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 Presented by Vv-e/«5\C\(2/rAV^^CA-WoY^ 
 
 BR 50 .A32 1898 
 
 Abbott, Lyman, 1835-1922. 
 
 The new Puritanism 
 
THE NEW 
 
 PURITANISM 
 
 PAPERS BY 
 
 LYMAN ABBOTT, AMORY H. BRADFORD 
 CHARLES A. BERRY, GEORGE H. GORDON 
 WASHINGTON GLADDEN, WM. J-. TUCKER 
 
 DURING THE SEMI-CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION 
 OF PLYMOUTH CHURCH, BROOKLYN, N. Y. 
 
 I 847-1 897 
 
 WITH INTRODUCTION BY 
 
 ROSSITER W. RAYMOND 
 
 NEW YORK: FORDS, HOWARD, 
 AND HULBERT ^ m dccc xcviii 
 
Copyright, in 1897, 
 
 BY 
 
 Fords, Howard, and Hulbert. 
 
PUBLISHERS' PREFACE. 
 
 The expansion both of knowledge and of 
 wisdom in all departments of life during the 
 Nineteenth Century has nowhere been more 
 manifest than in religious matters. The 
 general mental attitude in nearly all com- 
 munions has changed, towards God and 
 towards man. The result is an immense 
 increase of vital interest, with a correspond- 
 ing decline in mere formalism. 
 
 This is particularly noticeable in two 
 directions. One is that, where formerly the 
 more conscientious professing Christians 
 would "read a chapter" in the Bible with a 
 comfortable sense of duty done, now thou- 
 sands. Christians and others, are studying 
 those ancient scriptures with discrimination, 
 yet with genuine delight in their treasures 
 • — of allegory, of biography, of history, of 
 
 • • • 
 
 111 
 
IV PUBLISHERS' PREFACE. 
 
 literature, of spiritual instruction and in- 
 spiration. Whether as cause or as conse- 
 quence, is the other: that the pregnant 
 practical teachings of the Master himself are 
 looked to for ''standards" of faith and doc- 
 trine, rather than the ingenious speculations 
 of his followers, however saintly or learned. 
 
 Jesus had no time for rhetoric. His brief 
 sayings are compact of germinant life. One 
 of them — perhaps as characteristic of his 
 whole career as any — is that "The Sabbath 
 was made for man, not man for the Sab- 
 bath." The principle involved in this 
 maxim is that which has developed into the 
 splendid humanitarianism of Christian life 
 and work to-day: although its full meaning 
 is yet to appear. 
 
 Like all the enlargement of the physical 
 and psychical sciences during the past cen- 
 tury, the religious growth has been greatest 
 — or by reason of multiplied ramifications 
 most discernible— within the latter half of 
 that period. It was natural, then, that the 
 fiftieth anniversary of the inauguration of so 
 
PUBLISHERS' PREFACE, V 
 
 potent an influence as Plymouth Church and 
 the coming of its first pastor should offer 
 an occasion for reviewing at large the vast 
 spiritual migration of multitudes of Chris- 
 tian pilgrims to ** fresh fields and pastures 
 new." And the occasion would lack its 
 best worth if this did not include a look 
 forward to coming duties and privileges. 
 During that celebration, therefore, both 
 retrospect and prospect — the past century 
 and the coming one — were set forth by 
 men of acknowledged eminence, whose 
 broad views will attract and interest think- 
 ing people. It was inevitable that the 
 speakers should find special concern with 
 Henry Ward Beecher and Plymouth Church ; 
 not, however, merely because these were at 
 the focal point of the occasion, but because 
 in any consideration of morals and religion 
 in America during the past half-century ** he 
 reckons ill who leaves [them] out.** 
 
 The Addresses pertaining to the celebra- 
 tion have been gathered into this volume. 
 Concerning the particular relations of the 
 
Vi PUBLISHERS' PREFACE. 
 
 speakers to that church and its first pastor, 
 as well as to the themes assigned them, the 
 publishers are glad to present an introduc- 
 tory paper from Dr. R. W. Raymond, — for 
 forty-two years a member of the church, an 
 intimate friend of both the first and the 
 present pastor, and a recognized leader in 
 the brotherhood, not only intellectually and 
 spiritually, but in the practical organiza- 
 tion and administration of the work of the 
 church. 
 
 The larger bearings of these Addresses — 
 those indeed for which they were mainly 
 planned and of which they chiefly and ably 
 treat — will be evident from their titles, and 
 still more from their admirable contents. 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PUBLISHERS' PREFACE iii 
 
 INTRODUCTORY: Rossiter W. Raymond ^ ix 
 
 I. THE NEW PURITANISM: Lyman Ab- 
 bott 23 
 
 II. PURITAN PRINCIPLES AND THE 
 MODERN WORLD: Amory h/'Brad- 
 
 FORD 75 
 
 III. BEECHER'S INFLUENCE UPON RE- 
 LIGIOUS THOUGHT IN ENGLAND: 
 Charles A. Berry 107 
 
 IV. THE THEOLOGICAL PROBLEM FOR 
 
 TO-DAY: George A. Gordon . . . 141 
 
 V. THE SOCIAL PROBLEMS OF THE 
 
 FUTURE: Washington Gladden . . 173 
 
 VI. THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE: 
 
 William J. Tucker 213 
 
 VII. RETROSPECT AND OUTLOOK: 
 
 Charles A. Berry , 237 
 
 VIII. THE DESCENT FROM THE MOUNT: 
 
 Lyman Abbott 253 
 
 vii 
 
Ifntro^uctor^^ 
 
 ROSSITER W. RAYMOND. 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 The occasion, though not directly the 
 topic, of the addresses contained in this 
 volume was the semi-centennial jubilee of 
 Plymouth Church. The story of the origin 
 of the church, as briefly outlined in the 
 Outlook of Nov. 13, 1897, is as follows: 
 
 " A Brooklyn merchant had accidentally heard 
 Henry Ward Beecher in Indianapolis, and the 
 hearing had aroused his desire to bring the al- 
 most boyish preacher to New York. The un- 
 suspecting candidate for the pulpit of a not yet 
 existing church was invited to deliver an address 
 before one of the missionary societies at the then 
 famous May meetings. He came east for this 
 purpose. Meanwhile, a few gentlemen interested 
 in this Christian conspiracy met at a private 
 house on the 8th of May, 1847, and decided then 
 and there to purchase a church building on 
 Cranberry Street, which the First Presbyterian 
 Church had just vacated, in order to follow the 
 population to a more favorable location upon the 
 Heights. A week later (May 16, 1847) Henry 
 Ward Beecher preached in this church building 
 
 xi 
 
Xll IN TROD UCTOR V. 
 
 his first sermon in Brooklyn. Plymouth Church, 
 however, was not organized until nearly a month 
 later (June 13) ; the following day, Mr. Beecher 
 was called to its pastorate, but did not accept 
 the call until August; he began his labors on 
 October 10, and was installed by Council Nov. 
 11/' 
 
 This series of events was follovi^ed ap- 
 proximately in the recent celebration, which 
 comprised: 
 
 1. A memorial prayer-meeting of the 
 church, held Friday evening, May 7, in 
 commemoration of the original conference 
 of May 8, 1847. 
 
 2. Services on Sunday, May 16, the 
 fiftieth anniversary of Mr. Beecher's first 
 sermon in Brooklyn. In the morning. Rev. 
 Lyman Abbott, D.D., pastor of Plymouth 
 Church, preached on '' The New Puritan- 
 ism " ; in the evening, Rev. Amory H. 
 Bradford, of Montclair, N. J., preached 
 on " Puritan Principles and the Modern 
 World." 
 
 3. Services on Sunday, November 7, at 
 which Rev. Charles A. Berry, D.D., of 
 
INTROD UCTOR V. XUl 
 
 Wolverhampton, England, preached morn- 
 ing and evening, his theme in the morning 
 being "The Influence of Henry Ward 
 Beecher's Teaching on Religious Life and 
 Thought in England," and in the evening 
 " The Secret of the Power of the Christian 
 Church." The morning service was fol- 
 lowed by the administration of the Lord's 
 
 Supper. 
 
 4. On Thursday evening, November 11, 
 the fiftieth anniversary of the installation of 
 Henry Ward Beecher, a service at which 
 addresses were made by Rev. George A. 
 Gordon, D.D., of Boston, Mass., on " The 
 Theology for To-day " ; by Rev. Washing- 
 ton Gladden, D.D., on " The Social Prob- 
 lems of the P'uture " ; and by Rev. William 
 J. Tucker, D.D., President of Dartmouth 
 College, on " The Church of the Future." 
 
 5. On Friday evening, November 12, a 
 prayer-meeting of the church, to express 
 gratitude for the past and renewed conse- 
 cration for the future. 
 
 Concerning the distinguished speakers 
 
XIV IN TROD UCrOR K. 
 
 named above, little need be said to explain 
 the invitation extended to them by Ply- 
 mouth Church. The wisdom of that invi- 
 tation is vindicated by the results here 
 gathered for publication. 
 
 Dr. Bradford is a friend of many years, to 
 Plymouth Church, to Mr. Beecher, and to 
 Mr. Beecher's successor; and his splendidly 
 earnest and active church in Montclair con- 
 tains many emigrants from Plymouth, who 
 have found themselves in no strange atmos- 
 phere by reason of their change of residence. 
 His work and his books have caused him to 
 be recognized as a representative Christian 
 pastor, as well as teacher. 
 
 Dr. Berry, by virtue of official position 
 as well as of acknowledged eminence, may 
 claim to speak for the Congregational 
 churches of the country where Congrega- 
 tionalism originated, and therefore to meas- 
 ure truly and report fairly the progress and 
 tendency of those bodies. But he is dear 
 to Plymouth for other reasons. He was 
 not yet thirty-five years of age when Henry 
 
INTRODUCTORY. XV 
 
 Ward Beecher, deeply impressed with his 
 eloquence, invited him to visit America, 
 and preach in Plymouth Church. The invi- 
 tation was accepted; but Mr. Beecher's 
 death intervened before the promise given 
 could be fulfilled. When, after several 
 months, the young minister came, his per- 
 sonal magnetism and apostolic fervor found 
 instant recognition, and he received an 
 enthusiastic call to the Plymouth pulpit. 
 This call, which, after due consideration, 
 he declined, was followed by a widened 
 sphere of activity and fame in his own 
 country: and after the lapse of a decade, 
 Plymouth Church was glad to welcome 
 again, in the vigor of his prime, him whom 
 it had loved in his ardent youth. The 
 urgent requests pressed upon him from 
 every quarter, during his six weeks' stay in 
 this country, and the interest excited by 
 his numerous public addresses during that 
 period, in New York, Montclair, New 
 Haven, Boston, Chicago, Washington, etc., 
 have confirmed the reputation he had 
 
XVI IN TROD UCTOR V. 
 
 already gained among American Chris- 
 tians. 
 
 Dr. Gordon, whose ministrations in the 
 historic Old South Church of Boston, not 
 less than his published lectures and essays, 
 have put him in the forefront among modern 
 theological thinkers, was preeminently quali- 
 fied to clothe the old faith in the terms of 
 the new philosophy. 
 
 Dr. Gladden, identified not only with 
 liberal conceptions of Christian truth, but 
 yet more with liberal applications of it to 
 modern social needs, was the fit mouthpiece 
 for the Divine message, calling the church 
 of Christ to wider fields and fresh endeavors. 
 President Tucker was the author of a 
 notable address delivered some years ago 
 before the Phi Beta Kappa Association of 
 Harvard University, and one of the in- 
 spirers and founders of that *' Andover 
 House " which is to-day, under a different 
 name, doing in the city of Boston a prac- 
 tical work for Christ, and has set the exam- 
 ple for the similar work carried on by Union 
 
INTRODUCTORY. XVU 
 
 Theological Seminary in the city of New- 
 York. These and other services marked 
 him as a prophet, bearing a word of the 
 Lord concerning the church of the future. 
 
 A simple inspection of this list of orators 
 and topics will show that the semi-centen- 
 nial jubilee of Plymouth Church was not 
 planned to be a glorification of its history, 
 or of its beloved first pastor, or of his suc- 
 cessor. Indeed, these causes for pride and 
 gratitude are so vividly and perpetually 
 present in the consciousness of its members, 
 that they do not need to be recalled by 
 formal celebration. It was deemed a 
 worthier use of the occasion to devote it 
 largely to the recognition and declaration of 
 the ideals toward which the church is striv- 
 ing In Its Inner life and outward activities, to 
 the demonstration of its agreement in this 
 faith and practice with the working churches 
 of two continents, to the contemplation of 
 its own duties, present and future, and to a 
 solemn self-consecration for yet higher and 
 more fruitful service. 
 
XVIU INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 That this was the fittest commemoration 
 of Henry Ward Beecher's Hfe and work, no 
 one familiar with the history of Plymouth 
 Church for the past ten years can doubt. 
 It is well known that, at the time of Mr. 
 Beecher*s death, few persons outside of the 
 church believed that it could continue to 
 be what, under the inspiration of his leader- 
 ship, it had been. Besides those less 
 friendly observers, who, deeming it but a 
 heterogeneous assemblage, held together 
 by the magnetism of one man, prophesied 
 that it would fall to pieces when his pres- 
 ence was withdrawn, there were among its 
 sympathizing friends few, if any, who did 
 not sorrowfully anticipate at least some 
 measure of retreat, some diminution of 
 activity, some loss of power, some partial 
 surrender of the field of work, perhaps a 
 necessary change of locality, involving 
 almost a practical sacrifice of the continuity 
 and identity of the life of the church. Such 
 apprehensions were natural enough to those 
 who did not understand what had been the 
 
INTROD UCTOR V. XIX 
 
 real result of Henry Ward Beecher's pas- 
 toral work of forty years. He had recruited 
 and organized, trained and disciplined and 
 led an army of Christian soldiers, which did 
 not dream of retreating or surrendering or 
 disbanding because its captain had fallen on 
 the field. The church was neither a crowd, 
 fascinated by oratory, nor a throng of 
 friends, held by loving admiration of their 
 friend, nor a philanthropic society, trying a 
 benevolent experiment, and dependent upon 
 advertising and popular support. It was 
 an organized body of working Christians — 
 ''heterogeneous " indeed, as a church ought 
 to be, and held together by loyalty to one 
 person; but that person was the living, 
 present Lord Jesus Christ. A striking and 
 conclusive proof of the truth of this propo- 
 sition is the fact that although, ten years 
 ago, the surrounding air was laden with pre- 
 dictions and suggestions of retreat, no word 
 of that kind was heard from within the 
 church. In its crowded meetings, no voice 
 intimated fear of failure. Its animated dis- 
 
XX INTRO D UCTOR V. 
 
 cussions all terminated in practically unan- 
 imous decisions. The writer, as chairman 
 of the Advisory Committee of the church 
 during this period of its fancied peril, had 
 ample opportunity to know the temper of 
 his brethren, and bears joyful testimony to 
 their unswerving, undaunted, and undivided 
 enthusiasm of service. 
 
 Ten years have proved that this enthusi- 
 asm was not a flash, but a glow. Plymouth 
 Church, originally established in a locality 
 abandoned as unfavorable to such an enter- 
 prise, still holds its post, finding its warrant 
 in the work which lies about its doors. 
 Some of its members come many miles to 
 their worship and labors — the average dis- 
 tance considerably exceeds a mile. Yet 
 not one of the branches of church-work 
 established by Mr. Beecher has been dis- 
 continued; and new ones have been added 
 to the list. The social and the spiritual life 
 of the church are undiminished in vigor; 
 and it still enjoys abundant comment and 
 advice from the newspapers, which may be 
 
INTRODUCTORY, ' XXI 
 
 taken as evidence that it still exerts an in- 
 fluence upon the community. 
 
 Certainly this survival of a church sup- 
 posed to be doomed to decline or decay is 
 a phenomenon worth noting; and it is fair 
 to presume that the Divine blessing, to 
 which, above all, success has been due, has 
 been bestowed upon the continued preach- 
 ing of what Dr. Berry calls '' the credible 
 and beautiful gospel " of which Mr. Beecher 
 was an apostle, upon Christian lives inspired 
 by that teaching, and upon conceptions and 
 methods of church-work suited to the con- 
 ditions and demands of our time. 
 
 The services connected with the late 
 semi-centennial jubilee, taken together, pre- 
 sented a comprehensive picture of such a 
 church as Plymouth has been or aims to 
 become. Perhaps the most characteristic 
 features of this picture were those which are 
 not included in the present volume— the 
 testimony, the aspiration, the brotherly 
 love, expressed in the prayer-meetings of 
 the church itself. Nor should it be inferred 
 
XXU INTROD UCTOR Y. 
 
 that the addresses here given constitute a 
 formal and official programme of this church. 
 Nevertheless, they do express, with indi- 
 vidual variety and freedom, the general 
 standpoint and attitude of Plymouth Church, 
 present, past, and future. It has stood for 
 liberty and progress in theological thought; 
 for the application of the principles and pre- 
 cepts of Jesus Christ to social questions as 
 well as to single lives; and for the right 
 and duty of the church to employ all meas- 
 ures and all instruments which can be con- 
 secrated to the service of God and of 
 humanity. It has welcomed the light, and 
 followed its kindly leading. It has tried to 
 do Christ's work, in Christ's way, in his 
 name, and with his help. And to this 
 high calling it now gratefully girds itself 
 anew. 
 
 R. W. Raymond. 
 
 Brooklyn, November 27, 1897. 
 
Ube IFlew Puritanism* 
 
 LYMAN ABBOTT. 
 
I. 
 
 Ube 1Rew purttautsm*' 
 
 By LYMAN ABBOTT, D.D., 
 Of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, N. Y. 
 
 And he gave some, apostles; and some, 
 prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pas- 
 tors and teachers ; for the perfecting of the 
 saints, for the work of the ministry, for the 
 edifying of the body of Christ: till we all come 
 in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge 
 of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the 
 measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. 
 — Ephesiafis, iv : ii, 12, 13. 
 
 Fifty years ago to-day, in this very 
 place, though not in this building, Henry 
 Ward Beecher preached his first sermon in 
 Brooklyn. That fact suggests the text and 
 
 * Plymouth Church, Sunday morning, May 16, 1897. 
 Reported by Henry Winans; revised by the author. 
 
 25 
 
26 THE NEW PURITANISM. 
 
 the theme for this occasion. I am not 
 going, however, to preach a sermon of 
 reminiscences, nor to speak to-day to the 
 older members of Plymouth Church. I am 
 somewhat doubtful about the value of such 
 reminiscences, somewhat doubtful about 
 the value of endeavoring to live over the 
 past. A generation has grown up who do 
 not know that past, who do not know out 
 of what the Church of Christ has come 
 into its present light and life and liberty, 
 and who are not, therefore, able to discern 
 the tendencies of to-day, because they do 
 not understand the history of yesterday. 
 It is to this generation I speak this morn- 
 ing, for the purpose of pointing out to 
 them, as well as I can within the limits of a 
 discourse not to be unduly prolonged, what 
 has been that transition from the old Puri- 
 tanism to the new Puritanism, in which, 
 as I think, Mr. Beecher and Plymouth 
 Church have taken no inconsiderable part. 
 
 John Calvin declared that man had lost 
 his freedom in the Fall; he was no longer 
 
THE NEW PURITANISM. 27 
 
 a free moral agent.' Whatever else may- 
 be said respecting Calvinism, it was at least 
 logical and self-consistent, and the doctrine 
 of John Calvin, incorporated in the West- 
 minster Confession of Faith, remains there 
 to the present day. Jonathan Edwards in 
 the middle of the last century gave philo- 
 sophic exposition to the dogmatic declara- 
 tion of Calvin.' He possessed what Calvin 
 lacked — a spiritual imagination. He was 
 philosopher rather than dogmatist. His 
 argument in his famous treatise on the 
 Freedom of the Will may be put very 
 tersely — at least for the purposes of this 
 morning: Every phenomenon has its cause; 
 therefore, said Edwards, every volition of 
 the will must have a cause. The man's 
 will is controlled, as everything else is con- 
 
 ' " Man is not possessed of free will for good 
 works, unless he be assisted by grace, and that 
 special grace which is bestowed on the elect alone in 
 regeneration." — Calvin's Institutes, vol. ii. p. 238. 
 
 ' The reader who has not time to read Jonathan 
 Edwards* Works will find a full and sympathetic, 
 though critical, interpretation of them in Dr. A. V. G, 
 Allen's Life of Jonathan Edwards, 
 
2b THE NEW PURITANISM. 
 
 trolled. He must decide according to the 
 strongest motive; because if he did not 
 decide according to the strongest motive, 
 then he would decide according to a motive 
 weaker than the stronger, and that is a self- 
 contradiction. Man therefore has no free- 
 dom of the will. Freedom — so Jonathan 
 Edwards argued — consists in power to do 
 what you will; it does not consist in power 
 to will what you will do. The power which 
 Chrysostom affirmed in the will, to choose 
 between good and evil, Jonathan Edwards 
 explicitly and in terms denied. This denial 
 was the crucial point, the foundation-doc- 
 trine of the old Puritanism. Man had lost 
 his freedom; he was no longer able to 
 choose the right and eschew the wrong; he 
 could not repent; he could not do virtuous 
 deeds; he could not accept God's grace; he 
 could do nothing. But God in his infinite 
 mercy was pleased to rescue some men from 
 this state of servitude. He was not pleased 
 to rescue all; he was not under any obliga- 
 tion to rescue any. Man was culpable, 
 
THE NEW PURITANISM, 29 
 
 although he could not choose. God was 
 pleased by a miraculous act of grace to 
 select some men and take them out of this 
 bondage, this life of servitude, and put 
 them into a new life. These men were the 
 chosen; they were God's elect. The men 
 whom God had not chosen thus to select 
 and rescue by a miraculous act of grace were 
 hopelessly and eternally lost. Man him- 
 self had no more power to repent and begin 
 a new life than Lazarus had to come forth 
 out of his tomb before Christ had said to 
 him, Lazarus, arise! and no more power to 
 stay unrepentant, when Christ had called 
 him to repentance, than Lazarus would 
 have had to remain in the sleep of death 
 after Christ had said, Lazarus, come forth ! 
 The grace that summoned men was an irre- 
 sistible grace. If summoned they could not 
 help but come, and not one could come 
 unless so summoned. 
 
 In the old Puritanism this was not an 
 abstract doctrine, held only by metaphy- 
 sicians and confined to scholastic discussion. 
 
30 THE NEW PURITANISM. 
 
 It was embodied in the practical ministry 
 
 of the churches in the earlier history of 
 
 New England. A simple extract from a 
 
 practical sermon by an eminent preacher of 
 
 New England of the seventeenth century, 
 
 the Rev. Thomas Shepherd, one of the 
 
 founders of Harvard College, will illustrate 
 
 this. Imagine it preached to-day in the 
 
 chapel of that university: 
 
 *' Oh thou mayest wish and desire to come 
 out sometime, but canst not put strength to thy 
 desire, nor indure to doe it. Thou mayest hang 
 down thy head like a Bulrush for sin, but thou 
 canst not repent of sin; thou mayest presume 
 but thou canst not beleeve; thou mayest come 
 half way, and forsake some sins, but not all 
 sins ; thou mayest come & knock at heaven 
 gate, as th.Q foolish virgins did, but not enter in 
 and passe through the gate; thou mayest see 
 the land of Canaan, & take much pain to goe 
 into Canaan, and mayest tast of the bunches of 
 Grapes of that good land, but never enter into 
 Canaan, into Heaven, but thou liest bound hand 
 and foot in this woful estate, and here thou 
 must lie and rot like a dead carkasse in his 
 grave, untill the Lord come and rowle away the 
 stone, and bid thee come out and live.' 
 
 >> I 
 
 ' Quoted in Some Aspects of the Religious Life of 
 New England, by George Leon Walker, D.D., p. 23. 
 
THE NEW PURITANISM. 3^ 
 
 This doctrine Is no longer preached In 
 our churches; but it Is still preserved in 
 some of our creeds. Its philosophy is em- 
 bodied In that Westminster Confession of 
 Faith, which we might all be glad to recog- 
 nize as an honest and able attempt In the 
 seventeenth century to systematize religious 
 philosophy, but which we must declare to 
 be heresy when men still demand adhesion 
 to it as the best embodiment possible In our 
 times, of the glorious Gospel of Jesus Christ. 
 This is what the Westminster Confession of 
 Faith declares on this subject, — that Con- 
 fession of Faith which is accepted for sub- 
 stance of doctrine by a very considerable 
 proportion of the religious teachers of this 
 country, and is even exalted to be a stand- 
 ard of faith by some Congregational mln- 
 isters : 
 
 " Works done by unregenerate men, although 
 for the matter of them they may be things which 
 God commands, and of good use both to them- 
 selves and others; yet because they proceed not 
 from a heart purified by faith, nor are done in a 
 right manner, according to the Word, nor to a 
 
32 THE NEW PURITANISM. 
 
 right end, the glory of God; they are therefore 
 sinful, and cannot please God, or make a man 
 meet to receive grace from God. And yet their 
 neglect of them is more sinful and displeasing 
 unto God." ' 
 
 The Psalmist had said, ** He that hath 
 clean hands and a pure heart, who hath not 
 lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn 
 deceitfully, he shall receive the 'blessing 
 from the Lord, and righteousness from the 
 God of his salvation." But the old Puri- 
 tanism said No ! Though he wash his hands, 
 though he cleanse his life, though he walk 
 according to his conscience, this is not 
 a ground on which he can receive grace 
 from God. The prophet Isaiah had said: 
 ** Let the wicked forsake his way, and the 
 unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him 
 return unto the Lord, and he will have 
 mercy upon him, and to our God, for he 
 will abundantly pardon." But the old 
 Puritanism declared that that was only said 
 in order to deepen the despair of men, for 
 
 * West, Conf. of Faith, ch. xvi, § vii. 
 
THE NEW PURITANISM, 33 
 
 no unrighteous man can forsake his evil 
 way, and no wicked man can abandon his 
 evil thoughts. 
 
 Thus a system of fatalism had grown up 
 and been wrought out in the old Puritanism, 
 as absolutely fatalistic as the modern Neces- 
 sarianism. The old Puritanism said, as 
 modern Necessarianism says, that man is the 
 creature of his heredity and of his environ- 
 ment, but it added that they are both hope- 
 lessly bad. It declared that man is the son 
 of a fallen race, and has inherited nothing 
 but depravity from his parents; is a member 
 of a fallen race, and is surrounded by noth- 
 ing but depravity in the community. He 
 is the creature of his heredity, and that is 
 depraved ; he is the creature of his environ- 
 ment, and that is depraved ; there is no hope 
 for him, unless by a miraculous act of 
 supernatural power he is taken out of his 
 heredity and out of his environment: and 
 whether this miraculous grace will thus 
 rescue any particular man or not, no man 
 can tell. Nothing that he can do, nothing 
 
34 THE NEW PURITANISM. 
 
 that any one can do for him, will help or 
 hasten this miraculous process. 
 
 As to infants there was a hot debate, 
 which, so far as the Westminster Confession 
 of Faith was concerned, was settled by a 
 compromise — by the declaration that elect 
 infants dying in infancy are saved, leaving 
 those who thought there were no elect 
 infants to say they are not elect, and those 
 who thought that all infants are elect to say 
 they are all saved, and those who thought 
 that some are elect and some not, to say 
 that some are saved and some not. It was 
 one of the cases in which words were used 
 not in a double but in a triple sense, and 
 each man might take the meaning he pre- 
 ferred. 
 
 This old Puritanism, fatalistic in the very 
 essence of its philosophy, of course regarded 
 religion as something unnatural. It did 
 not belong to man's nature. It was some- 
 thing outside and beyond him. It was, 
 therefore, something outside and beyond 
 reason. As he could not arrive at righteous- 
 
THE NEW PURITANISM. 3S 
 
 ness by any obedience to law, so he could 
 not arrive at truth by any exercise of his 
 reason. Religion was wholly supernatural, 
 not to say contranatural, and depravity was 
 wholly natural. Truth was wholly the 
 result of a supernatural revelation, and no 
 man could arrive at truth except it were 
 supernaturally revealed to him, not only by 
 the Bible, but by a supernatural grace accom- 
 panying the Bible. It was not enough that 
 he had the Bible, and that he had preachers 
 to interpret the Bible, and a natural inclina- 
 tion to accept the teachings of the Bible; 
 he must have in addition miraculous light 
 streaming down upon him from God on the 
 pages of the Bible and into his heart and 
 his understanding, or the truth and the de- 
 sire to understand and receive and obey 
 the truth were all of no avail, for he had 
 not any capacity to perceive or understand 
 or receive the truth except as it was super- 
 naturally bestowed upon him in regenera- 
 tion. The light of nature was not enough, 
 nor the Bible enough, nor these two enough, 
 
36 THE NEW PURITANISM. 
 
 even when aided by some ''common opera- 
 tions of the Spirit." Upon this point the 
 Westminster Confession of Faith is as ex- 
 plicit as upon the others. Indeed, the two 
 are logically and necessarily connected : 
 
 "Others, not elected, although they may be 
 called by the ministry of the Word, and may 
 have some common operations of the Spirit, yet 
 they never truly come unto Christ, and therefore 
 cannot be saved; much less can men not pro- 
 fessing the Christian religion be saved in any 
 other way whatsoever, be they never so diligent 
 to frame their lives according to the light of 
 nature and the law of that religion they do pro- 
 fess; and to assert and maintain that they may 
 is very pernicious and to be detested.' 
 
 >> 1 
 
 This fatalistic religion did not accomplish 
 that which has been claimed for the old 
 Puritanism. In the beginning of the present 
 century intemperance was common — far 
 more common than to-day, not only out- 
 side the church, but inside the church; and, 
 according to the testimony of Dr. Lyman 
 Beecher, at ordination services the side- 
 
 * West. Con/, of Faith, ch. X, § iv. 
 
