the joyful cry, ^Svhat 
 hath God wrought!" they look off unto Jesus, 
 and press toward the mark. The catholic 
 church of today is full of faith in God and in 
 her own great destiny, full of love that never 
 faileth, full of hope in God's eternal promises, 
 hope that is as an anchor to the soul, both sure 
 and steadfast. Let Whittier voice it for us. 
 
 *'In time to be 
 Shall holier altars rise to Thee — 
 Thy church our broad humanity. 
 
 A sweeter song shall then be heard — 
 The music of the world's accord, 
 Confessing Christ, the inward Word. 
 
 That song shall swell from shore to shore, 
 One hope, one faith, one love restore 
 The seamless robe that Jesus wore." 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE KINGDOM 
 
 Line upon line will prove, I trust, no vain 
 repetition ; for questions that are sure to come 
 may as well be anticipated. 
 
 "What is your program? what would you have 
 us do?" 
 
 Reply: Do all the good you can, and don't make any 
 fuss about it (see page 73). Make two blades 
 of grass grow where one grew before (see page 
 197). 
 
 ''But what outlook for the future have we, un- 
 less we work together under common super- 
 vision '. 
 
 ?" 
 
 Reply: Leave the future to God. You are looking in 
 the wrong direction. Look back a hundred 
 years (page 202). 
 
 "But where there is such diversity of doctrine, 
 the church cannot give a united testimony." 
 
 Reply: What of it? If any man willeth to do His 
 will, he shall know of the doctrine. As Theo- 
 dore Roosevelt has reminded us, that proposi- 
 tion is not reversible. 
 204 
 
The Kingdom 205 
 
 "But what is 'the meaning of Christian unity' 
 when Christians go fifty different ways and do 
 fifty different things?" 
 
 Reply: That is one of the subjects of this chapter. 
 
 The catholic church is large and potent, but 
 it is only one of many provinces of the king- 
 dom of God. Not a sparrow falls without 
 our Father; and it makes a decided difference 
 to the kingdom of God whether the sparrow 
 falls from old age or from a cruel boy's gun. 
 The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to 
 Animals is not a church; probably many who 
 are active in its ranks are indifferent or hostile 
 to the church; but the new spirit which the 
 Society is infusing into the rising generation 
 of American children is the Spirit of Christ, 
 and so the Society belongs in his kingdom. 
 There is in some minds, I grant, a confusion 
 of terms, by which the word Church (with a 
 large C) is stretched to cover all good things 
 and all good people, even though the latter, 
 who presumably know their own minds, pro- 
 test against the classification. But no good 
 thing or person is outside of the kingdom. 
 
2o6 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 As one approaches the great metropolis, he 
 observes that a group of its most prominent 
 and lofty buildings are devoted to that factor 
 of civilization which v^e call, for want of a 
 better name, the daily press. We need not 
 look back a century to find a time when such 
 journals were cynically, and even bitterly, 
 averse to anything Christian; one of the chief 
 of them was constantly called ''The Satanic." 
 A large part of their revenues came from vi- 
 cious sources; virtue and religion were treated 
 either in a sneering or a patronizing tone. 
 Something has wrought such a change that at 
 present one of the most powerful agents for 
 the uplift of the community and the world is 
 the daily press. As a rule, with few excep- 
 tions, it stands for clean politics and human 
 welfare. It is not the church, nor any part of 
 it; the church is a highly efficient organ of the 
 kingdom — it is no disparagement of the 
 church to call it a conventional means of 
 grace — ; the press, like the school, is an uncon- 
 ventional means of grace, and it also belongs 
 to the kingdom. We visit Printing House 
 
The Kingdom 207 
 
 Square, and then in succession a City Hall, an 
 art museum, a university, a hospital, an acad- 
 emy of music, a play-ground, a bank, a market, 
 a railroad. We remember (see page x) that 
 Christ is to reign in politics, in art, in litera- 
 ture, in science, in commerce, etc. To per- 
 ceive the connection of each of the objects 
 visited with God's kingdom is a matter which 
 may be left, for the most part, to the reader's 
 own intelligence. Lest that should fail in the 
 case of the last-named object, the railroad, I 
 call attention to the part played in the early 
 history of Christianity by the great Roman 
 roads; over which the new religion spread so 
 swiftly that all Christian authorities on that 
 period agree in admiring the Providence that 
 used these hostile powers to build such means 
 of grace. Whenever the legions travelled 
 along them, under orders to persecute the 
 church. He that sitteth in the heavens cried: 
 ^'Shall the axe boast itself against him that 
 heweth therewith?" But far more swiftly, in 
 this our day, the kingdom grows along the 
 steam roads and the electric roads, while the 
 
2o8 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 telegraph is what Bushnell called it, a road 
 for thought.^ Of course it must be conceded 
 that every one of the agencies we are con- 
 sidering is religiously indifferent, in itself. A 
 railroad, an art museum, a university, may 
 sow tares instead of wheat. But the point to 
 be insisted on is that, on the great whole, 
 Christ's kingdom gains on the devil's, in each 
 department of human activity; the stars in 
 their courses fight for Deborah, not for Sisera. 
 This we have seen in the case of the daily 
 press, and it is readily shown in every case. 
 
 If ever philanthropy could have been di- 
 vorced from Christianity, it would have been 
 so within the massive walls which Stephen 
 Girard erected as a castle to shield his or- 
 phans from the least infection of the faith he 
 hated. Strange that so shrewd a bargainer, 
 who strictly forbade the entrance of any 
 clergyman to his college grounds, should have 
 supposed that the porter could always distin- 
 guish a minister by his garb, or that honorable 
 
 1 The whole essay on Roads in his Work and Play is well 
 worth reading still. 
 
The Kingdom 209 
 
 ministers, in all time to come, would be aware 
 of his absurd injunction. Strange that so 
 keen an intellect failed to perceive that walls 
 are no barrier to the wind that bloweth where 
 it listeth, or to the Christian Spirit which 
 breathes through a thousand unconscious 
 agencies in every Christian city. The fact 
 which forms a main contention of this book, 
 that Christianity is spirit and not form (see 
 pages v-xii), is well illustrated by Webster's 
 famous argument in the Girard College Will 
 case. 
 
