UnOFFlGIHL 
 CHRJSTIHRITY 
 
 SHeiTOll BISSGLL 
 
BX 7233 .B577 1918 
 Bissell, Shelton 
 
 Unofficial Christianity 
 
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 — EEB 
 
 UNO FFICIAL 
 CHRISTIANITY 
 
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 26 1918 
 
 SHELTON BISSELL, B.D. 
 
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 BOSTON 
 RICHARD G. BADGER 
 
 THE GORHAM PRESS 
 
Copyright, 1918 by Richard G. Badger 
 
 All Rights Reserved 
 
 Made in the United States of America 
 
 The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A. 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 These little sermons were preached by the 
 author in the First Congregational Church of 
 Boise, Idaho, during the late winter of 19 16-19 17. 
 At their conclusion the earnest wish was expressed 
 by the members of his Religious Education Com- 
 mittee, at the head of which stood Dr. E. O. Sis- 
 son, Commissioner of State Education, that they 
 should be published. 
 
 This has been done In the earnest hope that 
 some who have failed to find bread In much of 
 official creeds and platforms of Christianity, may 
 at least be encouraged to continue to look to Christ 
 himself for food. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I Changing Ideas 9 
 
 II Changeless Ideals 21 
 
 III Getting Rid of an Excommunicated 
 
 God 34 
 
 IV The Use and Misuse of the Bible . . 44 
 V The World, the Flesh, and the Devil 56 
 
 VI Times, Sacraments and the Man . . 65 
 
 VII Just Being Good 75 
 
 VIII The Conclusion of the Whole Matter 86 
 
UNOFFICIAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 CHANGING IDEAS 
 
 THE Impression that the golden age lies to 
 the rear is one of the persisting fallacies of 
 all time. Tennyson was true to human nature 
 when he observed that 
 
 "The past will always win 
 A glory from its being far, 
 And orb into the perfect star 
 We saw not when we moved therein." 
 
 In many quarters it is still more popular to 
 eulogize one's ancestry than to emphasize one's 
 posterity. This opinion, in the minds of people, 
 that we have somehow run by the millennium with- 
 out knowing it, is due largely to the fact that we 
 have lost a good many orthodox anchors. But 
 these disquieted souls are oblivious of the equally 
 patent fact, that each age forges its own anchors. 
 Different times grow different opinions as in- 
 evitably as different zones grow different plants. 
 
 9 
 
10 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 The supreme business of the church is not to 
 cherish a deposit of truth once delivered to the 
 saints, but to cultivate the garden where the tree 
 of truth grows. Christian dogma never yet has 
 expressed truth fully, — it has approximated it, 
 and this will continue to be the method indefinitely. 
 Thinking about life and living out life do not stand 
 in opposite armed camps. Though the former 
 never fully explains or accounts for the latter, it 
 will never cease to hold the attention of men. 
 The deeper we think, the closer we come to God, 
 who is supreme Mind. "We think God's thoughts 
 after Him." 
 
 Religion in the twentieth century will have dif- 
 ferent ideas about the world and itself than had 
 religion in any other century. 
 
 I. Its Universe is Vaster. The area wherein 
 its God once moved was "a right little, tight little," 
 comfortably compact and precisely measurable uni- 
 verse. On a waste of waters floated the earth. 
 Over it arched the solid convex firmament. Above 
 the firmament was another waste of waters. In 
 the firmament were windows, and in the earth 
 were doors, and when the windows above and 
 the doors below were opened, the rain fell and 
 the waters rose. From east to west, a little 
 journey, ran the sun each day, like a "strong man, 
 delighting to run a race." In his brief span he 
 measured the entire heavens. Thus the earth was 
 
Changing Ideas il 
 
 the centre of the solar and siderial movements. 
 And "above the circle of the earth" sat the an- 
 thropomorphic God. To him men looked up, — a 
 static God, permanently resident in a static heaven. 
 From it he made occasional excursions to see 
 what men were doing. To it men aspired to climb, 
 building a tower until God in self-defense brought 
 their work to naught by a babel of tongues. Thus 
 theology was built out of a geo-centric universe, 
 a static heaven, an anthropomorphic and architect 
 God, — and the whole scheme, God and all, was 
 not much bigger than the scroll on which men 
 wrote it down. 
 
 But long ago Copernicus smashed this universe 
 to bits when he demonstrated that the earth went 
 round the sun, not the sun round the earth. Later, 
 the telescope infinitely enlarged the boundaries of 
 the universe until Our brains reel under the con- 
 cept of immensity. We envy the nonchalance with 
 which men of science casually tell us that light, 
 traveling 186,000 miles a second, takes three and 
 a half years to reach us from Alpha Centauri, the 
 nearest of the fixed stars. And if we have the 
 patience to calculate how far distant this star lies 
 from us, we are then asked to compute the distance 
 of the farthest star, the light from which, starting 
 when King Solomon built his temple, is just arriv- 
 ing on this earth. 
 
 The theology of orthodoxy, however, is not 
 
12 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 built on these facts. It still sets up its localized 
 heaven and hell, its limited universe of space, its 
 architect and anthropomorphic God. And yet 
 heaven is not above the earth, nor hell beneath, 
 for there is no up nor down in the universe, but 
 only out. God is not a builder retired from busi- 
 ness, who in definite and measurable manner by 
 rule of thumb constructed a compact and delimited 
 celestial system once upon a time; for the system 
 is not yet made, and is never the same from mo- 
 ment to moment, and no one can comprehend the 
 bounds thereof, for it has no bounds. These 
 earlier notions of cosmogeny, celestial geography 
 and the sporadic activity of deity have passed 
 away from the realm of educated thought; but 
 they remain embedded in the dogmas of ecclesi- 
 asticism. 
 