7^ HE NEW PURITANISM. 37 
 
 board of the pastor looked and smelled like 
 the bar of a grog-shop ; and he adds: '' None 
 of the Consociation were drunk; but that 
 there was not, at times, a considerable 
 amount of exhilaration, I cannot affirm."' 
 Slavery was extending its black cloud over 
 one half the continent, and the Church, at 
 the beginning of the present century, was 
 
 ' " At the ordination at Plymouth, the preparation 
 for our creature comforts, in the sitting-room of Mr. 
 Heart's house, besides food, was a broad sideboard 
 covered with decanters and bottles, and sugar, and 
 pitchers, of water. There we found all the various 
 kinds of liquors then in vogue. The drinking was 
 apparently universal. This preparation was made by 
 the society as a matter of course. When the Con- 
 sociation arrived, they always took something to 
 drink round; also before public services, and always 
 on their return. As they could not all drink at once, 
 they were obliged to stand and wait as people do 
 when they go to mill. There was a decanter of 
 spirits also on the dinner-table, to help digestion, 
 and gentlemen partook of it through the afternoon 
 and evening as they felt the need, some more and 
 some less; and the sideboard, with the spillings of 
 water, and sugar, and liquor, looked and smelled 
 like the bar of a very active grog-shop. None of the 
 Consociation were drunk; but that there was not, at 
 times, a considerable amount of exhilaration, I can- 
 not affirm." — Autobiography of Lyttiaii Beecher, vol. i., 
 ch. xxxvii., p. 245. 
 
38 THE NEW PURITANISM. 
 
 generally silent. Dr. Hopkins of brave 
 memory raised his voice against slavery: 
 but then Dr. Hopkins was not orthodox — 
 he was also at the same time writing two 
 volumes entitled TJie Nezv Divinity. The 
 heresy and the moral reform were going 
 along together. There were no missionary 
 organizations, either home or foreign; and 
 when first the attempt was made to organ- 
 ize a foreign missionary organization, the 
 preachers of fatalism protested against it as 
 an irreverent attempt to interfere with the 
 decrees of Almighty God. 
 
 Of course this system was not without 
 some compensating advantages. It did de- 
 velop in men a profound sense, if a somewhat 
 morbid sense, of their guilt and sinfulness; 
 it did develop in men a very profound, if 
 not altogether healthful, reverence for God. 
 If reverence be compounded, as the philoso- 
 phers tell us it is, partly of fear and partly 
 of love, then we must say that the rever- 
 ence of the old Puritanism was mostly fear 
 and very little love. But still there was 
 
THE NEW PURITANISM, 39 
 
 reverence, and by it the conscience was 
 made strong, and when the conscience was 
 brought to bear on human life it carried with 
 it tremendous sanction. There were revi- 
 vals of religion also ; but the revivals of reli- 
 gion were generally emotional rather than 
 ethical. They were transitions from a state 
 of indifference, through a state of despair 
 and a state of exhilaration, into a state of 
 peace. Jonathan Edwards, in his book 
 or essay on Revivals, gives five tests of a 
 work of grace. They are these: first, 
 increased esteem for Christ; second, diminu- 
 tion of worldliness — by which he means 
 dancing, card-playing, and the like; third, 
 respect for the Scriptures; fourth, reception 
 of the truth — by which he means the New 
 England system of theology; and fifth, 
 love. If by '* love " he had meant what in 
 these later days we mean, we might have 
 accepted it as an adequate interpretation of 
 Christ's saying: " By their fruits ye shall 
 know them." But he does not mean by 
 'Move" what we mean by ''love"; he 
 
40 THE NEW PURITANISM. 
 
 does not define it as Christ defines it in the 
 parable of the Good Samaritan, and as Paul 
 defines it in the thirteenth chapter of First 
 Corinthians. Love, he says, is spurious 
 unless it is "" attended with a sense of 
 our own unworthiness, as in ourselves the 
 enemies and haters of God and Christ, and 
 with a renunciation of all our excellency and 
 righteousness." Any one who will com- 
 pare the account of the revivals of religion 
 under Jonathan Edwards, in 1740, and the 
 revivals of religion under Dr. Finney, in the 
 early part of this century, will see the 
 radical ethical difference between the two. 
 The system of theology which openly 
 scorned what Dr. Lyman Beecher called 
 the '* natural virtues " was not adapted to 
 do much toward eradicating " natural 
 vices." After one of Dr. Finney's ser- 
 mons in Oberlin, the people of the town 
 were seen the next morning going about the 
 village returning the books and saws and 
 axes which they had borrowed. No such 
 sign of revival was ever witnessed, I venture 
 
THE NEW PURITANISM. 4I 
 
 to say, under the preaching of the old 
 Puritanism. 
 
 Ah'eqtdy before the beginning of this cen- 
 tury the old Puritanism had created a 
 reaction. We seem to swing, like a pen- 
 dulum, back and forth, and never stay 
 stationary in the center. This reaction was 
 seen in several ways. First, in a blatant, 
 irreverent, blasphemous, and unintelligent 
 infidelity. Thomas Paine's Age of Rea- 
 son was finally given to the public in the 
 year 1795. While, of course, some of its 
 statements are accepted to-day — for no 
 man, however great his genius, can write a 
 book of one hundred pages and not say 
 some true things — on the whole, Paine's 
 attitude of mind is repudiated by all un- 
 believers of the present time, unless possi- 
 bly I except Robert IngersoU. But when 
 it was published Paine's ^^^ of Reason was, 
 perhaps, the most popular book of the time. 
 When President Dwight took the presi- 
 dency of Yale College, it is said that there 
 were only four professing Christians in the 
 
42 THE NEW PURITANISM, 
 
 whole College and two Thomas Paine so- 
 cieties; and so popular was French infidelity 
 that a number of leading members of the 
 senior class had dropped their own names 
 and taken as their own, those of leading 
 French infidels/ 
 
 The second reaction was the great Meth- 
 odist movement. The Methodism which 
 was born in England in the middle of the 
 eighteenth century had spread to the United 
 States before its close. It denied emphati- 
 cally the fatalism of Calvin and Edwards 
 with the accompanying doctrine of particu- 
 lar election, and affirmed in the most vig- 
 orous manner the freedom of volition and 
 the universal provision of divine grace. It 
 transferred responsibility for the moral ac- 
 tion of the individual from God to man, 
 and in this was its power; it passed by, if 
 it did not ignore, the sovereignty of law 
 and the Lawgiver over free moral agents, 
 and in that was its weakness. 
 
 * Life of Timothy Diuight: Introduction to D wight's 
 Theology, p. 20. 
 
THE NEW PURITANISM. 43 
 
 This movement was followed by one more 
 local in its character, the Unitarian revolt, 
 in the beginning of the present century. It 
 was confined to the Puritan churches and, 
 in the main, to those of New England 
 origin. Under the leadership of Channing 
 it denied the Trinity, but not the divinity 
 of Christ. Rather, it affirmed the inherent 
 divinity of man. It did not stop with 
 declaring that man preserved freedom of 
 volition ; it also declared the excellence of 
 the ''natural virtues** which Puritanism 
 condemned, and affirmed the practical and 
 ethical and natural character of religion. 
 Says its great leader. Dr. Channing: " I 
 conceive these to be the leading principles 
 of modern divinity: practical righteousness 
 is all in all, and every system which em- 
 braces motives enough to a good practice is 
 sufficiently correct. Love is the fulfilling of 
 the law and of the gospel. All truth is 
 designed to excite this temper, and to form 
 the habits which flow from it, and this is the 
 
44 THE NEW PURITANISM. 
 
 only test which we fallible mortals can apply 
 to doctrines." 
 
 More important than either Methodism 
 or Unitarianism, from the theological point 
 of view, was that revival of philosophy 
 which may be traced back to Samuel Taylor 
 Coleridge (i 8 16-1834), in the first quarter 
 of the present century, though it includes 
 among its apostles such men as Erskine of 
 Scotland, Maurice and Stanley in England, 
 Bushnell and Phillips Brooks in America. 
 Coleridge parted from the old Puritanism 
 in his fundamental conception of both man 
 and religion: man possesses a free determin- 
 ing creative will, which is the secret of his 
 spiritual, godlike nature. If he has not 
 this he is a machine, not a man: neither 
 amenable to moral law nor capable of moral 
 virtue. Religion is the supreme life of this 
 will, its highest development, and so man's 
 highest education. Religion therefore rests, 
 in the last analysis, not upon an authority 
 without, — whether of church, creed, or 
 Bible, — but upon the reason and conscience 
 
THE NEW PURITANISM. 45 
 
 of man, upon his own spiritual recognition 
 of and deference to divine law and divine 
 truth. If he has not a natural capacity to 
 perceive and receive the truth he has no 
 capacity for religion, and is a mere higher 
 animal, not a man. 
 
 Crossing the ocean and following the less 
 philosophical and more emotional protest of 
 Methodism and the less spiritual but more 
 purely ethical protest of Unitarianism, both 
 of which had prepared for its advent, this 
 rational and spiritual philosophy of life 
 mixed with and modified the Old Puritan- 
 ism, making of it a New Puritanism. In 
 the transition from the Old to the New such 
 theological teachers as Edwards A. Park, 
 such revival preachers as Charles G. Finney, 
 such mediators between the rationalist and 
 the scholastic theologian as Dr. Lyman 
 Beecher and Albert Barnes and Horace Bush- 
 nell, were efficient and representative factors. 
 They differed widely in temperament, and 
 materially in philosophy; but they agreed 
 in insisting on man's free will, or his natural 
 
46 THE NEW PURITANISM. 
 
 ability to choose the right and eschew the 
 wrong; on man's personal responsibility for 
 his choice, as well as for his outward actions; 
 on the naturalness of religion and man's 
 native, inherent capacity for it; and on the 
 natural virtues as the sole satisfactory evi- 
 dence of the possession of supernatural 
 grace. For this teaching, now so elemental 
 in Congregational theology, Drs. Park, and 
 Finney, and Kirk, and Lyman Beecher, 
 and Horace Bushnell, and Mr. Barnes were 
 all accused of heresy, and Dr. Lyman 
 Beecher and Mr. Barnes were put on trial 
 in the Presbyterian Church, with, as a 
 result, the division in 1838 of the great 
 Presbyterian Church into two churches, 
 each maintaining the same General Confes- 
 sion, but one interpreting it according to 
 the Old Puritanism, the other according to 
 the New. The first was historically accu- 
 rate, but was unscriptural and unphilosoph- 
 ical; the second was scripturally and philo- 
 sophically accurate, but departed widely 
 
THE NEW PURITANISM. 47 
 
 from the traditional theology and historic 
 standards of the Church. 
 
 The ethical reaction against the Old Puri- 
 tanism was quite as marked as the theolog- 
 ical reaction. The temperance movement, 
 though by no means confined to the Puritan 
 churches, received its impulse and its con- 
 secration therefrom. In fifteen years after 
 Lyman Beecher preached his ''six sermons 
 against intemperance" the consumption of 
 strong drink in New England had decreased 
 more than one half /^r capita. In the Puri- 
 tan churches, if we may include the Uni- 
 tarian offshoots from Puritanism, and in the 
 Friends* Meetings, the antislavery move- 
 ment also received its chiefest religious im- 
 pulse, and almost exclusively in the churches 
 of the New Puritanism. The Old School 
 Church was an apologist if not a defender 
 of slavery. The Congregational churches 
 which adhered to the Edwardsian theology 
 were never found in the skirmish-line, and 
 rarely in attacking column, of either the 
 temperance or the antislavery forces, while 
 
48 THE NEW PURITANISM. 
 
 Lyman Beecher and Charles G. Finney, and 
 Edwards A. Park, and Horace Bushnell, 
 and Albert Barnes were all equally known 
 as reformers in the moral life and in theo- 
 logical philosophy. 
 
 This rapid historical survey seemed to be 
 necessary to make possible an intelligible 
 picture of the conditions of life and thought 
 in 1847, when Henry Ward Beecher, in the 
 thirty-fourth year of his age, preached his 
 first sermon in Brooklyn in the place, 
 though not in the church-building, where 
 we are now gathered. 
 
 The Old Puritanism was still dominant. 
 Whether we measure force by numbers, 
 wealth, or social eminence, we must accord 
 to the Old Puritanism the first place. Still, 
 Lyman Beecher, Dr. Finney, Dr. Bush- 
 nell, Mr. Barnes and Professor Park were 
 making the churches familiar with the then 
 new but now axiomatic doctrine that man 
 is free, that religion is natural to him, and 
 that all virtue is acceptable and all vice 
 blamable in regenerate and unregenerate 
 
THE NEW PURITANISM, 49 
 
 alike. The Mexican War was drawing to its 
 close; the cannon thundering on Mexican 
 plains was awaking the sluggish conscience 
 of New England to a sense of its participa- 
 tion in and responsibility for slavery. 
 Theodore Parker had just begun his cam- 
 paign against it in Boston. Garrison was at 
 once provoking by his unwisdom and over- 
 coming by his courage the prejudices and 
 the passions of conservative New England. 
 John G. Whittier was writing now editorials, 
 now poems, to awaken the nation, and earn- 
 ing the title given to him by an admirer, of 
 the best lobbyist in the country, by his 
 indefatigable and unofficial labors with timid 
 politicians and halting legislators. Mobs 
 were trying in vain, in obedience to the 
 demands of slavery, to put a stop to free 
 speech in the North, as they had already 
 put a stop to it in the South, where free 
 speech, free press, free schools, and free 
 labor were catalogued together in a common 
 denunciation. The great Evangelical So- 
 cieties — preeminently the American Board 
 
50 THE NEW PURITANISM. 
 
 and the American Tract Society — were 
 silent before slavery, if not acquiescent in 
 it, because all Evangelical Christians did not 
 agree in condemning it. The American 
 Missionary Association had just been organ- 
 ized in Albany on a platform of freedom to 
 speak the truth and the whole truth in 
 preaching the Gospel. 
 
 The first sermon of the young preacher 
 was published in full in the New York 
 Tribune, — a more rare compliment in those 
 days than in ours. It was on the text 
 *' Every man shall give account of himself 
 unto God." In the sermon as read to-day 
 there is nothing extraordinary except its 
 cumulative proofs from life in support of the 
 text. But in its recognition of human 
 liberty and human responsibility it at once 
 identified the young preacher as belonging 
 theologically to the New Puritanism. His 
 second notable sermon was the fourth one 
 preached in Brooklyn, on the evening of 
 October lo, the first Sunday after his 
 coming to the church. It was a call to arms 
 
THE NEW PURITANISM. 5^ 
 
 against intemperance and slavery, especially 
 the latter. It identified him, not only with 
 the New Puritanism, but with the radical 
 wing of the New Puritanism, for in it he 
 identified social morality with personal and 
 spiritual religion. The church was organ- 
 ized with but twenty-one members. But it 
 rapidly drew to itself men and women 
 attracted by the courage even more than by 
 the eloquence of the preacher, sharing his 
 convictions and eager to share in his work. 
 So rapid and so substantial was the growth 
 of the church that when, a little over two 
 years later (January 13, 1849)^ the building 
 was destroyed by fire, the church was strong 
 enough in both courage and money to buy 
 additional land, in order to enlarge its 
 accommodations and erect the structure in 
 which it has ever since worshiped. It is 
 not my purpose to trace the subsequent 
 history of Mr. Beecher or of Plymouth 
 Church. This has been often done and is 
 in print, easily accessible to any reader. I 
 propose on this background of history, 
 
52 THE NEW PURITANISM, 
 
 rapidly and imperfectly etched, to try to 
 
 tell you for what, during forty years, the 
 
 church and its pastor stood, and for what 
 
 the church and its present pastor still stand. 
 
 In the first place, Mr. Beecher, from the 
 
 very beginning, was a preacher of Christ, 
 
 and this church has been from the very 
 
 beginning a Christian church. There are 
 
 two ways in which men may come to Christ: 
 
 one through acquaintance with him as a 
 
 man- — as Peter and James and John came; 
 
 and the other through a vision of him as a 
 
 God — as Paul came. Henry Ward Beecher 
 
 came to Jesus Christ through a vision of him 
 
 as God. Let me read his account of his 
 
 experience: 
 
 " I was a child of teaching and prayer; I was 
 reared in the household of faith; I knew the 
 Catechism as it was taught; I was instructed in 
 the Scriptures as they were expounded from the 
 pulpit, and read by men : and yet, till after I 
 was twenty-one years old, I groped without the 
 knowledge of God in Christ Jesus, I know not 
 what the tablets of eternity have written down, 
 but I think that when I stand in Zion and before 
 God, the brightest thing which I shall look back 
 
THE NEW PURITANISM. 53 
 
 upon will be that blessed morning of May when 
 it pleased God to reveal to my wandering soul 
 the idea that it was his nature to love a man in 
 his sins for the sake of helping him out of them; 
 that he did not do it out of compliment to 
 Christ, or to a law, or a plan of salvation, but 
 from the fullness of his great heart; that he was 
 a Being not made mad by sin, but sorry; that he 
 was not furious with wrath toward the sinner, 
 but pitied him— in short, that he felt toward me 
 as my mother felt toward me, to whose eyes my 
 wrong-doing brought tears, who never pressed 
 me so close to her as when I had done wrong, 
 and who would fain, with her yearning love, lift 
 me out of trouble. And when I found that Jesus 
 Christ had such a disposition, and that when 
 his disciples did wrong, he drew them closer 
 to him than he did before ; and when pride and 
 jealousy, and rivalry, and all vulgar and worldly 
 feelings rankled in their bosoms, he opened his 
 heart to them as a medicine to heal these infirmi- 
 ties; — when I found that it was Christ's nature 
 to *lift men out of weakness to strength, out of 
 impurity to goodness, out of everything low and 
 debasing to superiority, I felt that I had found a 
 God. 
 
 " I shall never forget the feelings with which 
 I walked forth that May morning. The golden 
 pavements will never feel to my feet as then the 
 grass felt to them; and the singing of the birds 
 in the woods — for I roamed in the woods — was 
 
54 THE NEW PURITANISM. 
 
 cacophonous to the sweet music of my thoughts, 
 and there were no forms in the universe which 
 seemed to me graceful enough to represent the 
 Being the conception of whose character had 
 just dawned upon my mind. I felt, when I had, 
 with the Psalmist, called upon the heavens, the 
 earth, the mountains, the streams, the floods, the 
 birds, the beasts, and universal being, to praise 
 God, that I had called upon nothing that could 
 praise him enough for the revelation of such a 
 nature as that in the Lord Jesus Christ." 
 
 Our knowledge comes from our experi- 
 ence. Calvin, as a student in Paris, was 
 called the Accuser, because he was so rig- 
 orous in his conscience against himself and 
 against every one else. Luther found his 
 message when it was whispered to his own 
 heart, The just shall live by faith; and in 
 it he found peace. And when the message 
 of God in Christ was proclaimed to Mr. 
 Beecher's heart, the message was given to 
 him which all the rest of his life he pro- 
 claimed. He was not primarily a preacher 
 of righteousness, not primarily an anti- 
 slavery preacher, not primarily a preacher 
 of law or doctrine or theology of any kind; 
 
THE NEW PURITANISM. 55 
 
 he was primarily a preacher of Christ. The 
 one great book of his life, written as a book, 
 not composed of spoken words reported, 
 was the Life of Jesus, the Christ ; and when 
 that Life was left unfinished, because his 
 life had been broken in upon, and his sons 
 undertook to finish it for him, they found 
 in his sermons enough of description of 
 Christ's life to complete the work, with one 
 single great exception. He had never ven- 
 tured to describe the passion and death of 
 Christ upon the cross, because he could not 
 command himself to do it. 
 
 At one time Mr. Beecher lectured in a 
 ** Fraternity Course," projected by the 
 young men of Theodore Parker's church for 
 charitable purposes. The Course included 
 Mr. Parker, together with six or eight of the 
 other best known lyceum orators of that 
 day ; but men who forgot that Paul preached 
 to Jews and to pagans set their batteries 
 in array against Henry Ward Beecher for 
 lecturing to radical Unitarians. In his 
 answer he said this (I read it not as an 
 
56 THE NEW PURITANISM, 
 
 accurate definition of his theology, I do not 
 think it is, but as an exposition of his own 
 personal experience): ''Men at large will 
 be apt to say that I have done a more ex- 
 emplary Christian act, in daring to avow an 
 ethical sympathy with Theodore Parker, 
 between whom and myself there exists an 
 irreconcilable theological difference, than if 
 I had bombarded him for a whole year and 
 refused to take his hand. . . . Could Theo- 
 dore Parker worship my God ? Christ Jesus 
 is his name. All that there is of God to 
 me is bound up in that name. A dim and 
 shadowy effluence rises from Christ, and 
 that I am taught to call the Father. A 
 yet more tenuous and invisible film of 
 thought arises, and that is the Holy Spirit. 
 But neither is to me aught tangible, rest- 
 ful, accessible." 
 
 This Apostolic conception of Christ as 
 the one Image of the invisible God, to be 
 worshiped and glorified, together with the 
 Father and the Holy Spirit, Mr. Beecher 
 never lost. It was his conception, and 
 
THE NEW PURITANISM, $7 
 
 underlay his religious life and his pulpit 
 
 teaching, to the end of his life. In 1886, 
 
 one year before his death, this is what he 
 
 said to the ministers in London: 
 
 *' Now, if you ask me if I believe in the divin- 
 ity of Christ, — I do not believe in anything else. 
 Let a man stand and look at the sun, then ask 
 him what he sees besides. Nothing; it blinds 
 him. There is nothing else to me when I am 
 thinking of God; it fills the whole sphere, the 
 heaven of heavens, the whole earth and all time; 
 and out of that boundlessness of love and out of 
 that infiniteness of divine faculty and capacity 
 it seems to me that he is, to my thought, what 
 summer is when I see it marching on after the 
 cold winter is over. I know where the light 
 comes from and I know where the warmth comes 
 from. When I see anything going on for good 
 and for the staying of evil I know it is the Sun 
 of Righteousness, and the name to me is Jesus — 
 every time Jesus. For him I live, for him I love, 
 for him I labor, for him I rejoice in my remain- 
 ing strength, for him I thank God that I have 
 yet so much in me that can spend and be spent 
 for the only one great cause which should lift 
 itself above every other cause in this whole 
 world." 
 
 You will bear me witness that I do not 
 often speak of denominations by name, and 
 
58 THE NEW PURITANISM. 
 
 it is a habit of mine not to use theological 
 terminology, but I confess it fills me with 
 wonder that Mr. Beecher should ever have 
 been regarded as a Unitarian, or this church 
 should ever have been looked at as in any 
 sense a Unitarian church, or, if I may be 
 allowed to say so, that its present pastor 
 should ever have been thought to be Uni- 
 tarian in his tendency. That there are 
 certain great truths which Channing pro- 
 claimed, and which Mr. Beecher held, I do 
 perfectly believe; and I am glad to take 
 truth wherever I can find it. If I can find 
 it in a Roman Catholic bishop, in a Uni- 
 tarian teacher, in a Friends' conventicle — 
 wherever I can find truth, I will take it. 
 But the heart of Mr. Beecher's teaching was 
 this: that Jesus Christ was God manifest 
 in the flesh. The center that holds this 
 church together is its faith in Jesus Christ 
 and its loyalty to him. And what Mr. 
 Beecher held and this church holds on this 
 subject, I hold no less earnestly. We do 
 not ask what men believe on other things, 
 
THE NEW PURITANISM. 59 
 
 what they think about decrees or fore- 
 ordination. I think we would even let a 
 man join us who believes in limited atone- 
 ment and special election; he might be as 
 heretical as the old-time Puritans, and we 
 would not close the door on him. The one 
 thing we demand is loyalty to Jesus Christ. 
 Some of us believe in infant baptism, and 
 some do not ; some believe in universal sal- 
 vation, some in conditional immortality, and 
 some in endless punishment; some are 
 liberal and progressive, and some are con- 
 servative: we do not ask what they think on 
 these questions. The one thing that holds 
 us together is this: we all love Christ as 
 our Saviour; we all acknowledge him as our 
 Master; we all follow him as our Leader; 
 we all bow down to him with absolute 
 allegiance as our Lord. I will exercise my 
 own rational judgment in determining what 
 he said ; I will exercise it on the Gospels as 
 freely as I exercise it anywhere else ; for God 
 gave us our reason to use. But when I have 
 found out what Christ teaches, that is final, 
 
6o THE NEW PURITANISM, 
 
 that to me is truth: and when I find out 
 what Christ commands, that is final, that 
 to me is law: and when I find out where 
 Christ leads, that is final; that is where I 
 mean to follow, God helping me. First of 
 all, the foundation of all, the most import- 
 ant of all, this church is in its very heart, as 
 Mr. Beecher was in his heart, and as I hope 
 before God I am in my heart, a loyal sub- 
 ject of Jesus Christ. 
 
 Rooted in this faith in Christ was that 
 great faith of his, of which he was preemi- 
 nently a herald — God is love. If I might 
 specify the three characteristics of what I 
 call the New Puritanism, they would be 
 these: first, man is free; secondly, in all 
 sane men is the light that lighteth every 
 man that cometh into the world; thirdly, 
 God is love. Finney was the exponent 
 of the first: his message was the law of 
 liberty. Bushnell was the exponent of 
 the second: his message was that in the 
 light within men is the life of men. Mr. 
 Peeqher was the exponent of the third : God 
 
THE NEW PURITANISM, t)I 
 
 is love. Because he believed that God is 
 love, he believed in an emotional and an 
 enthusiastic religion. One of his earliest 
 sermons was a plea for enthusiasm; and in 
 that time the church did not believe in 
 enthusiasm. The measures which Dr. Kirk 
 was using in Albany, which Dr. Finney was 
 using all over the country, which Dr. 
 Lyman Beecher had used in the West, were 
 called new measures. To ask a man to rise 
 in church for prayer, to ask him to acknowl- 
 edge Christ before men, to ask him then 
 and there to give his heart to God, — these 
 were new measures. Mr. Beecher believed 
 in them, and used them. He believed in 
 revivals of religion and labored in them. 
 This church believed in revivals of religion ; 
 I hope it believes in such revivals of religion 
 now. It was born in a revival ; it has been 
 nurtured in revivals; it has carried the 
 spirit of revival with it ever since. It is 
 true, the methods and the measures have 
 changed ; but it is not true that the spirit 
 has changed. 
 
62 THE NEW PURITANISM. 
 
 And because Mr. Beecher believed and 
 because we believe in love as the heart of 
 God, therefore he believed and we believe 
 in a natural religion — for is it not natural 
 for people to love ? Is the mother who 
 does not care for her child a natural 
 mother or an unnatural mother ? Is the 
 man who does not care for his country a 
 natural man or an unnatural man ? Is the 
 friend who feels no friendship for the com- 
 panion at his side a natural man or an 
 unnatural man ? If religion is love, then 
 religion is natural. We are accused of 
 decrying supernatural religion. If by that 
 is meant that we affirm that religion, in the 
 heart and essence of it and in all the phases 
 of it, is most natural, then I plead guilty to 
 the charge. We believe that religion is the 
 natural life of a right soul, and that to live 
 apart from God is against nature, contrary 
 to nature, unnatural. And so we believe, 
 and he believed, in a rational religion — in 
 the application of the whole man to religion, 
 and the use of the whole man in the relig- 
 
THE NEW PURITANISM, 63 
 
 ious life. We believe that religion does not 
 stifle the reason and bid men refuse to use 
 it; we believe that religion incites men to a 
 larger and freer use of the reason. The 
 Christian minister should be the freest of all 
 free-thinkers. 
 
 For the same reason we believe in a vital 
 religion, a religion of the common life. 
 The old definition between the secular and 
 the religious we repudiate. I learned this 
 lesson in my youth, in Plymouth Church. 
 I was getting up a concert for the Young 
 Men's Christian Association; it was to be 
 held here in Plymouth Church; I wrote 
 out a notice for Mr. Beecher to read: 
 ** There will be," said the notice, *'some 
 secular music and some sacred music." 
 He read it, and then commented thus: 
 *' All good music is sacred, and all bad 
 music is execrably secular. ' * Religion might 
 be not inaptly defined, the art of living. I 
 will not say right living, because no living 
 is living that is not right living. Wrong 
 living is death, not life. Religion is the life 
 
64 THE NEW PURITANISM. 
 
 of the conscience, of the faith, of the hope, 
 of the love, of the reverence; it is the life 
 of the eyes, of the fingers, of the feet, of the 
 whole man. It is to be carried out in the 
 factory, in the store, in the office, in society, 
 in the home, in all the places of life, — 
 and therefore in the intellect. The notion 
 that there are two departments of man, one 
 religious and the other secular, that the 
 goats live in the secular and the sheep live 
 in the religious, is all based on a misinter- 
 pretation of one of Paul's declarations — 
 " The natural man receiveth not the things 
 of the spirit of God ; . . . neither can he 
 know them." What he means is this: The 
 ''natural man " — that is, the mere ani- 
 mal man — cannot understand the super- 
 natural, supersensuous world. To under- 
 stand that world we must rise above the 
 animal condition and enter into a higher 
 realm, the spiritual. But that realm is open 
 to every man. Whosoever will, may take 
 of the water of life freely. 
 
 I wish I could make you see how natural 
 
THE NEW PURITANISM. 65 
 
 a thing it is to love God as God loves you, 
 and how unnatural a thing it is not to do it; 
 how natural a thing it is to pray, giving 
 thanks for his goodness, and how unnatural 
 a thing it is to live with closed lips; how 
 natural a thing it is to take the inspiration 
 of his love and carry it out in daily life and 
 service to others, and how unnatural a thing 
 it is to live a selfish, worldly, mean, and 
 despicable life. There is not one of you 
 who has not wings, and the air is all about 
 you. You cannot fly without air; no! But 
 God has surrounded the world with air, 
 and he has given you the wings — now rise 
 and fly. Do not be a grub; that is the 
 unnatural thing. 
 