 Let us now leave the fringes of the subject 
 of this chapter and penetrate to the heart of 
 it. Here, as well as anywhere, we may ex- 
 amine the charge (see page 62) that we mis- 
 apprehend totally what Jesus meant by the 
 kingdom of God, which was not a spiritual 
 power, eternal and invisible, but a very defi- 
 nite earthly conception. The Messianic hope 
 which he taught w^as the hope, it is said, of an 
 apocalypse, or millennium; the conviction that 
 Israel, beneath Messiah's sway, would domi- 
 nate the nations, as in the glorious days of 
 
2IO The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 David and Solomon, and that rebellious sub- 
 jects would be cut off by the wrath of God re- 
 vealed in fire from heaven. Then would the 
 end come. With all deference to the able 
 scholars who hold this opinion, it is of a piece 
 with such investigations as we noted on pages 
 147, 148, and the proper answer, here as there, 
 is 'What of it?" We all know that the blessed 
 kingdom which is now illuminating and ele- 
 vating the world is the kingdom of love and 
 peace; we all feel, this year, more strongly 
 than mankind has ever felt before, the vivid 
 contrast between that kingdom and the king- 
 dom of force and violence. The former in- 
 carnates the spirit of Jesus, which is the spirit 
 of self-sacrifice; the latter the spirit of Nietz- 
 sche, which sacrifices others to self. We be- 
 lieve, to be sure, in a final consummation; 
 even science shows that this old earth is not to 
 go on forever as it is; but the kingdom which 
 Jesus taught us to pray for is the transforma- 
 tion of the spirit of earth into the spirit of 
 heaven (see page 15). If there ever was an- 
 other Jesus, who was so ignorant as to sup- 
 
The Kingdom 21 1 
 
 pose that the world, apart from a little rem- 
 nant, was to be conquered by force, subdued 
 by a stroke of almightiness, this is not the 
 Christ whom we revere and whom we strive 
 to follow; our Jesus Christ brings a gospel for 
 all mankind, and sets the round world to sing- 
 ing: Glory to God in the highest, and on earth 
 peace, good will to men. He is the only be- 
 gotten Son of the God of love, and his king- 
 dom is the kingdom of love that never faileth. 
 
 The reader who may object to so dogmatic 
 a pronouncement is invited to study the mas- 
 terly lectures of Professor Samuel Harris,^ 
 especially the chapter which contrasts the true 
 idea of the kingdom with millenarianism. 
 
 The maxim that nothing succeeds like suc- 
 cess is often used in the interest of Satan's 
 kingdom; but it applies still more truly to the 
 kingdom of God. Whether you look at it 
 lengthwise, as it spreads through history, or 
 breadthwise, as it spreads over the earth today, 
 herein is a marvellous thing, that there should 
 be such power in a mustard seed that the least 
 
 2 The Kingdom of Christ on Earth. (Andover, 1874.) 
 
212 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 of all herbs should supplant the cedars of Leb- 
 anon, such power in a bit of leaven that the 
 quiet fermentation of the gospel should go on 
 transforming the laws and customs, the busi- 
 ness and fashions, of this old, wicked world. 
 It is the Lord's doing; it is his kingdom. 
 
 Now and then, something of this process 
 becomes visible to the naked eye. Lo, these 
 are parts of his ways, but how little a portion 
 is heard of him; but the thunder of his power 
 who can understand? In the previous chap- 
 ter, we looked in upon the revolving wheels 
 of one of these divine factories, the Federal 
 Council of the Churches of Christ in Amer- 
 ica. Another such, of still wider scope, is the 
 Edinburgh Missionary Conference. I say is, 
 rather than was, for like the Federal Council, 
 it has provided for the perpetuation of its 
 Christlike work. Its transactions are open to 
 all, through the nine volumes it issued,^ eight 
 of which give eight elaborate reports, which 
 had been in preparation for two years by most 
 
 s World Mission Conference. Reports of the Commissions. 
 New York, 1910. 
 
The Kingdom 213 
 
 fitly chosen men all over the world, on such 
 themes as ^^Carrying the gospel to all the non- 
 Christian world," ^'Missions and Govern- 
 ments," ^'Co-operation and the promotion of 
 Unity," ^The Home Base of Missions," while 
 the ninth presents a brief history of the Con- 
 ference, with its official records and the ad- 
 dresses given before it. The more thor- 
 oughly I study those reports, the more my con- 
 viction grows that this body — though without 
 the shadow of a shade of authority — was the 
 most truly Ecumenical Council that the king- 
 dom of God on earth has ever known. The 
 report on Co-operation and Unity, and the dis- 
 cussion that followed, revealed many gratify- 
 ing examples of concord across denomina- 
 tional lines. It would be like the gracious 
 Providence of our Father if those heathen na- 
 tions who have received the gospel from us 
 should teach their teachers the meaning of 
 Christian unity. Let us be thankful that 
 other missionary Conferences of this kind are 
 in store for the future. For my part, I see 
 not how a world Conference resting on the 
 
214 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 principle of authority could be convened, 
 without that surrender of our dearly bought 
 freedom against which Paul warned us, say- 
 ing: ''Stand fast therefore in the liberty 
 wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be 
 not entangled again in the yoke of bondage." 
 There is a marked resemblance between the 
 essential aim of the Federal Council of the 
 Churches of Christ in America, as Mr. Gar- 
 rison phrased it (see page 195), and the mes- 
 sage of Mr. Roosevelt to the Edinburgh Con- 
 ference, as follows: 
 
 "I believe that unity in a spirit of Christian brotherhood 
 for such broad Christian work will tend, not to do away 
 with differences of doctrine, but to prevent us from laying 
 too much stress on the differences of doctrine. ... If only 
 we can make up our minds to work together with earnest 
 sincerity for the common good we shall find that doc- 
 trinal differences In no way interfere with our doing this 
 work." 
 