 II. Its Time is Infinitely Extended. The idea 
 of a definitely ascertained date on which things 
 began to be, is a prime essential of the doctrines 
 of orthodoxy. Man emerged from nothingness 
 upon a certain day, 4004 years before Christ. All 
 the vast, complex, and differentiated life of this 
 planet has been crowded into this brief 5900 years 
 since that time. Races, nations, literature, the 
 arts and sciences, civilization, culture, — all these 
 have been born and cradled and reared and many 
 of them have died and been buried within this all 
 too short span. Now the very brevity of this 
 
Changing Ideas 13 
 
 world process necessitated a scheme of special and 
 instantaneous creation. Six thousand years were 
 not long enough for gradual growth. God must 
 start some things at maturity. As Athene sprang 
 full-armed from the head of Zeus, so biological 
 species and ranks and orders leaped fully de- 
 veloped from the earth. Yet, although we know 
 that the longevity of great trees and the testimony 
 of fossiliferous strata, the accumulated sediment 
 of rivers and the logic of the growth of society, 
 all point to an immeasurably longer time of human 
 habitation, and organic and inorganic develop- 
 ment on this earth, than the paltry 6000 years 
 allowed by the theory of fiat and special creation, 
 the conception of a definitely begun, a something- 
 out-of-nothing-made, and a short careered universe 
 still keep their tenacious grip upon orthodox 
 theology. The longevity, if not the infinity of the 
 time processes of creation, has not sufficiently im- 
 pressed the minds of the makers of the doctrines 
 of orthodoxy, to lead them to reject the obsolete 
 and discredited, for the true and proven. 
 
 III. Its Man is Nobler. More significant are 
 the changing ideas about man. Original sin and 
 total depravity have been the twin mill-stones 
 about the neck of humanity. 
 
 ''In Adam's fall 
 We sinned all," 
 
14 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 was more than a nursery jingle, — it was a por- 
 tentous doctrinal announcement of doom. From 
 this oracular version of an ancient Semitic legend 
 has come a whole theology of pessimism and 
 human helplessness. It created for itself a termin- 
 ology abounding in such words and phrases as 
 "total surrender, our lost estate, moral inability, 
 worthless worms, broken and empty vessels," and 
 it magnified God's grace into everything, and 
 whittled man's grit down to nothing. 
 
 To-day men believe that they are saved, not 
 by being supplanted by God, but by being supple- 
 mented by him. Otherwise creation would seem 
 to have been a waste of God's time. They hold 
 that if Adam tainted the race, God has had 
 plenty of time since to make it wholesome. They 
 assert that what man needs is not surrender but 
 discovery. They believe that humanity, raised to 
 its highest potentiality, is divinity. In brief: that 
 salvation consists in true self-expression through 
 God-contact, not in self-repression through God- 
 usurpation. 
 
 Yet a single glance through the pages of the 
 present day theology of orthodoxy will convince 
 one that its doctrines are still deduced from the 
 discarded premises of "depravity and fallen 
 estate," and that it is still sceptical of the ability 
 of man to do very much for himself, despite the 
 fact of his divine kinship. 
 
Changing Ideas 15 
 
 Once, also, and not so long ago, man was a 
 duality or a trinity. Body warred against spirit, 
 and flesh against soul. Or mind and soul and body 
 were engaged in Internecine strife. From this idea 
 came asceticism, and the hurtful practices of flesh- 
 mortifications and flagellations, for the sake of the 
 emancipation and exaltation of the enslaved spirit. 
 This dichotomy and trichotomy of the person has 
 done Its injurious work upon the body of Chris- 
 tian thought for centuries, and to-day its baleful 
 effect Is felt in every organ. Squarely antagonistic 
 to this Is the truth of this age, that personality Is 
 a unity. So nicely blended are the elements of 
 body and spirit that what helps and hurts the one, 
 helps and hurts the other. The properties of the 
 bodies are not devilish, bastard, and hostile to 
 the properties of the mind. They are rather the 
 legitimate Instruments of the real person, the self- 
 knowing and self-directing ego. Modern psychol- 
 ogy, as all really know, insists upon the closest and 
 most Intimate relation between the interacting 
 body and mind. 
 
 But the theology of orthodoxy is still permeated 
 with the doctrine of man's duality or trinity, with 
 the cognate thought of the opposition of the one 
 to the other. Paul's dictum of a "warring to- 
 gether of flesh and spirit" has been twisted out 
 of Its figuratively spiritual meaning, and has been 
 given a literal metaphysical construction which the 
 
1 6 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 words do not warrant. 
 
 So, too, man was once thought to be inspired 
 through a kind of temporary soul-dispossession or 
 suspended animation. His individuality was dis- 
 carded for the time being. He was literally "not 
 himself." He fell into a kind of holy swoon and 
 saw visions and heard voices. Or he became a 
 mere automaton, — a pen-point in the hand of the 
 Almighty. He was an amanuensis, and wrote 
 what God dictated. Now this was a quite logical 
 deduction from the doctrine of man's total de- 
 pravity. Of and by himself, man could not think 
 or know or do one true or holy thing. Hence God 
 had to pour him full of revelation, as a cup is 
 poured full of water. Man had to guard against 
 mixing up any ideas of his own with the ideas of 
 God. He could be God's private secretary and 
 take down at his dictation what he uttered, — no 
 more. As a passive channel through which the 
 wisdom of the Almighty might trickle, he was a 
 success now and then. As an interpreter of truth 
 through the medium of his own unenlightened in- 
 telligence and personal experience, he was a de- 
 lusion and a snare. 
 
 Now, however, it is believed on the best of 
 evidence that inspiration means raising a man's 
 individuality to its highest terms, not reducing it 
 to the vanishing point. The portion of truth which 
 each man utters is colored and characterized by 
 
Changing Ideas 17 
 
 the peculiar temperament and prepossessions of 
 the speaker. Moral and religious predispositions 
 will affect the quality of his message to this extent, 
 — that they will give to that nugget of truth which 
 the speaker has found, that quality of alloy which 
 is inevitably associated with his fallible nature. 
 As the water takes its color from the soil through 
 which it flows, so the utterance of truth takes its 
 hue from the individuality of the speaker who is 
 its mouthpiece. New psychology does not deny 
 revelation, it denies the old mechanical "suspended 
 animation" ideas of the method of revelation. It 
 finds the channel of communication between the 
 individual and God in that sensitive submerged 
 self, the sub-conscious, upon which the mind of 
 eternal Truth plays as a musician upon his instru- 
 ment. Even as the musician can express only im- 
 perfectly, according to the limitations of his Instru- 
 ment, the thought of the composer, so can the Ideal 
 of truth be mirrored forth but dimly and partially. 
 Man does not passively record the picture of God 
 like a sensitive photographic plate, but actively 
 takes the phase of truth which he has found, and 
 gives It shape and color and expression as it passes 
 through the seething crucible of his thoughts. 
 