 And because God is love, and religion is 
 love, and life is love, and love is natural to 
 man, religion is to be seen in carrying love 
 out in daily conduct. There is no religion 
 which is not ethical. There is no religion in 
 the emotions excited and life left impover- 
 ished. There is no religion in ecstatic 
 prayers and mean and niggardly living, — 
 
66 THE NEW PURITANISM. 
 
 to quote Mr. Beecher again, *' We cannot 
 pray cream and live skim-milk. ' ' From the 
 first that has been the message of this pul- 
 pit. Because we have loved Christ, and 
 because we have loved the God whom Christ 
 has revealed to us, and because we have 
 loved our fellow men in that they are God's 
 children and are revealed to us in Christ, 
 therefore have we stood against whatever 
 dwarfs and diminishes and belittles human- 
 ity, therefore have we stood for whatever 
 ennobles, enfranchises, and lifts humanity 
 up. Would that you younger men and 
 women could see in what condition was 
 society in America when the American 
 Tract Society and the American Board and 
 the American Home Missionary Society 
 were all silent on the subject of slavery, 
 because all Evangelical Christians were not 
 agreed upon the subject of slavery; when 
 the great Methodist Church and the great 
 Presbyterian Church were divided, one of 
 them almost wholly, and the other partly, 
 on the question of slavery; what it was 
 
THE NEW PURITANISM. 6/ 
 
 when, if a man spoke for freedom in New 
 York or Philadelphia or Boston, he did so 
 at the hazard of violence from a mob, and 
 perhaps at the hazard of his life , what it 
 was when men were vilifying Sumner and 
 Chase and Garrison and Phillips, and even 
 John G. Whittier, because they had raised 
 a voice for the freedom of the slave ; what 
 it was, in a new church enterprise in this 
 great commercial metropolis, to proclaim 
 liberty unto all God's children; and then 
 what it was for the merchants, the lawyers, 
 the business men, whose business prosperity 
 apparently depended on silent lips, to rally 
 around that new herald and say. Go on, 
 speak for us, and we will stand by you! 
 It is easy now. It does not now require 
 bravery to be brave in Plymouth pulpit. 
 He who stands here can speak on the labor 
 question, on Biblical criticism, on theolog- 
 ical and ethical problems, on any phase 
 of any theological or ethical problem, and 
 the church, whether it agrees with him or 
 not, will say. Speak, if you speak your own 
 
68 THE NEW PURITANISM, 
 
 convictions. The one thing this church 
 would not endure would be this: that its 
 minister should be afraid to say what he 
 thought was the truth. It does not take 
 courage to speak freely on this platform. 
 A man would have to be a hero in cowardice 
 to be a coward here. 
 
 I have tried to indicate the features of 
 the Old Puritanism — a fatalistic system, with 
 God as sovereign Judge; and the features 
 of the New Puritanism — man a free moral 
 agent, with God the all-loving Father: and 
 now I put them side by side and ask you 
 not only to judge them as they look, but to 
 judge them by their fruits. We have had 
 the experience of something like one hun- 
 dred years of the New Puritanism, begin- 
 ning in 1800, growing stronger and stronger, 
 until it came to its flower about the mid- 
 dle of this century; and what is the frui- 
 tion ? Intemperance still exists. Yes, but 
 not in the church of Christ. We are not 
 all total abstainers, and we are not all 
 of us prohibitionists; but the church does 
 
THE NEW PURITANISM. 69 
 
 stand for self-control, and against the traffic 
 that makes money out of the death of men. 
 We have seen slavery abolished and every 
 chain broken, and the men who broke the 
 chains — I repeat it — were the same men 
 who were preaching the New Puritanism. 
 It would be difficult to find a single aboli- 
 tionist belonging to the Old Puritanism. 
 We have seen foreign and home missions 
 both born. Then, not a church with a mis- 
 sion chapel — now, no church of size in any 
 of our cities without one; then, no foreign 
 missionary organization, no home missionary 
 organization — now, a foreign missionary 
 organization carrying the gospel to the 
 heathen, and a home missionary organiza- 
 tion building up the waste places of our 
 own country, and the American Missionary 
 Association working among the poor and 
 the outcast, where no man was allowed to 
 work in 1850. And all this having its 
 fountain and its source in spiritual life. 
 
 I do not know whether I ought to speak 
 of this church or not. God knows I do not 
 
fO THE NEW PURITANISM. 
 
 wish to praise or to flatter, certainly not to 
 apologize or excuse; and yet, when we are 
 told that the New Puritanism is undermin- 
 ing life and destroying faith, I have a right 
 to point to the fifty years of history of this 
 Christian church. Still it ministers every 
 Sunday to two essentially distinct large con- 
 gregations. Still its voice is carried beyond 
 its walls to unseen and unnumbered auditors 
 beyond. Still through its ministry men and 
 women are brought to confess their faith in 
 God and in his Son Jesus Christ. In fifty 
 years, three thousand six hundred and 
 thirty-three have thus come into the king- 
 dom of God through the doors of this 
 church.^ The love of Christ draws men 
 who could not be coerced by fear. What 
 sort of Christians does the New Puritanism 
 make? Probably not unlike other Christians 
 — some good, some indifferent, some poor. 
 Yet in answer to tliat question I may point 
 
 ' An average of a little over seventy-two a year. 
 During the ten years since Mr. Beecher's death, six 
 hundred have joined the church, an average of sixty a 
 year, without special measuresormeetingsof any kind. 
 
THE NEW PURITANISM. 'J\ 
 
 to the fact that in our three Sunday-schools 
 are gathered every Sunday an average of 
 over twelve hundred, studying the Bible; 
 that we do not lack faithful teachers, that 
 on this fiftieth anniversary-day every class 
 is supplied, and we have a waiting-list of 
 volunteers to call from in the future ; that 
 Plymouth Church is a week-day as well as 
 a Sunday church; that with its two Kin- 
 dergartens, its two Sewing-schools, its two 
 Societies of Christian Endeavor, its three 
 Boys' Clubs, its Boys* Brigade, its Mothers' 
 Meetings, and its Missionary Societies, 
 there is rarely an evening in the week in 
 which there are not going on contem- 
 poraneously two or more meetings for the 
 service of God in and through the service 
 of humanity ; and that an average of ten to 
 twelve thousand dollars is given annually, 
 all of it spontaneously, most of it in modest 
 contributions — aside from the expenses of 
 the church itself — for the support of this 
 work of Christ by Christ's disciples in this 
 church of Christ. 
 
72 THE NEW PURITANISM, 
 
 The church has had its trials. Its home 
 burnt down, that is built again ; attacked and 
 vilified in the person of its pastor for his 
 heresies and erraticisms, it has maintained 
 itself unscathed ; assaulted in the very cita- 
 del of its life, the only effect has been to 
 rally its members around about its leader and 
 make it more united and more stalwart than 
 before. Suddenly in the midst of the battle 
 the flag is seen to waver and the flag-bearer 
 falls in death ; but the church halts only for 
 a moment, then gathers around that flag 
 stronger than ever, better organized, to go 
 on following another standard-bearer. For 
 it has not been the flag-bearer, it has been 
 the flag, and yet more the Christ whom 
 that flag means, that has held this church 
 together, and will hold it together so long 
 as God has work for it to do. And, please 
 God, with our face to the future, fol- 
 lowing him, we will go on, preaching the 
 freedom of man's will, preaching the re- 
 ligion of righteousness and practical love, 
 preaching the Christ of God as the revela- 
 
THE NEW PURIl^ANISM. 73 
 
 tion of his infinite and all-saving mercy, not 
 fearing lest we go too far, for we have not 
 yet overtaken Christ, not fearing lest we be 
 led astray, — no fear of that so long as we 
 follow where he leads the way: — first, last, 
 and all the time, a church of Jesus Christ. 
 
Ipurttan principles anb tbe /iDobern 
 
 MorlO, 
 
 AMORY H. BRADFORD. 
 
II. 
 
 puritan iPrtnctples auD tbe /iDobern 
 
 Morlt)/ 
 
 By AMORY H. BRADFORD, D.D., 
 Of First Congregational Church, Montclair, N. J. 
 
 ** I proclaimed a fast there at the river Ahava, 
 that we might afflict ourselves before our God to 
 seek of him the right way." — Ezra^ viii. 21. 
 
 The sleepy river flows as slowly by Delfs- 
 haven to-day as when two hundred and 
 seventy-seven years ago a little company of 
 English Christians embarked on its waters, 
 for the most memorable voyage ever sailed 
 on any sea. 
 
 The precise point of their departure can- 
 not be identified. The river is lined with 
 warehouses and factories, and neither tradi- 
 
 * Plymouth Church, Sunday evening, May 17, 1897. 
 
 77 
 
78 PURITAN PRINCIPLES 
 
 tion nor history speaks of the exact spot 
 where the Speedwell was anchored. But 
 some things which preceded the embarka- 
 tion are known, and among them that a day 
 of fasting and prayer was observed, when 
 John Robinson, with the inspiration of a 
 prophet and the tenderness of a pastor, 
 preached from the text which has been 
 chosen for our text to-day. The solemnity 
 of the occasion cannot be reproduced. It 
 was one of those historic moments when 
 men chosen of God dimly realize that they 
 are facing a mission of vast and mysterious 
 magnitude, and therefore humble them- 
 selves before Almighty God and seek to 
 know his will. At least one sentence in 
 that sermon has become immortal. Indeed 
 it may be questioned if any other senti- 
 ment ever spoken by any English preacher 
 is so vividly remembered or will live so 
 long. Edward Winslow, writing twenty 
 years after, in speaking of Robinson and his 
 sermon, says: ** Amongst other wholesome 
 instructions and exhortations he used these 
 
AND THE MODERN WORLD. 79 
 
 expressions, or to the same purpose." (I 
 quote but one:) **And if God should reveal 
 anything to us by any other instrument of 
 his, to be as ready to receive it as ever we 
 were to receive any truth by his ministry. 
 For he was very confident the Lord had 
 more truth and light yet to break forth out 
 of his holy Word." 
 
 The Pilgrim Fathers were all Puritans, 
 and yet they were not bigots. Their eyes 
 were open toward the future, but they did 
 not forget the truths which had been forged 
 in the fires of the Reformation. The ser- 
 mon of John Robinson on that memorable 
 day was an eloquent and solemn presenta- 
 tion of the principles of Puritanism ; the 
 principles which in England led to Hamp- 
 den, Harry Vane, Cromwell, the Puritan 
 Revolution; the principles which inspired 
 the heroic souls who dared a winter voyage 
 on the North Atlantic in a craft smaller 
 than ocean yachts to-day; which led to the 
 compact in the cabin of the Mayflower ^ to 
 the Declaration of Independence, to the 
 
80 PURITAN PRINCIPLES 
 
 Union of States, and to all that distin- 
 guishes what is best in American civilization. 
 Therefore it has seemed as if this sermon 
 and this text were the proper starting-point 
 for a consideration of the *' Relation of 
 Puritan Principles to the Modern World." 
 
 No people can ever safely forget or neg- 
 lect the source of their loftiest inspirations. 
 We shall appreciate our destiny only as we 
 first appreciate our beginnings. The roots 
 of the American Republic are bedded deeply 
 in the soil of Puritanism. Were some of 
 our ancestors Scotch ? They were Scotch 
 Puritans. Were others Dutch? They came 
 here with the principles which so powerfully 
 influenced the Pilgrims in Holland. Were 
 still others English? In so far as their work 
 was vital and enduring they were men of 
 the same spirit and temper as those who a 
 little later in England fought at Marston 
 Moor and Naseby, Worcester and Dunbar. 
 Others may sneer at Puritanism, but for an 
 American to do so is like a son desecrating 
 the home in which he was born and the 
 
AND THE MODERN WORLD. 8 1 
 
 memory of the parents by whom he was 
 
 trained. 
 
 What were the distinctive Principles of 
 Ptiritanism ? They were the following: 
 
 Every individual has immediate access to 
 God, and in all the affairs of the spirit is 
 responsible to him alone. 
 
 As men are responsible to God alone, all 
 are under a sacred obligation to insist on 
 the right and duty of absolute mental free- 
 dom, unhindered by dictation from any 
 human authority. 
 
 The true church of Christ is composed of 
 all regenerate persons, and all are to be 
 regarded as regenerate who prove their 
 faith by holy character. 
 
 As a later though perfectly logical and 
 necessary result of what precedes: all be- 
 lievers have equal rights before God, and 
 when they act together the body of believers 
 may be trusted. 
 
 These principles may seem somewhat 
 abstract and academic, but they made the 
 Puritan Revolution in Great Britain a neces- 
 
82 PURITAN PRINCIPLES 
 
 sity and the American Republic a possi- 
 bility. Locked in their somewhat rough 
 exterior is the life which thrills in modern 
 liberty, and they suggest with clearness the 
 social state which will prevail when the 
 noblest religious, social, and political ideals 
 have had time to work to their legitimate 
 ends. 
 
 What was the Genesis of Puritanism ? 
 
 It is difficult to find the source of any 
 river. Rivulets run to a thousand valleys, 
 and the spring in which the most remote 
 seems to have its birth may have unseen 
 streams reaching to far-distant fountains. 
 The source of every river is in the clouds; 
 their source is the ocean, and the ocean is a 
 fountain because of the attraction of the 
 sun. There have been Puritans in all ages 
 and among all religions. Moses was a 
 Puritan; so were the prophets; so were the 
 apostles; so were Augustine and Marsiglio, 
 so were Luther and Calvin. The Puritans 
 have always been those who have insisted 
 
AND THE MODERN WORLD. 83 
 
 that spirit is more than form, and that 
 character is more than ceremony. The 
 noblest utterance of Hebrew Puritanism 
 was this: '* What doth the Lord require of 
 thee, but to do justly, to love mercy, and 
 to walk humbly before thy God? '* 
 
 Historically, Puritanism as we under- 
 stand it began soon after the Church in 
 England under Henry the Eighth was sep- 
 arated from the Church in Rome. The 
 cause of that separation was vicious. A 
 lecherous king wished freedom from Papal 
 dictation in order that he might be divorced 
 and thus be able lawfully to marry again. 
 After the division the Church of England 
 remained the same as before, except that 
 the King was in the place of the Pope. 
 The separation was called a reformation. 
 From the beginning, however, men of lofty 
 character insisted that it had not gone far 
 enough ; that the Church should not only be 
 separated from Papal dictation, but from all 
 those tenets and practices which were hos- 
 tile to righteousness. From that time there 
 
§4 PURITAN PRINCIPLES 
 
 were Puritans in name as well as in fact, 
 and they were a constantly growing force in 
 the ecclesiastical and political life of Great 
 Britain. They insisted on purity of charac- 
 ter as essential to service in Church and 
 State. All were not Separatists then, as 
 they are not now. There are Puritans in the 
 Church of England to-day, as there were 
 then. The Presbyterians of Scotland were 
 as distinctly Puritans as the Separatists of 
 England. Puritanism was a spirit which 
 manifested itself in many forms. When 
 the Separatists under Cromwell defeated 
 the Presbyterians under Lesly at Dunbar, 
 the fight was between the Puritan who 
 believed in a State Church and the Puritan 
 who believed that union of Church and 
 State was a device of the devil. Puritan 
 principles are not limited to any ecclesiasti- 
 cal organizations. They came to this coun- 
 try with the Scotch-Irish, with the Pilgrims 
 of Plymouth, and the Puritans of Massa- 
 chusetts Bay. They are making themselves 
 felt now as clearly as two centuries ago. 
 
AND THE MODERN WORLD. 85 
 
 The Nonconformist Conscience in England 
 is a new manifestation of Puritanism ; the 
 municipal revival in the United States is 
 another. Both are the insistence that the 
 offices of the State are as holy as those of 
 the Church, and that no man ought to 
 represent the State in any official position 
 who is not pure in his character and unsel- 
 fish in his aspirations and methods. 
 
 From the first, Puritanism has been dis- 
 tinctly a religious movement, but it quickly 
 ceased to be ecclesiastical. It is as religious 
 to-day as when the Pilgrims sailed or Crom- 
 well fought or Milton sang; and it is relig- 
 ious now, as then, because a true view of 
 religion embraces all which concerns the 
 welfare of man both in time and eternity. 
 Puritanism stands for reality; for character; 
 for clean living as a condition of public ser- 
 vice; for recognition of responsibility to 
 God ; for the supremacy of the spirit. When 
 Oliver Cromwell entered Parliament in 1653, 
 and said, pointing to one member, ''There 
 3its a taker of bribes;" to another, ''There 
 
86 PURITAN PRINCIPLES 
 
 sits a man whose religion is a farce;'* to 
 another, using the hardest name possible, 
 which I soften, ** There sits a man whose 
 personal conduct is impure and foul;" and 
 then in the name of Almighty God broke 
 up the Parliament, he was the impersona- 
 tion of Puritanism ; and for one, I wish he 
 would rise from his grave and in the same 
 spirit enter some of our halls of legislation, 
 both state and national. 
 
 So much for the genesis of Puritanism. 
 
 What has been the Effect of Puritanism 
 
 on the World? 
 
 To ask that question is to answer it. It 
 fought the priesthood in the Hebrew times, 
 and insisted on genuineness and spirituality. 
 It was personified in John Calvin when he 
 wrought to perfect expression the truth that 
 every individual may come into the imme- 
 diate presence of God and is responsible to 
 him alone. It' inspired the Puritan Revolu- 
 tion. It sent the Pilgrims to Plymouth. 
 It made this nation a republic, and has 
 
AND THE MODERN WORLD. 87 
 
 dominated the whole British Empire, so 
 that the Union Jack stands for a liberty 
 quite as ample as that represented by the 
 Stars and Stripes. 
 
 At one time Puritanism seemed synony- 
 mous with narrow theology, bigotry, witch- 
 burning, sanctimoniousness, spiritual des- 
 potism. That was because its principles 
 had not had time to work into life and 
 institutions. Freedom of thought is now 
 realized wherever Puritanism is in control. 
 The fact that men are responsible to God 
 alone, and therefore that no earthly sover- 
 eign has any divine right, has undermined 
 or limited every throne in Europe. Puri- 
 tanism compelled the modern movement in 
 theology, and John Calvin and Jonathan 
 Edwards were its greatest prophets and 
 the lineal theological ancestors of Horace 
 Bushnell, Henry Ward Beecher, and Phillips 
 Brooks. Puritanism has always insisted 
 on a high standard of character as a pre- 
 requisite to public service; that no man 
 should be in the Church whose life has 
 
88 PURITAN PRINCIPLES 
 
 not experienced a change so vital as to be 
 called a new birth; that the State is as 
 holy as the Church, and therefore that 
 those who minister at its altars should be 
 without taint. Puritanism is a spirit, but a 
 spirit which has always found expression in 
 men and institutions — and what men and 
 institutions have sprung into being at its 
 touch ! There were all the heroes of the 
 Puritan Revolution in England — Hampden, 
 Pym, Sir Harry Vane, John Howe and 
 John Owen, Milton, the seer and prophet 
 as well as the poet of the Commonwealth, 
 and Cromwell, the kingliest soul that ever 
 ruled Great Britain. In later days there 
 have been such men as Bright in Parlia- 
 ment, Gordon in the field, Dale, Maclaren, 
 and Spurgeon in the pulpit, and Robert 
 Browning among the poets. The history 
 of America' in large part is either the history 
 of Puritanism, or of those who were made 
 great by its ideals. Ideally this Republic 
 rests on these four corner-stones: the right 
 and privilege of the individual to come into 
 
AND THE MODERN WORLD. 89 
 
 the immediate presence of God; absolute 
 freedom in all matters of religion ; righteous- 
 ness of character essential to public service; 
 and, the universal brotherhood of man. 
 These truths have commanded the loyalty 
 of the best men in our churches; they have 
 inspired our noblest preachers; they thrill 
 in the music of poets like Lowell, Whittier, 
 Longfellow; they are recognized by so 
 many of our politicians as have learned that 
 the State was made for man and not man 
 for the State. The most beneficent and 
 enduring elements in the political, social, 
 literary, religious life of the world for two 
 hundred years either has been the expres- 
 sion of the Puritan spirit or from it has re- 
 ceived inspiration. And this leads now to 
 a more important inquiry. 
 
 Is there any Serious Demand in the Modern 
 World for that whicJi is Essential in the 
 Principles of Puritanism ? 
 
 Before that question can be intelligently 
 answered we must have some accurate ideas 
 
90 PURITAN PRINCIPLES 
 
 about this modern world. It has great ex- 
 cellencies; has it any serious perils? I shall 
 limit the field of observation to our own 
 country. He who knows the dominant 
 forces in any one civilized nation practically 
 knows those of the world. Four facts meet 
 every student of the history of our country 
 and of our time. 
 
 There is a wide-spread and growing ten- 
 dency toward the effacement of the feeling 
 of individual responsibility to God. The 
 everlasting obligation of men to choose 
 right, and their moral peril if they refuse, 
 is not as vivid as it should be. Thomas 
 Carlyle said that the Puritan Revolution 
 was the last of the heroisms. He was 
 wrong. Heroism is the monopoly of no age 
 and no creed, and its source is always in the 
 consciousness of responsibility to God. 
 Cromwell refused to be king because he was 
 not convinced that God had called him to 
 wear a crown. How many vacant chairs 
 there would be in the high places of govern- 
 ment if all who have not heard a divine call 
 
AND THE MODERN WORLD, 9^ 
 
 were to retire from public service ! We have 
 Tammany politics, the defeat of Arbitration 
 Treaties, and juggling with municipal fran- 
 chises, because God has no place in the 
 plans of those who sit in legislative halls ; ^ 
 we have pagan immoralities introduced at 
 banquets, and pagan vice winked at in high 
 places, because a day in which God will 
 judge every man is no longer dreaded; we 
 have monopolies reaching out to embrace 
 and strangle our liberties, because greed of 
 gold and power has blinded men to God, 
 
 Another characteristic of our time is a 
 misconception of what is meant by intellec- 
 tual and spiritual freedom. Liberty of 
 thought is the supreme achievement of 
 modern times. There is no longer any 
 human authority in the realm of religion. 
 Councils, assemblies, states, are all com- 
 posed of fallible men. No thinking person 
 now accepts any doctrine in science, politi- 
 cal economy, or religion solely because it is 
 hallowed by age or has been championed by 
 the great of other times. There is no holy 
 
92 PURITAN PRINCIPLES 
 
 of holies in the realm of truth. The blind 
 can see that the days of authority in all 
 matters of thought are not only numbered 
 but ended. But the pendulum has swung 
 too far. Liberty of thought does not mean 
 freedom to believe a lie ; does not mean that 
 there is no authority in truth; does not 
 mean that it is of little importance what 
 men believe; does not mean that one creed 
 is as good as another. And yet this fallacy 
 is growing in our land. It is said that one 
 creed is as good as another, — which means 
 there is no truth. Men are asking what 
 they like to believe, not what they ought to 
 believe. Freedom to think and to express 
 thought is a condition of growth; freedom 
 to think without the consciousness of obli- 
 gation to accept truth and cling to it forever 
 is a delusion and a peril. That was a wise 
 word of the author of The Way Out of 
 Agnosticism: ** Either we must cease to 
 think, or learn to think m^ore profoundly.** 
 Let us cling to our liberty, but remember 
 that that does not mean freedom to play 
 
AND THE MODERN WORLD, 93 
 
 with sanctities, — to seek to revive mysteries 
 which have been dead so long that no one 
 knows when they died ; but rather the duty 
 to think, to think hard, to think long; until 
 there shall come a ghmpse of the unity 
 in which all things cohere, or until there 
 breaks upon the vision such a revelation as 
 is given only to those who reverently and 
 patiently knock at the door of truth. 
 
 A third characteristic of the modern world 
 is a dimming of the lines which separate 
 virtue and vice, right and wrong. This is 
 evident most of all in current social and 
 domestic ideals. The civilization of a 
 nation is always according to its standard of 
 moral purity. Those who reverence and 
 safeguard their homes prosper and endure; 
 those who are fascinated by immoralities 
 sow the seed of their own decay. In these 
 days Puritanism is sneered at in high circles 
 as prudery, and the divorce courts are mills 
 that never cease to grind a baleful grist. 
 
 There is yet one more characteristic of 
 our time and our nation which it is painful 
 
94 PURITAN PRINCIPLES 
 
 to state and more painful to be compelled 
 to recognize. We are living in a republic 
 and compelled to witness the defeat of the 
 people. If I were asked, What is the most 
 ominous fact in the life of this country 
 to-day? I should without hesitation answer, 
 The defeat of the people. The fundamen- 
 tal principle of modern civilization is the 
 right of the people to rule; but in this 
 country at least the people do not rule. 
 Two very simple illustrations will suffice — 
 but they might be indefinitely multiplied. 
 
 In a small town the question is merely 
 one of the granting of a franchise to a 
 trolley company. The people say: '* Re- 
 strict and safeguard, and let it come;" but 
 outside monopolies, thinking only of divi- 
 dends, either buy up a council, or procure 
 special legislation and drive through their 
 own schemes without the slightest regard to 
 the wishes of those who own the property, 
 whose homes are invaded, and whose life- 
 purposes are ruined. Thus the people are 
 defeated. 
 
AND THE MODERN WORLD, 95 
 
 Two great nations, after glaring at each 
 other for more than a century conclude that 
 they have shaken fists long enough, and 
 that they had better clasp hands and prove 
 themselves the brothers that they are in 
 blood, in language, in history, in religion; 
 and the people in both nations lift such a 
 cry of gladness as has not been heard for a 
 quarter of a century. This is the people's 
 business, and they have a right to be 
 heeded. But no ; the machinery of govern- 
 ment is straightway invoked that prejudice 
 may rule and the people be humiliated and 
 disgraced. Thus government of the people, 
 for the people, and by the people has failed 
 almost before the echoes of Lincoln's ora- 
 tion have died away. I do not speak as a 
 pessimist. It is not pessimism to face facts. 
 Most of our cities are ruled by corrupt 
 oligarchies; most of our states are in the 
 hands of selfish politicians ; and international 
 problems, instead of being solved by repre- 
 sentatives of the people, are shelved by 
 those who misrepresent them. 
 
9^ PURITAN PRINCIPLES 
 
 These four facts cannot be evaded ; they 
 should be honestly and fearlessly faced: 
 Consciousness of individual responsibility to 
 God is dim ; playing with everlasting realities 
 is called liberty of thought; the line be- 
 tween right and wrong, purity and vice, is 
 being rubbed out; and, the people are sys- 
 tematically and constantly defeated. This 
 is not all there is to modern life, but these 
 are our perils. 
 
 What does this modern world need? A 
 revival of Puritanism. Individuals and 
 society should rise to a comprehension of 
 the truth that all men live in the presence 
 of the Almighty, and are responsible to 
 him. What made the Ironsides invincible? 
 They could fight all day because they had 
 prayed all night. They endured as seeing 
 Him who is invisible. On the field of 
 Dunbar Cromwell snatched victory from 
 what had seemed sure defeat. When the 
 sun rose and the enemy fled, he halted his 
 troops and, riding before them, sang, " Let 
 God arise; let his enemies be scattered!" 
 
AND THE MODERN WORLD. 97 
 
 God may be realized, — that realization 
 makes prophets and heroes. Introduce 
 into our modern life the glad and awful 
 reality that God besets us behind and 
 before; that there is no space in the uni- 
 verse in which any man can hide from him ; 
 bring out again the fact of a judgment-seat 
 before which all some time and somehow 
 must stand, — and there will be less trifling 
 with the everlasting sanctities. Those 
 who have seen God will not dare his dis- 
 pleasure. This is what the modern world 
 most needs. Preachers who experience 
 God will have time neither for pyrotech- 
 nics nor pantomime; teachers will realize 
 with Thomas Arnold that a life of truth- 
 fulness and genuineness is the first and 
 most inspiring of all instruction ; and legis- 
 lators will enter capitals with the humility 
 of those who have received a divine call. 
 
 As it brushes away the assumed authority 
 of churches, councils, schools, and all other 
 assemblies of presumptuous and fallible 
 men, Puritanism insists that while there 
 
9S PURITAN PRINCIPLES 
 
 must be perfect freedom of thought, it 
 should be a freedom consistent with the 
 obligation of every man to seek and obey 
 truth. Authority in the hands of fallible 
 men becomes an enormity, but the au- 
 thority of the truth can be evaded only at 
 peril. Puritans believe something, and 
 believe it with all their hearts. Like Crom- 
 well, they protect others in their beliefs, 
 while they are willing to fight and to die for 
 their own. In these days, when the foun- 
 dations of faith tremble ; when the doctrines 
 which once made heroes are being ques- 
 tioned; when foreign cults are coming in 
 like a flood; when the intellectual and 
 spiritual world is in a state of unrest, above 
 all things there should be intellectual hon- 
 esty and thoroughness; unwillingness to be 
 satisfied with any sham, however ancient or 
 honored; the determination to think every 
 subject through until truth is found, wher- 
 ever it may lead. These qualities always 
 have been and always will be the very 
 essence of Puritanism. Puritanism can be 
 
AND THE MODERN WORLD. 99 
 
 satisfied only with reality. It insists on 
 mental freedom, and is afraid only of that 
 which is false. The modern world asks 
 what pleases ; Puritanism asks what is right. 
 The modern world says: Every man is at 
 liberty to think as he chooses; Puritanism 
 replies: Yes, so long as he remembers that 
 no one can escape from the authority of 
 truth. 
 
 The lines separating right and wrong, vir- 
 tue and vice, are growing dim in this 
 modern world. Luxury and effeminacy are 
 taking their places. Literature in great 
 part is becoming mere dirt, a covering of 
 cancers with cloth of gold ; the stage has 
 forgotten its Greek dignity and become, 
 largely, a place where vice panders to vice. 
 Let the old Puritans come back once more: 
 they must never again desecrate cathedrals 
 or dare to destroy that which is beautiful in 
 art; but let them with their austere morali- 
 ties deal with the paganisms, the luxuries, 
 the fashionable vices, the polluted litera- 
 ture, and the brazen effrontery of those who 
 
iOO PURITAN PRINCIPLES 
 
 disgrace the stage. Better the time when 
 a man was forbidden to kiss his wife on the 
 Lord's day than a land without any Lord's 
 day; better the abolition of the play than 
 plays which stimulate sensuality; better a 
 solemn face than one blotched with vice. 
 The modern world needs no distortions of 
 Puritanism, but its essential spirit — the 
 spirit which will never compromise with 
 evil, and which is as loyal to purity in the 
 individual, the family, and society as King 
 Arthur was loyal to his knightly vows. 
 
 The sad fact which faces all who love 
 their country in these days and in this 
 Republic is that in the land of freedom, the 
 land of Washington, of Lincoln and of 
 Grant, the people for whom the fathers died 
 are either defeated or in peril of defeat. 
 In the home of brotherhood, brotherhood is 
 outraged ; and where the voice of the many 
 should be heeded it is publicly derided. 
 Nothing will give to the American people 
 the realization of their ideals but the politi- 
 cal principle for which the Pilgrims stood; 
 
AND THE MODERN WORLD. lOI 
 
 namely, the people and the whole people 
 acting together should always be trusted. 
 Above every other truth Puritanism places 
 God the Sovereign, and then declares that 
 before that Sovereign all men have equal 
 rights. It never asks where a man was 
 born, what is his name, or what is the color 
 of his skin; but insists that the whole 
 people are to be trusted, without regard to 
 accidents of birth or wealth. This world 
 belongs to all the people. Their voice may 
 not always be the voice of God, but it is 
 nearer to it than any other sound ever heard 
 on the earth. When the people have a 
 chance to speak their convictions they are 
 seldom wrong. This is the dispensation of 
 man, not of any class; and yet classes stand 
 in the way of man. Colleges and schools, 
 press and pulpit, ought to unite in a crusade 
 for the deliverance of the people from those 
 who, masquerading in the livery of liberty, 
 are its worst enemies. 
 