 Although the Conference was strictly a 
 church body, it went outside the pale more 
 than once to discuss questions belonging to the 
 wider aspects of the kingdom. Thus on the 
 day devoted to ''Missions and Governments," 
 when the horrible atrocities of the Congo rub- 
 
The Kingdom 215 
 
 ber trade were considered, a few judicial 
 words from the President, Lord Balfour of 
 Burleigh, evoked from every quarter the most 
 spontaneous and tremendous applause of the 
 entire eight days. The words were these: 
 
 'You will, I hope, leave behind you, as is suggested in 
 the Report, some permanent body which will speak for 
 you, which will hear what you have to say to it, will sift 
 it in a sympathetic and straightforward manner, and hav- 
 ing itself attained to the truth, if the truth is against the 
 action of the Government, will, with one voice, leave the 
 Government which is concerned no peace till it gets 
 reform." 
 
 Exactly relevant to our subject is the inter- 
 pretation of that storm of cheers by Dr. Gaird- 
 ner.'* 
 
 "It was as though a whole society of world-servants 
 . . . were demanding to be given an articulate voice; a 
 voice with which to make known its just desires and its 
 just complaints, and with which, if it please God, to per- 
 form more faithfully and more effectually its office of 
 tribune to a world of mjen. 
 
 **Was there not something else there too? Was it not 
 as though the unboj-n babe of Unity Regained had 
 strongly stirred in the womb? . . . the only corporate 
 unity that would be worth having, the unity that is the 
 expression of the desire of co-operation, the unity that is 
 the Will to Live, and the Will to Act, Together'' 
 
 4 Echoes from Edinburgh 1910. By W. H. T. Gairdner. 
 New York, 1910. 
 
2i6 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 The slow but steady development of what 
 might be called a Christian race conscious- 
 ness among Orientals gives a marked illustra- 
 tion of the diversity and independence in out- 
 ward ways and things, which, on our view, 
 may be expected to characterize the growth of 
 the kingdom. The Eastern Christian is men- 
 tally and spiritually different from his West- 
 ern brother, but the latter has too often sought 
 to dominate the former, and to force his 
 Christian development into Western moulds, 
 with as little success as must always attend the 
 effort to fit a round peg to a square hole. The 
 original message of Christianity came from 
 Orientals to Orientals. We Westerners, often 
 unconsciously, have shaped the institutions of 
 Christianity, age after age, in accordance with 
 oui- prevailing habits of thought and feeling; 
 we should hail with joy every visit of Eastern 
 sages to our Lord, as they bring him their in- 
 digenous gifts of gold, frankincense, and 
 myrrh. Let there be the natural unfolding of 
 a native Christianity for the Arab race, an- 
 other for the Hindus, another for the Chi- 
 
The Kingdom 217 
 
 nese. The essence and spirit of the gospel 
 would be the same in all; but the tendency to 
 preserve the individual traits of each contra- 
 dicts, I believe, the probability of any form of 
 external unity. The subject demands a vol- 
 ume for itself; it has been ably treated by 
 Professor Moore of Harvard University and 
 the late President Hall of Union Theological 
 Seminary.^ 
 
 If the kingdom of heaven is to follow the 
 analogies of nature, which is also the king- 
 dom of God, we ought to look to its past for 
 homogeneity, and to its present and future 
 stages for " a definite, coherent heterogene- 
 ity.'' Why should not we be satisfied with 
 this goodly diversity instead of insisting upon 
 a highly organized unity? To be sure, we 
 "are bound to be dissatisfied till all the race 
 is one" (page 68), but when the multitude of 
 them that believe are of one heart and one 
 soul, when the Holy Spirit of love makes them 
 
 5 The Naturalization of Christianity in the Far East. By 
 Edward Caldwell Moore. Reprinted from the Harvard Theo- 
 logical Review for July, 1908. 
 
 The Universal Elements of the Christian Religion. By 
 Charles Cuthbert Hall. (See especially the last chapter.) 
 New York, 1905. 
 
2i8 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 one in Christ Jesus, we could not secure a 
 higher unity and we need not demand a lower. 
 It is the unity of the Spirit in the bond of 
 peace. If the kingdom of God is righteous- 
 ness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost 
 (Rom. 14: 17), the Christian world is so far 
 from having already attained — peace, for in- 
 stance — that all its energies are needed for 
 this spiritual work. The progress of Chris- 
 tian unity, in any age of the world, is accu- 
 rately measured by the growth of the kingdom 
 in that age. 
 
 Looking back over the ways we have 
 traversed in the practical part of this book, it 
 is plain that all these paths converge to the one 
 central idea of the kingdom of God. The 
 Home tends to anarchy when God is left out 
 of the family life; but the Christian Home is 
 the kingdom of God in miniature and sample 
 (page 80). The Christian School is an en- 
 gine of mighty power in the great business of 
 making the kingdom of God triumphant 
 (page 97). In the chapter on the Calling 
 we learned that the kingdom of God is a social 
 
The Kingdom 219 
 
 kingdom (page 117) and we considered the 
 question how the various callings of men can 
 promote that kingdom (page 123). The 
 State is to become the brotherhood of man, 
 synonymous with the kingdom of God (page 
 128). The Bible as a means of grace will con- 
 tinue its conquests until the kingdoms of this 
 world become the kingdom of our Lord (page 
 158). The local church fulfils the prophetic 
 ideal of the kingdom, giving light and saving 
 life (page 161). The catholic church has its 
 only reason for being, in its ministry to the 
 kingdom (page 189). All these are simply 
 organs (or means) of grace, while the king- 
 dom is grace itself. But as it is the very na- 
 ture of grace to go forth in loving ministry to 
 its object, so the divine grace that centres in 
 the kingdom is ever flowing back to bless the 
 Home, the School, the State, and all. The 
 ebb and flow of the tide would give but a 
 feeble analogy; the kingdom of God is the 
 supreme organism (page loi), whereof each 
 part is at the same time the means and the end 
 of all the rest. 
 