 IV. Its Processes are Inductive. Long ago 
 men abandoned a priori methods of investigation. 
 Bacon showed the folly of starting with a theory 
 and then hunting for facts to fit the theory. Ex- 
 
1 8 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 perlences are the final test. We begin with them, 
 and out of them we derive our principles of 
 thought and action. We examine the universe 
 and find in it order, system, unity, and regularity. 
 We conclude, therefore, that there is a mind and 
 will behind this cosmos, and we call this mind and 
 will, "God." Once men would have begun with 
 an idea about God, which they had excogitated 
 from metaphysics, or logic, or fancy, and would 
 have bent the facts to fit the theory, no matter 
 what resulted to the facts. 
 
 The inductive process is more widely operative 
 than we suspect. There is not a cherished conven- 
 tion or institution which is not being weighed in 
 the scales of induction. Do the facts of life, the 
 needs of humanity, the large axiomatic and in- 
 dubitable verities, intuitively known, warrant these 
 same conventions and institutions? If not, must 
 they be merely modified, or swept aside in totof 
 The church, the state, the marriage relation, the 
 home, the school, — these time-honored institu- 
 tions, cherished and enriched by Christianity, must 
 defend themselves against a growing clamor of 
 criticism. If these institutions will minister to the 
 fundamental needs of social man, if they will in- 
 crease his vitality, dignity, and happiness, then 
 they will stand. But if, in our highly complex and 
 rapidly socializing civilization, these ancient con- 
 ventions, like lumbering stage-coaches, will not 
 
Changing Ideas 19 
 
 carry mankind safely and swiftly along the high- 
 way of life, then they must be superseded by other 
 vehicles more adapted to the time. Thus we start, 
 not with an a priori theory about the inviolability 
 and everlasting sanctity of these Institutions upon 
 which we have built our modern world, but rather 
 we start with experiences, aspirations, Intuitions; 
 and rigidly Insist that these shall be conserved by 
 the habits and conventions of society. Even If this 
 method of Induction should be highly Inconvenient 
 to religious practices, it undoubtedly has come to 
 stay, and theology ought to make the most of it. 
 But it is quite evident that the method of ortho- 
 doxy is to make the institution — the church, the 
 Sabbath, the sacrament, marriage, home and the 
 like — the primary and paramount thing, whether 
 the needs of a modern world are met adequately 
 by them or not. 
 
 Evolution — which is another way of saying 
 that organic life, individual and social, becomes 
 differentiated through forces operating and in- 
 herent within each body rather than through spe- 
 cial acts of creation and modification exerted from 
 without the body — Is known to-day to be the 
 method of progress. It Is all the more regrettable, 
 therefore, that evolution is anathema maranatha 
 to the theology of orthodoxy, and that those who 
 wear its sign and own its sway may not hope to 
 enter the portals of an officially accredited evan- 
 
20 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 gellcal faith. 
 
 Honestly to recognize changing Ideas, and to 
 adjust the timeless principles of religion to the 
 temporary thought-forms of the day so that re- 
 ligion may not be a thing apart, antique, and mis- 
 understood. Is the heroic task of the Christian 
 world. Truth Is a matter of all times, and has 
 resources for all needs. From whatever point of 
 compass the wind may blow, the mariner uses the 
 same rudder to steer him to the desired haven. 
 
 "New occasions teach new duties. 
 
 Time makes ancient good uncouth, 
 He must upward go, and onward. 
 Who would keep abreast of truth.'' 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 CHANGELESS IDEALS 
 
 AN idea is passive, an ideal is active. An ideal 
 is an idea in motion, accomplishing some- 
 thing, — that has the power to make the one who 
 cherishes it its disciple, defender, crusader. An 
 ideal is able to recruit men, set them to work, 
 arouse energy. An ideal is an idea dynamized and 
 magnetized. An idea is the object of men's con- 
 templation; an ideal, the object of their convic- 
 tion. The former is a picture to view; the latter, 
 a motive to drive. Men hold the idea of knowl- 
 edge, and about it they speculate, argue, discuss. 
 They may admire and exalt it, but not follow it. 
 But men hold the ideal of knowledge, and for it 
 they will sacrifice health and comfort, toward it 
 they will struggle with grim determination, and in 
 comparison with it they will count all earthly 
 riches and treasure as mere dross. 
 
 This being so, it follows that a man is worth his 
 ideals, not his ideas. The former persist, the 
 latter change. The latter touch the periphery of a 
 man, the former become immanent in his moral 
 
 21 
 
22 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 consciousness. If religion seems open to convic- 
 tion on the charge of failing to meet ideas, she be- 
 comes vindicated as exalting Ideals. So long as 
 she inspires men to seek ends, rather than to think 
 on means, so long will she be invincible. 
 
 There are three ideals at least which religion 
 has never lost, and which, as religion, she never 
 can lose. These ideals, it is true, sometimes have 
 been repudiated by pseudo-religion, dogmatism, 
 and ecclesiastlclsm. But the life of genuine re- 
 ligion depends upon them, and to them the truly 
 religious man will cling. They are : 
 
 I. Sincerity, an ideal affecting the Integrity of 
 a man's soul. 
 
 II. Loyalty, an Ideal affecting a man's rela- 
 tion to God. 
 
 III. Unity, an Ideal affecting a man's relations 
 to his fellows. 
 
 I. Sincerity. There Is only one thing more 
 disastrous than dishonesty toward others, and 
 that is dishonesty toward oneself. Unless one Is 
 absolutely sincere with his own soul he cannot be 
 sincere with others. Jesus found an appalling 
 amount of insincerity being palmed off as genuine 
 piety. He was compelled to call the respectable 
 hypocrites of his day by some harsh names in 
 order to do justice to his feelings, and to them. 
 "Whitewashed sepulchres" and "dirty cups and 
 platters" were some of the richly deserved epi- 
 
Changeless Ideals 23 
 
 thets which he applied to them. This he did, 
 primarily, because they were trying to fool people. 
 They began by fooling themselves, and ended, 
 of course, by fooling most everybody else. 
 
 The need of sincerity was never more urgent, 
 largely because the demand of society, politics, ec- 
 clesiasticism is "conformity." In college life a 
 man who breaks with sacred tradition "queers 
 himself." In politics, a man who leaves his party 
 is disciplined. In society, a man who defies custom 
 is ostracised. In ecclesiasticism, a man who re- 
 nounces orthodoxy is banned. Seldom is the ques- 
 tion raised: "If these excommunicants are sin- 
 cere, should not their opinions be tolerated, even 
 respected?" Conformity is not a sure prophylac- 
 tic. Sincerity is. A tainted community will be dis- 
 infected more quickly through heresy than through 
 orthodoxy, if perchance the former is sincere and 
 the latter not. 
 