 The evils of the modern world demand 
 that emphasis once more be strong and 
 
102 PURITAN PRINCIPLES 
 
 clear on the four truths which are the 
 corner-stones of Puritanism: 
 
 All men are responsible to God. 
 
 All must have freedom of thought, but 
 never liberty to believe error or to do 
 wrong. 
 
 The line separating right and wrong is an 
 everlasting one; it is, in the nature of 
 things, a part of the order of the universe. 
 
 The whole people, since they have the 
 same Father and the same King in the realm 
 of spirit, have the same rights, spiritual, 
 social, religious; and they can be and ought 
 to be trusted. 
 
 The Pilgrims to whom John Robinson 
 preached on that memorable day before the 
 Speedwell sailed were Puritans. The Pil- 
 grims who landed at Plymouth were Puri- 
 tans; their children who founded here *' a 
 Church without a Bishop, and a State with- 
 out a King," were Puritans. The principles 
 which have given us our right to be called a 
 Christian nation were derived from the 
 Puritans; most of our colleges were founded 
 
AND THE MODERN WORLD, IO3 
 
 by Puritans; our school system came from 
 the Puritans; our ideals are all Puritan. 
 These ideals will become realities, and the 
 American nation worthy to possess its privi- 
 leges and possibilities, only as we are loyal 
 to the principles and the spirit which were 
 the inspiration of our fathers. Our hope is 
 not in Puritanism in its narrowness and with 
 its bigotries, but in its larger spirit which 
 reveres God and seeks his will ; which owns 
 no authority but truth; which believes in 
 righteousness and does right, and always 
 and everywhere trusts the people. 
 
 I have thus spoken of our perils and our 
 needs. Of the outcome I have no doubt. 
 There is no room for pessimism in the creed 
 of a Christian. We may seem to have for- 
 gotten the hoHest ideals, but we shall not 
 swing entirely away from them. Through 
 the generations one increasing purpose runs. 
 God fulfills his plans in many ways. To a 
 heroic service our fathers were called: a 
 service equally important and imperative 
 belongs to their children. Let us gird our- 
 
104 PURITAN PRINCIPLES 
 
 selves like men for our mission, and never 
 doubt that the victory will be with those 
 who side with God. 
 
 I have chosen this subject for this occasion 
 because no pulpit ever more continuously, 
 consistently, and unflinchingly represented 
 that which is essential and enduring in Puri- 
 tanism than the one in which I have the 
 honor to stand to-night, and which has been 
 distinguished by the incomparable ministry 
 of the man whose first sermon in this city 
 we are this day celebrating. Henry Ward 
 Beecher, strange as the saying may sound 
 in some ears, was a Puritan of the Puritans. 
 He had no patience with the narrowness 
 and hardness of many who bore that great 
 name. He delighted in the beautiful, and 
 would never have sanctioned the defacing 
 of the cathedrals. He rejoiced in all that 
 makes this world bright and glad, and we 
 cannot think of him with a demure face or 
 as discouraging innocent pleasure. But 
 underneath all the exuberance of his nature 
 was such a realization of God as few men 
 have experienced, and that was the unfail- 
 
AND THE MODERN WORLD. I05 
 
 ing source of his personality and ministry. 
 To him the birds sang the songs of God ; the 
 winds echoed the music of God; the waters 
 reflected the beauty of God; the heavens 
 declared the glory of God. The secret of 
 his power was in his realization that he, like 
 a little child, could come into the very pres- 
 ence of the Almighty. Out of that con- 
 sciousness poured his ministry like a broad, 
 deep river, — sometimes placid like summer 
 waters; sometimes dark and threatening; 
 sometimes rushing and turbulent, but al- 
 ways flowing steadily from an inexhaustible 
 fountain. 
 
 Because he appreciated his responsibility 
 to God, he insisted as few in any time have 
 insisted on the privilege and duty of every 
 man to think for himself, and he never 
 doubted that to all who think honestly and 
 bravely will some time be given the realiza- 
 tion of God, 
 
 Because he had seen God, he preached 
 righteousness with a power which has never 
 been surpassed. His sermons thrill with 
 reverence for the moral order of the world. 
 
I06 PURITAN PRINCIPLES 
 
 No medieval Calvinist was more constant or 
 terrible in his denunciations of evil ; and no 
 disciple of modern thought ever more per- 
 suasively presented the beauty of holiness. 
 
 Because he believed in God, he believed 
 in the brotherhood of man, and that the 
 whole people could be trusted ; and with 
 amazing eloquence he proclaimed that doc- 
 trine until the land he loved became a land 
 without a slave. 
 
 This greatest preacher of the modern 
 world was one of the most distinctly typical 
 Puritans of this or any time. It is not for 
 me to eulogize Henry Ward Beecher ; he 
 needs no eulogy, either in this church or 
 this city ; but it is a joy to be able to recall 
 once more the truths which he loved and 
 proclaimed, and in the faith of which he 
 lived and died. When he passed into the 
 silent land 
 
 " It seemed there came, but faint, 
 As from beyond the limit of the world, 
 Like the last echo born of a great cry, 
 Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice 
 Around a king returning from his wars." 
 
Mcccbcfs Ifntluence upon IRellotous 
 Ubougbt in BnalanD* 
 
 CHARLES A. BERRY. 
 
III. 
 
 **:Bccc]Kt5 Ifntluence upon IReltolous 
 XTbou^bt in Bnglant)/'' 
 
 By Rev. CHARLES A. BERRY, D.D., 
 Wolverhampton, England. 
 
 In recognition of the fact that Henry 
 Ward Beecher, beloved as the pastor of this 
 church, was yet the property of Christen- 
 dom, and by a delicate and gracious cour- 
 tesy, I have been called from the shores 
 of my fatherland, and from the home and 
 work I love, to speak to you to-day upon 
 the influence of Henry Ward Beecher on 
 teaching and preaching in Great Britain. 
 But before proceeding to that task, not less 
 grateful because difficult, it is my duty, as 
 it is my privilege and my joy, to express to 
 
 ' Plymouth Church, Sunday morning, Nov. 7, 1897. 
 
 109 
 
110 BEECHER'S INFLUENCE UPON 
 
 the pastor, the officers, the members of this 
 famous and influential church, the congratu- 
 lations and the good wishes of a host of 
 sister churches across the Atlantic waves. 
 My own church especially, which has more 
 than once come into close and sacred rela- 
 tions with Plymouth, and never into rela- 
 tions more co-operative or effective than 
 when, during a recent and regrettable crisis, 
 we exchanged cablegrams of mutual petition 
 for the preservation of peace and the resto- 
 ration of good will between America and 
 England, has charged me to express to you 
 the warmest sentiments of appreciation and 
 regard, and most cordial prayers for your 
 enlarged usefulness and prosperity in the 
 new half-century on which you have entered 
 this year. The welfare of Plymouth is in- 
 deed the solicitude of all English-speaking 
 Christendom, not merely because of recog- 
 nized debt to the ministries and achieve- 
 ments of a glorious past, but because of 
 sincere desire to have those ministries 
 attested and confirmed in a solid, sober, 
 
RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN ENGLAND, III 
 
 unbroken, and apostolical succession of 
 saintly and serviceable fellowship. The 
 severest, and therefore the truest, test, 
 whether of a pastorate or of a church, and 
 especially where great publicity and popu- 
 larity have attended their union, is reached 
 only when the two are sundered — when, on 
 one hand, the contagious and constraining 
 vitalities of a great personality are with- 
 drawn, and, on the other hand, the respon- 
 sive enthusiasms of an appreciative people 
 are denied the magnetic excitation of thrill- 
 ing voice, and kindling eye, and gold-tipped 
 winged eloquence, and are driven back for 
 their awakenment and sustenance upon the 
 quieter but more reliable agencies of in- 
 tellectual and spiritual understanding. 
 Then it is that the secret comes out whether 
 or not pastor and people have been walking 
 in a vain show; whether or not, in his 
 attraction of great multitudes, the pastor 
 has neglected the training and the discipline 
 of a living church; whether or not the 
 people, seemingly so zealous for God and 
 
112 BEECHER'S INFLUENCE UPON 
 
 humanity, are the dupes of a sensuous spell, 
 the victims of mere ravishing oratory, or the 
 intelligent and devoted disciples and ser- 
 vants of a beautiful gospel, made credible 
 by the genius of a heaven-sent interpreter. 
 And it is from that point of view, if I may 
 venture so to express it here this morning, 
 that the friends of Plymouth Church in 
 Britain discover their deepest satisfaction 
 and joy. 
 
 Ten years have passed, and well-nigh 
 eleven, since he was taken whose name will 
 forever be entwined with some of your 
 greatest national achievements and most of 
 your ecclesiastical and theological progress. 
 And what do we see around us to-day ? A 
 living church — large, compact, earnest, rev- 
 erent, devoted, as rich in organization as it 
 is in life, still occupying its place down here 
 right in the midst of this thronged and 
 crowded city, a center of one of the most 
 gifted and devoted Christian bands to be 
 found anywhere in the world, a church laden 
 with holiest traditions and memories, and 
 
RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN ENGLAND. 113 
 
 yet alive and devoted to the thought and 
 duty of to-day. This is the true Beecher 
 memorial, not that brass medallion (speak- 
 ing as is the likeness, it suggests more than 
 it contains); not yon bronze statue, erected 
 by the love and reverence of grateful citi- 
 zens; not any printed or spoken eulogy, apt 
 to become exaggerated, or, in fear of ex- 
 aggeration, to fail in tribute ; but this living 
 church, surviving him, pulsating by his 
 spirit, reproducing his ideas and ideals — 
 this living church, that loved and loves 
 him so well as to turn from mere grief or 
 reminiscence to active service — this is his 
 memorial. And we across the water thank 
 God that his memorial is in the form of a 
 living fellowship rather than of cold marble 
 or printed eulogy. 
 
 And what is thus the best memorial to 
 the man who is gone is the best tribute to 
 the church that remains, and to him who 
 reluctantly, nervously, in spite of feelings 
 that his work lay in other directions, took 
 up the leadership of this church, and has 
 
114 BEE CHER'S INFLUENCE UPON 
 
 maintained, as he still maintains it, in 
 efficiency of Christian instruction and Chris- 
 tian service. 
 
 Our congratulations to-day from across 
 the water are deep and sincere. We rejoice 
 with you over your great and glorious past. 
 We enter, if with surprise yet with the more 
 grateful joy, into your loving and fruitful 
 present. We join hands with you in peti- 
 tioning that, as in the past and in the 
 present, so in days to come, you may enjoy 
 the conscious presence of the Master, and 
 work effectively by the grace and power of 
 the Holy Ghost. 
 
 Now, from what I have said, it will be 
 quite clear to you that this memorial ser- 
 vice, at least as far as I am concerned, is 
 neither to be an exhibition of vain and 
 reminiscent regret, nor a mere ebullition of 
 foolish and degrading idolatry. If to-day 
 we look back, it is to relearn the lessons, to 
 catch the inspirations, which sprang from 
 the lips and the mind of your great preacher. 
 If to-day, in looking back, we concentrate 
 
RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN ENGLAND. II5 
 
 our thoughts upon a man, it is not that we 
 may glorify him or raise him to false emi- 
 nence in the thought and affection of Chris- 
 tendom, but that we may glorify God in 
 him — the God who made, the God who 
 inspired him. There is, as we all know, a 
 false hero-worship, the worship of a man 
 which hides God, and which the more 
 shrivels the heart because playing upon it 
 the fiction of enlargement. But there is a 
 hero-worship that is true, that is divine, 
 that is enlarging and sweetening. A great 
 man is God's best gift to men. Not to 
 recognize and not to cherish him is to 
 blaspheme the bounty and the grace of 
 God. It were, indeed, as easy to blot out 
 from a landscape the mountain that rears its 
 snowy crest beyond the clouds, as to forget 
 or to ignore the presence of great personali- 
 ties in God's earth and in Christ's church. 
 
 That doctrine of equality which declares 
 that one man is as good as another is a lie. 
 Equality of privilege, equality of oppor- 
 tunity, equality as sinners before God, 
 
Il6 BEECHER'S INFLUENCE UPON 
 
 equality as rightful claimants upon God for 
 saving grace — that is the true equality. 
 But in God's world, some- are made tQ lead 
 and some to follow, some to teach and 
 some to learn; and any driveling doctrine 
 of equality which would erect the lowest, 
 the meanest, the least capable into line with 
 the foremost, has written upon it the abso- 
 lute rejection of God. His great men he 
 sends to be brothers and to be servants; 
 but their brotherhood and their service are 
 constituted in this, that they must teach, 
 that they must be obeyed, that they must 
 lead, that they must be followed. God has 
 gifted them with such amplitude as to live 
 in them for the example and guidance of 
 mankind. And hence it is that in the New 
 Testament we never can get away from the 
 personality of St. Paul. Modest as he 
 was, conscious of his ill-desert in presence 
 of the Eternal, knowing as none other could 
 know the limitations and debilities of his 
 own soul, yet was he conscious that God 
 had put grace into him, and gifts such as 
 
RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN ENGLAND. II7 
 
 constituted him servant and leader of all. 
 And throughout his epistles we find that, 
 with delicacy but with unmistakable mean- 
 ing, he puts his own case to the front, that 
 men might think, not of him, but of the 
 grace of God that made him; not of his 
 eloquence, not of his fame, not of his per- 
 sonality, but of the wondrous power and 
 the redemptive efficiency of the love of 
 Jesus Christ. 
 
 And so we think to-day of Henry Ward 
 Beecher. You cannot shut out his per- 
 sonality. Why should you try ? By so 
 much as that personality made the world 
 brighter, God's thought clearer, man's duty 
 simpler, life's sufferings easier to be borne, 
 in that measure he was a fresh incarnation 
 of the Eternal Love. For that reason 
 we glorify God in him, and we pray that 
 the succession, the true apostolic and saint- 
 ly succession, of God's great and gifted 
 ones may never cease until this weary world 
 has passed through all the phases of its 
 travail and its discipline, and is merged in 
 
Il8 BEECHER'S INFLUENCE UPON 
 
 the shadowless light and the ineffable love 
 of God. 
 
 But now from these general remarks I 
 turn to my more specific subject. I am not 
 to speak of Beecher in the entirety of his 
 life — which is as merciful for me as for you; 
 for, if I began to get beyond the fringe of 
 that great personality, you would not get 
 dismissal until sunrise to-morrow, and then 
 I should not have passed the first head of 
 the discourse. I am to speak of Beecher's 
 influence on the thought and preaching of 
 England. That assumes that Beecher had 
 an influence upon the thought and preach- 
 ing of England; and I am here to-day to 
 affirm that he had a distinct and effective 
 influence in those great departments of life. 
 Now, put that fact into juxtaposition with 
 another fact, which helps to interpret it and 
 to fix its true value. Henry Ward Beecher 
 was seldom seen and seldom heard by the 
 great masses of the people in my country. 
 Only a fraction of the religious leaders and 
 teachers of Britain ever saw that face which 
 
RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN ENGLAND, II9 
 
 reflected so much of the sunniness of God. 
 It will appear to you quite clear, then, that 
 his influence was not the influence of per- 
 sonal presence, of captivating eloquence, 
 but was the influence of thought when 
 reduced to the cold and lifeless level of a 
 printed page. That fact is of value in 
 determining the quality of Henry Ward 
 Beecher's ministry. 
 
 There is a foolish idea in many quarters 
 that the orator and the thinker can never be 
 one and the same man ; that the orator is a 
 man devoted to the tricks of speech, depend- 
 ent for his power upon the resourcefulness 
 of a contagious personality; and that the 
 thinker, on the other hand, is a man who 
 necessarily must withdraw himself from all 
 the activities of the world, and from the 
 influence of great public assemblies. Never 
 was greater mistake made in the estimate of 
 function and faculty. There can be rhetoric 
 without thought, but never oratory. For 
 what is the orator? The orator is, what the 
 word that signifies him etymologically sug- 
 
120 BEE CHER'S INFLUENCE UPON 
 
 gests, the man who beseeches, the man who 
 reasons, the man who pleads, the man who 
 wins. He is the petitioner, the prophet. 
 And what is the prophet? The man who 
 speaks for God to men in winsome speech — 
 speech that interprets the Eternal — and so 
 interprets him that men want to rush after 
 him and to embrace him. The prophet is 
 the poet and the orator. The rhetorician, 
 the man of words — reduce him to a printed 
 page, and you kill both him and his speech. 
 Beecher was a thinker gifted of God with 
 fine faculty of vision ; he saw into the deep 
 things of God, and what he saw, God gave 
 him tongue and lip to speak. And so his 
 oratory was lifted far above the wind and 
 bluster of the rhetorician, and became the 
 fine vehicle of thoughts that burn, emotions 
 that kindle, and reasons that bend the will 
 and inspire the soul. 
 
 But when we turn to ask what, in this 
 realm of thought, was Beecher's contribution 
 to modern Christendom, we confront a task 
 less easy; for during the period of Henry 
 
RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN ENGLAND. 121 
 
 Ward Beecher's life we in England at least, 
 and you in America, I dare say, came under 
 the sweep and influence of a whole host of 
 new thinkers and new workers. I will speak 
 of the land I know. 
 
 In England, during these fifty years past, 
 we have seen the rise of Colenso and 
 Biblical criticism; and, young as I am, 
 I am old enough to remember the viru- 
 lent and contemptuous abuse heaped upon 
 the head of Bishop Colenso for his daring 
 pioneer work in the task of rightly under- 
 standing the Scriptures of God. But his 
 name and presence have been influential 
 these fifty years in guiding the thought 
 and method of Christian teachers. During 
 the same period, at the very opposite ex- 
 treme, one sees John Henry Newman and 
 the Oxford Movement leading men away 
 from all inquiry and from all research into 
 absolute surrender to ecclesiastical, not to 
 say Papal, authority. Right in the midst 
 of this same generation rises a figure, re- 
 fined, modest, little seen while yet the 
 
122 BEECHER'S INFLUENCE UPON 
 
 figure lived, much loved since the man 
 within the figure passed up into the eter- 
 nal. Frederick William Robertson, of 
 Brighton, has been in England perhaps 
 the most widely potent religious force of 
 the Victorian era, introducing preachers to 
 a method of Biblical interpretation which 
 made the Book more divine by making it 
 more human, lifting the truth of God into 
 celestial light by showing how its ramifica- 
 tions reached through all the darknesses 
 and shadows of human life. There, in 
 a quiet little retreat, among souls kindred 
 with his own, sits John Frederick Denison 
 Maurice, seeing deeply, speaking simply, 
 so throwing himself into his message that 
 men from the professions, and especially 
 from the legal profession, gathering around 
 him, got so much of the man that they 
 could not hold him, but gave him forth 
 throughout England, and made him one 
 of the foremost of our theological teachers. 
 Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, in the Abbey 
 of Westminster, shedding that sweetness 
 
RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN ENGLAND, 1 23 
 
 and light of which Matthew Arnold spoke 
 so much and exhibited so little; George 
 Macdonald, writing novels, but into them 
 throwing the ne.w religious spirit, and in- 
 terpreting through literature some of the 
 profoundest, some of the loftiest, theolog- 
 ical truths; A. J. Scott in Manchester, and 
 Baldwin Brown in London, bringing back to 
 men the great truth about the Fatherhood 
 of God, and making that Fatherhood, in- 
 stead of the ancient sovereignty, the center 
 of theological systems — these, and the like 
 of these, have all been busy in England dur- 
 ing the Victorian era, teaching, enlarging, 
 sweetening the Church of Christ. 
 
 And yet, among them all, not hindmost, 
 but foremost, was the man who was pastor 
 of this church ; foremost in thought-leader- 
 ship and influence, because speaking to men 
 as preacher, not as mere academic student, 
 not as mere recluse reading books and 
 thinking thoughts in silence, but as a 
 preacher who had seen visions, and dreamed 
 dreams, and gripped problems, and found 
 
124 BEECHER'S INFLUENCE UPON 
 
 out new ways to emancipation and progress. 
 Beecher thus shines as one of the brightest 
 stars of our mpdern firmament, one of the 
 beautifulest of the gifts of God to these 
 later days* 
 
 What shall we say was his' precise con- 
 tribution to this manifold and greatly en- 
 riched age ? I will say, in the first place, 
 Beecher's greatest work was that he helped 
 to bring back Christendom to the realization 
 and enjoyment of the living Christ. Do 
 not misapprehend my meaning, or imagine 
 that I am implying an absence of Christ 
 from the generations that went before ours. 
 Not even theologies could banish Christ out 
 of the world into which he had once come 
 as Redeemer; and he has been here through 
 all the ages, living and working with men. 
 But, alas! how often has Christ been here, 
 as God was with Cyrus of old, girding him, 
 yet unknown by him, undiscerned by him. 
 It sometimes seems to me that the mediaeval 
 epochs of Christian life are well represented 
 in that Disciples' walk to Emmaus with the 
 
RELIGIOIJS THOUGHT IN ENGLAND. 1 25 
 
 Master, when, with glowing heart, they 
 knew they were in the presence of a great 
 teacher, but with holden eyes they did, not 
 see him, did not know him. 
 
 Beecher's work has been to open men's 
 eyes to the fact that He who makes the star 
 to glow, He who lifts the hopes and pur- 
 poses of Christendom, is none other than 
 the Son of God, and that he is not dead 
 but risen and living; and that He who lives 
 and sits upon the throne descends and 
 dwells with us, nearer to us than breathing, 
 closer than hands or feet. 
 
 Very early in the story of the Christian 
 church did Christ come to be more of a 
 historic person than of a Living Presence, 
 more of a dim and distant reminiscence on 
 the page of history than a deliverer and 
 companion standing by our side. The 
 Roman Catholic Church, to which with 
 reverence and with thankfulness I personally 
 acknowledge deep debts of gratitude for 
 many things bright and beautiful, yet did 
 this wrong to Christendom, that it placed 
 
126 BEE CHER'S INFLUENCE UPON 
 
 itself between the believer and his Lord, 
 and taught men to look for Christ in a 
 sensuous sacrament, in a visible priest, in 
 a ritual service, and created, however un- 
 wittingly, in the thought of Christendom, 
 this feeling, that only there could Christ be 
 found ; that outside of those sacred walls 
 men walked and worked, and fought and 
 suffered, without his close companionship 
 and inspiration. And when, in due course, 
 Luther arose in his might, with a waiting 
 and willing Europe at his back, to smite the 
 shackles of the Catholic Church from the 
 neck of Christendom, alas, alas! men went 
 and put the Bible where the Pope had put 
 the Church — put there the Bible, and doc- 
 trines springing from the Bible — and re- 
 created a sense of limitation in the spiritual 
 universe, causing men to think and believe 
 that in the Book and nowhere else could 
 they find Christ or learn anything about 
 him, and that in the doctrines of the Church 
 they had the embodiment, such as it was, 
 of the Master's presence with his people. 
 
RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN ENGLAND, 1^7 
 
 And so the Church struggled on, weak- 
 ened and h'mited by these false conceptions 
 of Christ, and of the way to Christ, until in 
 our own age, from every quarter of the 
 compass, hungering souls cried out for the 
 Living God, for the Christ who said that he 
 would come back again and dwell in his 
 church and with his people; and foremost 
 among those called to interpret this cry of 
 the heart and to guide men to the Living 
 Saviour was Henry Ward Beecher, who 
 himself had found the way, and whose 
 whole life and preaching exhibited the 
 reality, the closeness, the sacredness of 
 communion with Christ. 
 
 In one of those matchless epigrammatic 
 passages that brighten so many of the 
 pages of James Martineau, I found one day 
 this little gem of definition: ** Complete 
 unbelief is attained when God is driven as 
 much out of the past as we have driven 
 him out of the present; and complete belief 
 is reached when God is made to fill the 
 present as much as piety causes him to fill 
 
128 BEECHER'S INFLUENCE UPON 
 
 the past/* No truer word has been spoken 
 to this generation than that. To fill this 
 present with the living God ; to have the 
 courage and the truth to say that if God is 
 not here in Brooklyn he never was in Jeru- 
 salem ; that if he did not speak by his gifted 
 prophet here, he had nothing to say to 
 Abraham, nothing to David, nothing to 
 Isaiah, and nothing to Paul; and that if he 
 be not here a living inspiration, to comfort 
 and to quicken and to bless, the whole story 
 of his unveiling in the past is one vast but 
 beautiful fiction, to be buried henceforth 
 from the thoughts of men — that is the 
 truth and the duty of this present time. 
 And Beecher led us in England, as he led 
 you in America, to see God and to know 
 that Christ is present, to see the linea- 
 ments of his face, to bask in the light of 
 his spirit, and to feel all care and worry 
 and weakness and limitation removed by 
 the saving and emancipating touch of Christ 
 in the heart. 
 
 Out of this great truth, which Beecher 
 
RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN ENGLAND. 1 29 
 
 taught US to recover, came another truth — 
 namely, that the sources of theology are not 
 to be found in books, not even in sacred 
 books, but in Christian experience. Having 
 found the Living Christ and recognized 
 him, having come into personal communion 
 with him and felt the glow of the heart, and 
 the broadening of the vision, and the sweet- 
 ening of the temper, and the quickening of 
 all the perceptive and appreciative faculties, 
 it was an easy and a necessary step to the 
 conclusion that here are the great facts on 
 which theology is built, out of which the- 
 ology must be formed. As the scientist 
 goes to nature for his facts, and proceeds 
 by methods of induction from observed 
 facts to necessary conclusions, so, said 
 Beecher, the theologian must come into the 
 realm of Christian facts, discoverable in the 
 great body of Christian experience, and 
 must by the same inductive methods argue 
 from these facts to what is true about God 
 and what is true about man and duty. 
 
 It is true that the scientific student must 
 
130 BEECHER'S INFLUENCE UPON 
 
 have his class-book, must study his class- 
 book, and by it be guided where to look for 
 his facts and how to treat them when he 
 finds them. And so we have our text- 
 book, this Bible of God, this book of man, 
 and in addition to it we have our volumes 
 of church history, and we have our histories 
 of Christian doctrine and Christian method. 
 Yet these are but guides, pointing us to 
 where we shall find the great verifying facts, 
 and teaching us how to deal with them, and 
 what to make of them when we find them. 
 Do you tell me that such a basis for the- 
 ology is uncertain ? that the experience of 
 one man may differ widely from the experi- 
 ence of another man ? That is true; for if 
 out of mere individual experiences we were 
 to attempt the construction of a theology, 
 we should reach conclusions as confused 
 and as misleading as would be those of the 
 scientist if he attempted, out of a little fact 
 here and a little fact yonder, to construct a 
 great scientific theory. Our induction must 
 be from all the facts. My experience must 
 
RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN ENGLAND. I3I 
 
 be attested by yours, yours and mine by 
 that of a great company, that of a great 
 company to-day by that of a great company 
 which went before us. When so attested 
 and so confirmed, it will be found that the 
 great realities of religion are written in the 
 hearts and souls of men; and that through 
 a broad induction from them we must arrive 
 at our beliefs in theology. Mr. Beecher's 
 theology was not made up out of books, did 
 not constitute itself in propositions ; it was 
 the living interpretation of facts which he 
 observed and of experiences which he 
 shared. 
 
 And so it comes to pass, if you will 
 allow me one illustration, that Henry Ward 
 Beecher put before the church a doctrine 
 of the Deity of Jesus Christ, which to 
 me seems absolutely irrefutable. He did 
 not me ely gather texts strewn here and 
 there over the Biblical page, and piece 
 them together, and say, '^ This book tells 
 me that he was God, and I must believe it 
 because the Book says it," No, he went 
 
132 BEE CHER'S INFLUENCE UPON 
 
 back into his own experience, into the ex- 
 perience of the Christian Church. And 
 what did he find ? He found there unmis- 
 takably a great yearning after God, a yearn- 
 ing so deep and. persistent that only one 
 thing could be concluded — that God put it 
 there, and put it there as a ground of ex- 
 pectation that he would answer the craving 
 he had created. And out of that came 
 clearly and necessarily the conclusion that 
 the God who made man thus to need and 
 to yearn after himself must answer him, 
 must come to him, or cease to be God — 
 become indeed Diabolus, not to be wor- 
 shiped, however strong, but to be rejected 
 and repelled as one who made the soul only 
 to mock it and to destroy it by delusion and 
 despair. Thus it was that, arguing from 
 Christian experience, Beecher learned that 
 it was reasonable and obligatory for the God 
 who made man to come to him, and speak 
 to him, and work for him, and die for him. 
 Then, bringing these observations and 
 reasonings to the light of the Scriptural 
 
RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN ENGLAND, 1 33 
 
 revelation, and looking at the historic 
 Christ from the standpoint of human crav- 
 ings and needs, Beecher could not escape 
 thq, conclusion that the Christ portrayed in 
 the Gospels was God's answer to man's 
 necessity. And in grateful surprise he 
 cried: ** Why, this is God. There is not a 
 single thing I would have in God but I find 
 in Christ. There is not a single thing in 
 Christ I would not like to have in God. 
 This is, this must be, God. I worship and 
 I adore." 
 
 That is an illustration of the new method 
 in theology, largely inaugurated by Henry 
 Ward Beecher. Do you not see how much 
 more powerful, how much more conclusive, 
 it is ? Take any number of texts and 
 prophecies and Messianic hopes written here 
 in the Book, and you cannot build up a 
 theory from them which you will not some- 
 times doubt and sometimes reject. But 
 build up your theories from Christian ex- 
 perience, and you have an absolutely invul- 
 nerable castle of truth in which to live and 
 
134 BEECHER'S INFLUENCE UPON 
 
 breathe and work. This, then, was Beecher's 
 second contribution to modern Christian 
 thought — to teach us where to find the 
 sources of our theology. 
 
 I cannot do more than merely indicate 
 the effects which flowed from these two 
 great contentions and contributions. Will 
 you note, then, in passing, that this method 
 of Beecher's made theology an intensely 
 vital and interesting study — the most vital 
 and .interesting of all studies ? 
 