220 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 If the kingdom is thus the central power 
 in humanity, what is the central power in the 
 kingdom? Surely the King himself; our 
 Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. On his head 
 are many crowns; nothing human is foreign 
 to the sphere of his peaceful conquest (page 
 207) . Of him and through him and unto him 
 are all things. Since he is all-sufficient, we 
 need no pope or super-pope, whether as me- 
 diator or as titular head. Paul was looking 
 unto Jesus when he sent to his poor converts, 
 and to us also, the glad message of the four 
 alls (II Cor. 9:8): " God is able to make 
 all grace abound toward you; that ye, always 
 having all-sufficiency in all things, may 
 abound to every good work." 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 RETROSPECT 
 
 This chapter is designed to be both a sum- 
 mary and a supplement; to review the course 
 of the argument and to strengthen it here and 
 there. The title of the book — the meaning 
 of Christian unity — is taken in two senses; 
 the idea of Christian unity, and what it means 
 to uS. The former is the subject of Part 
 First. Christ prayed that all his people 
 might be one; that is, that the Holy Spirit 
 might dwell in them and work through them 
 in ever growing power. His teachings, which 
 are abundant and clear, are In full harmony 
 with this interpretation. Other interpreta- 
 tions have been held, but no attempt is made 
 here to examine them in detail. 
 
 Part Second investigates the practical side 
 of Christian unity, and this discloses a bewil- 
 dering variety of opinions. As the reader 
 may have perceived, I have no great rever- 
 
 221 
 
222 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 ence for bibliographies. They are useful to 
 candidates for the doctorate, but the majority 
 of our fellowmen are still, perhaps, outside 
 that category. Any one who wishes to pe- 
 ruse a hundred and fifty volumes bearing 
 on our chapter VII will find them listed in 
 Mr. Elliott's '^Making Good in the Local 
 Church" (see above, page 170). A selection, 
 rather than collection, of books relating to 
 chapter VIII appears at the end of Bishop 
 Brown's ^'Level Plan" (above, page 188). 
 This has the merit of indicating, in the case of 
 each book, the standpoint of its author. See 
 also A Bibliography of Topics related to 
 Church Unity. By the Rev. F. J. Hall, D.D. 
 (a pamphlet to be had of Robert H. Gardiner, 
 Gardiner, Me.). Another important list, 
 which serves to illustrate chapters IV and 
 V, especially the former, is in Dr. Vedder's 
 recent book.^ If there are readers who de- 
 sire a few thousand volumes germane to 
 the other chapters of Part II, they can ob- 
 
 1 The Gospel of Jesus and the Problems of Democracy. By 
 Henry C. Vedder. New York, 1914. 
 
Retrospect 223 
 
 tain them by consulting the United States 
 Catalogue (found in all leading libraries) 
 under such titles as Family, Home, Educa- 
 tion, Teaching, Bible, Christian Life, Chris- 
 tianity, Kingdom of God. It has seemed pref- 
 erable to give references as they naturally 
 came up in the progress of the book. 
 
 Returning, then, to the Cardinal Precept 
 (Part I, Chapter I), I make grateful mention 
 of Dr. Swete's book noted below,^ the rather, 
 as it furnishes a welcome vindication of the 
 use of the Fourth Gospel as authentic (above, 
 page 62). Dr. Swete is not only a Professor 
 in the University of Cambridge, but also, as 
 all scholars know, he has stood for many years 
 in the front rank of biblical critics; it needs 
 only to mention, among various contributions, 
 his standard edition of the Septuagint and his 
 critical commentaries on the Gospel of Mark 
 and the Apocalypse of John. Professor 
 Swete is willing to concede that in some early 
 passages of the Fourth Gospel, reflections of 
 
 2 The Last Discourse and Prayer of Our Lord. A Study of 
 John XIV-XVIL By Henry Barclay Swete. London, 191 3. 
 
224 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 the Evangelist himself have so blended with 
 the words of our Lord that it is difficult to dis- 
 tinguish them. But after long and careful 
 study of these closing discourses, together with 
 the prayer in Chapter XVII, he is convinced 
 (page x) "that they approach as near to the 
 words actually spoken by our Lord as the 
 memory of one who heard them can bring us. 
 ... I cannot escape from the feeling that a 
 greater than the greatest of the Evangelists is 
 here." Swete, like Godet (above, page 44), 
 is inclined to drop the word one before in us 
 in John 17:21. His remarks on verse 23 
 show that he shares the common view of the 
 effect of external Christian unity upon the 
 world, on which I commented in Chapter 
 VIIL 
 
 We pass on to Chapter 11. An excellent 
 book on the Lord's Prayer is a modest volume 
 containing a series of sermons by Dr. William 
 Walter Woodworth (Boston, 1891). The 
 meaning of Christian unity is brought out in 
 his comments on "Our Father." 
 
 In speaking of the Parables (Chapter III) 
 
Retrospect 225 
 
 allusion was made (pages 33, 54) to the study 
 by James Stirling: ^'Christ's vision of the 
 kingdom of heaven." As it is a leading thesis 
 of my own book that Christian unity is the 
 kingdom of heaven, I call especial attention to 
 his grouping of all the parables (he makes 
 them twenty-nine in number) under six 
 classes, each presenting a different aspect of 
 the kingdom of heaven. A still later book, 
 Jesus and His Parables, by George Murray 
 (Edinburgh, 1914), contains an important 
 section on The Course of the Kingdom, pages 
 216-272, compare Section 3, Fellowship with 
 God the Ideal, pages 174-215. 
 