 The very life of religion depends upon sincerity. 
 It is not going to be a child's task to preserve 
 this life. The official creeds are barnacled with 
 doctrines which many honest men must repudiate. 
 Yet there are those who conform to these creeds 
 who cannot sincerely believe them. This seems a 
 monstrous charge to make. But facts bear out 
 this assertion. Those who hold holy orders in one 
 of the historic churches of Christendom must 
 agree that "divine grace can come to man only 
 
24 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 through the medium of an unbroken apostolic suc- 
 cession." This means that in no other way, save 
 through the sacrament of Holy Communion ad- 
 ministered by a priest in that particular church, 
 can the good, healthy life of God get into a man. 
 Yet one who speaks from an intimate acquaint- 
 anceship with the church in question, and who 
 speaks uncontradicted, says: "Everybody knows 
 that there are numbers of Anglican clergymen who 
 do not beheve that the charismatic gift is de- 
 pendent upon an unbroken apostolic succession. 
 . . . Everybody knows also that no layman, not 
 even a non-conformist minister, can take orders in 
 the Anglican church without submitting to that ec- 
 clesiastical ceremony by which he professes his be- 
 lief in that doctrine." 
 
 Will any one doubt that there are large numbers 
 of worshipers who in their hearts honestly ques- 
 tion the truth of the assertion that Jesus was "con- 
 ceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin 
 Mary," and yet who glibly patter the Apostolic 
 Creed each Sunday? Even in the articles of faith 
 of the so-called more liberal churches, there are 
 items referring to the infallibility of the scriptures, 
 the metaphysical nature of the Trinity, and the 
 substitutionary method of the atonement, which 
 should be expunged in the interest of strict hon- 
 esty. "The world will little note nor long re- 
 member" any creed the adherents of which are 
 
Changeless Ideals 25 
 
 with reason suspected of holding it with certain 
 strong mental reservations, or disingenuous ex- 
 planations. "Let your speech be yea, yea; nay, 
 nay;" said the great Master of sincerity, and 
 added, "whatsoever is more than these cometh of 
 evil." And the implication may be as strongly in 
 the direction of creeds that mean exactly what 
 they say, as in the direction of a speech unadorned 
 by expletives. 
 
 The prime business of a Christian is to as- 
 semble the facts of life; mobilize the experiences; 
 marshal the intuitions; then examine them with 
 honesty, humility, and a mind hospitable to truth; 
 heat them all with the fire of a pure enthusiasm, 
 fusing them together for a great and unselfish pur- 
 pose; and then, whatever the result may be, to 
 hold to it. Let a man "will to believe." Let him 
 bring to bear all the desire to be orthodox that he 
 may. There will be unique occasions when what 
 appears from the seething caldron is not the con- 
 viction which he had anticipated. There will be 
 times when the bland egg of creed may hatch an 
 ugly duckling. And all the orthodox barn-yard 
 fowls may cackle at him that he has got an "unde- 
 sirable barn-yard citizen," and with many a cruel 
 peck they will banish him from the domestic pre- 
 cincts. But he knows that though it be not a prop- 
 er duckling, it has a right to lie on the straw and 
 sail on the pond. And some day, in the slow turn- 
 
26 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 Ing of the wheel of time, It will prove to be a glori- 
 ous swan. 
 
 Let Christianity beware of compromising with 
 sincerity for the sake of orthodoxy. 
 
 II. Loyalty. The religion of the twentieth 
 century will insist upon that heart-attachment to 
 the eternal God which shall save men. Nothing 
 short of that kind of loyalty will avail. It was 
 the only loyalty that counted with Christ. He em- 
 phatically asserted that there was no law greater 
 than allegiance to God with heart and mind and 
 soul and strength. This puts all of a man in inti- 
 mate contact with God. In feeling, in thinking, 
 in aspirations, in his physical powers, even, he is 
 to be an unswerving partisan of the Almighty. 
 
 Now loyalty, as a virtue, is not unknown to the 
 theology of orthodoxy. But it is the minor and 
 subordinate loyalty to sacraments, formulae, 
 rituals, institutions and dogmatic infallibles. 
 All these may be short of God. In point of fact, 
 they generally are. The proof of this is found in 
 the refusal of orthodoxy to abate its creed one jot 
 or tittle in the face of radical and sweeping modi- 
 fications of men's ideas of God. The rigidity of 
 orthodoxy convicts it of disloyalty to the very 
 principle about which it claims to be most ortho- 
 dox. In utter loyalty a man may break with a 
 theology. What happens? He is damned by the 
 adherents of that theology. And for what? For 
 
Changeless Ideals 27 
 
 disloyalty to the theology without reference to 
 God. He who doubts this, easily may make the 
 test. It win be necessary for him merely to ex- 
 press his opinion that the Ideal of the Kingdom Is 
 Independent of any belief In the total Inerrancy of 
 Scripture, the substitutionary nature of the atone- 
 ment, the virgin birth, the physical resurrection, 
 the metaphysical trinity, the observance of the 
 sacraments of baptism and the Supper, a spatial 
 and material heaven and hell, and a membership 
 In an evangelical church. Startling results will be 
 sure to follow. Honestly believing all this, this 
 same belief will not be "counted unto him for 
 righteousness." His shrift will be short and his 
 excommunication long. He has been disloyal to 
 orthodoxy, — what matter about his loyalty to 
 God? 
 
 As the demands of this age are for sincerity in 
 the first place, so It Inevitably follows that if a 
 man's sincerity leads him to break with orthodoxy 
 in the interest of loyalty to God, there shall be 
 nothing but approval for the departure. This 
 demand will result In more flexible creeds, so con- 
 structed as to be adjustable to honest modifications 
 of convictions which occur from time to time. 
 The heresy of the twentieth century is going to 
 be insincerity in the first place, and then, as a 
 corollary, loyalty to a creed which Is disloyal to 
 God. To make it possible for a man to be both 
 
28 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 loyal to God and loyal to creed, will be the stimu- 
 lating task of the religion of this age. 
 
 III. Unity. This is the ideal which affects a 
 man's relations to his fellows. In sheer self- 
 defense to-day, the church is putting this in the 
 fore-front of its platforms. The alarming evi- 
 dences of disintegration, so visible on every hand, 
 may be unerringly traced to the schismatic spirit 
 of sectarianism, which has made the church im- 
 potent to mitigate the woes of a world in torment. 
 