 When I was a youth at college, the most 
 popular thing to say in class was that the 
 study of theology had decayed, and that 
 only intellectual fossils engaged themselves 
 in its pursuit. It would be a shame un- 
 speakable for any man in England to say 
 that to-day. For theology has become the 
 very center of all studies; and men are 
 turning to it from every walk in life, as to 
 that which most satisfies, most repays, most 
 instructs. And the secret of it is that the 
 theology which used to be studied was 
 studied from books; the theology that has 
 
RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN ENGLAND, 135 
 
 ' now won and held the intellect of Christen- 
 dom is a theology studied from life. 
 
 In the second place, this method supplied 
 the elements of certainty in religion. It 
 threw men back upon the witness which 
 God has placed within themselves, and lifted 
 them, as to the certainty of their faith, 
 above the reach of any criticism or any new 
 development of thought. In England, 
 except in few and inconsiderable places, it 
 would be impossible to-day to raise any 
 alarm, to create any heresy-hunt, because a 
 man brought before Christendom some 
 results of Biblical criticism, or some new 
 interpretation of any of the great doctrines 
 of the faith. Why ? Because men have 
 come to see that whether Jonah is a fact or 
 a fiction does not matter; that the spiritual 
 and ethical truth in the story is the thing 
 of importance; that whether Moses wrote 
 the Pentateuch or not is of infinite unim- 
 portance, except as a matter of literary 
 interest, so long as the great unfolding of 
 the Divine Will is seen to be unmistakable 
 
136 BEECHER'S INFLUENCE UPON 
 
 and divine; and because men have come to 
 see that the credibility of Christian truth 
 finds warrant in the heart and souls of men, 
 and not in the mere maintenance of historic 
 propositions and theological theories. And 
 so it has come to pass that we in England — 
 I do not know how it is in America — that 
 we in England live very calmly amid the 
 busy development of scientific theory, amid 
 the busier activities of Biblical criticism, 
 amid the rearrangement of doctrinal truth. 
 We are very calm, because we know that 
 He in whom we live and trust is in us and 
 with us. We know him. We do not 
 know merely about him: we know him. 
 We walk with him. We let him come 
 into the heart. There is glow, there is 
 sunshine, there is brightness, there is hope, 
 where he is. And so we say, '^ Do what 
 you will with the mechanics of religion, you 
 cannot take him away from us; he is 
 crucified in us afresh every day; he rises 
 afresh in us every day; and, when we are 
 willing, he sends Pentecosts of glow and 
 
RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN ENGLAND, 1 37 
 
 power into our expectant souls. We knoiv 
 him because we have him; and our faith 
 is sure. " 
 
 The time has passed, and I must now 
 content myself with saying in conclusion 
 that I have laid no particular stress in this 
 review upon Beecher's specific contributions 
 to this or that form of Christian doctrine. 
 I have done more, or attempted to do more: 
 I have tried to show that he has influenced 
 the whole spirit of theology and the whole 
 attitude of Christian thought. Calvin's 
 name is identified with the doctrine of 
 Sovereignty, Luther's with the doctrine of 
 Justification, Wesley's with the doctrine of 
 Sanctification. You will never be able to 
 identify the name of Beecher with any one 
 single doctrine. But this we do in England 
 — this I trust and believe you do in 
 America: we feel that this man held so 
 much of God in him, and recognized so 
 clearly the grace that had saved him, as to 
 bring into the whole realm of theologic 
 thought a new spirit, a new outlook, which 
 
138 BEE CHER'S INFLUENCE UPON 
 
 broke down ancient superstitions, and made 
 the way clear for men to work in new con- 
 structions, solid and beautiful, of Christian 
 truth and Christian hope. His was the 
 influence of leaven in the meal. Sometimes 
 it is the fate — shall I not say it is the glory? 
 — of such workers as he, soon to be lost on 
 the page of history as a mere name, and to 
 live, as he often longed to live in life, 
 obscure, unnoticed of men, with his work 
 for his joy and his Master for his reward. 
 But whether the name of Beecher goes 
 down on the page of history as one of the 
 creative personalities or not, of this I am 
 assured: his spirit will go down, and it will 
 be a spirit making for peace, breadth, 
 charity, yea, a spirit making for the recog- 
 nition of Christ, the love of Christ, the sur- 
 render of the heart to Christ, and issuing 
 through that surrender into emancipation 
 and enlargement of thought, of service, of 
 personal and sacred experience. 
 
 Accept, then, my friends, these fragmen- 
 tary utterances of one who knew and loved 
 
RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN ENGLAND. 1 39 
 
 your pastor, and who knew and loved him 
 well enough to know that, as he is here with 
 us to-day, he is well content at the absence 
 of mere personal eulogy, and at the exalta- 
 tion of those great truths and wise methods 
 for which he pleaded. Mr. Beecher is gone 
 from you, and gone from the world, as a 
 corporeal presence; but his influence still 
 lives and operates in many hearts and lands. 
 Here in this building, where the echoes of 
 his voice still linger, that influence is 
 obvious and potent. Beyond this building, 
 outreaching even the expansive coasts of 
 this vast continent, that influence is not less 
 effective because less specifically recogniz- 
 able. He lives, here where he was known, 
 beyond, where he was not known, in the 
 work he accomplished, in the thoughts he 
 uttered, in the spirit he breathed. But if 
 he is to continue to live, it must be through 
 you, and through us who caught so many 
 inspirations from his heart. And the most 
 permanent, as it will be the most honoring, 
 memorial we can rear to him will be to obey 
 
140 BEECHER'S INFLUENCE. 
 
 as well as learn his teaching, and to trans- 
 late into renewed and sanctified life the 
 credible and beautiful Gospel which he 
 preached with such power and exhibited 
 with such grace during forty sacred years in 
 this house. 
 
Ube UbcoloQical iproblem tot Zo^Wa^. 
 
 GEORGE A. GORDON. 
 
IV. 
 
 Ube XTbeologtcal problem tov Uo*=2)as/ 
 
 By the Rev. GEORGE A. GORDON, D.D., 
 Of Old South Congregational Church, Boston, Mass. 
 
 The strange thing that confronts one 
 almost everywhere to-day is the absence of 
 theology in the supreme sense of that word. 
 For all thinking men who are in any meas- 
 ure open to the new light and spirit of our 
 time, Calvinism as an adequate interpreta- 
 tion of the ways of God with men, or even 
 as a working philosophy in life, is forever 
 gone. And thus far nothing equally elab- 
 orate and commanding has arisen to take its 
 place. There has been a great negation of 
 one theology, without, in the deepest sense. 
 
 * Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, Thursday, Novem- 
 ber II, 1897. 
 
 143 
 
144 THE THEOLOGICAL PROBLEM 
 
 an equally great affirmation of another. 
 We can imagine a parallel. We can imagine 
 an explosion and rejection of the Ptolemaic 
 system of astronomy without the introduc- 
 tion into the vacant place of the Coper- 
 nican. That the sun and planets do not 
 revolve round the earth we can suppose 
 that men have become absolutely certain; 
 that this little globe of ours is not the center 
 of the universe is clear; that what are called 
 sunrise and sunset are but appearances can 
 no longer be doubted. But nothing further 
 is settled. No map of the heavens to re- 
 place the old one has yet been made. No 
 scheme of the real center and movements of 
 the planetary system has yet been elabo- 
 rated. Nothing exists but single thoughts, 
 isolated discoveries, promising insights that 
 so far have not been wrought over into one 
 comprehensive and sovereign conception. 
 The old astronomy, with its appeal to sense 
 and its wonderful hold upon the popular 
 imagination, is gone, and the new, in any- 
 thing like scientific shape, has not arrived. 
 
FOR TO-DAY. 145 
 
 If we can imagine the men of the fifteenth 
 century as having lost Ptolemy without 
 having found Copernicus, we shall have a 
 parallel for the condition of things in 
 theology to-day. In proof of this state- 
 ment, I ask you to recall the chief fields of 
 theological interest at the present time. 
 History, criticism, interpretation— of these 
 we have an unprecedented supply. The 
 annals of the race, literary and institutional, 
 secular and religious, have been read with 
 an eagerness, an intelligence, and with the 
 application of scientific methods absolutely 
 unparalleled. The text, the composition, 
 the times and environments of the Old 
 Testament and the New have been the 
 subject of amazing and fruitful activity. 
 The same is true of the entire history of the 
 Christian church. And antiquity as the 
 source of beginnings has wielded a wonder- 
 ful fascination over thousands of scholars. 
 Upon history, criticism, interpretation, the 
 representative library of to-day is full of 
 new books, and one can have nothing but 
 
146 THE THEOLOGICAL PROBLEM 
 
 praise for the splendid achievement em- 
 bodied in them. The limitation, however, 
 is strikingly obvious. One looks almost 
 in vain for books giving an elaboration 
 into coherent and commanding form of 
 the new ideas by which Christian men are 
 living. The new ideas lie in our life with 
 the most confusing and provoking miscel- 
 laneousness. We cry out for order. The 
 house of faith must be rebuilt; and for 
 the last five and twenty years scholars the 
 world over have done nothing but collect 
 materials. David was allowed to make a 
 contribution to the house of the Lord for 
 his time, but he was not permitted to build 
 it, because he had been a man of war and 
 had shed much blood. It may be that a 
 similar prohibition, for a similar reason, has 
 been served upon the critical scholars of our 
 time. They have been men of war; they 
 have shed much blood; and if they should 
 construct an edifice for faith, perhaps the 
 generation still smarting under the wounds 
 it has received might refuse to enter. 
 
FOR TO-DAY. I47 
 
 Others may think that the parallel to these 
 historical scholars is Saul and not David. 
 It is because of compromise with an evil 
 system, because of foolish unwillingness to 
 shed more blood, that they have lost their 
 throne. At all events, the house of faith 
 remains to be built. We have materials in 
 abundance, old and new, but the building 
 is not in sight. If any man shall say, We 
 need none, because we have a building of 
 God, a house not made with hands, eternal 
 in the heavens, he is simply mistaking the 
 eternal pattern in the Mount for the taber- 
 nacle below that it is still incumbent upon 
 the spiritual intelligence to raise for the 
 service and solace of all the journeying chil- 
 dren of God. Books on theology proper, 
 works dealing with ideas and organizing 
 them into a great and commanding whole, 
 are lamentably few. It is so much easier to 
 dig than to construct, to be intellectual hod- 
 carriers than to be architects and builders of 
 the habitation of the spirit. 
 
 A further confirmation of this contention 
 
148 THE THEOLOGICAL PROBLEM 
 
 may be had from a national instance. Five 
 and twenty years ago Calvinism was domi- 
 nant from one end of Scotland to the other. 
 To-day it is dominant nowhere; it has, in- 
 deed, been utterly outgrown and left behind. 
 What has effected this great change ? 
 Chiefly the new Biblical scholarship, and 
 not philosophical thinking. Professor Dav- 
 idson, of Edinburgh, that quiet, shrewd, 
 fascinating, resistless old scholar and maker 
 of scholars, is behind it all. His greatest 
 pupil, W. Robertson Smith, made an epoch 
 in the national life of Scotland by his learn- 
 ing, and not by any departure from Calvin- 
 ism. Others have risen up and carried 
 forward the work that he, with so much 
 ability and courage, inaugurated. Hundreds 
 of young leaders are to-day spreading the 
 light. A corresponding movement has been 
 running, during most of this time, in New 
 Testament interpretation. For years Pro- 
 fessor A. B. Bruce, revered as a great 
 teacher of the New Testament, as much in 
 America as in Great Britain, was almost a 
 
FOR TO-DAY. I49 
 
 solitary light. Now he is the center of an 
 ever-growing brotherhood of like-minded 
 men. The thing to be noted is that in the 
 accomplishment of this wonderful revolution 
 in the belief of a nation very little purely 
 theological thinking has appeared. The 
 light has come in through history, criticism, 
 exegesis; the old scheme has been expelled 
 by a new body of knowledge, and a fresh 
 mass of nobler religious feeling. Still, it 
 must be said that in Scotland to-day there 
 is really no philosophical theology, no theory 
 of Christianity, and man's religious life 
 worked out in fundamental opposition to 
 the rejected Calvinism. Scotland waits for 
 a theology to fill the vacant throne. 
 
 The same thing meets us at home. How 
 many diligent, learned, and brilliant work- 
 men we have in fields that pass under the 
 general name of theology it would be im- 
 possible to say. Nor would it be possible 
 to do them too much honor. All our theo- 
 logical schools, or nearly all, are centers of 
 fresh and fruitful activity; many of our col- 
 
ISO THE THEOLOGICAL PROBLEM 
 
 leges and universities are in touch with the 
 same spirit. But the movement has hardly 
 got beyond the question of literature. It is 
 the work of the scholar rather than the 
 thinker; it is the gathering of knowledge 
 rather than the organization of ideas. No 
 one can value too highly these preliminaries ; 
 but preliminaries should have a tendency to 
 become finals, tributaries should at least 
 move onward toward the main stream, the 
 interests of the scholar should merge at 
 length in the greater interest of the thinker. 
 And although untold good must continue 
 to come, in many ways and for many ends, 
 from Biblical scholarship, it is at least 
 questionable if we have not already reached 
 the permanent conception of the nature and 
 ofifice of the Holy Scriptures. They are 
 simply the supreme literature of the religious 
 life, and their authority, as in the teachings 
 of Christ, is the authority of the highest of 
 their kind. Historical criticism is, after all, 
 a matter of environment; the content of the 
 Bible, the word of God there, is the object 
 
FOR TO-DAY. 15I 
 
 of the enlightened human spirit. We need 
 no longer delay our new building era on 
 account of the Bible. Its hewn stones rest- 
 ing upon the chief corner-stone a^e already 
 here and in place. 
 
 The absence of a theology giving intel- 
 lectual form and justification to the better 
 sentiment of the time is abundantly visible 
 in our ministry. Among almost all our 
 effective preachers the sympathies are 
 modern; but in the greater number the 
 theology is either ancient or non-existent. 
 In either case, the mass of prevailing emo- 
 tion and practical activity has no corre- 
 sponding body of ideas in league with it. 
 The scheme entertained is usually some 
 decrepit modification of the Calvinistic kind, 
 too long idle for effective service, with the 
 courage but without the capacity for battle; 
 while the purposes, sentiments, and practi- 
 cal outlooks are all of this new and greater 
 day. We are full of joy so long as we are 
 permitted to feel with these brethren ; but 
 the moment we hear them speak their 
 
152 THE THEOLOGICAL PROBLEM 
 
 philosophy, our bewilderment is like that of 
 the patriarch of old. The hands are the 
 hands of Esau; so far, so good. But the 
 voice is the voice of Jacob: here comes in 
 the endless confusion. How often does one 
 see the old theology unconsciously dressing 
 itself up in the garments of the new, with 
 unreflecting simplicity covering the parts 
 that would surely betray it, and advancing 
 guilelessly in borrowed enthusiasms and 
 simulated loves to obtain dominion over the 
 blind ! The success is but for the moment; 
 the old supplanting character cannot long 
 be concealed. 
 
 Now, the chief theological necessity for 
 to-day I take to be the rebuilding of the 
 edifice of Christian belief. We need a 
 temple for the intelligence. We need fun- 
 damental and ruling ideas set in the strength 
 of their own natural order. We need an 
 intellectual basis for the new faith, passion, 
 and enterprise of the Church of Christ in 
 our time. As will be seen, I can indicate 
 but a single line of thought upon this vast 
 
FOR TO-DAY, 153 
 
 subject. Christian thinkers are under bonds 
 to find in God the secure foundation for all 
 human interests, the assurance of a divine 
 intention and grace adequate to the need 
 and capacity of mankind. We must first 
 of all command the point where the life of 
 Christianity itself is involved. And this is 
 the point whose importance the entire his- 
 tory of Plymouth Church illustrates, in sup- 
 port of which it has stood these fifty years, 
 and round which has toiled, with prophetic 
 insight, magnificent insistence, and benefi- 
 cent results to the whole country, the 
 genius both of its first minister and its 
 second. 
 
 I. Calvinism is right in its claim that the 
 being of God is the supreme interest both in 
 theology and life. This is the note of 
 greatness, sounding clearer as the genera- 
 tions pass, in the thought of Augustine, 
 Calvin, and Edwards. Jonathan Edwards, 
 because of his devouring passion for God as 
 the absolutely perfect, is bright with an 
 everlasting light. The new movement in 
 
154 THE THEOLOGICAL PROBLEM 
 
 theology, conscious as it is of revolutionary 
 intent, is here at one with all true theology. 
 It aims to behold all things in God, Its 
 hope is to begin, continue, and end in God. 
 Its source in all its genuine representatives 
 is the aboriginal necessity of the human 
 soul: " My heart and my flesh cry out for 
 the living God.*" 
 
 But Christian thinkers are learning that 
 there are two great abuses of this sublime 
 passion. Willingness to be damned for the 
 glory of God may be the sign of a humble 
 spirit; but it is in reality the supreme insult 
 to God. For it assumes that the glory of 
 God and the weal of man are incompatible 
 interests. To exalt God so high as to 
 banish him from the world is a terrible 
 error. To refuse to see God in the natural 
 life of men is to take the first step toward 
 atheism. For a God wholly above the 
 world- process, wholly apart from the normal 
 interests of men, wholly transcendent, is 
 practically no God at all. In Carlyle's 
 phrase, such a God *' does nothing," and 
 
FOR TO-DAY. 1 55 
 
 for human beings he is nothing. This is 
 the inevitable outcome of the belief that 
 makes God too good to be in the world, 
 that makes the world too wicked to have 
 the presence of God in it. The other 
 abuse is one peculiar to our century. It 
 lies in identifying God with the develop- 
 ment of human history, in refusing to see 
 that God is at the same time in all and over 
 all. 
 
 Against this twofold error of a God 
 wholly above the world, and a God com- 
 pletely one with its process, the theology 
 for to-day must do battle. The acorn falls 
 into the ground. The plan of the tree is 
 there. That plan lives in the acorn, and 
 yet transcends it. It bursts the acorn in 
 the soil, runs it out into new and wondrous 
 forms, drives it up through the earth, sends 
 it higher and higher, and through the disci- 
 pline of a thousand years it struggles to live 
 more and more in the tree. And when the 
 tree has come to its best; when it is deepest 
 in the earth, highest in the air, and widest 
 
15^ THE THEOLOGICAL PROBLEM 
 
 in the sweep of its great arms, the ideal of 
 the tree still looks beyond. The wondrous 
 product still falls short of perfection, and 
 therefore the plan is still a beautiful excess 
 even upon the tree at its best. This is the 
 Christian idea of God. He is in the organ- 
 ism of humanity from the first. It is he 
 that sends the race into all its growths. It 
 is he that gives man ideals, and that fills his 
 heart with achieving power. It is he that 
 brings men into families that grow sweeter 
 with the centuries; that sets these families 
 in nations that slowly ascend in character; 
 that moves the nations into wider federa- 
 tions of trade and art and science; that 
 lights up the future with the dream of uni- 
 versal brotherhood ; that compels the race 
 to leave more and more of its brutehood 
 behind it ; and that, with a sublime insist- 
 ence, urges it on upon the full realization of 
 its humanity. We have an indwelling God, 
 a God whose indwelling is the fountain of 
 our whole character and hope. But we 
 have a God above and beyond the process 
 
FOR TO-DAY, 1 57 
 
 of human society, a God whose character is 
 an eternal excess upon human history, a 
 God who can never live wholly in man 
 because he is so infinitely great in wisdom 
 and love for man. God lives eternally in 
 his own plan, in his own ideal, in his own 
 love. He lives for himself because he repre- 
 sents in himself the inconceivable good in 
 reserve for mankind. Thus we must strive 
 to combine in our thought of God the 
 primary truth in Calvinism — the infinite ex- 
 altation of God, and the fundamental in- 
 sight of our century — God's presence in all 
 human history. 
 
 2. I have said that Calvinism is pro- 
 foundly right in concentrating human in- 
 terest upon God. It is right in its funda- 
 mental contention concerning God. The 
 final thing in the universe is the Divine 
 Will. Calvinism is wrong, grievously wrong 
 in the character that it ascribes to that 
 ultimate Will. If that Will be against the 
 greater part of mankind, as Calvinism de- 
 clares, nothing can long keep us from 
 
158 THE THEOLOGICAL PROBLEM 
 
 despair; but if that Will be for us, as a true 
 theology must contend, who can be against 
 us? The fundamental position of the tradi- 
 tional theology does not admit a God for 
 mankind. The new superstructure of senti- 
 ment cannot stand upon the old theological 
 basis. The scheme of salvation which has, 
 with a few noble exceptions, prevailed in 
 the Church from the days of Augustine to 
 the present time, the theory against which 
 Henry Ward Beecher revolted, and which 
 he fought with the power of a world-shaker, 
 never dreamed of God as seriously caring for 
 all mankind. There was antiquity, but 
 only the Hebrew people were of concern to 
 God. A few great souls might possibly be 
 recovered from the general wreck, like 
 Cyrus and Socrates, Plato and Plutarch, 
 Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius; but, as a 
 whole, antiquity did not lie in the gracious 
 purpose of God. It had died to him in 
 Adam, and he had not even cared to try to 
 make it live to him in Christ. There were 
 the nations contemporaneous with the 
 
FOR TO-DAY, 1 59 
 
 Christian Church in its development. They 
 were material from which a selection was 
 made; but as nations, as communities of 
 human beings, they were not included in 
 God's moral regard for the world. There 
 were the heathen peoples, the belated rear- 
 guard of mankind, the millions who had 
 been obstructed in the onward march, 
 detained in the swamps fighting the beast in 
 its earlier and uglier forms. In the dust 
 and heat of this modern day they began to 
 roll in sight. What was to be thought con- 
 cerning them? Again the same scheme was 
 applied. Their entire past was regarded as 
 Godless; the myriads of their predecessors, 
 those whom these races looked upon as 
 heroic and pious ancestors, had gone ir- 
 revocably to their doom. These peoples 
 themselves are but fresh material for the 
 selective purpose of the Highest; and 
 through the message of the missionary he 
 will choose whom he will, and reject whom 
 he will. The old theology had two super- 
 lative merits; it was honest, and it was 
 
l6o THE THEOLOGICAL PROBLEM 
 
 courageous. It did not try to appear other 
 than the terrible partialism that it was. It 
 did not shrink from the avowal of its own 
 logic. 
 
 That is the scheme which has fallen from 
 the control of the Church, and to whose 
 vacant throne no contrasted conception of 
 equal thoroughness and vigor has yet come. 
 And it is precisely this ultimate origin of 
 the new theology to which I would turn 
 attention. The new scheme is not founded 
 upon sentiment; it is not the product of 
 benevolent dreamers; it is not held blindly 
 in spite of human nature, the movement of 
 history, the spirit of the New Testament, 
 the order of the moral world, the heart of 
 the universe. The old scheme was great in 
 its confidence that the facts were on its side 
 and against the nobler view. Nothing could 
 be further from the truth. The older 
 theology saw the sternness of life, but it did 
 not understand Paul's exclamation, ''Behold 
 the goodness and the severity of God!" 
 Its hopeless outlook upon the world was due 
 
FOR TO-DAY. l6l 
 
 to limitation of vision. As Phillips Brooks 
 has taught us in one of his noblest sermons, 
 it is easy to curse life if only a part is seen. 
 Balak was shrewd enough to see that if 
 Balaam was to find himself able to curse 
 Israel, he must look upon the part, the 
 utmost part, the wretchedest part, and not 
 upon the magnificent whole. 
 
 3. The theology for to-day must found 
 itself upon the will of God, and upon the 
 will of God at its highest. When we look 
 for God in the cosmic order, we can do little 
 until we find man there. Man, as the 
 crown of the cosmic process, shows that 
 process at its best, shows what lies behind 
 it all. When we look for God in man, we 
 do little until we find Christ, the Ideal Man. 
 In Christ man the creature is at his best, 
 and God the Creator is at his best. The 
 incarnation is the center of all sane theology. 
 Man at his best can alone give us God at 
 his best. To this issue the supreme divinity 
 of Christ comes. Jesus took the Infinite at 
 his best ; that is, he took God as he was in 
 
1 62 THE THEOLOGICAL PROBLEM 
 
 his Son. Unless we look at his model, the 
 genius of the architect can be known only 
 from his building; and his character will 
 share in the confusion of the process. Un- 
 less we look at Christ, the typal man, we 
 can judge the Maker of our human world 
 only by what we see. And only when God 
 shall have made the pile complete can our 
 judgment be final. Therefore we build 
 upon Christ as the sublime anticipation of 
 perfected humanity, as the archetypal man 
 standing complete in the confusion of the 
 great historic construction, and giving us 
 through man at his best God at his best. 
 We must therefore revise all other revela- 
 tions of God in nature, in the constitution 
 of man, in human history, and in the Holy 
 Scriptures themselves, by the light that falls 
 from the glory of God in the face of Jesus 
 Christ. Nothing must be allowed to con- 
 tradict the essential meaning of the Incarna- 
 tion. It stands for the eternal goodness of 
 God in the inexpressible sternness of the 
 process of history. If the Incarnation is 
 
FOR TO- DA V. 163 
 
 not to be lost from faith, if the mission of 
 Christ is not to be reduced to a delusion, if 
 Christianity is not to be contracted into the 
 religion of a sect, the saving purpose of God 
 in Christ must be made to cover the race. 
 
 It is true that this principle is revolu- 
 tionary. The affirmation that God has a 
 Christian purpose toward our entire human- 
 ity involves an extension of the field of 
 redemption so enormous as to make obso- 
 lete, at a single stroke, the whole theological 
 map of the traditional view. And what 
 seems worse, while all clear-seeing men are 
 aware that this does not necessarily imply 
 universal salvation, it is true that it looks 
 that way. 1/ God shall succeed^ universal 
 salvation will be the final result. And this 
 sounds so perilous to good morals, and 
 seems to cut the nerve of all strenuous 
 endeavor! O my brothers, when will 
 Christian thinkers fear atheism more than 
 universalism, when will they see that the 
 deepest immorality lies in distrust of the 
 righteous will of God, when will they awake 
 
164 THE THEOLOGICAL PROBLEM 
 
 to the fact that only those who believe in a 
 God for humanity and eternally for human- 
 ity can resist unto blood ! Any scheme 
 that puts God with an inclusive and ever- 
 lasting purpose of redemption behind man- 
 kind, looks like universalism ; but let us 
 remember that any other scheme is, in our 
 time, a royal road to atheism. When we 
 assert, as we do so easily, the brotherhood 
 of man, let us be sure that the universe, 
 according to our view, is not against it; let 
 us be sure that there is in God a universal 
 fatherhood upon which to found it. 
 
 4. One more specification must be made. 
 Where in the new scheme of theological 
 thought does the Christian doctrine of the 
 Holy Spirit come in? About no other truth 
 of the Christian faith is there, among good 
 people, so much serious and profound con- 
 viction and so much vagueness. Still every 
 Christian heart knows when its treasure is 
 rightly named. It knovv^s when the point is 
 met and when it is missed. It will not 
 accept a stone for bread, nor a scorpion for 
 
FOR TO-DAY. 165 
 
 an ^'gg. The philosophical idea of the 
 immanence of God is not the Christian doc- 
 trine of th« Holy Spirit. The life of God 
 in the souls of the Hebrew prophets and in 
 the hearts of the outside saints, as Dr. 
 Bushnell calls them, the divine indwelling 
 represented by the ethnic religions at their 
 best, or by the Hebrew faith at its highest, 
 is not what the disciple of Christ means 
 when he speaks of the Holy Spirit. There 
 is indeed a profound identity in the two 
 experiences, but there is a difference equally 
 profound. God is the same God, and yet 
 the Christian revelation brings to light the 
 hidden character of God. The Christian 
 conception of God as the God and Father 
 of our Lord Jesus Christ is so ineffably great 
 that God looks through it upon the believer, 
 and comes through it in upon the heart of 
 the individual and the Church in ways and 
 measures and powers altogether new. 
 
 The doctrine of the Holy Spirit is the 
 coming of the life of the God and Father of 
 Jesus Christ. God as he comes through 
 
l66 THE THEOLOGICAL PROBLEM 
 
 the historic Christ, as he finds the form of 
 his coming in Christ, as he is seen and felt 
 and experienced through Christ, is the Holy 
 Spirit of our faith. The Christian idea of 
 the Holy Spirit is inseparable from the 
 Christian thought of Christ. A supreme 
 historic character reveals the ineffable love 
 of God, and continues the everlasting form 
 of God for the Christian mind, the channel 
 along which God evermore comes to the 
 Christian heart, the atmosphere through 
 which God in his light and grace comes and 
 lives in the Christian life. 
 
 It is indeed the Christian God who made 
 the heavens and the earth, who made our 
 world the abode of life, who filled life with 
 ceaseless aspiration and endowed it with 
 the force that through ascending forms 
 seeks its consummation in man. It is the 
 Christian God who made all men of one 
 blood, who left no people altogether with- 
 out witness of himself, who through lower 
 religions and higher has spoken to the 
 human soul, who has given man a moral 
 
FOR TO-DAY, 167 
 
 nature, an ideal of fellowship in the family 
 and in the total interests of existence, who 
 has constituted our humanity in his own 
 image, smitten it with an immortal hunger 
 for himself, and moved upon it from the 
 beginning in the tides of his love. It is the 
 Christian God who has made our human 
 world and the universe in which it is set; 
 but men did not know it and could not 
 know it until Christ came. The immanent 
 God is known in Christ as our Father; but 
 not until he is thus known can we date the 
 coming of the Holy Spirit. The Pentecos- 
 tal vision of God, and life and power under 
 God, were mediated by the Lord Jesus 
 Christ. Because he is the final and perfect 
 mediator of God, we know God as the Holy 
 Spirit. Therefore is the Holy Spirit the 
 Christian Indweller, the Christian Com- 
 forter. He is the light of the Christian 
 intelligence, the strength of the Christian 
 will, the rapture of the Christian heart, the 
 Ineffable in the Christian life. He is the 
 reserve of God bestowed alone upon those 
 
l68 THE THEOLOGICAL PROBLEM 
 
 who look to him through our Master, 
 Christ. 
 