 This last thought, Fellowship with God, 
 adds one more synonym for Christian unity 
 to those I have mentioned in Part I, Chapter 
 IV, *^The underlying harmony of Christ's 
 teachings." More might well be made, than 
 is made there, of a negative fact which em- 
 phasizes that harmony; namely, that Jesus is 
 almost totally silent on the subject of organ- 
 izing his kingdom into a body politic. The 
 word church he uses only twice. "Tell it 
 
226 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 unto the church," in Matthew i8: 17, relates 
 to such local gatherings as the Jews had 
 long known. "Upon this rock I will build 
 my church," in Matthew 16: 18, followed im- 
 mediately by the bestowal of the keys in verse 
 nineteen, was not spoken to Peter alone; see 
 18:18, itself made universal by 18:19, 20. 
 The fellowship in God of united Christians 
 has been in every age the key to open the king- 
 dom of heaven; and conversely, they who par- 
 ticipate in the spirit of the kingdom of heaven, 
 that is, the brotherhood of love, illustrate, just 
 in the degree of that participation, the mean- 
 ing of Christian unity, which embraces all 
 men potentially and all Christians actually. 
 
 At the outset of Part II, I have discussed 
 the true point of view for considering the 
 practical part of the subject. Christian unity 
 is to be furthered, not by clamping church 
 bodies together, for their internal friction 
 would be heightened instead of cancelled. 
 Nor is it by reducing such bodies to their low- 
 est terms, and uniting the residue, for thereby 
 much that is valuable in each would be lost. 
 
Retrospect 227 
 
 Nor is it (probably) by combining what all 
 regard as their most distinctive features; there 
 is danger that unchristian elements would ap- 
 pear in the corporate result. 
 
 Instead of beginning at the top, as all these 
 theories do, we should begin at the bottom, 
 each Christian loving his neighbors with sin- 
 cere devotion and winning them thus to 
 Christ, and all these Christian neighborhoods 
 gradually blending and expanding, until the 
 whole world would become a fellowship of 
 brothers. This was Christ's simple program; 
 it has never been thoroughly tried, but it is 
 never too late to carry it out. There are 
 helps, close at hand, in what may be called 
 the unconventional means of grace. 
 
 First, the home. We put the emphasis in 
 the wrong place when we ask what we can do 
 to help the home; say rather, what can the 
 home do to help the kingdom? It is a mis- 
 take that is even worse to emphasize the de- 
 generacy of the modern home; there are 
 multitudes of genuine Christian families, each 
 one the salt to preserve and the light to 
 
228 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 illumine the community. The best work for 
 the kingdom is done for children and youth 
 in their own homes, where are implanted feel- 
 ings and habits of reverence, dependence, 
 trust, obedience, culminating in faith, hope 
 and love. We should beware of obstructing 
 the proper work of the home by calling away 
 its members so often to less imperative forms 
 of Christian service. 
 
 From the home the normal child goes to the 
 school, but does not step thereby outside the 
 sphere of the kingdom. A vast number of 
 children, who never come under the sway 
 of the means of grace at home, are reached 
 and moulded for good by the Christian atmos- 
 phere of the school. A healthy discipline is 
 there, for those who would otherwise miss it; 
 order, application, manliness, democracy, 
 characterize these centres of young life. In- 
 dividual traits are not toned down and oblit- 
 erated, but developed rather to their truest 
 expression. Education, in its inmost mean- 
 ing, is genuinely Christian, as the greatest 
 educators have testified. 
 
Retrospect 229 
 
 ^^The kingdom of God grows like a tree, 
 ever assimilating new material" (page 105). 
 The home and the school are not its only 
 feeders. God calls us all to our daily work, 
 desiring no drones in his hive; and so that 
 daily work, a trade, a profession, or what not, 
 is our calling, an unconventional means of 
 grace. The one principle to regulate and 
 elevate the relations of all employers and all 
 employed is found in the precept: "One is 
 your Master, even Christ; and all ye are 
 brethren." Nothing is settled until it is set- 
 tled right; God requires truth in the inward 
 parts. Envy and inefficiency on the part of 
 workmen are fatal to the progress of God's 
 kingdom; so are injustice, pride and tyranny 
 in the employing class. The Christian pub- 
 lic should never sit down at. ease until fair 
 dealing prevails on all sides; then will God's 
 kingdom come and his will be done in earth 
 as in heaven. 
 
 We come next to the State, whose relation 
 to the Church has been the theme of perpetual 
 disputes. Neither of these two has any inde- 
 
230 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 pendent authority; both are God's ministers 
 for the ultimate end of his kingdom. A 
 State, for instance, can demand the service of 
 its subjects, and also their lives, which it is 
 cruelly sacrificing even now by the hundred 
 thousand; but after that it has nothing more 
 that it can do, whereas the kingdom is an 
 everlasting kingdom. The State, according 
 to its true conception, is humanity organized 
 for government; it is the political organ of 
 the brotherhood of mankind, and it is a blun- 
 der as well as a crime for one State to prey on 
 another. Out of the present turmoil will 
 emerge a new heaven and a new earth, 
 wherein dwelleth righteousness; for human- 
 ity sweeps onward to the one future certainty; 
 namely, that the kingdoms of this world are 
 to become the kingdom of our Lord. 
 
 The Bible may be regarded in different as- 
 pects, but all must agree that it is a powerful 
 means of grace. It finds us at the greatest 
 depths of our being, and through its touch of 
 Spirit it makes the whole world kin. God is 
 in it and man is in it; they are not in opposi- 
 
Retrospect 231 
 
 tion, as is falsely assumed by those who would 
 exalt or disparage either, but in conjunction, 
 and that too of so intimate a kind, that the 
 product resembles less a physical mixture 
 than a chemical combination. The unique 
 majesty of the Bible becomes most impressive 
 when we ascend to its loftiest mountain peak 
 and behold the glory of redemption in the 
 face of Jesus Christ. Here we find the true 
 meaning of Christian unity, for the whole race 
 will be one when and only when it is one in 
 Christ. 
 
 The local church is another means of grace. 
 It is its blessed mission to save life ; the whole 
 life, in all its phases and in all its powers. 
 No single method, as that of the revivalist, or 
 that of institutional machinery, should limit 
 its activities; like Terence, it should count 
 nothing that belongs to man to be foreign to 
 itself. Christian unity is impossible on any 
 narrow ground; but every true church is en- 
 gaged in large and universal enterprises 
 which directly promote that unity, such as the 
 Sunday School, the preaching of the gospel. 
 