 But at the very outset a distinction between 
 unity and uniformity should be drawn. Nor is 
 this done in a spirit of casuistry, nor in the inter- 
 ests of an ecclesiastical system. It is not Intended 
 to becloud the issue through logomachy. The 
 argument is not to run thus: 
 
 1. The demand is for uniformity. 
 
 2. Doing away with sectarianism would 
 mean uniformity. 
 
 3. But unity, not uniformity, is the real 
 need. 
 
 4. Hence we shall not help matters by 
 interfering. 
 
 The argument will run, rather: 
 
 1. The demand is for unity. 
 
 2. Doing away with sectarianism would 
 mean uniformity, not necessarily unity. 
 
 3. A modified sectarianism would mean 
 unity. 
 
Changeless Ideals 29 
 
 4. Hence let us modify sectarianism, not 
 
 do away with it. 
 
 Uniformity is an outward, artificial, and non- 
 vital agreement in method and order. Unity is 
 an inner, spontaneous, and vital agreement in 
 spirit and principle. You may have heterogeneity 
 and lack of cohesion, and yet have uniformity. 
 You may have dissimilarity in form and variety in 
 expression and yet have unity. There may be 
 unity in a democracy of states, differing widely in 
 their several characteristics. There may be lack 
 of unity in a monarchy, all parts of which look and 
 act ahke. For religion to demand uniformity, 
 therefore, would be for it to ask for a stone in- 
 stead of a loaf. For it to demand unity, however, 
 is simply for it to adopt life-saving precautions. 
 If It can have unity by preserving all of the sects, 
 they will be preserved; if It can have unity by 
 destroying some of them, it will destroy them. 
 The prime demand is unity, not uniformity. 
 
 A little consideration will convince any honest 
 person that to persist and do its work and cope 
 with hostile forces, themselves united, religion 
 must make a much more serious-minded and reso- 
 lute effort toward unity than it has heretofore 
 made. No half-hearted compromises will avail. 
 There must be sacrifice, the heroic cutting down to 
 the quick, the true unselfish renunciation of cher- 
 ished, but non-essential religious hobbies. The 
 
30 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 liberal will have to surrender some things, as well 
 as the conservative, for the former has gone as 
 far ahead of the procession as the latter has fallen 
 behind. The process is going to be a painful one, 
 and there is going to be weeping and wailing and 
 gnashing of teeth. But it is the only way. 
 
 Some churches are ready even now. As a rule, 
 they stand midway between the rear and advance 
 guard. They have announced their willingness 
 to seek a common ground of conviction with other 
 communions. They may not believe that it is 
 necessary to abolish the institutional forms by 
 means of which they work, simply in order to 
 agree in spirit with those who hold other forms. 
 But they are resolved never to allow ritual, rubric, 
 sacrament, polity, or ecclesiastical tradition to 
 stand between them and a good, healthy, sympa- 
 thetic understanding with their neighbor denom- 
 inations. When this spirit appears, unity is not 
 far away. 
 
 It may make its approach along any one of sev- 
 eral different avenues. It may come from lands 
 of far suns and alien tongues, where the pagan, 
 for his very soul's sake, must not suspect a divided 
 Christendom. Here the missionary becomes an 
 "Episco-presby-gationalist," combining the best 
 that there is in one polity, with the best that there 
 is in the others. For the untutored savage and the 
 sophisticated oriental alike, it would be a fatal in- 
 
Changeless Ideals 31 
 
 dictment against Christianity to differentiate be- 
 tween the various cross-breeds and hybrids of 
 Protestant faith which are on exhibition In the 
 Occident. "Is Christ divided?" would be the 
 more-than-sllencing rejoinder of the object of an 
 evangelizing solicitude, to sectarian invitation. 
 Back to the sluggish and muddled stream of a 
 European and American conventionalized Chris- 
 tianity may yet flow the purer waters of an Asian 
 or African faith in Jesus, quickening and purify- 
 ing the former, not the least evidence of which 
 shall be the birth of the spirit of Christian unity. 
 Or the very urgency of the present world crisis, 
 which has wxU-nigh overwhelmed the church In 
 Europe under the threefold indictment of infi- 
 delity, inefl^clency and Imbecility, may operate to 
 wipe out the schismatic spirit. For generations the 
 established and non-established churches of the 
 British Empire have stood locked in combat, each 
 grimly determined to abate not a jot the classic 
 hostility which they piously have received as a 
 legacy from former generations. To-day the face 
 of the world has changed. The trenches have 
 made strange bedfellows. In the withering fire of 
 death, old controversies have been forgotten. 
 Back from the battle-front come the healing In- 
 fluences. Says a leading spokesman for the non- 
 llturglsts, "relations between Anglicans and Non- 
 conformists are more cordial than they have ever 
 
32 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 been." In accepting an invitation to occupy the 
 pulpit of the leading and most militant non-con- 
 formist church in England, the Dean of Durham, 
 speaking as a high official in the Established 
 church, remarks: "I hold it the plainest duty of 
 the parent church of England to draw closer and 
 make effective for service the spiritual links which 
 unite the divided sections of English-speaking 
 Christendom in an unexpressed but conscious 
 unity." 
 
 From another quarter the approach may con- 
 ceivably come. The American clergyman, 
 recognizing the loss of efficiency in the present sys- 
 tem, whereby one minister is required to be an 
 expert in many lines, thereby proving inept in some 
 of them, pleads for such specialization and dif- 
 ferentiation among the clergy, that the one who 
 is most fitted for a certain department of Chris- 
 tian labor may devote his whole time to that par- 
 ticular work. Thus the one who possesses the 
 homiletical gift predominantly shall not be com- 
 pelled to squander his time and ability upon de- 
 tails of administration, teaching, pastoral work, or 
 social service. He shall be a preacher, supremely 
 and exclusively, with the necessary time for study 
 and the fusing of thought in the fires of meditation 
 and feeling. The one who possesses peculiar 
 teaching ability shall devote his entire time to re- 
 ligious education in the church and community. 
 