 Here, then, is the issue of all that I have 
 said to-night. I have insisted upon a meta- 
 physical insight, an ethical faith, a historical 
 fact, and a supreme experience. I have 
 contended for the insight that finds a God 
 in all and over all ; for the faith that holds 
 to the absolute goodness of the Infinite 
 Will; for the historical fact that becomes 
 the supreme interpretation both of the 
 Divine intention and human capacity; and 
 for the exalted experience in which all truth 
 finds its field and power. Immanence and 
 transcendence must meet in the nature of 
 the Ineffable God, the righteousness of God 
 must come to sovereign expression in the 
 Incarnation of the Son of God, and the 
 prophetic character of the Incarnation must 
 advance toward fulfillment in the Christian 
 life. The metaphysical insight must issue 
 in the ethical faith, both insight and faith 
 must find verification in the history of Jesus 
 Christ, and upon this must begin the dis- 
 
FOR TO -DA Y. 1 69 
 
 pensation of the Holy Spirit, the perpetual 
 coming of the Christian God in the Hfe of 
 mankind. 
 
 For the individual the message from the 
 theology here indicated is that salvation is 
 righteousness. Whatever truth there may 
 be in the ideas of imputation, substitution, 
 vicarious sacrifice — and I am glad to be able 
 to see a world of noble meaning in them — 
 they do not in any way conflict with the 
 fact that righteous character, and nothing 
 else, is salvation; that character is the 
 achievement of the personal will ; that it can 
 be won, in the deepest sense, only by the 
 soul for itself; that God himself cannot 
 bestow it except through the agony and 
 bloody sweat of the human spirit. The 
 path of eternal life is the path of anguish; 
 tears are its meat day and night while it 
 hears the world cry, ''Where is thy God? " 
 The stress of heart in the soul that is gain- 
 ing new standing in the truth, winning new 
 interests in the kingdom of God, and mak- 
 ing new advances upon righteousness cannot 
 
170 THE THEOLOGICAL PROBLEM 
 
 be put into words. There are none but 
 heroic feet upon that stairway of fire. 
 Idlers and pretenders, soft and luxurious 
 lives, have no place in that awful but blessed 
 process. Salvation for the moral shirk, 
 while he remains a shirk, God in his mercy 
 has made forever impossible. 
 
 But this is not the final word. To the 
 question shot upward from the hearts of the 
 brave in the strenuousness and seeming 
 impossibility of the righteous life, Is God 
 for us or against us? there must be but one 
 answer. We must not make God responsi- 
 ble for the continuance of iniquity. We 
 must define sin as resistance to the realiza- 
 tion of the righteous purpose of God in the 
 soul. God is against the race only when it 
 is against itself; and in that case his wrath 
 is his mercy. God is on the side of every 
 man who sets his heart on righteousness. 
 The deepest in human nature, in human 
 society, in human history, in the course of 
 the world, in the on-going universe, makes 
 for the seeker after righteousness, The 
 
FOR TO-DAY, I/I 
 
 stars in their courses fight for the man who 
 contends for a pure heart ; and to every soul 
 face to face with the tremendousness of the 
 moral process the sublime comfort comes, 
 "The Eternal God is thy refuge, and under- 
 neath are the everlasting arms." 
 
Ube Social problems of tbe ff uture. 
 
 WASHINGTON GLADDEN. 
 
V. 
 
 Ubc Social iproblems ot tbe ffitture. 
 
 By the Rev. WASHINGTON GLADDEN, D.D.,» 
 Of First Congregational Church, Columbus, O. 
 
 I BRING to you to-night, my friends of 
 Plymouth Church, no better offering than 
 that which can be expressed in the pulsa- 
 tions of a heart that beats in unison with 
 yours as you recall the toils and the gains, 
 the battles and the victories, of the last fifty 
 years. In all the larger life of this memo- 
 rable era this church has borne a worthy 
 part. The prudent man hesitates to com- 
 pare the efficiency of moral causes, or to 
 employ superlatives in estimating the forces 
 that work for righteousness; but I shall risk 
 
 ' Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, Thursday, Novem- 
 ber II, 1897. 
 
 175 
 
176 THE SOCIAL PROBLEMS 
 
 nothing in saying that we are standing in 
 a place from which light and power have 
 radiated to the ends of the earth. In shap- 
 ing the thought of this Nation and in 
 leavening its life, Plymouth Church has 
 been and is one of the potent influences. 
 It is impossible for you to recall and re- 
 count, as you have been doing for the last 
 few days, the history of the last fifty years, 
 without deep and solemn thankfulness to 
 God for the tasks which he has put upon 
 this church, and the work that he has 
 wrought by means of it. 
 
 If Plymouth Church has stood for one 
 thing more clearly than for anything else, it 
 has been the idea that Christianity gives 
 the law to the whole of life ; that it must 
 control our business, our politics, our pleas- 
 ures; that Jesus Christ is Lord of capital 
 and counting-room, of factory and studio, 
 of school and home. It was this resolute 
 purpose to apply the Christian law to all our 
 social relations that made the Plymouth 
 pulpit the power that it was in the great 
 
OF THE FUl'URE, 1 77 
 
 conflict which issued in the war and the 
 emancipation of the slaves. How strange 
 and far away seems the day when this testi- 
 mony began to be uttered in Plymouth 
 Church — not here alone, but here more 
 clearly and convincingly than almost any- 
 where else. It was not the popular thing 
 to say in those days; men who were looking 
 for promotion found something else to talk 
 about. To insist that the slave was our 
 brother, and that we had no right to make 
 merchandise of him, was an offense against 
 all decencies and proprieties. Well do I 
 remember a prayer in the church which was 
 nurse of my childish faith, a prayer wherein 
 the young minister made bold to pray "for 
 our brethren in bonds as bound with 
 them;" and how the faces of the elders 
 reddened with indignation because politics 
 had been brought into their pulpit! That 
 minister went ; he was not allowed to stand 
 upon the order of his going. And the same 
 temper quite generally prevailed. To insist 
 upon the clear declaration of the doctrine 
 
178 THE SOCIAL PROBLEMS 
 
 that God is the Father of all men was to 
 expose yourself to accusations of sensation- 
 alism and sedition and even of heresy. It 
 was clearly proved, from some influential 
 pulpits, that abolitionism and infidelity 
 were one and the same thing. That was 
 the kind of Christianity that Plymouth pul- 
 pit had to meet and fight; and there was no 
 faltering. These walls began to echo with 
 words of power that stirred the conscience 
 and the manhood of the whole Nation. If 
 they could only give back to us to-night a 
 few of the trumpet-calls with which they 
 have resounded! 
 
 I remember well — it is not possible that 
 I should ever forget — what seemed to me 
 the culmination of this mighty testimony, in 
 the Thanksgiving sermon preached here 
 thirty-seven years ago this month — in 
 November, i860, immediately after the 
 election of Abraham Lincoln. The Legis- 
 lature of South Carolina had already called 
 a convention to dissolve the Union, and the 
 air was full of the mutterings of secession. 
 
OF THE FUTURE. 179 
 
 The house was crowded. And what a 
 reaffirmation we heard that day of the great 
 truth of human brotherhood, of which these 
 political movements were the passionate 
 repudiation! I sat up there, in that left- 
 hand gallery, against the wall, and listened 
 to what I have always felt was the most 
 tremendous speech I ever heard. How the 
 house rocked and swayed with the glorious 
 passion ! There were thunderings and light- 
 ning and voices; there were hailstones and 
 coals of fire. **I would die myself,** cried 
 the prophet, "cheerfully and easily, before 
 a man should be taken out of my hands 
 when I had the power to give him liberty 
 and the hound was after him for his blood. 
 I would stand as an altar of expiation 
 between slavery and liberty, knowing that, 
 through my example, a million men would 
 live. A heroic deed, in which one yields 
 up his life for others, is his Calvary. It was 
 the hanging of Christ on the hill-top that 
 made it the highest mountain on the 
 globe. 
 
 > > 
 
l80 THE SOCIAL PROBLEMS 
 
 And then again: *'I stand to declare that 
 justice is worth more than all the corn-fields 
 of the continent. I stand to declare that 
 right between man and man is worth more 
 than all the freights of all the ships that 
 whiten the sea. I stand to declare that 
 there is not in the king's crown, nor in the 
 scepter of any monarch, such a power as 
 there is in simple mercy between human 
 beings. I stand to declare that the secret 
 of national compactness is in national con- 
 science, national affection, and national faith 
 in moral ideas. And I stand to declare 
 that the period in which men scoff at moral 
 laws and moral truths is a period of rank 
 infidelity and utter apostasy. The form of 
 religion may stand in such a period, but it 
 will be worm-eaten; it will be dead; it will 
 be rotten. And if you want to know which 
 way nations are to go to find prosperity, let 
 me tell you that every nation that means to 
 be prospered must steer straight to the 
 lighthouse of God's universe. And what is 
 that? God's heart. Any nation that steers 
 
OF THE FUTURE. l8l 
 
 for any other thing will run upon rocks and 
 shoals. ' * 
 
 Such were the great deliverances of that 
 memorable day. Such has always been the 
 testimony of Plymouth Church; thank God 
 that it is as clear and strong to-day as ever 
 it was! When, therefore, Plymouth Church 
 summons me to speak of the social ques- 
 tions of the future, it is not requiring of me 
 a kind of speech that is novel to this plat- 
 form. The religion of this church has 
 always been vitally related to the social life 
 of the people. Nor is it needful that I 
 should go in search of any new message. 
 The one great truth of the brotherhood of 
 man is the substance of all I have to say. 
 Nobody can say it more strongly than your 
 pastor has said it: '* All our national prob- 
 lems are problems of human brotherhood." 
 
 You have asked me to speak of social 
 questions; there is but one social question, 
 and that is the question whether, 
 
 '* Man to man, the world o'er, 
 Shall brithers be, and a' that." 
 
1 82 THE SOCIAL PROBLEMS 
 
 Just as soon as men are ready to answer 
 that question heartily, in the affirmative 
 sense, our social problems will disappear as 
 easily as the August sun absorbs the morn- 
 ing mist. To recognize this relation of 
 brotherhood as existing between all human 
 beings, and to accept the truth that every 
 human institution, every law, every form of 
 social organization, must conform to this 
 fundamental fact, is to find the true and 
 complete solution of all the questions that 
 disturb our peace. 
 
 Take, for example, the question of taxa- 
 tion. In some of its forms this question has 
 been worn threadbare by discussion; in 
 other of its aspects not nearly so much has 
 been said about it as needs to be said. 
 Beyond doubt a large share of the evils 
 under which we are suffering to-day arise 
 from inequitable taxation. The great ma- 
 jority of good citizens have come to look 
 upon the tax-gatherer as a disturber of their 
 complacency, and upon the levies which he 
 makes as something in the nature of extor- 
 
OF THE FUTURE. 1 83 
 
 tion. And, as things now are, there is 
 some justification for this feeling on the 
 part of honest men; for there can be no 
 doubt that, even when direct taxes are con- 
 sidered, the honest man bears far more than 
 his fair share of the burdens of society. 
 What it costs to be honest is brought home 
 to every man who goes to the treasurer's 
 office for his tax-bill. My own opinion is 
 that we have some systems of taxation 
 which are calculated — not perhaps intended 
 — to put the heaviest burdens on those 
 least able to bear them. And it is certain 
 that even under the system of direct taxa- 
 tion the strong and shrewd do contrive to 
 evade a large part of their proper contribu- 
 tion, and that the conscientious are com- 
 pelled to suffer for the sins of the unscrupu- 
 lous. This state of things is becoming 
 intolerable and even ominous; dangers to 
 the peace of society are arising in this 
 quarter whose seriousness is not likely to be 
 overstated. 
 
 What, now, is the cause of all this? It is 
 
1 84 THE SOCIAL PROBLEMS 
 
 nothing else but the refusal to accept the 
 simple fact of human brotherhood, and to 
 live in true brotherly relations. These 
 schemes by which some classes are burdened 
 for the aggrandizement of others are in con- 
 tempt of the law of brotherhood. These 
 strong and shrewd citizens who contrive to 
 pay less than their share of the cost of 
 government, knowing well that others must 
 therefore pay more than their share, are 
 not acting the part of brothers. This in- 
 fraction of the law of Christ, which is the 
 fundamental law of all sound democratic 
 society, is just as real as is that of the slave- 
 holder. The fact that it is less obvious and 
 flagrant, that it is more easily concealed, 
 does not diminish its danger to character or 
 to the social order. It is out of these 
 hidden injustices that the worst mischiefs of 
 society arise. 
 
 I have said that a great many good citi- 
 zens always make this enforced contribution 
 to the common welfare somewhat unwill- 
 ingly. But if all men were brothers in- 
 
OF THE FUTURE. 1 85 
 
 deed, and, instead of seeking to shirk their 
 burdens and put them on the shoulders of 
 others, were trying to bear one another's 
 burdens, this would be the one expenditure 
 which we should make most cheerfully. 
 For, to say nothing of our consciousness 
 that we were thus ministering to the com- 
 mon good, we should also have the assur- 
 ance that larger returns would come to 
 ourselves from this outgo than from any 
 other possible investment. If the money 
 paid into the public treasury were honestly 
 and intelligently used for the public welfare, 
 we should receive greater benefit from it 
 than from the same amount employed in 
 any private enterprise. "No money we 
 pay,'* says Professor Ely, ''begins to yield 
 such results as money paid in taxation, pro- 
 vided always that it is prudently expended 
 by a good government. Let a small house- 
 owner in a city like Baltimore, who pays, 
 say, fifty dollars a year in taxes, reflect on 
 what he receives in return. He receives, 
 dollar for dollar, five times as much as for 
 
1 86 THE SOCIAL PROBLEMS 
 
 any other expenditure. Streets, libraries, 
 free schools, protection to property and per- 
 son, including health department, pleasure- 
 grounds royal in their magnificence, — all 
 these are placed at his service. What 
 private corporation ever gave one-fifth as 
 much for the same money?" All this is 
 possible because of the great economies of 
 co-operation when a whole city joins in the 
 enterprise. And if the principles of taxa- 
 tion were equitably adjusted, so that each 
 one should be called on to bear his fair 
 share of the public burdens according to his 
 abiUty, and if the citizens, in the spirit of 
 the royal law, heartily responded to this 
 arrangement, each man determining to put 
 upon his brother no part of his own load, 
 taxation would cease to be a problem, and 
 would present to us a welcome opportunity 
 not only of serving our fellows, but of in- 
 creasing our own happiness. 
 
 It may be supposed that this suggestion 
 borders on Utopianism; and, indeed, I have 
 no expectation that it will be entirely 
 
OF THE FUTURE, 1 8/ 
 
 adopted in the Greater New York during 
 tlie coming administration; but I am as 
 fully convinced as I can be of anything that 
 you will never get this problem of taxation 
 solved, with any degree of satisfaction, 
 until you have brought this obligation of 
 brotherhood very distinctly to bear upon it; 
 until you make it perfectly clear, to Chris- 
 tian men at least, that it is just as un- 
 brotherly and un-Christian to make your 
 neighbor pay your taxes as it is to steal his 
 pocketbook or compel him to serve you as 
 a slave. We must, of course, do what we 
 can to frame systems of taxation by which 
 these obligations shall be equitably dis- 
 tributed and impartially enforced; but we 
 shall never get justice done and peace estab- 
 lished until the law of brotherhood, instead 
 of the law of conflict, is recognized as the 
 supreme law of the social order. 
 
 Monopoly is another of the troublesome 
 facts of the social order. What is monopoly ? 
 It is the successful attempt to get the 
 sources of some commodity or service so 
 
1 88 THE SOCIAL PROBLEMS 
 
 completely under control that the monopo- 
 list can fix his own price upon it. Monopo- 
 lies of certain kinds of traffic were formerly 
 granted by kings to favored subjects; in 
 later times they are secured by getting pos- 
 session of lands or mines or patented ma- 
 chinery, or by making such combinations of 
 capital and resources that competition shall 
 be practically impossible. I will not dis- 
 cuss the methods by which monopoly is 
 secured ; it is the aim and purpose of it that 
 I am dealing with. And I suppose that the 
 simple purpose is to acquire power which 
 may be used by the monopolist in levying 
 tribute upon the possessions and earnings of 
 his fellow men — in making them enrich him 
 by their labor. The monopolist makes no 
 bargains with those who deal with him; the 
 price is fixed by himself. Economically 
 they are not his equals, they are his 
 dependents. *'Give a man power over my 
 subsistence," said Alexander Hamilton, 
 " and he has power over the whole of my 
 moral being." And there are those who do 
 
OF THE FUTURE. 1 89 
 
 control, In a large measure, the means of 
 our subsistence, and who thus possess a 
 power over our lives which one human being 
 ought not to assume over the life of another. 
 Such a power does not consort with brother- 
 hood. It is not in the heart of the brother 
 to make of his brethren dependents on his 
 will and servants of his greed or his ambi- 
 tion. The thought that his wealth is a 
 tribute that he has had power to enforce 
 upon those to whom he owes a brother's 
 love and service would be intolerable to 
 him. It is true that in many cases the 
 tribute paid by each is so small that the 
 oppression is not felt. A profit of one cent 
 a month out of each of the inhabitants of 
 this country would not seem large, but it 
 would give me an income of $8,400,000 a 
 year. The fact that the exactions of 
 monopoly are so light has blinded us to its 
 dangers. For the spirit that can make spoil 
 of humanity, however cautiously it may 
 operate, is a spirit which cannot be safely 
 harbored among men. These tremendous 
 
1 90 THE SOCIAL PROBLEMS 
 
 accumulations of power threaten the very 
 foundations of the social order. '* Liberty 
 and monopoly," says Mr. Lloyd, ''cannot 
 live together." ''When it comes to know 
 the facts, the human heart can no more 
 endure monopoly than American slavery or 
 Roman empire." If brotherhood is the 
 fundamental fact, this must be so, for the 
 law of brotherhood is the precise antithesis 
 of the spirit of monopoly. The one bids 
 me by love serve my neighbor and count 
 his interest my own ; the other bids me by 
 craft make my neighbor serve me, while I 
 drain his cistern into my reservoir. It can- 
 not be difficult to see that the essence of 
 the thing which we call monopoly is the 
 very contradiction of the spirit of Christian 
 brotherhood. 
 
 Doubtless we must find ways of restrain- 
 ing this power, or controlling it for the good 
 of all. I believe in monopolies; indeed, 
 vast economies are possible by means of 
 them; but I believe that the people should 
 own every one of them and reap these 
 
OF THE FUTURE. I9I 
 
 gains, rather than that a few should be en- 
 riched at the expense of the many. But 
 the one thing needful is the application to 
 all human relations of the Christian law of 
 brotherhood. It is well if we forbid men 
 thus to lay tribute on one another: but that 
 will avail us little unless we can make them 
 see that such spoliation violates the Chris- 
 tian law as really as does theft or slavery; 
 and that human society cannot rest on 
 secure foundations until the desire to enrich 
 ourselves at the expense of our neighbors is 
 submerged in the nobler wish to make them 
 the sharers in our prosperity and partners in 
 our happiness. 
 
 The labor question also is a disquieting 
 business. Between those who organize the 
 world's industries and those who perform 
 them the relations have come to be some- 
 what strained. On either side there is too 
 much suspicion and ill will; the struggle 
 over the division of the product of labor has 
 developed bad tempers on both sides: at 
 best we have a state of truce in which the 
 
tg2 THE SOCIAL PROBLEMS 
 
 combatants tolerate each other; at worst 
 we have conflicts in which each strives to 
 inflict economic injury upon the other, and 
 both, so far as this purpose goes, are uni- 
 formly and terribly successful. The amount 
 of harm which the assailants are able to do 
 each other is very great ; a considerable part 
 of the poverty and suffering of the land and 
 a much larger part of the unsocial feeling 
 which threaten our peace are due to these 
 labor quarrels. War between civilized men 
 is always in the last degree irrational ; these 
 labor wars are no exception to the rule. 
 Every hour of their continuance diminishes 
 the product of industry and reduces the sum 
 of welfare for both employers and em- 
 ployed. 
 
 What is the cure for these disorders ? 
 Many remedies are suggested, all of which 
 may afford relief. Conciliation, arbitration, 
 profit-sharing, ownership by the workmen 
 of stock in the company which employs 
 them — all these are rational suggestions of 
 methods whose practicability has already, 
 
OF THE FUTURE, ^93 
 
 to a considerable extent, been demon- 
 strated. But there is not much use in the 
 temporary conciliation of those who intend 
 to hold themselves in relations which imply 
 hostility ; and arbitration connotes enmity. 
 For all these methods, and for every other 
 attempt to find a better way of organizing 
 labor, there is needed first of all the recog- 
 nition of the fundamental fact of human 
 brotherhood. Those to whom this is a 
 reality have no need to be reconciled ; the 
 law of strife has become to them as un- 
 natural as the warfare of the right hand 
 against the left; they are able to see that 
 it is a manifest absurdity for one social class 
 to think to prosper through conflict with 
 
 other classes. 
 
 If men are brethren, and if the most un- 
 natural and monstrous business they can 
 possibly engage in is fighting one another 
 (and that is certainly the doctrine of Jesus 
 Christ), then I see no reason why this truth 
 should not be asserted and insisted on as 
 the only principle that can bear rule in the 
 
194 THE SOCIAL PROBLEMS 
 
 realm of labor and capital. I know of 
 factories where it is really believed and 
 acted on ; I know employers to whom the 
 truth that the men who work for them are 
 their brother men, partners of their welfare 
 and sharers of their prosperity, is just as 
 palpable as gravitation, and just as thor- 
 oughly respected. Those are happy fac- 
 tories, you may guess — and prosperous, too, 
 thank God ! They ought to prosper. Is it 
 really incredible that men should find more 
 profit in helping one another than in cheat- 
 ing and fighting one another? To some, to 
 many, I fear, it is incredible. With the 
 New Testament in our hands for eighteen 
 hundred years, we have not yet really 
 learned to believe that friendship is better 
 than strife; and we still go on assuming 
 that the society in which each one is trying 
 to get all he can away from everybody else, 
 and to give as little as he can to everybody 
 else, is the only normal society ; that if we 
 should turn right about and give all we 
 could to everybody, taking from others only 
 
OF THE FUTURE. 195 
 
 that which they could freely give, we should 
 speedily find ourselves in the highway to 
 ruin. Is it not curious that reasonable men 
 should not be able to see that by such 
 assumptions the social order is simply in- 
 verted as to its leading motive, and that it 
 is high time for those men who have the 
 power to turn the world upside down to 
 come hither also, that they may get it right 
 side up? To all right reason it is so pal- 
 pable, so utterly common-sensible, that it is 
 cheaper and easier and safer and more 
 profitable for those who are working to- 
 gether to be friends than to be foes, to be 
 brothers than to be competitors— so per- 
 fectly obvious is all this that one sometimes 
 feels like going out with Wisdom ''into the 
 top of the high places, beside the gates at 
 the entry of the city, at the coming in of 
 the doors," and crying with her: ''O ye 
 simple, understand prudence, and ye fools, 
 be ye of understanding heart! ** 
 
 I have no doubt that we need and must 
 have some better organization of labor; 
 
196 THE SOCIAL PROBLEMS 
 
 forms that give larger room for the free 
 play of brotherhood than those which now 
 prevail — forms which shall invoke it and in- 
 corporate it. But first of all we must get 
 the idea. We are transformed, we and our 
 institutions, by the renewing of our minds, 
 by getting new ideas. According to our 
 faith it will be unto us. Not until we 
 believe in brotherhood as the foundation of 
 the industrial order shall we be able to find 
 the forms which will express it. 
 
 Pauperism and crime are problems that 
 confront us. How shall we eliminate the 
 pauper, exterminate the criminal ? Are 
 there laws that can contrive it, forces that 
 can achieve it? Repression, regulation of 
 all sorts, have been tried ; the tale of severi- 
 ties has been exhausted. We have flung to 
 the pauper the dole which signified our 
 superiority and his dependence: that was 
 the denial of brotherhood. We have made 
 the prisoner an outcast, by our obdurate 
 resentments disowning him. Under this 
 treatment paupers and criminals are multi- 
 
OF THE FUTURE. ^97 
 
 plying apace. Is there not some better way 
 of dealing with them? Does the law of 
 brotherhood reach down to this level ? 
 Verily, it seems so. There was Lazarus 
 at the gate of Dives; there was the thief on 
 the cross. ''Blessed are ye poor," said 
 Jesus; "yours is the kingdom of God." 
 " It was I," he said, " that you found in 
 prison; that low-browed, brutal creature, 
 whom you took by the hand and lifted up 
 
 that was I. If you had anointed vision, 
 
 you could see some lineaments of me in that 
 repulsive face." 
 
 So the law of brotherhood pledges us to 
 these. The Son of Man came to seek and 
 to save that which was lost. He did save 
 them ; he can save them ; and so can we, if 
 his mind is in us. Our fault, our shame, 
 has been that the truth of brotherhood has 
 been disallowed, to the pauper in our pride, 
 to the prisoner in our hardness. We have 
 suffered the one to grovel at our feet; we 
 have forced the other to skulk and hide from 
 our faces. Neither is the brotherly thing 
 
19^ THE SOCIAL PROBLEMS 
 
 to do, — how far from it! Can we learn to 
 lift the one to his feet and to put a brotherly 
 arm about the other? Love can save them 
 both, — not always, indeed, without some 
 wholesome severities of discipline; but the 
 love that exalts character and believes in the 
 divine possibilities of manhood can save 
 them both. And what a task it is to reach 
 and save these degraded and sinking mil- 
 lions, to lift them up into manhood — a task 
 how appalling in its magnitude, but in its 
 possibilities how alluring to heroic faith! 
 
 And democracy! There it looms right 
 before us, writ large, in letters of flame, on 
 the clouds that hang above our horizon — 
 the one social question which includes, for 
 us, every other. Shall democracy endure ? 
 Shall government of the people, by the 
 people, for the people, live and flourish, or 
 shall it perish from the earth ? A question 
 of some consequence, one would say, to 
 this nation at least, perhaps to some others! 
 Do you say there is no question? I answer 
 that over considerable spaces of this con- 
 
OF THE FUTURE. I99 
 
 tinent, for considerable portions of time, 
 government of the people has ceased to 
 exist. Do you pretend to say that you, 
 even now, are living under a government of 
 the people ? How much had the people of 
 this State to do with naming the men who 
 are now, by a fine fiction, said to represent 
 them in the Legislature ? or with authoriz- 
 ing or inspiring the measures of that body ? 
 Is it the people's will that the Legislature 
 of New York has actually sought to do? Is 
 it the people who make nominations and 
 influence appointments and dictate legisla- 
 tion hereabouts? You know better than I. 
 If there is any truth in current reports, 
 there is some question as to whether 
 democracy, government by the people, is 
 anything more than a name. What we 
 have is really government of the people by 
 bosses, — for whom the present deponent 
 saith not, though he has his suspicions. 
 Glimpses are seen through a screen, which 
 is becoming more and more transparent, of 
 the flitting forms of monopolist and pluto- 
 
200 THE SOCIAL PROBLEMS 
 
 crat playing into the hands of the political 
 imperator. Because he has the power they 
 are ready to pay him heavily for immunity 
 and privilege — the privilege of laying tribute 
 upon the people; because he gets their 
 money he can debauch voters, and control 
 nominations, and keep himself in power. 
 
 Is there a remedy for this ? There is; 
 and, strange as it may sound to many, it is 
 nothing in the world but the simple recog- 
 nition of Christ's law of brotherhood. For 
 Christ's law of brotherhood is the corner- 
 stone of democratic government. Mr. 
 Lloyd is speaking with scientific accuracy 
 when he says that *' the Constitution and 
 laws of the United States are, however im- 
 perfectly, the translation into the language 
 of politics of doing as you would be done 
 by. * ' The foundation of republican govern- 
 ment is not, ** Every man for himself:'* it 
 is, ^'Each for all and all for each." On any 
 other foundation it is theoretically impossi- 
 ble. What are the great words? Liberty, 
 Equality, Fraternity, — and the greatest of 
 
OF THE FUTURE. 201 
 
 these is Fraternity. No; you cannot leave 
 that out; if you undertake to build your 
 State on individual interest, bidding each to 
 seek his own, unmindful of his brother's 
 good, you will have — just what you do 
 have in too many places — the form of liberty 
 without the power thereof. 
 
 All that there is need to do, therefore, is 
 simply to recognize the fundamental princi- 
 ples on which our government rests, and 
 make our practice conform to our theories. 
 We have only to do what every demagogue 
 promises to do when he asks the votes of 
 his fellow citizens. Does he not always 
 assure them that he will seek their welfare ; 
 that he will make his own interests subordi- 
 nate to the service of the people? It is not 
 probable that they always believe him, but 
 he would not dare to say anything else. 
 He knows, and they know, we all know, 
 what the ideals of a democracy are. That 
 every man is a brother man; that there are 
 no privileged classes and no servile classes; 
 that the strong shall not aggrandize them- 
 
202 THE SOCIAL PROBLEMS 
 
 selves by exploiting the weak; that all shall 
 see that each has the opportunity of man- 
 hood, — this is democracy; the Christian 
 doctrine of brotherhood lies at the base of 
 it. We have only to clear our minds of 
 cant and live up to our principles; that is 
 all. We have got the idea; our creed is 
 sound enough; the only trouble with us is 
 that we so imperfectly realize it. Instead 
 of using the power of all for the equal ser- 
 vice of all, we have too often permitted the 
 strong to monopolize power and to use it in 
 the oppression of the weak; we have legal- 
 ized and fostered gigantic egoisms Avhose 
 purpose it is to lay tribute on the people. 
 All this is in despite and defiance of the first 
 principles of brotherhood. What we have 
 to do is to repent and do the first works; 
 to make our democracy mean, not monopoly 
 nor autocracy, but government of the peo- 
 ple, by the people, for the people. 
 