232 The Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 the development of Christian character in the 
 whole social life of the community. The 
 function of the church is inspirational, and 
 the spirit it inspires is that of hearty, universal 
 brotherhood. 
 
 The subject of the catholic church brings 
 us face to face with two clashing opinions as 
 to the very nature of the church; the one 
 going back to a supposed apostolic succession, 
 the other embracing in the church all who fol- 
 low Christ. The feasibility and flexibility of 
 this latter conception is exemplified on a large 
 scale by the wide activities of the Federal 
 Council of the Churches of Christ in America. 
 The other conception is exemplified in a 
 document lately issued by the Bishop of Zan- 
 zibar.^ I quote literally, without comment, 
 from these proposals. 
 
 "6. The Council shall not allow members to raise ques- 
 tions affecting the Christian ministry and sacra- 
 ments, nor interfere in any way with represented 
 Churches in their views of the same. (See Note 4.) 
 7. The Council shall take no share in any policy by 
 
 3 Proposals for a central missionary Council of Episcopal and 
 non-Episcopal Churches in East Africa. By Frank Weston, 
 D.D.> Bishop of Zanzibar. London, 1914. 
 
Retrospect 233 
 
 which Communicants of any one represented Church 
 shall receive Holy Communion in another Church. 
 (See Note 4.) 
 
 Note 4. § 6 and 7. These clauses safeguard the dog- 
 matic position of each Church and Society. The strict 
 observance of them will enable men who think with me 
 to sit upon the Council; while the disregard of them 
 would result in many of us severing ourselves from those 
 who had set them at naught. 
 
 This is a hard saying; but, in fact, it only means that 
 some of us are so sincerely convinced of the Episcopal 
 position that we feel bound in honour not to surrender it. 
 And we expect the members of non-Episcopal churches to 
 feel as strongly about their own several positions. 
 
 Let us each be strict in observing those points for the 
 sake of which we feel compelled to keep the Church in 
 disunion." 
 
 As all roads once led to Rome, so all the 
 means of grace which we have found to pro- 
 mote Christian unity have their centre in the 
 kingdom of God (see pages 218, 219). Noth- 
 ing in all history has succeeded like the success 
 of that kingdom, whether one considers its ex- 
 tent in time or in space. Slowly but surely it 
 is realizing a more vital Christian unity. 
 Christians go fifty different ways and do fifty 
 different things; they are severed by conti- 
 nents and seas, and they have no central or- 
 ganization; but so long as they hold the Head, 
 
234 ^^^ Meaning of Christian Unity 
 
 they have not only the hope but the fruition, 
 day by day, of that exceeding great and 
 precious promise: It is your Father's good 
 pleasure to give you the kingdom. 
 
 I call attention, in closing, to a volume 
 entitled The Catholic Conception of the 
 Church^ The very fact that it holds a dia- 
 metrically opposite position to my own (for 
 it defends the Anglican theory of apostolic 
 succession) makes more significant its general 
 agreement on the nature of the kingdom of 
 God. This kingdom, according to Dr. Simp- 
 son, is the sphere over which God presides. 
 
 "The phrase Kingdom of Heaven conveys to the mod- 
 ern mind an idea of unearthliness and futurity which is 
 entirely absent from the phrase itself, and v^^hich it v^ould 
 not have conveyed to our Lord's contemporaries." 
 
 It is an existing fact, he says, present in germ, 
 future in consummation ; imperfect now, per- 
 fect hereafter. It is not merely individual, 
 but also and especially social; a social insti- 
 tution on earth; a community of men (pages 
 i-io). 
 
 Here, and not in the author's conception of 
 
 *By W. J. Sparrow Simpson, D.D, New York, 1914, 
 
Retrospect 235 
 
 the Church, lies a genuine basis for Christian 
 unity. 
 
 For as soon as we ask: "how large is this 
 ^community of men' designed to be"? we 
 come back to the all-inclusive love of our 
 Father in heaven, who maketh his sun to rise 
 on the evil and on the good, who so loved the 
 world that he gave his only-begotten Son. 
 Protestants though we be, we join from the 
 heart in the hymn of a sweet singer of the 
 Romanist faith : — 
 
 It Is God ; His love looks mighty, 
 But is mightier than it seems. 
 'Tis our Father; and His fondness 
 Goes far out beyond our dreams. 
 
 There's a wideness in God's mercy 
 Like the wideness of the sea ; 
 There's a kindness in his justice, 
 Which is more than liberty. 
 
 For the love of God is broader 
 Than the measure of man's mind; 
 And the heart of the Eternal 
 Is most wonderfully kind. 
 
INDEX 
 
INDEX 
 
 American Sunday School Un- 
 ion, 1 80 
 
 Ames, C. G., The Lord's 
 Prayer, 18 
 
 Armenian, Coptic and Syrian 
 Churches, 200 
 
 Ashenhurst, J. O., The Day 
 of the Country Church, 
 170, 177, 178 
 
 Ashworth, R. A., The Union 
 of Christian Forces, 
 
 /95 
 Athletics, disciplinary value, 
 
 94 
 Autocracy, 126 
 
 Baby-story theory of the 
 
 Bible, 144 
 Balfour, Lord, of Burleigh, 
 
 215 
 Bancroft, G., History of the 
 
 United States, 130 
 Beatitudes, The, 26-30 
 Beecher, W. J., as biblical 
 
 critic, 142 
 The Prophets and the 
 
 Promise, 42 
 Begbie, Harold, and reformed 
 
 men, 20 
 Bernard, T. D., The Central 
 
 Teaching of Jesus 
 
 Christ, 3 
 Bible, The, 141-160 
 
 as a game of chance, 150 
 its power, 158, 159 
 
 Bible, The, a means of grace, 
 
 151 
 
 what is it? 146 
 Bible classes for men, 175 
 Biblical criticism, 62, 141-151 
 
 precepts, how far binding, 
 
 149 
 Bibliographies needless, 124, 
 
 222 
 Brahmanists and Buddhists, 
 
 self-surrender of, 16 
 Brotherhood is to transform 
 the world, 9 
 of man is the kingdom of 
 