Changeless Ideals 33 
 
 Thus the specialization shall continue. But, by 
 the nature of the case, this involves a more united 
 Christian polity than we have. There must be 
 amalgamation, re-grouping, elimination, a general 
 re-arrangement of Protestant divisions, and a 
 consequent reduction of separate competing bodies 
 in every community if this is to be adopted. Small 
 matters of disagreement in doctrine and polity 
 must be dropped overboard by common consent. 
 Comity and co-operation must be the watchword 
 of the hour. In the Middle-West this scheme is 
 seriously and vigorously advanced by the pastor of 
 a large Baptist church. Asked whether, in the 
 necessary abandonment of cherished views in 
 order to bring about unity, he will be willing to 
 make the form of baptism an optional one as be- 
 tween sprinkling and immersion, he replies: 
 "Whether we Baptists would make concessions in 
 order to bring about the federation I suggest, so 
 far as I am concerned personally, I should say 
 'yes* with great emphasis, and there are scores and 
 hundreds of younger men in our denomination that 
 feel exactly as I do." 
 
 Unofficial Christianity of the twentieth century 
 is to be characterized by ideals, rather than ideas. 
 Up to the present the latter, not the former, have 
 been predominant. Among the most potent forces 
 which will rule Christian men and women in this 
 age will be sincerity, loyalty, and unity. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 GETTING RID OF AN EXCOMMUNICATED GOD 
 
 THERE are two contrasting cries which come 
 up to us out of the heart of the Old Testa- 
 ment. The one is the despairing utterance of a 
 God-fearing man who felt himself deserted by the 
 Almighty in the hour of his crisis, and whose 
 plaintive lament was, "Oh, that I knew where I 
 might find him !" The other was the lofty rhetori- 
 cal question of a soul transfigured, 
 
 "Whither shall I go from thy spirit. 
 
 And whither shall I flee from thy presence?" 
 
 The difference between these two cries, is the 
 difference between the query where God is, and 
 the query where God is not. It is the difference 
 between the faith that God is somewhere, and 
 that he is everywhere. The latter is the word of 
 belief, but the former is not the word of 
 infidelity. Both are expressions of faith at dif- 
 ferent stages of rehgious development. The 
 former means a God detached, remote, per- 
 manently residing apart from his creation, with 
 
 34 
 
Getting Rid of an Excommunicated God 35 
 
 arrivals and departures according to a time- 
 schedule, "subject to change without notice," 
 characterized by interventions and special provi- 
 dences, miracles, and theophanies. The latter 
 means a God at hand, indwelling, permanently 
 residing within his creation, controlling and in- 
 forming it, as a spirit dominates a body, continu- 
 ally expressing his will in the modus operandi of 
 the universe, and so glorifying the natural order, 
 that "every common bush's aflame with God." 
 
 Granting that the religion of the twentieth cen- 
 tury must conceive of God under the thought 
 forms of immanence, it remains to offer a suffi- 
 cient apologetic in the face of the partisans of the 
 theology of orthodoxy, who may not be acquitted 
 of defending the doctrine of a detached and 
 transcendent God, and therefore one who is more 
 somewhere than everywhere. Now God cannot 
 be both wholly within his creation, and at the same 
 time wholly without it. It would be a contradic- 
 tion in terms and in fact. But just as the true 
 Jesus was within the visible, physical body; so the 
 Almighty is within his creation. If this latter is 
 the vital and prevailing view to-day, it may be de- 
 fended on two grounds : first, our relation to God 
 is a moral, not a mechanical one; second, our rela- 
 tion to him is a natural, not a formal one. 
 
 I. Our Relation to God is a Moral, not a Me- 
 chanical One. Our starting point must be the 
 
36 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 presence of certain inconsistent and even antagon- 
 istic elements in the world. Sin, evil, suffering, 
 death, — these have to be accounted for without 
 being disloyal to a God who is, by the nature of 
 the case, both all-powerful and all-good. Some, 
 like John Stuart Mill and, more recently, George 
 Bernard Shaw, frankly wash their hands of such 
 a hypothetical God. The former propounds his 
 famous dilemma, — "Either God could have pre- 
 vented evil and did not, — or he would have 
 prevented evil, and could not. If I accept the first, 
 I conclude that he is not all good. If I accept the 
 second, then he is not all-powerful." Having led 
 us into the maze. Mill leaves us there to find our 
 way out, although for himself, he would frankly 
 sacrifice God's omnipotence in order to save his 
 benevolence. Shaw cheerfully chooses the same 
 alternative, also, with this quite Shavianesque sug- 
 gestion, that God himself, with the very best of 
 intentions, is only experimenting and approximat- 
 ing at good, doing the best with the material he 
 has on hand, but impotent to get better results. 
 
 Now if the majority of us are constrained to re- 
 ject both of these explanations, what remains? 
 The believer in a non-resident Deity answers that 
 evil has been precipitated into the universe by an 
 all-wise power for inscrutable but good and suffi- 
 cient reasons, and that at certain indeterminate 
 times he will intervene in order to give the unl- 
 
Getting Rid of an Excommunicated God 37 
 
 verse a shove toward righteousness, or repair the 
 damage done by the depraved wills of men, or 
 rectify some vagrant tendency In nature. Thus we 
 get the "Interventlonallst" type of Christian, who 
 looks to see Satan bound and cast Into the pit, and 
 who ardently awaits the coming of the great and 
 glorious day when Jesus shall return and set up 
 his Kingdom. In brief, the only logical conclusion 
 to which we are driven if we accept the premise 
 of a transcendent God who Is at the same time 
 both all-powerful and all-good, is the mechanical 
 one. But note where that leads. Goodness Is to be 
 accomplished by God through coercion. God be- 
 comes an infinite arbiter with power to compel his 
 decisions. Man yields because he must; God gets 
 what he wants, that is all. The millennium is to 
 arrive because God produces It, not because man is 
 ready for It. It is a kind of transcendent case of 
 *'mlght makes right." 
 
 On the other hand, we are convinced that this 
 Is a moral universe. There is no satisfaction in 
 thinking that God by dint of superior prowess 
 Is going to get what he Is after in the end. In 
 point of fact, man is not made good, he becomes 
 good. For God to arrive from without periodi- 
 cally and by special dispensation repair the uni- 
 verse, would simply mean that he could make men 
 behave themselves, — it would not mean that men 
 were becoming good. Even so, a magisterial 
 
38 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 disciplinarian might interfere to compose the vio- 
 lence of a turbulent company, and by dint of physi- 
 cal prowess or direful threat produce an appear- 
 ance of calm. But there can be no real solution 
 of evil until man desires to be right. Omnipotence 
 cannot do more than make men refrain from evil, 
 man must choose to be good himself. 
 