 " But have not the people all the rights 
 that law can give them? " you may be ask- 
 ing, ^*Why do they not protect them- 
 
OF THE FUTURE. 203 
 
 selves ? And if they do not, who can save 
 them ? " 
 
 Yes, I answer; they have all the rights 
 that law can give them ; and the issue shows 
 us how weak the law is for the enfranchise- 
 ment of humanity. Something more than 
 legal privilege is needed : the wisdom and 
 the will to use it rightly are needed also. 
 If the ballot were a weapon of self-defense 
 — which is about the highest idea of it that 
 some people entertain — it would avail very 
 little to millions of our voters, for they 
 would not know how to use it for their own 
 protection. Very dim, indeed, are the con- 
 ceptions of its meaning entertained by great 
 multitudes of those who are intrusted with 
 it. I asked Mr. Reynolds, one day, how 
 many of those swarming tribes and tongues 
 on the East Side of New York had any idea 
 of citizenship. ''Well," he said, **most of 
 them have found oat that a vote is worth 
 something — that they can get money for 
 it." That, alas! is the first lesson in poli- 
 tics that a great many of them learn, — the 
 
204 THE SOCIAL PROBLEMS 
 
 only lesson, I fear, that multitudes of them 
 ever have learned. And it is this that 
 makes the problem of our democracy so 
 serious. A democracy it is not when such 
 elements largely enter into its constituencies. 
 The men who can thus be manipulated by 
 demagogues are not standing with us upon 
 the level of brotherhood; they have sold 
 their birthright, the badge of their political 
 manhood ; they have consented to become 
 the underlings of bosses and the tools of the 
 conspirators against liberty. If we have 
 not the power to prevent this, we shall not 
 wait long for the unrolling of the scroll of 
 flame on which the words of doom are 
 written. Listen to this solemn warning of 
 the man who fell the other day fighting 
 against the despotism of the boss: 
 
 *' When there is general patriotism, vir- 
 tue, and intelligence, the more democratic 
 the government the better it will be; but 
 when there is gross inequality in the distri- 
 bution of wealth, the more democratic the 
 government the worse it will be ; for while 
 
OF THE FUTURE. 205 
 
 rotten democracy may not in itself be worse 
 than rotten autocracy, its effect upon na- 
 tional character will be worse. To give the 
 suffrage to tramps, to paupers, to men to 
 whom the chance to labor is a boon, to men 
 who must beg or steal or starve, is to invite 
 destruction. To put political power in the 
 hands of men embittered and degraded by 
 poverty is to tie firebrands to foxes and turn 
 them loose amid the standing corn; it is to 
 put out the eyes of a Samson and to twine 
 his arms around the pillars of national life." 
 What shall be done about it ? Shall we 
 take this power from those who are not fit 
 to use it? That is not an easy thing to do: 
 there are barricades and dynamite along that 
 road. The only way that I can see is to 
 lift these multitudes up to the levels of 
 citizenship ; to deliver them from the thrall- 
 dom into which, in their pitiful ignorance, 
 they are selling themselves, into the man- 
 hood which is their heritage. Our brothers 
 they are by right divine; we must redeem 
 them, and make them worthy of the honors 
 
206 THE SOCIAL PROBLEMS 
 
 of brotherhood. There is no salvation for 
 our democracy unless we can save them. 
 It is avast undertaking, no doubt; but how 
 simple it would be if all who profess and 
 call themselves Christians would but gird 
 themselves for the work of realizing here on 
 the earth the brotherhood which He came 
 to found! 
 
 So it all comes back to this at last. Of 
 all our social questions, this is the one: Do 
 we believe in Christ's law of brotherhood ? 
 Are we willing to recognize it as the funda- 
 mental law of all our social life, and to test 
 all our methods, all our institutions, by it ? 
 Of course there are millions of people in the 
 world — Christians not a few, so called — who 
 do not believe what Jesus told us about the 
 Father, who flatly deny it all. When there 
 was only one man in the world, they say, 
 God was the Father of that one ; but before 
 there were two he had ceased to be the 
 Father; the fall of man was a fall out of 
 sonship into something else — strangerhood 
 or alienship. Man may become a child of 
 
OF THE FUTURE. 20/ 
 
 God if he will repent and be converted; 
 until that change passes upon him, he must 
 not say "Our Father." And if we are not 
 the sons of God, then, of course, we are not 
 brothers. What are we ? Competitors, I 
 suppose; there is no better word. It is on 
 this assumption that most of our theology 
 and our political economy has been built. 
 Here, just here, is the tap-root of most of 
 our social disturbances. The whole creation 
 groaneth and travaileth together, waiting 
 for the manifestation of the sons of God, — 
 waiting for the truth to shine out, as the 
 lightning shineth, from the one end of the 
 heaven to the other, that men are the 
 children of God, brothers by birthright, — 
 not foes, not strangers, but helpers one of 
 another. 
 
 Fellow men, we must believe it! What 
 is the good of disputing it and fighting 
 against it any longer ? Has not the law of 
 strife wrought woe and desolation long, 
 enough ? Sometimes it seems to me that 
 the day of the great revelation cannot be 
 
208 THE SOCIAL PROBLEMS 
 
 very far off. When we see selfishness in the 
 industrial realm climbing into the colossal 
 plutocracies that crush individual rights and 
 lay their palsying hand on all our liberties; 
 when we see selfishness in the State usurp- 
 ing all powers, and using the people as the 
 tools of its vast malefactions, it seems to 
 me that we are witnessing a demonstration 
 of what selfishness, when it is finished, 
 bringeth forth, which ought to convince the 
 world that there must be some better rule 
 of life. There is something so much better, 
 so much nobler, waiting for us all, and not 
 far away ! How rich and strong and happy 
 we might be, if we would only believe in it, 
 and lay hold upon it with the faith that 
 worketh by love! What possibilities are 
 before us as soon as we learn that life 
 means love ! 
 
 "We are to become fathers, mothers,** 
 says Mr. Lloyd, **for the spirit of the father 
 and mother is not in us while we can say of 
 any child that it is not ours, and leave it in 
 the grime. We are to become men, women, 
 
OF THE FUTURE. 209 
 
 for to all about, reinforcing us, we shall in- 
 sure full growth, and thus insure it to our- 
 selves. We are to become gentlemen, 
 ladies, for we will not accept from another 
 any service we are not willing to return in 
 kind. We are to become honest, giving 
 where we get, and getting with the knowl- 
 edge and consent of all. We are to become 
 rich, for we shall share in the wealth now 
 latent in idle men and idle land, and in the 
 fertility of work done by those who have 
 ceased to withstand but stand with each 
 other. As we walk our parks we already 
 see that by saying 'thine* to every neighbor 
 we may say 'mine' of palaces, gardens, art, 
 science, far beyond any possibility to selfish- 
 ness, even the selfishness of kings. We 
 shall become patriots, for the heart will 
 know why it thrills to the flag. Those 
 folds wave the salute of a greater love than 
 that of the man who will lay down his life 
 for his friend. There floats the banner of 
 the love of millions, who, though they do 
 not know you and have never seen you, will 
 
2IO THE SOCIAL PROBLEMS 
 
 die for you and are living for you, — doing in 
 a thousand little services unto you as you 
 would be done by. And the little patriot- 
 ism which is the love of the humanity 
 fenced within our frontier will widen into 
 the reciprocal service of all men. Generals 
 were, merchants are, brothers will be, 
 humanity's representative men." 
 
 That is part of what it means — a little, a 
 very little, of all that it means. And the 
 world is waiting wearily to see it, to walk in 
 the light and joy of it. 
 
 I think of that morning on the shore of 
 Galilee, where, after his resurrection, our 
 Lord appeared in the early dawn to the dis- 
 ciples who had toiled all night and taken 
 nothing. *' Children," said the Master, 
 ** have you aught to eat ? They answered 
 him, No. And he said unto them, Cast the 
 net on the right side of the boat, and ye 
 shall find. They cast therefore, and now 
 they were not able to draw it for the multi- 
 tude of fishes." If through the long night 
 of the centuries the toilers on the sea of life 
 
OF THE FUTURE. 211 
 
 have taken less than they hoped for, may 
 it not be because they have sought their 
 gains on the wrong side of human nature — 
 on the side of selfishness and strife ? And 
 is it not his voice — the voice of the Son of 
 Man — that now, in the dawning of a better 
 day, we hear bidding us cast the net on the 
 other side; to believe that love is wiser than 
 craft, and that the hand that is open to give 
 will forever hold more of the good of life 
 than the hand that is clenched to keep ? 
 
XTbe Cburcb of tbe jf uture* 
 
 WILLIAM J. TUCKER. 
 
VI. 
 
 Ube Cburcb ot the future^ 
 
 By the Rev. WILLIAM J. TUCKER, LL.D.,i 
 President of Dartmouth College. 
 
 I ASSUME that you are quite as well aware 
 as I am that the subject which you have 
 assigned to me is full of temptation. 
 Happy is the man who can discuss the 
 Church, even the Church of the future, 
 without ** falling into many foolish and 
 hurtful" disputations ''which war against 
 the soul." I make no attempt to avoid the 
 difficulty, except it be to affirm, at the out- 
 set, our agreement with all believers in 
 Christ at the essential point. 
 
 ^ Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, Thursday evening, 
 November ii, 1897. 
 
 215 
 
2l6 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 The Church of the future must be the 
 Church. In this, I say, we are all as clearly 
 agreed as are those who are known by distinc- 
 tion as ** churchmen." The revolt against 
 ecclesiasticism on our part has never led us 
 to accept any weak and shifting substitutes 
 for the Church of Christ. We have never 
 abandoned our right in the common posses- 
 sion. The right to possess is the right to 
 inhabit, the right to appropriate, the right 
 which may deepen at any time into the 
 obligation to reform. These are still our 
 rights in the Church. 
 
 The significant fact to-day within the 
 Church is the strength of the movement 
 toward Christian unity among the more 
 advanced types of Protestantism. It is 
 futile for us to say that we, who are Prot- 
 estants of Protestants, are happy in the 
 mere fact of denominations and sects. If 
 the sect is the price of freedom, we will pay 
 it. If it is the permanent price, we will pay 
 it to the end. But a sect, a denomination, 
 a communion, whatever name you may use 
 
THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 21/ 
 
 to declare or to disguise the fact of a part, 
 and however that part may have been 
 dowered with freedom, does not represent 
 our full idea of what the Church ought to 
 be, or our full faith in what the Church will 
 be. It does not express our present feel- 
 ings and desires. The hymns we sing are 
 the hymns of the Church universal. We 
 would not tolerate a sectarian hymn. The 
 saints whom we appropriate are of all com- 
 munions. The fact that some of them 
 might have disowned us does not lessen our 
 sense of ownership. We crave the largest 
 possible fellowship among the living — pos- 
 sible within the limits of truth and honor. 
 We are working the great federal idea as the 
 best practical embodiment in our time of 
 the unity of the Church. Nowhere, as I 
 believe, is there a clearer conception of the 
 fundamental idea of the Church, or a deeper 
 sense of its meaning, than among those who 
 are forced to stand for the dignity and 
 rights of the churches. We accept to the 
 full the distinction between a purely per- 
 
2l8 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 sonal Christianity and the organic union of 
 souls in Christ. 
 
 I pause to emphasize the distinction. I 
 go back for a moment into the origins of 
 Christianity. The first view we have of the 
 Christian Church is that of the group around 
 the table of Christ. John alone with Jesus 
 would have represented discipleship, but 
 not the Church. The Church is a society 
 of which the original and simplest form is 
 the group. So we have the outward growths 
 of the Church — first the group gathered 
 about the person of the human Christ, then 
 the society organized in his name to com- 
 memorate his sacrifice and to bear witness 
 to his resurrection, and then the community 
 springing up on every hand permeated with 
 his Spirit, and striving to exemplify his 
 teachings. We are, of course, back of the 
 great formalities of the Church. Nothing 
 has as yet been conventionalized. The 
 newness, the absolute strangeness of the life 
 of the Church gave it its first unity. The 
 unity of the early Church was built up on 
 
THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 219 
 
 the rare and seemingly impossible virtues, 
 like the forgiveness of enemies. A man 
 could not be a Christian in those days and 
 be like anybody else outside his own kind. 
 The Church was a succession or aggregation 
 of groups of like-minded and like-hearted 
 men and women, made one by the incom- 
 ing of that Life which has mastered all, and 
 which had changed them in measure to its 
 likeness: every one of whom could say, 
 '* The life which I now Hve I live in the 
 faith of the wSon of God who loved me and 
 gave himself for me." 
 
 One fact explains the origin of the Chris- 
 tian Church. The Spirit of Christ, spread- 
 ine from life to life, made some form 
 necessary to express and develop the col- 
 lective life. How much of organization, 
 how much of ritual, how much of creed, was 
 the open and varying question. It is still. 
 It is one of the questions which confronts 
 Christianity as it enters each new age, and 
 each new race, and every new stage of 
 Christian civilization. And there seems to 
 
220 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 be but one answer to the question from 
 the spiritual side: no more organization or 
 ritual or creed than the Spirit of Christ can 
 inform and utilize ; up to that limit, perfect 
 liberty. 
 
 I assume that the celebration of the half- 
 century of this church, so wonderful in its 
 history, is a fit occasion for the reaffirmation 
 of faith in the Church universal, the holy 
 Catholic Church. The life of this particular 
 church, which stands out with so much dis- 
 tinction, if you will with so much separate- 
 ness, has no other source than that which 
 feeds the whole body of Christ. And yet, 
 because of its history, because of its dis- 
 tinctive qualities, because of the very con- 
 trast which it has to offer, it has the right 
 to ask its own questions, to hold its own 
 opinions, to cherish its own faith about the 
 Church of the future. Especially it has the 
 right to ask why so many and so great 
 divergencies from the common type are 
 necessary, why must there be so many 
 separate communions and individual 
 
THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 221 
 
 churches which bear so conspicuously the 
 stamp of independence. 
 
 Or, to change the form of the question 
 and extend it, why is the Church at large 
 so far away from the realization of its own 
 working unity, unable as yet to think or act 
 or worship in any real spiritual unity, to 
 say nothing of uniformity ? 
 
 I address myself, in what I may further 
 say, to the answer to this question. The 
 answer, to my mind, is twofold; a part of 
 it is written in history, a part of it is being 
 wrought out before our eyes. 
 
 First, the Church can never realize its 
 own working unity — the Church of the 
 future cannot be any other than the Church 
 of to-day — until it makes a sufficient place 
 in its life for freedom, particularly for 
 intellectual freedom. The Church for a 
 long time attempted to secure unity by 
 ignoring and suppressing freedom. The 
 result was Protestantism. The same result 
 is sure to follow to-day, and always, even 
 when the attempt is made in our Protestant 
 
222 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE, 
 
 communions. Protestantism is not a his- 
 tory. It is a principle. We make no 
 progress by celebrating historic events. 
 We make progress by applying principles. 
 Now, the principle of Protestantism is one 
 essential factor in the unity of the Church. 
 The rights of conscience, of private judg- 
 ment, of free investigation, have gained a 
 standing which cannot be withdrawn. It is 
 absurd to conceive of the Church of the 
 future as existing without them. How long 
 it will take to win for them complete recog- 
 nition no one can tell. Sometimes we are 
 amazed at the apparent backwardness of the 
 Church. Examples come to our knowledge 
 which we cannot ignore. But if you are 
 recalling, as I speak, the various attempts 
 which have been made during the past years 
 to restrict the honest freedom of thought or 
 inquiry, we must also remind ourselves of 
 the uniform failure of these attempts. 
 
 Resistance to the principle of religious 
 liberty is intrenched for the most part in 
 scant minorities. All the more advanced 
 
THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 223 
 
 communions arc agreed in theory and fact 
 — for nearly every one has now been put to 
 the test — that the Church must make room 
 for the largest and freest growth of the 
 individual. We accept no standards which 
 lower the stature of the Christian man. 
 Rather than allow this, even in the assured 
 interest of unity, we will wait, wait ** until 
 we all come in the unity of the faith and of 
 the knowledge of the Son of God unto the 
 perfect man, unto the measure of the 
 stature of the fullness of Christ.'* 
 
 But this part of my answer need detain 
 us no longer. It has been written in his- 
 tory. The Church of the future must be 
 free. It has bought its freedom with a 
 great price. I have no doubt about the 
 coming freedom of the Church. My doubts 
 and fears all center around the second part 
 of my answer. I have reserved, therefore, 
 time for its larger presentation. 
 
 The Church can never realize its working 
 unity, it cannot realize itself, until it is will- 
 ing, and until it knows how to lose itself in 
 
224 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 the life of humanity. Do you say that this 
 answer is so broad that it is vague ? Then 
 let me bring you back to the law of Christ, 
 as true to the Church as to the individual, 
 "Whosoever will save his life shall lose it, 
 and whosoever will lose his life for my sake 
 shall save it." This was the law to which 
 Christ subjected himself, and of which he 
 reaped the benefit. And the marvel of his 
 life was not simply the willingness, it was 
 still more the ability, one may almost say 
 the skill, to lose himself in humanity. 
 Herein Tay, of course, the mystery of the 
 Incarnation, but equally, also, the clear and 
 fine action of the whole after-life. With 
 what restraint he kept himself from all par- 
 tial and false assumptions of authority, 
 ecclesiastical or* political ! How consistently 
 he refused to be drawn aside into secondary 
 and passing issues! With what tremendous 
 steadfastness he held to the one course which 
 would take him completely, absolutely, and 
 forever into the life of men! Call to mind 
 the glowing words of St. Paul as he tries to 
 
THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 22 5 
 
 tell the process and then to show the 
 reward. "Who, being in the form of God, 
 thought it not a thing to be desired to 
 retain his equality with God, but made him- 
 self of no reputation and took upon him the 
 form of a servant, and, being found in 
 fashion as a man, he humbled himself and 
 became obedient unto death, even the death 
 of the cross. Wherefore God hath highly 
 exalted him and given him a name which is 
 above every name, that at the name of Jesus 
 every knee should boW, of things in heaven, 
 and things in earth, and of things under the 
 earth, and that every tongue should confess 
 that he is Lord, to the glory of God the 
 Father. ' ' 
 
 There are limits to the imitation of 
 Christ, but who will doubt that it is the 
 supreme business of his Church to repro- 
 duce his spirit and his method and his pur- 
 pose in the world ? What is the Church 
 put into the world for, except to lose itself 
 in the life of the world, that it may thereby 
 save its own life and that of the world ? 
 
226 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE, 
 
 This is not the loss of identity; it is the 
 exact opposite of all compromise or conces- 
 sion; it is simply the complete and joyous 
 surrender of itself to the one end and object 
 of its existence. But the history of the 
 Church shows a constant struggle between 
 the two policies, the policy of saving and 
 the policy of losing. Only in the great 
 moods of the Church has it risen to the 
 sublime conception or practice of Jesus, of 
 losing its life in that of humanity. Such 
 was the mood of the martyr period, when 
 the Church poured out so fully its life-blood 
 into the heart of the world. Such was the 
 mood of the great reforming period, when 
 the Church had found out that it could do 
 better for the world than to suffer at its 
 hands, and straightway undertook to give it 
 liberty and law and righteousness. Such 
 was the mood of the period which ushered 
 in modern missions, expressed in the re- 
 markable saying of young Mills to his 
 comrades, "We ought to carry the Gospel 
 to dark and heathen lands, and we can do 
 
THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE, 22/ 
 
 it if we will." And such I believe to be the 
 mood into which the Church is beginning to 
 rise, in the person of its choicer souls, by 
 which it is fulfilling the task of entering into 
 the real life of the modern city, identifying 
 itself with the humanity which has no voice 
 but a cry, or a grievance, or a threat, and 
 trying to interpret man to man. 
 
 But over against these greater and rare 
 moods is the common and commonplace 
 mood of the Church, which is always ex- 
 pressed in one way or another in the policy 
 of saving its own life, — a policy of exclusion, 
 of separation from the life of humanity, a 
 policy of using the world for its own 
 aggrandizement. I do not put in evidence 
 the degenerate and worldly periods of the 
 Church. I call your attention to the very 
 theories and doctrines which the Church has 
 tried to make itself believe, and trained its 
 children to believe, based on the exclusive- 
 ness and separateness of its life from that of 
 the common humanity; the appalling doc- 
 trine of the arbitrary election of the few 
 
228 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 against the many, or the weak and illogical 
 theory of the hopelessness of the many, for 
 want of a present and visible connection 
 between a Universal Saviour and those for 
 whom he died. I call your attention to the 
 ease with which the Church in any com- 
 munity follows the lines of social classifica- 
 tion and becomes identified with men in 
 classes. I call your attention to its con- 
 tentment with works of charity and rescue, 
 which reach the few, instead of concern 
 about changing the conditions which affect 
 all. I call your attention to the want of a 
 steadfast and united effort and struggle in 
 regard to those interests which are wrapped 
 up in the life of the city and the State. I 
 make mention of these things, not in the 
 way of an indictment against the Church, 
 for that is far from our present business, 
 but that we may not underestimate the 
 problem before us. It is nothing less, as I 
 have said, than to cause the Church to 
 believe in and to carry out the policy of 
 losing itself in the life of humanity. The 
 
THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 229 
 
 hopeful sign is that the idea is coming in 
 and beginning to shape itself into a faith. 
 This is the vision of the latter day, not of 
 a Church saved out of the world, but of a 
 world redeemed by the Church. In one of 
 his more daring utterances Dr. Dale once 
 spoke of the motive which impelled Christ 
 to come into the world. It must have 
 been, he said, that he somehow felt that his 
 fortune was bound up in the fortune of 
 humanity. Surely this is true of his 
 Church. It cannot be much better in the 
 end than it can succeed in making the 
 world. The great object for which it longs 
 and prays touching its own life will not 
 come about directly, but indirectly through 
 its service in the life around it. The 
 Church is intent upon unity. That will not 
 be brought about by any force working from 
 within, not by agreements or adjustments 
 or concessions or compromises. The unity 
 of the Church will come in only through the 
 brotherhood of man. 
 
 And now, do you ask me how this idea is 
 
230 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE, 
 
 to be realized, how this policy is to be car- 
 ried out by the Church of saving its life by 
 losing it in the life of humanity ? I can 
 refer only to certain sure agencies. First, 
 the wise and fearless use of truth. Emer- 
 son used to say, "He who helps one man 
 helps one man ; he who tells the truth helps 
 mankind." The supreme power of the 
 Church is the power to tell the truth. This 
 is other than charity, except as the truth is 
 told in love. But the truth to be told must 
 be known, and to be known it must be 
 sought out. Courage without knowledge is 
 mere audacity. It may exhibit the man, it 
 will not help the truth. I believe that the 
 power of the Church of the future will rest 
 more rather than less upon its pulpit. A 
 truth-knowing, truth-loving, truth-telling 
 pulpit will carry the truth into the deepest 
 and most remote places. So this Church, 
 through its pulpit, carried the truth of the 
 riehts of man down into the heart of the 
 Nation, and out into its uttermost parts. 
 No other agency could have wrought so 
 
THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 23I 
 
 mightily against slavery and for freedom as 
 the plain, uncompromising, unceasing truth. 
 Truth which is timely will bear iteration. 
 Blow on blow will tell. Appeal after appeal 
 will be heard. The truth will prevail. 
 That is our hope in present moral issues as 
 in respect to the past, if only we can get a 
 like hold upon the truth, the whole truth, 
 and nothing but the truth. 
 
 And next to the persistent use of the 
 timely truth I put the training of the social 
 conscience. The modern Church has thus 
 far been brought up in individualism — a 
 strong and wholesome discipUne, but not 
 sufficient for present conditions or for those 
 which are impending. It is our constant 
 complaint that corporate action is not as 
 responsible as individual action. We say 
 that the same man cannot be depended 
 upon to act with others as he will act when 
 alone. Perhaps we ought not to expect 
 that he wrill. Nevertheless, the fact remains 
 that corporate responsibility must bear some 
 proportion to the tremendous advance in 
 
232 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE, 
 
 the absorption of individual activity into 
 corporate activity. You have lost the in- 
 dividual; how are you going to follow him 
 with individualism ? Individual responsi- 
 bility is becoming capitalized; how are you 
 going to get at the moral value of the new 
 capital ? 
 
 Or, carry the thought over into our social 
 and civic obligations. In the old days of 
 Boston, in the time of its transition from a 
 great village into a city, the citizens organ- 
 ized themselves into a Watch and Ward 
 Society. They took turns in patrolling the 
 streets. Of course this could not last. A 
 city means delegated authority, the creation 
 of departments to do certain things, and 
 then usually the organization of societies to 
 see that they do them. This is the process 
 by which we divest ourselves of individual 
 responsibility, — not by denying it in the first 
 instance, but by putting the exercise of it 
 at a further and further remove from us, till 
 at last with this removal of responsibility 
 there comes in the gradual loss of senti' 
 
THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 233 
 
 ment, of feeling, and even of shame. I 
 suppose that it would be as hard for the 
 average citizen of this city to repent of his 
 share of its sin as for a man trained in the 
 New England theology to repent of the sin 
 of Adam. He doesn't know how to do it. 
 His mind, as now trained, is not capable of 
 working that way. 
 
 What we want, in the Church at least, is 
 a habit of mind which will correspond to 
 present facts and conditions. It is useless 
 to confront new and obstinate conditions 
 with old habits of thinking, or with unused 
 sensibilities. Every great movement, from 
 the Reformation down, has demanded and 
 created for itself an appropriate habit of 
 mind and of conscience. No great headway 
 can be made until this demand has been 
 complied with. When once the present 
 demand has been met, and a habit of mind 
 has been created which will express itself 
 steadily and rightly through sensitiveness 
 to others, through responsibility for things 
 held in comn)onj through what we must 
 
234 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE, 
 
 call, in spite of its philosophical vagueness, 
 " the social conscience,*' the Church will 
 have made a sure advance in the art of 
 losing itself in the life of humanity. 
 
 And, finally, I urg'e, as the great incen- 
 tive to the realization of this end, the 
 acceptance of the idea itself, the announce- 
 ment of it, the assumption that it is here 
 and at work in the life of the Church. We 
 prepare ourselves for this conception of the 
 Church by appropriating it and using it. 
 When the Baptist came among men, he 
 said, ** Repent, repent! the kingdom of 
 heaven is at hand." When Jesus came, he 
 said, "The kingdom of heaven is at hand," 
 it is here, "repent and believe the Gospel." 
 Not preparation for something to come, but 
 participation in something present ! Let us 
 recognize every effort on the part of the 
 Church, however humble it may be, to lose 
 itself in the life of humanity. Let us hold 
 it up as the great conception. This is not 
 an idea to be taken up for a mission, or a 
 social settlement, or a crusade; it is some- 
 
THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 235 
 
 thing to be made the business of the great 
 Christian majority. The Church cannot go 
 on with its advanced work under present 
 contradictions, here and there a few souls 
 the world over losing themselves in the life 
 of others, and everywhere else the Church, 
 in one way or another, building itself up out 
 of the world. Why have we come to a halt 
 in foreign missions ? Chiefly, I believe, 
 because we are beginning to be ashamed, 
 through all our Christian nature, of our 
 unsanctified materiaUsm. The nations have 
 found us out, and we know it. They have 
 explored Christendom, and what impresses 
 them most is the vast amount of unapplied 
 Christianity. Here, then, is the immediate 
 work of the Church. Here lies the ready 
 task of the new Christianity, to set Christen- 
 dom in order — its cities, its industries, its 
 society, its literature, its law. In so doing, 
 we again make the Gospel the power of 
 God unto salvation to every one that be- 
 lieveth, to the Jew first, and also to the 
 Greek. 
 
236 THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 The Church of the future — it must be the 
 Church. Upon that we are agreed. What- 
 ever may be our interpretation of its 
 authority, we maintain the fact without 
 doubt or qualification. 
 
 The Church of the future will be free. 
 That is a safe prophecy. There will be 
 room in it not only for men themselves, 
 but for all that they know and believe and 
 hope for. Like the city seen in vision, it 
 will stand open wider and wider, that men 
 may bring their glory and honor in to it. 
 
 Will the Church learn to lose itself in the 
 life of humanity ? Will it at last catch the 
 sublime secret of its Master and make that 
 its own ? Who will venture to affirm so 
 much ? Who dares to hope for less ? 
 
IRetrospect anb ©utlooft* 
 
 CHARLES A. BERRY. 
 
VII. 
 
 IRettospect auD ©utloo??» 
 
 By Rev. CHARLES A. BERRY, D.D. 
 
 Dr. Abbott and Christian Friends: 
 — I have so far thrown my life into the life 
 
 of this congregation as to know that it 
 would be foolish, not to say cruel, were I to 
 detain you at this time of night; I will con- 
 tent myself with one or two remarks suited, 
 I think, to a jubilee occasion. 
 
 The first is that the man or the institution 
 which has ceased to think of or care for 
 yesterday is "no good** for to-day or to- 
 morrow. 
 
 ^ After President Tucker's address, Dr. Berry was 
 asked to close the exercises with a few remarks, 
 which are here given as taken down by the stenog- 
 rapher. 
 
 239 
 
240 RETROSPECT AND OUTLOOK. 
 
 The second is that the church which 
 thinks too much about itself, about its his- 
 tory, about its principles, about its tradi- 
 tions and aptitudes, is going to waste its 
 whole life in that kind of thinking, and will 
 stop short of fruitful action. 
 
 And my third remark is that the church 
 which honestly and sincerely finds fault with 
 itself has infinite promise of usefulness and 
 progress in the days to come. 
 
 These three remarks have germinated in 
 my mind while listening to the address of 
 President Tucker. I could haVe imagined 
 I was at the Congregational Union of Eng- 
 land and Wales, hearing such scriptural, 
 constructive doctrine of the Christian church. 
 
 I have been at many meetings to-day, 
 and at one of them two speakers, broad, 
 catholic-minded, cultured men, announced 
 themselves as "Churchmen." I could have 
 understood that in England, where we have 
 grown into a loose use of language; but in 
 America, where you are always precise and 
 accurate, where you do not talk *' news- 
 
RETROSPECT AND OUTLOOK. 24I 
 
 paperese," I was amazed to hear the term 
 used, as they used it, to characterize a 
 single denomination. 
 
 With some others, I have set myself in 
 England to recover the term "Churchman" 
 as the proper title of every man who has 
 joined his individual Christian life with an 
 organized Christian society. We are known 
 by negative terms in England. You, I 
 believe, have only one of those negative 
 terms in America. We are known as 
 Protestants, Nonconformists, and Dissen- 
 ters. You, together with other great 
 churches in this country, have only the first 
 of those negative terms as descriptive of 
 you. 
 
 I am not ashamed of being called Prot- 
 estant : I glory in it ; and I glory in it the 
 more because there is a large school of 
 thought growing up in a particular church in 
 England which is trying to banish the word 
 and to banish the thing. And I am proud 
 as any man can be of a great heritage in the 
 name of Nonconformist and the name of 
 
242 RETROSPECT AND OUTLOOK. 
 
 Dissenter. But while I use these terms for 
 myself, and while I use them amongst my 
 friends, I rise in indignant repudiation when 
 either Catholic or Anglican flings those 
 terms at me as descriptive of my position, 
 and I claim to be as against them not only 
 a Churchman, but a High Churchman. 
 