 God, 128 
 versus strife, 124, 198 
 Brown, W. M., The Level 
 Plan of Church Union, 
 vii, 188-190, 196, 197, 
 222 
 Bunyan, J., The Jerusalem 
 
 Sinner Saved, 52 
 Burns, R., Poem, 94 
 Bushnell, H., Christian Nur- 
 ture, 76, 77 
 Happiness and Joy, 39 
 Work and Play, 208 
 quoted, 174 
 
 Calling, The, 105-124 
 Calvinism and the Christian 
 
 consciousness, 9 
 Capitalists, how serve God's 
 
 kingdom, iio-ii^ 
 
 239 
 
240 
 
 Index 
 
 Christian emblem, fishing not 
 hunting, 38 
 spirit in politics and liter- 
 ature, X, xi 
 
 Christianity and the Cities, 
 
 137 
 Oriental, 216, 217 
 Church, the Catholic, 180-203 
 a means to the kingdom of 
 
 God, 189, 205 
 theories of, contrasted, 181- 
 
 190 
 true theory of, 192-201 
 Whittier on, 203 
 Church, the Local, 161-179 
 and revivalists, 168, 169 
 and sociability, 171, 172 
 as parish, 164 
 in a factory village, 178, 
 
 179 
 life in the world, 177, 178 
 uniform methods wrong, 
 
 166-174 
 varieties, 163-165 
 Churches yoked, 172 
 Churchill, W., The Inside of 
 
 the Cup, xi 
 Comenius, J. A., The Great 
 
 Didactic, 91, 102 
 Congo Rubber atrocities, 215 
 Conventional means of grace, 
 
 141-220 
 Cox, S., The Book of Job In- 
 terpreted, no 
 Cuyler, T. L., as a pastor, 169 
 
 Dickens, C, novels alluded 
 
 to, 14, 72 ^ 
 Dike, S. W., views on the 
 
 family, 73, 74, 85 
 Divine begetting, 147 
 
 Du Bois, W. E. B., The Phil- 
 adelphia Negro, 135 
 
 Duties depend on doctrines, 
 61 
 true point of view, 62-71 
 
 Dykes, J. O. books on the 
 Kingdom, 47 
 
 Ecumenical unity futile, 201 
 
 Edinburgh missionary confer- 
 ence, 212, 213 
 
 Education and individual 
 traits, 95 
 is religious, 101-104 
 
 Elliott, E. E., Making good in 
 the Local Church, 170, 
 222 
 
 Emerson, R. W., shot fired at 
 Concord, 144 
 
 Eschatology, 209-211 
 
 Faber, F. W., Hymn, 235 
 Federation of Churches, 192- 
 
 195 
 Fellowship with God, 225 
 Fishing, a Christian emblem, 
 
 Forgiveness and the rule of 
 three, 21 
 
 Fremantle, W. H., The World 
 as the Subject of Re- 
 demption, 36 
 
 Froebel, F., Education of 
 Man, 103 
 
 Gairdner, W. T. G., Echoes 
 of Edinburgh 1910, 
 
 215 
 
 George, Henry, land tax, 
 
 122 
 Girard College, 209 
 God in business, 106 
 
Index 
 
 241 
 
 God, most men believe in, 106 
 
 not a great man, v 
 Godet, F., on John, 44 
 Government, municipal, 133 
 Greek Church and Unity, 200 
 Grenfell, W. T., and catho- 
 licity, 185-188 
 
 Hall, C. C, The Universal 
 Elements of the Chris- 
 tian Religion, 217 
 Hall, F. J., Bibliography, 222 
 Hallam, Arthur, and Tenny- 
 son, 95, 96 
 Happiness and joy, 39 
 Harris, S., The Kingdom of 
 
 Christ on Earth, 211 
 Hickok, L. P., Moral Science, 
 
 131, 132 
 Home, The, 72-88 
 beneficent activity of, 88 
 industrial pressure against, 
 
 83 
 Is society, 74 
 leavening power of, 75 
 like living tissue, 75, 76 
 pushed aside, 84 
 Home training, elements of, 
 
 79, 80, 85 
 Hopkins, M., The Law of 
 
 Love, 56 
 Humanity Is the Kingdom of 
 God, 45 
 complex, X 
 enthusiasm of, 41 
 Humility unites men, 27 
 
 Isles of Shoals, 161 
 
 Jefferson and civil liberty, 
 
 ,136 
 Jeremiah, his greatness, 154 
 
 Jerusalem and Philadelphia, 
 
 133-136 
 Jesus Christ, central teaching, 
 
 3, 4 
 culmination of teaching, 4 
 foundation of concord, iil 
 harmony of teachings, 42- 
 
 58 
 his program, 9 
 
 frustrated by pride, 70 
 separate sayings 36-41 
 silence concerning organ- 
 izations, 57, 225, 226 
 summary of teachings, 57 
 supremacy, 158, 220 
 teachings, as related to 
 Unity, 3-58 
 Job, the Book of, 108-111, 153, 
 
 154 
 John's Gospel authentic? 62, 
 223 
 connects Paul with Sermon 
 
 on the Mount, 4 
 does not ignore the King- 
 dom of God, 54, 55 
 Jonah, the Book of, 155 
 Judge-advocates, 144, 145 
 
 KiKUYU, 187, 188 
 
 Kingdom of God, 204-220 
 and evolution, 217 
 Includes all life, 205-207 
 not apocalyptic, 209-211 
 not unearthly, 234 
 