 This suggests what really has happened. God, 
 ever with us, ever the indwelling spirit of the 
 visible world, ever has willed good to us. As free 
 spirits derived from him, we are allowed to accept 
 his good intentions or not as we choose. Anything 
 short of that would mean an artificial, toy universe 
 for God to play with. In the clash of wills, hu- 
 man and divine, God's sometimes goes down. 
 "Gipsy" Smith used to say: "God can open the 
 blind eye, or unstop the deaf ear, or paint a lily- 
 bell, or form a dewdrop, or create the trill of 
 the bird-song, or open the gates of the morning 
 without a creak of their hinges, or set an atom 
 swinging in the sunshine, with all its rhythm and 
 poetry, as much as in the movement of a constella- 
 tion; but he can save no man against his will." To 
 become good, man must will to be good. He may 
 overthrow God's good intentions for him. But the 
 end of God's defeat is the beginning of man's edu- 
 cation. The problem of a moral universe is to 
 bring it to pass that man shall choose to follow 
 after good, not that man shall be compelled to 
 
Getting Rid of an Excommunicated God 39 
 
 make good. It Is when we ask, seek, knock, that 
 the normal relations are established. As Victor 
 Hugo put It, "Nothing Is so stupid as conquering, 
 the true glory is In convincing." And God Is not 
 stupid enough merely to overwhelm us, he must 
 persuade us. 
 
 This Is the real problem of the earthly home. 
 Order, obedience, thrift, must be maintained 
 through the voluntary acquiescence of the children. 
 The question Is not, as an American educator has 
 phrased It, "I will conquer that child, no matter 
 what It may cost him; but, I will help that child 
 to conquer himself, no matter what It may cost 
 me." The discipline of life Is another name for 
 the Inevitable trouble that comes to a man when 
 he gets the best of God for the time being. In 
 the long-run, years, centuries, ages, man learns that 
 he pays too heavy a price to have his own way. 
 Chastened and instructed, he will habituate him- 
 self to a life In harmony with divine purpose and 
 goodness. He will love truth and right for their 
 own sake. He will become good of his own voli- 
 tion, and reap the peaceable fruits thereof. 
 
 II. Our Relation to God is a Natural, not a 
 Formal One. The theology of orthodoxy always 
 has taken Its terminology and analogies from the 
 social and political complex of its day. Monarchy, 
 aristocracy, feudalism, democracy, are all so many 
 moulds into which has run the molten thought of 
 
40 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 each age about God. The Almighty has been an 
 absolute monarch and man has been an unruly sub- 
 ject. The problem then becomes one of satisfying 
 outraged majesty. Or, God has been a judge and 
 man a culprit, and the problem then has resolved 
 itself into the vindication of broken law. Or, God 
 has been a creditor and man a debtor, and the 
 problem then becomes one of paying a commercial 
 obligation. In consequence, we have had theories 
 of the atonement whereby Christ did gratuitous 
 things for man which put him right with God. 
 These theories are based upon ideas of God de- 
 rived from passing human communal and govern- 
 mental relationships. They were merely formal, 
 forensic, artificial. A subject may remove from 
 the kingdom and change his citizenship. A culprit 
 may obtain a different venue and thus come under 
 the jurisdiction of another judge. A debtor may 
 go into bankruptcy and thus escape the payment of 
 his debts. The point to be observed is this : in all 
 these relationships, God and man have been 
 brought together in ways which are not vital and 
 inevitable and inescapable, but on the contrary are 
 artificial, humanly arranged, and purely hypotheti- 
 cal. The only relation between the two which can 
 be true, is that which postulates a permanent, es- 
 sential, and spiritual affinity. God was not in Jesus 
 Christ as a king, or judge, or creditor, or any 
 other political, judicial, or economic functionary. 
 
Getting Rid of an Excommunicated God 41 
 
 He was in Jesus Christ as a revealed Father. His 
 deaHngs with us are domestic and paternal, not 
 commercial, forensic, or governmental. Only the 
 former relation preserves our sense of kindly inti- 
 macy. With a father we may have communica- 
 tion; from king, judge, creditor, we receive only 
 excommunication. All arrangements made for 
 atonement of guilt, smack of formality and arti- 
 ficiality, as if we are being haled into an infinite 
 court before an infinite bar. But if we are within 
 the eternal precincts of God's home, then atone- 
 ment becomes not a formal expression of law, but 
 a natural expression of love. The only thing for 
 which we human fathers wait in order to forgive, 
 is a voluntary confession of guilt, and a mani- 
 festation of contrition on the part of the one 
 whose act has broken the domestic peace and har- 
 mony. When such evidence of penitence appears, 
 the ordinary father requires nothing more in order 
 gladly to restore the offender to the place he had 
 lost by virtue of his own act. Now, either we are 
 all wrong, and should demand an innocent victim 
 upon which to inflict the punishment belonging to 
 the offender, before said offender may be for- 
 given; or else, if we are right, the theology of 
 orthodoxy with its substitutionary blood atonement 
 is all wrong. If our relation with God is one of 
 natural aflinity, it would appear as though he 
 needed nothing but our contrition, to cause his for- 
 
42 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 giveness to occur. 
 
 One final consideration leads us to believe in the 
 natural rather than the formal relation. In all 
 the various guises under which the latter theory 
 is presented, it is not necessary for God to feel 
 anything approaching affection in the entire trans- 
 action. The king whose outraged majesty is satis- 
 fied; the judge whose regard for violated law is 
 justified; and the creditor whose bad debts are all 
 paid, — maintain an attitude of cold and severe dis- 
 approval of the offender, which, according to the 
 analogies, need never change into anything even 
 approximating affection, when "the great transac- 
 tion's done." But the kernel of the Christian rev- 
 elation of God, is love. Only that process of read- 
 justment between man and God which is rooted in 
 love, can be true. The monarchical, the juridical, 
 the commercial, are strong in logic, but weak in 
 love. They are therefore totally inadequate. But 
 the domestic, or paternal is, by the nature of the 
 case, a love relation. It comes closer, on the 
 whole, to account satisfactorily for the way that 
 Christ re-establishes harmony, than any other. 
 Only when the father enters into the suffering of 
 the son, and is cut to the quick by the same blade 
 of transgression which has wounded the soul of 
 the sinner, is the latter brought to see the true 
 meaning of his sin. No forensic, artificial, or 
 logically fabricated edifice of a coldly calculated 
 
Getting Rid of an Excommunicated God 43 
 
 substitutionary atonement can permanently chasten 
 and regenerate the perverted mind of the world. 
 God will still be excommunicant. Christ will still 
 be the innocent victim of outraged divine dignity. 
 The character of the Deity will still suffer by con- 
 trast with the best of human parenthood. The 
 human analogy of personal contact between father 
 and son, and forgiveness on the condition of re- 
 pentance, will annihilate that scheme of salvation 
 which makes it impossible for God to do what he 
 would like to do, unless Jesus does something first; 
 and bases forgiveness, not upon personal contri- 
 tion alone, but also upon the intellectual accept- 
 ance by the sinner of a divine scrapegoat upon 
 whom all the sins of all time have been heaped. 
 