 The Protestant is a man who protests. 
 What does he protest against? He protests 
 against the claim of a particular ecclesiasti- 
 cal dignitary to be the vicar of Christ on 
 earth; that is what he protests against 
 ultimately, and his protest is based upon 
 this, that, when he has Christ himself, he 
 stands in no need of a vicar of Christ. 
 A vicar, as you know, is, etymologically 
 and actually, one present who represents 
 another who is absent. Very well. If a 
 great church is content to say that the 
 Master is absent and must have a vicar to 
 represent him, that is its own lookout. 
 But since we claim, and claim with good 
 evidence of the truth, that we have a 
 Master with us, then we protest against 
 
RETROSPECT AND OUTLOOK. 243 
 
 any man setting himself up to be Christ's 
 vicar. 
 
 I have been at a good many jubilees 
 lately; in fact, I feel quite at home at a 
 jubilee. We have been having a Diamond 
 Jubilee in England. You have not reached 
 that yet: I hope you will, and I hope Dr. 
 Abbott will be pastor. But at the real 
 jubilee of Her Majesty's reign ten years ago, 
 there was a great ceremony of thanksgiving 
 at Westminster Abbey. I sat with others 
 in the great west gallery and had full view 
 of the whole scene. I noticed one thing 
 very striking and very suggestive. You 
 know, in England we do nothing without 
 the presence of royalty; but, as the Queen 
 cannot be everywhere, we have a pretty 
 little device in the shape of what is called a 
 mace, and this mace is representative of the 
 ofificial presence of the Sovereign. The 
 House of Lords cannot sit in session unless 
 the mace is set on the table, in suggestion 
 of the fact that the Queen is representatively 
 present. The House of Commons cannot 
 
244 RETROSPECT AND OUTLOOK, 
 
 sit without its mace on the table. Nor 
 can the High Court of Justice. At this 
 jubilee service every one of these great 
 bodies brought into Westminster Abbey its 
 own mace, carried by its mace-bearer. But 
 when, from the magnificent composition on 
 the organ, specially written for that occa- 
 sion. Dr. Bridge swiftly swept the chords 
 around, and struck the first notes of the 
 National Anthem, the crowd got up and 
 cried, "The Queen! The Queen!" — and 
 servitors hurried with cloths and covered 
 up these maces. The living Queen was 
 there; and the metal mace, which was but 
 symbolic, had become an offense and must 
 be covered up. So, when we have the liv- 
 ing Christ with us, we cover up the mace- 
 vicariate, whether it be Romish, or Angli- 
 can, or Nonconformist. The living Christ 
 is what integrates our church life, and we 
 are happy when Ave have him. 
 
 Well, I might illustrate our English Non- 
 conformity and Dissent in similar terms, but 
 then I should be making a speech. Yet, 
 
RETROSPECT AND OUTLOOK. 245 
 
 when all these little expositions of terms 
 were over, I should come to this point, that 
 these negative terms are but clearances to 
 make a wide-open space, on which our posi- 
 tive, constructive church doctrine rears itself 
 in architectural symmetry and beauty. We 
 are Churchmen, and no negative term de- 
 scribes us ; and I shall regret it with a deep, 
 unspeakable regret if the churches outside 
 two particular churches in this country ever 
 consent to surrender that accurately descrip- 
 tive term when speaking of their organized 
 association in Christ and with each other. 
 
 Much has been said to-night about the 
 Church of the Future. I was glad to hear 
 it is going to be in a sense the Church of 
 the Past and the Church of the Present im- 
 proved. I cannot join in any wholesale 
 criticism, still less denunciation, of earlier 
 forms of church life, whether in England or 
 America. It is true the work of the Church 
 has been markedly individualistic, but then 
 the whole life of the world during the last 
 fifty years has been markedly individuahstic. 
 
246 RETROSPECT AND OUTLOOK. 
 
 and the church has entered into the condi- 
 tions of life around it, and at least has tried 
 to make these individual men as good as 
 they could be made. We have come to 
 changed conditions to-day; and it is a right 
 instinct that is aroused in the Church to 
 make it alive to its social obligations and 
 duties. But it seems to me that the differ- 
 ence between the work that lies behind us 
 and the work that lies before us may be 
 stated as the difference between remedial 
 Christianity and preventive Christianity. 
 That is to say, the social v/ork of the Church 
 in the past — for the Church has had its social 
 work in the past, and has done it with more 
 or less efficiency — has been to remedy the 
 effects of evils which have been left to work 
 themselves out and multiply themselves in 
 fresh evil effects. To-day the Church has 
 aroused itself to this: it is our business to 
 strike deeper, to get at the roots of these 
 evils and remove them, — and then we shall 
 be under no necessity to remedy their 
 effects. 
 
RETROSPECT AND OUTLOOK. 247 
 
 For instance, take the various philan- 
 thropic agencies of the Church in the past. 
 They have been the kindliest of human 
 movements, and the total of their effects 
 constitutes a story which should fill us with 
 gratitude to God to-night — the philanthro- 
 pies of healing, the philanthropies of eman- 
 cipating, the philanthropies which have 
 raised the whole tone of thought about 
 women and children, about workers in our 
 factories and toilers on the land and on the 
 sea. But among all these philanthropies, 
 the Church stopped short of striking down 
 at that root of sclfisJmess^ which is the life- 
 origin of all the mischiefs that are spread 
 around us to-day. We have now opened 
 our eyes to that fact; and under the gui- 
 dance of great and consecrated thinkers it 
 is becoming generally understood by our 
 people that it is not sufficient to give a 
 basin of soup and a blanket to some poor 
 man, but the duty is to work for laws that 
 shall prevent men from ever coming to such 
 poverty. 
 
.248 RETROSPECT AND OUTLOOK. 
 
 Of course, among all this work we have 
 to remember — and at times I think some 
 of our social enthusiasts forget it or do not 
 sufficiently rate it at its significant value — 
 that much of the poverty, much of the sin, 
 much of the suffering in the world are due, 
 not to economic but to moral causes; and 
 the Church must never forget that, in striv- 
 ing to get at a new economy, she must, 
 alongside that effort, continue her old work 
 of trying to get at the lapsed and the fallen, 
 who, it may be, have lapsed and fallen 
 through evil conditions in the past, but who 
 are with us to-day and whose ills are turned 
 in sin and shame upon us. She must strive 
 at a gospel which aims at individual conver- 
 sion, and must do this as essential and 
 preparatory to that other and larger social 
 enterprise upon which we are graciously 
 entering to-day. 
 
 If I may be permitted to say so, without 
 even the distant suggestion of mere compli- 
 ment, nothing in President Tucker's speech 
 struck so deep a chord in me as that in 
 
RETROSPECT AND OUTLOOK. 249 
 
 which he reiterated his beHef that the 
 Church of Christ must lose itself in humanity. 
 Yes, it must; but it must lose itself as a 
 separate entity all the same. You plunge 
 leaven into the meal; it is lost in the meal; 
 it does its work in the meal: but it is able 
 to do its leavening work because it is sepa- 
 rate in nature from the meal which it is 
 there to leaven. 
 
 And that is what we mean in England 
 when we call ourselves ''Separatists." It 
 does not mean that we are gardens walled 
 around. It does not mean that we are to 
 live our own little life in our own little way, 
 and get safely up to glory sooner or later. 
 It means that we come away from the world 
 in order to go into the world ; we come 
 away from the world to Christ in order that 
 we may carry Christ back to the world. 
 We build up our churches of men and 
 women who have been alone with Christ; 
 and then, when they have so separated 
 themselves into communion with Christ, 
 ** Nov/," we say, '* plunge right into the 
 
250 RETROSPECT AND OUTLOOK, 
 
 world and lose yourselves in the work of 
 leavening the whole of humanity up to your 
 own faith, your own love, your own joy and 
 hope." Has it ever been your tragic lot to 
 watch the rescue of a drowning man — how 
 he tries to clasp his rescuer and so doom 
 both to destruction ? But the wise rescuer 
 knows he must not let the poor, drowning 
 creature touch him. He must get at him 
 and grasp him, and not be grasped by him. 
 It is so with the world and the Church. 
 The Church must grasp the world, must 
 grasp it by the firm grip of the strength it 
 has discovered in Christ, must be separate 
 from, in order that it may be one with, the 
 world it means to save. Who would say 
 that Christ, who identified himself with the 
 race, had not to be separate from it ? 
 Separateness ran right through from the 
 first day to the last of that unique life; but 
 it was the separateness which I am trying, I 
 fear vainly, to describe, — the separateness 
 of one who finds the spring of his life else- 
 ivhere, and is consecrated to ideals far 
 
RETROSPECT AND OUTLOOK, 2$! 
 
 above the rush and movement of the life 
 around him, but who out of that separate- 
 ness gave himself to the race, and, as he was 
 lost in it, lifted it to new vision and hope. 
 
 And so the Church of the Future, striking 
 its roots deep into the past, above all strik- 
 ing its roots deep into the soil prepared by 
 Him who promised to come and be in the 
 midst of his people, must out of such root- 
 age bear fruit more abundant, more beauti- 
 ful, more fragrant, more satisfying than it 
 has done in the past. 
 
 Dr. Abbott and Friends, it has been a 
 sacrament to me to be at Plymouth at this 
 jubilee. Two things have struck me. They 
 are quite in the line of what I have been 
 saying. The first is, that amid all the extra- 
 ordinary services of this occasion you have 
 steadily maintained your regular work, — 
 not allowed it to flag. To me, one of the 
 most beautiful things was that, though you 
 were here for a special memorial service 
 last Sunday morning, you admitted mem- 
 bers to this church ia the ordinary way at 
 
252 RETROSFECT AND OUTLOOK. 
 
 communion. It was typical of the whole 
 attitude of this church to this jubilee: 
 "' We will rejoice, and we will sing special 
 songs; but we will go on with our work." 
 There seems to me great hope in that. 
 
 And a second point which has struck me 
 is that, while you have been commemorat- 
 ing a great personality, a personality so con- 
 tagious, so great, as to be felt beyond the 
 sea hot less than here, you have remem- 
 bered your present duty and consecrated 
 yourselves afresh to the work which lies 
 before you. In that spirit, my dear friends, 
 I pray you may continue. Continuing so, 
 living the life of to-day, among the men of 
 to-day, preaching the truth of to-day, there 
 can but come upon you that blessing of 
 God which maketh rich, that grace of Christ 
 which, in proportion as it enables you to 
 work for others, fills you with joy and satis- 
 faction. 
 
Zbc descent trom tbe /iDount 
 
 LYMAN ABBOTT. 
 
VIII. 
 
 Uhc Descent from tbe /iDount.' 
 
 By the Rev. LYMAN ABBOTT. D.D. 
 
 " And look that thou make them after their 
 pattern, which was shewed thee in the mount." — 
 Exodus^ XXV. 40. 
 
 Moses was accustomed from time to 
 time to go away from Israel, into mountain 
 solitudes, and there receive the inspiration 
 which was to impel and the vision which 
 was to instruct. Inspired and instructed, 
 he came down from these mountain solitudes 
 to tell the people how they were to live. 
 Thus inspired and instructed, he laid the 
 foundations of the Hebrew commonwealth; 
 
 » Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, New York, Sunday 
 morning, November 14, 1897. 
 
 255 
 
256 THE DESCENT FROM THE MOUNT, 
 
 revealed to them the great political princi- 
 ples which have underlaid free governments 
 ever since, the fundamental principles of 
 social moral order, and the essential ele- 
 ments of vital spiritual experience. To-day 
 it would be difficult to find a better and 
 simpler statement of the fundamental prin- 
 ciples of the social order than that afforded 
 by the Ten Commandments. The Levitical 
 code has long since passed away into 
 oblivion, but the four elements of religious 
 experience to which it gave expression still 
 abide as the four fundamental elements of 
 spiritual life — penitence, thanksgiving, con- 
 secration, and communion. 
 
 From time to time prophets and poets 
 arise who bring to the world similar inspi- 
 ration and similar vision: men with clear 
 sight, who have perceived more clearly than 
 most men what are the eternal verities; men 
 of quickened hearts, who have more courage 
 than most men to proclaim what they have 
 seen; men of the larger hope, more auda- 
 cious to believe that the ideals which they 
 
THE DESCENT FROM TttE MOUNT. 257 
 
 have seen in the mountain-top can be real- 
 ized in common life. Poets, we call these 
 men. The word poet means '* maker." 
 The poet is the real maker of life, the real 
 creator, for he is the one who etches for us 
 what we are to make. Prophets, we call 
 them, because they speak for another, and 
 through them Another speaks forth the 
 truth — the truth of life coming from God. 
 These vision - experiences come to us in 
 our households, interpreted to us by the 
 prophets of our homes. Women, God makes 
 to be idealists. They see with clearer vision 
 than men, whose eyes are filled with dust, 
 and feel with more blessed assurances than 
 men, whose hearts are perturbed with the 
 perpetual conflicts of life. Blessed is the 
 man who can look back to the visions he 
 has received from his mother! Blessed the 
 man who walks with a guardian angel by 
 his side, who from time to time clears 
 away the dust that fills his eyes as well as 
 the perturbations that disturb his heart, 
 and helps him to see the true life and the 
 
258 THE DESCENT FROM THE MOUNT. 
 
 true God, through eyes he trusts in the 
 woman he loves! 
 
 But not only through others — poets, 
 prophets, wives, mothers — come these 
 visions to us: they come to us directly and 
 immediately. All healthful young men and 
 young women have these vision-hours. 
 They all love poetry ; they all love novels, 
 — not always the modern novel, which is 
 very far from a portraiture of ideals, but 
 novels and poetry which transcend all visi- 
 ble realities. All healthful young people 
 love poetry and love good novels, because 
 these appeal to their sense of vision. They 
 see a better life than that by which they are 
 surrounded; a better love than that which 
 blooms by their side; a larger hope than 
 that which animates the public men, the 
 business men, the social life in which they 
 walk. When the cynic tells them that they 
 are young, and laughs at the hopes and 
 visions of their youth, he is a liar: they are 
 truth-seers. There is not a boy here to-day 
 who does not sometimes see a vision of a 
 
THE DESCENT FROM THE MOUNT. 259 
 
 better life, nor a girl who does not some- 
 times feel herself drawn to something more 
 splendid than she has ever witnessed. These 
 are beckonings of God. This is the touch 
 of God upon the eyes that are blind, say- 
 ing, Open your eyes and see, you that saw 
 not. Welcome these visions and truths. 
 In them God calls you unto the mountain- 
 top, that he may reveal to you the pattern 
 according to which life should be shaped. 
 And even in later life, from time to time, 
 we get these visions. Sometimes they 
 come through poet, through prophet, 
 through wife, through mother, through 
 memory of past experience; sometimes 
 they come we know not how. Tennyson 
 says— I quote his sentiment, not his words, 
 —"We walk in the valley, and the eternal 
 mountains are hid by the hills of time." 
 Sometimes we climb these hills of time and 
 see the eternal mountains,— and then, when 
 we come back again, are almost inclined to 
 discount our vision and put it from us as an 
 idle and fugacious thing. No, God has 
 
26o THE DESCENT FROM THE MOUNT. 
 
 called us to the mountain-top to show us a 
 pattern. 
 
 Now there are two things that I want to 
 say about these patterns, these visions. 
 The first is, that we are not to stay in the 
 mountain-top looking at them. We are not 
 to think that because we have enjoyed a 
 vision, we are religious. It is no more 
 religious to enjoy a splendid vision of the 
 truth than it is brave to enjoy reading 
 Tennyson's ''Charge of the Six Hundred." 
 We can no more dwell in these than we can 
 live in an architect's plans. When the plan 
 is drawn, the house is to be built according 
 to the plan. But the plan is not the house. 
 When the inspiration of courage has been 
 stirred in our heart by the charge of the Six 
 Hundred, we are to do and dare and die, if 
 need be; but the courage is in doing and 
 daring and dying, not in reading the poem 
 about doing and daring and dying. You 
 cannot divide life into two sections, one 
 secular and the other religious, and think 
 you are religious because when the curtain 
 
THE DESCENT FROM THE MOUNT, 26 1 
 
 is raised and the drama is played before your 
 eyes you wipe the tears away from your 
 eyes under the pathos of it, or feel your 
 heart stirred with the splendid utterances of 
 the elocutionist. To be religious is to live 
 the drama of life, not to look at it; to act 
 the true life, not to hear it. 
 
 We are to build according to the pattern 
 in the mount; not merely stay and feast 
 our eyes upon it. Our noblest moments are 
 to be those that indicate to us what our life 
 should be. We are not to take counsel of 
 our more prosaic hours; we are not to be 
 guided by our more doubtful experiences; 
 we are not to sail by our guesses in the 
 hours when the fog environs ; we are not to 
 walk by short-sighted expediencies in the 
 masmatic mists of the valley. Having 
 climbed the hills and seen the path, in that 
 very path which has been so witnessed to us 
 from the hilltop we are to walk. When 
 we have ascended our mount and the vision 
 has been given us and the pattern displayed, 
 we are to build according to that pattern. 
 
262 THE DESCENT FROM THE MOUNT. 
 
 and not according to some poorer and lower 
 one. 
 
 Men say that these visions are imprac- 
 ticable. The only thing that is practicable 
 is the highest. It is not true, ''Whatever 
 is, is right;" but it is true, ** Whatever is 
 right, can be." And it is for us, when we 
 have gotten the vision of purity and truth 
 and courage and righteousness, then to act it 
 out in the real drama of our daily life. It 
 is not the practical politician who can tell us 
 what will make a prosperous nation: it is 
 the poet. It is not the man who measures 
 life by expediency who can tell us what will 
 make prosperity either to the individual, 
 the home, the nation, or the church: It is 
 the prophet. It is not Aaron Burr: it is 
 Charles Sumner. When we have been on 
 the mountain-top, and have seen the vision, 
 and our hearts have burned within us with 
 a larger hope, and we have come down out 
 of the mountain-top to engage in the ordi- 
 nary vocations of our life, in the shop, the 
 office, the home, we are to carry the 
 
THE DESCENT FROM THE MOUNT, 263 
 
 memory of that vision with us and square 
 our life to that. Never anything less. 
 **Be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is 
 perfect." We are not to say, ''Ah, that is 
 too much. I cannot be perfect." What if 
 a mason should say, ''You cannot have a 
 perfectly perpendicular wall. I will let the 
 house be crooked!" What if a plumber 
 should say, "You cannot prevent a pipe 
 from leaking, I will let the pipe leak!" 
 That is not the kind of plumber or mason 
 we want. We are to build to the plumb- 
 line ; and the ideal life is that by which we 
 are always to test our conduct, measure our 
 character, and guide and determine our 
 living. 
 
 For the last week this church has been 
 upon the mountain-top. I wonder how 
 many have said to me, "What an uplifting 
 time we have had!" My task this morn- 
 ing is no simple or easy one; it is so to 
 bring you down from the mountain-top that 
 your vision will do you good, not harm. 
 If for this week you and I in our individual 
 
264 THE DESCENT FROM THE MOUNT, 
 
 lives, and this church in its church-Hfe, are 
 to go on living the same life we lived 
 before, with no deeper faith in God, no 
 larger sympathy for our fellow men, no 
 more vital spirit of self-sacrifice, no more 
 living consciousness of a living Christ than 
 we had before, it were far better for us if we 
 had never gone up to the mountain-top. 
 
 It seems to me, as I look back upon these 
 meetings, as though some divine mind had 
 wrought on the mind of each speaker who 
 has addressed us, and worked them all to a 
 common end and fashioned them all to a 
 common message: Dr. Gordon declaring to 
 us that there is but one Sovereignty in the 
 world ; Dr. Gladden telling us that we only 
 conform to our Father which is in heaven 
 when we are inspired by his love and count 
 all men our brethren ; Dr. Tucker saying to 
 us that we cannot live this life of service 
 and of love without sacrifice, and that we 
 shall accomplish God's work in the world 
 only as we lose our life that we may find 
 life for others ; and Dr. Berry encircling this 
 
THE DESCENT FROM THE MOUNT. 265 
 
 message by his addresses on Sunday morn- 
 ing and on Thursday evening, phrased in 
 the enunciation of the truth that the living 
 Christ in the heart of a Hving church is the 
 secret of its power — to know the living 
 God, to carry out the spirit of brotherhood, 
 to bear the cross. 
 
 This is the vision we have had. What 
 shall we do because of it ? How are we to 
 build our church-life and our individual 
 lives ? 
 
 There is but one Sovereignty in the world, 
 — Love. Not merely there is love in the 
 world ; not merely there is sovereignty in 
 the world; but there is only one Sover- 
 eignty, and that Sovereignty is Love, only 
 one supreme Power, and that Power is 
 Love. How many men are there who 
 really think righteousness and purity and 
 truth are in the world conquering and to 
 conquer? But we shall have listened to the 
 services of the last week in vain if we do not 
 go back to take hold of life with a larger 
 hope, because of a profounder faith in love's 
 
266 THE DESCENT FROM THE MOUNT, 
 
 sovereignty. The iceberg breaks off from 
 the glaciers in the North and floats down- 
 ward to freeze the tropics. No flowers 
 bloom upon it; no birds sing about it; no 
 trees grow upon it ; no life is nurtured on its 
 bosom. But the great Gulf Stream em- 
 braces it, and little by little it dissolves, and 
 takes on the heat of the stream, and is trans- 
 formed into it and swept by it to Europe's 
 shore, to baptize and to give it life. God 
 is the Gulf Stream of history ; and all cold- 
 ness and selfishness, apostasy and falsehood 
 and unrighteousness are yet to be dissolved 
 in him. Iceberg after iceberg, ice-flow after 
 ice-flow, floats down, but it floats on the 
 bosom of God. God's breath is in the 
 world, and it is a breath of spring. If when 
 spring comes you find one corner of your 
 garden still hard with frost, or still covered 
 with snow, do you despair ? You wait a 
 little. Perhaps the time for planting has 
 not yet come, nor of digging, but you know 
 it will come, and you do not question that 
 the breath of God is the breath of spring. 
 
THE DESCENT FROM THE MOUNT. 26/ 
 
 We shall have heard this message in vain if 
 we do not take up our life with a larger 
 hope. 
 
 And because God's heart is love and 
 God's will is love, our work in it, God's 
 work in the world, is a work of love. Last 
 night if you had gone up Broadway at ten 
 o'clock you would have seen a line of men 
 at the corner of Tenth Street. You 
 may see it any night. All night long that 
 line is forming, men sitting on the curb- 
 stone, standing in procession, waiting until 
 half-past four or five o'clock comes, that 
 they may get a loaf of bread from the 
 Vienna Bakery. So I am told, and I have 
 seen the procession once. In the iron 
 country of Pennsylvania are men — your 
 brothers, my brothers — who have to work 
 in the iron-mills twelve hours a day every 
 day in the year. What time does that 
 leave for home, for wife, for children, even 
 for worship? In the city of New York and 
 Brooklyn are women — your sisters, no 
 stronger, no better able to bear the stress 
 
268 THE DESCENT FROM THE MOUNT. 
 
 of life than your daughters and mine — who 
 work in stores, the proprietors of which will 
 not allow them to take a seat even when 
 they are doing no work. In some of the 
 States of this Union are children, six, 
 seven, eight, nine years of age, dwarfing 
 their minds and their bodies by toil and 
 labor, when they should be at play or at 
 school. These are some of the facts' of our 
 industrial life. They are not so bad as the 
 facts of slavery. But they are not human 
 brotherhood. It is not for this that Christ 
 came into the world and lived and suffered 
 and died. There is something more yet for 
 us to do. Do you ask me how shall we cor- 
 rect these foul abuses ? It is not mine to 
 tell you how; not mine, at all events, 
 to-day; enough for me to say this: There 
 is a vision of human brotherhood that is far 
 above this; a vision of human brotherhood 
 which will give to all men enough ; which 
 will give to every man opportunity for self- 
 development and self-culture; which v/ill 
 give to every husband time for his Avife, and 
 
THE DESCENT FROM THE MOUNT. 269 
 
 to every father time for his children, and to 
 every man time for himself and for his God. 
 That is the vision; and you and I are not 
 to be content until that vision is realized. 
 If we heard Dr. Washington Gladden' s 
 address here last Thursday night, in which, 
 wisely refusing to discuss methods and 
 plans, he simply held up the ideal of human 
 brotherhood before us, — if we heard that, 
 and then do not do something this very 
 week to realize it, we had better not have 
 heard. It is my duty to make human 
 brotherhood a little more real in the 6^?^/- 
 look office, and yours to make it a little 
 more real in the relations with your domes- 
 tic servants, and in your office and shop and 
 store and factory, or your vision of human 
 brotherhood has been worse than in vain. 
 You are to come down from the mountain- 
 top and build according to the pattern. 
 Will you ? 
 
 We cannot do this without sacrifice. It 
 costs something. It may cost a great deal. 
 To some men, much; to some men, little. 
 
2/0 THE DESCENT FROM THE MOUNT, 
 
 But, at all events, if the law of human 
 society is brotherhood, the law of church is 
 more than brotherhood; it is this: **As I 
 have loved you, that ye also love one 
 another." It is service carried on to self- 
 sacrifice. 
 
 What is a church of God ? It is not a 
 body of men who come together for esthetic 
 enjoyment, to listen to fine music and re- 
 joice in a beautiful house, or to be pleased 
 by oratorical display and splendid eloquence, 
 or to be instructed and uplifted through the 
 intellect and by discussion. It is not a 
 body of men and women who come together, 
 as on a mountain-top, to see divine and 
 spiritual visions, and feel their hearts played 
 upon as by the very fingers of God himself, 
 and listen to the very music of the Celestial 
 City. None of these things. Do you 
 remember how John the Baptist sent to 
 Jesus, and said, **Art thou the Messiah, or 
 shall we look for another?" and do you 
 remember what he answered to the delega- 
 tion? ''Wait." And then he went on with 
 
THE DESCENT FROM THE MOUNT. 2J\ 
 
 his work. And the bhnd came to him, and 
 he touched their eyes, and they went away 
 to see ; the lame came, and they threw away 
 their crutches; the lepers came, and he put 
 his hand upon their brow, and the scales 
 fell off from their skin, and the fresh blood 
 began to pulsate again in their veins. And 
 then, when the work of healing was over, 
 the people sat upon the ground, and he, 
 standing on a little eminence, preached 
 to them. And as he preached women wiped 
 away the tears from their eyes; and men, 
 despairing, looking upon the ground, lifted 
 up their eyes and took the sunshine from 
 Christ s face; and men and women who 
 had sinned away their lives, and lost it 
 all, took back new life from him and went 
 forth with joy and hope in their faces. 
 Then, when the sermon was over, he said 
 to John's delegation, "Go, and show John 
 again what things ye do see and hear; the 
 blind receive their sight, and the lame 
 walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf 
 hear, the dead are raised, and the poor 
 
2/2 THE DESCENT FROM THE MOUNT, 
 
 have the glad tidings preached to them." 
 What is a church of Christ ? Do you want 
 to know ? Do not go back to past history 
 to find out what apostolic successions have 
 come down through the centuries. Do not 
 go to the record to find out what creed is 
 written in the church-book. Do not go to 
 the baptismal font to see, as Professor Swing 
 has said, "whether water is applied to the 
 candidate or the candidate is applied to the 
 water." These are not the questions that 
 determine what is a church of Christ. Go 
 into the homes and lives of the church- 
 members, into the mission work of the 
 church, into the heart of the men of the 
 church, into the congregations of that 
 church, and see whether those that have 
 been lame and footsore and weary are 
 beginning to throw away their crutches and 
 march toward the kingdom of God ; whether 
 those who have walked as they that are 
 blind, or as seeing men as trees walking, are 
 beginning to get their eyes open and to see 
 the truth of God with celestial clearness; 
 
THE DESCENT FROM THE MOUNT. 273 
 
 whether those who have never heard any- 
 thing but the beat of the hammer on the 
 anvil are beginning to hear the celestial 
 choirs; whether those who were sick and 
 struck through with leprosy are beginning 
 to be cleansed; whether those that were in 
 despair because of their sins are beginning 
 to look up and say, There is hope for me 
 within the kingdom. If so, that is a church 
 of Christ, whether it is Quaker or Catholic, 
 whether Episcopal or Presbyterian. What 
 is the church of Christ? The church that is 
 giving its service to men in the highest of 
 their being. Are you going to give your- 
 self more to that service? Is your life going 
 to be a higher life ? Will our mission 
 chapels do better service ? Will our Sunday- 
 school be richer in its equipment ? Will 
 our individual lives be nobler ? Can you 
 throw away one crutch and walk with a 
 crutch and a cane ? This is the question. 
 
 You heard, and you applauded with a 
 silent appreciation, which is better than 
 hand-clapping, Dr. Berry's declaration that 
 
274 THE DESCENT FROM THE MOUNT. 
 
 the faith of this church is faith in a Hving 
 Christ. I was very glad — and I think I 
 speak for you as well — we were very glad 
 he did not come here to give us a message 
 about Mr. Beecher, but to interpret the mes- 
 sage that he and we had received in past 
 times from Mr. Beecher. The living Christ 
 is the secret of the power of the church. 
 Moses came down from Mount Sinai, and 
 left the vision of Jehovah there, and com- 
 ing dov/n wore a veil upon his face, as Paul 
 tells us, that the people might not see the 
 reflected glory fade away. The centuries 
 passed by, and Jehovah came again, to live 
 in visible form, to walk a man among men; 
 and he took the disciples up with him into 
 the Mount of Transfiguration, and they 
 beheld him there in glory, as Moses had 
 beheld him in glory in Mount Sinai; but 
 when the cloud received those that talked 
 with Jesus, the revelation of Jehovah was 
 left, and the visible God descended out of 
 the mountain-top with the disciples. That 
 is the difference between Judaism and 
 
THE DESCENT FROM THE MOUNT, 2^5 
 
 Christianity. One Is a memory; the other 
 
 is a living experience. 
 
 We have been on the mountain-top; 
 memories have been about us; we have 
 seen, as it were, our own sainted dead ; they 
 have been with Christ and we with Christ, 
 together. And now the cloud has received 
 the sainted dead out of our sight, and we 
 are coming down the hill into the valley 
 where need and poverty and suffering and 
 sin all are. Let us bring the living Christ 
 with us, to inspire us, to bear the cross of 
 Christ, not in gold upon our bosoms, nor in 
 steeple on our church, but in our hearts and 
 in our lives, that by our service we may 
 gather all men to ourselves as brothers and 
 to God as the All-Father through Jesus 
 Christ his Son, never failing in our hope of 
 the final result, because we believe that 
 Love is the only Sovereignty.