 Labor problems, 108-123 
 
 unions, 117-121 
 Ladd, G. T., What Is the 
 
 Bible, 151 
 Lambeth in Boston, 182-185 
 Lanier, S., The Crystal, 156 
 Longfellow, H. W., The Saga 
 
 of King Olaf, 29, 30 
 
242 
 
 Index 
 
 Lord's Prayer, 11-24 
 
 each petition links with 
 "Our Father," 18 
 
 Love, the law of, 56 
 
 Lowell, J. R., The Present 
 Crisis, 140 
 
 Luke, the Gospel of Human- 
 ity, 54 
 
 Magna Charta, 129, 130 
 Mark's Gospel, the Seed 
 
 growing secretly, 53 
 Matthew's Gospel and the 
 Kingdom of God, 45-53 
 Maurice, F. D., The Lord's 
 
 Prayer, 12 
 Mayfloiver, The, 130 
 Meekness not weakness, 29 
 Milton, Paradise Lost, 126 
 Mohammedan literature, 156 
 Montessori, M., The Montes- 
 
 sori method, 103, 104 
 Moody, D, L., remark on the 
 
 minor prophets, 112 
 Moore, E. C, The Naturaliza- 
 tion of Christianity in 
 the Far East, 217 
 Moses and the giving of the 
 
 Law, 143 
 Murray, George, Jesus and 
 His Parables, 225 
 
 Nashville Conference, 64 
 National Church not feasible, 
 
 190 
 Nature not a goddess, ix 
 
 Objections anticipated, 61, 62, 
 89, 129, 204, 205 
 
 Oppenheimer, F., The State, 
 128 
 
 Parables, The, 30-35 
 of grace, 31, 32 
 of judgment, 32, 33 
 of the mustard-seed and the 
 leaven, 34, 35, 211, 212 
 Park, E. A., Convention Ser- 
 mon, 179 
 Pessimist's view of church 
 divisions, 202 
 of the family, 80, 81 
 Pestalozzi, J. H., Swan Song, 
 
 102, 103 
 Pope of Rome, not to be de- 
 posed, 190 
 Prayer, highest form of divine 
 service, 25 
 the Lord's, 11-24 
 the Pharisee's, v 
 Precept, the Cardinal, 3-10 
 Press, the daily, 206 
 Pride separates men, 26 
 Promise, not promises, 42 
 
 Quadrilateral, 182, 185 
 Quakers, or Friends, viii 
 
 Religion, source in the home, 
 
 76 
 Retrospect, 221-235 
 Rhinelander, P. M., on Unity, 
 
 67, 68, 157, 191 
 Riis, J., Peril and Preserva- 
 tion of the Home, 86 
 Robertson, J., Early Religion 
 
 of Israel, 145 
 Roman Catholicism and the 
 
 Church, 200 
 Roosevelt, T., message to 
 
 Edinburgh Conference, 
 
 214 
 
 Sacred Includes secular, 79 
 
Index 
 
 243 
 
 Saxe, J. G., Pyramus and 
 Thisbe, 202 
 
 School, The, 89-104 
 
 even for those who have 
 
 good homes, 91 
 public, unifies, 92-95 
 
 Scoffers at religion, 163 
 
 Sects like sectors of a circle, 
 vii 
 
 Shema, the first great com- 
 mandment, 40 
 
 Simpson, W. J. S., The 
 Catholic Conception of 
 the Church, 234 
 
 Sinai, Mount, 131 
 
 Social problems, 123 
 
 Society for the Prevention of 
 Cruelty to Animals, 205 
 
 Spencer, I. S., A Pastor's 
 Sketches, 107 
 
 Spirit versus form, vii, xii, 209 
 
 State, The, 125-140 
 defined, 132, 133 
 
 Stirling, J., Christ's Vision 
 of the Kingdom of 
 Heaven, 33, 54, 225 
 
 Storrs, R. S., Jr., The Divine 
 Origin of Christianity, 
 35, 36 
 
 Strahan, J., The Book of Job 
 Interpreted, no 
 
 Sunday School, The, 174-176 
 
 Sunday School Times, The, 
 and biblical criticism, 
 142 
 
 Swete, H. B., The Last Dis- 
 course and Prayer of 
 our Lord, 223, 224 
 
 Swift, J., Gulliver, vi 
 
 Thaxter, C, Among the Isles 
 of Shoals, 162 
 
 Tremaine, D. C, Church Effi- 
 ciency, 165, 175, 177 
 
 Trench, R. C, Notes on the 
 Parables, 49, 191 
 
 Unconventional means of 
 
 grace, 72-140 
 Unity and (not or) Union, 
 191 
 Christian, among Christian 
 workers, 20, 202 
 and schism, 63 
 by addition, not subtrac- 
 tion, 65 
 defined, iii, 57, 58, 68, 225 
 a goal, not an achieve- 
 ment, 9 
 independent of forms, ix 
 inward and unobtrusive, 
 
 67, 90 
 not Church Unity, v 
 not metaphysical, 8 
 Unity, Christian, a present 
 fact, 68 
 related to the Bible, 157, 
 
 158 
 a thing of degrees, 57, 58 
 two aspects, xii 
 the way to obtain, iii 
 Unity, confessional, inade- 
 quate, xii 
 Universalism, early and later, 
 6, 7, 58 
 
 Vedder, H. C, The Gospel 
 of Jesus and the Prob- 
 lems of Democracy, 222 
 
 War, the great, Iii, 15, 62, 
 Teacher versus warrior, 97 126, 127, 132, 138 
 
244 
 
 Index 
 
 Webster, D., Girard College 
 
 Will Case, 209 
 Weston, F., and catholicity, 
 
 185-188, 232, 233 
 Whittier, J. G., Hymns, viii, 
 
 203 
 Williamson, J., History of 
 
 Maine, 162 
 Wilson, W., governs on 
 
 Christian principles, x 
 The State, 127 
 
 Woodworth, W. W., The 
 Lord's Prayer, 224 
 
 Woolman, John, representa- 
 tive Friend, viii 
 
 World conference of churches, 
 64-66, 181 
 
 Young Men's Christian As- 
 sociation, 180 
 
 Young People's Society of 
 Christian Endeavor, 180