 No explanation of God is true which makes him 
 less loving and merciful than the best of human 
 fathers. No theory of God will work which ex- 
 communicates him as spiritual renewer and re- 
 deemer. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE USE AND MISUSE OF THE BIBLE 
 
 IT ought not to be necessary to spend time prov- 
 ing that the value of an instrument depends al- 
 together upon the use which is made of it. A sul- 
 phur match may kindle a fire which will warm back 
 to life and service a freezing saint of God; or it 
 may start a conflagration which will lay waste a 
 city and burn to death scores of people. 
 
 When we approach the Bible, the trouble with 
 many is that they refuse to accept the premise 
 that the book is a mere vehicle of truth. To them 
 it is truth itself, and as such, like a potent charm, 
 it simply needs to be applied in order to produce 
 miraculous results. The difficulty with this posi- 
 tion is that in order to hold it, one must be mole- 
 blind to facts. Intellectual honesty inevitably will 
 compel one to abandon this thesis. 
 
 There are three assumptions which absolutely 
 vitiate any defensible attitude toward the Scrip- 
 tures, and which the religion of the twentieth cen- 
 tury must destroy root and branch. 
 
 I. The Bible is a Book of Equal Moral and 
 44 
 
The Use and Misuse of the Bible 45 
 
 Religious Authority Throughout. As a matter of 
 fact, we are dealing with a literature which reflects 
 the spiritual culture of many ages. There is no 
 unity or homogeneity In it. There are contradic- 
 tions, discrepancies, irreconcllables in It. Jephtha 
 keeps a holy vow and slays his daughter. But a 
 prophet, centuries later, declares that a man "shall 
 not give the fruit of his body for the sin of his 
 soul," and that what God desires is justice, mercy 
 and a humble demeanor before him. Jacob and 
 David, exiled from home, are convinced that they 
 are leaving God behind them as well, and going 
 out to lands ruled by other deities. But a Psalmist 
 asks the rhetorical question, "Whither shall I go 
 from thy spirit and whither shall I flee from thy 
 presence?" An ancient law declared that God 
 "visited the sins of the Fathers upon the children 
 unto the third and fourth generation." But 
 a later Hebrew teacher flatly contradicted 
 this when he asserted, "The soul that 
 sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not 
 bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall 
 the father bear the iniquity of the son." The Jew- 
 ish historian records that when David took a 
 census of the people, he was tempted of God; a 
 later chronicler, in the interest of orthodox theol- 
 ogy, modifies this by making Satan, not the deity, 
 the tempter. The wholesale murders of Jehu, in 
 ridding the earth of the dynasty of Omri, were 
 
46 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 approved by God, according to the writer of 
 Kings; but later prophets unsparingly denounced 
 Jehu, and attributed the current national disasters 
 to God's judgment because of those crimes. In 
 the earliest times, God was worshiped under dif- 
 ferent names at many local shrines; then worship 
 was centralized at Jerusalem, and shrine worship 
 was forbidden; finally Jesus announced that 
 "neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem shall 
 ye worship the father," thus making religion 
 ubiquitous. 
 
 Accordingly, there are very different levels of 
 ethical and religious ideas in Scripture. Its litera- 
 ture ranges from ruthless injunctions of indis- 
 criminate slaughter of enemies, to God-like man- 
 dates to love and forgive one's foes. Guilty and 
 innocent are involved in punishment. Slavery, 
 concubinage, drunkenness, blood revenge, lust, and 
 murder not only find place in its pages, but if not 
 tacitly defended, are only mildly rebuked. Com- 
 pare with these the noblest utterances of the great 
 prophets and Jesus, touching cleanness of heart, 
 fidelity, chastity, forgiveness, and magnanimity, 
 and it will be perceived how utterly impossible it 
 is to defend the premise that the Bible is of equal 
 moral and spiritual value and authority through- 
 out. 
 
 II. A Book, All Parts of which Apply to Us. 
 This second position of those who misuse the 
 
The Use and Misuse of the Bible 47 
 
 Bible is equally demoralizing. As a matter of 
 fact, each man who put pen to parchment wrote 
 with an absorbing interest in the events of his 
 own day and people. There is no shadow of 
 justification in the belief that they expected eternity 
 to be upon their productions. Much of what they 
 discussed had no existence beyond the hour In 
 which these men lived. But the allegorizing and 
 *'proof-text" habits of grubbing, sophomoric in- 
 terpreters, have vitiated sound Biblical truth, lo, 
 these many years. Out of the arsenal of Scripture, 
 men have brought clumsy, archaic, and utterly 
 useless weapons for the slaughter of the hosts of 
 righteousness, or the defense of citadels of im- 
 morality. Polygamy has been approved because 
 Abraham and David divided their connubial affec- 
 tions among several wives. Witches were burned 
 in New England and authority therefore was 
 drawn from the impregnable rock of Scripture, 
 which declares, "Suffer not a witch to live." Negro 
 slavery based Its claim upon the curse of God pro- 
 nounced upon Ham. The moderate drinker re- 
 fers you convincingly to Paul's kindly suggestion 
 to Timothy that he "take a little wine for his 
 stomach's sake." The militarist knows that he Is 
 Christian because the Master said, "I came not to 
 send peace but a sword." And the pacifist retorts 
 that he is equally Christian because of the Lord's 
 Injunction to turn the other cheek when smitten. 
 
48 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 Tyrants always have attempted to crush move- 
 ments for freedom by quoting Paul's word, "Let 
 every soul be in subjection unto the higher powers, 
 for the powers that be are ordained of God", and 
 the same great Apostle is made sponsor for the 
 theory of the subordination of woman, because he 
 once said, "the husband is the head of the wife". 
 
 If the Bible ever ainywhere claimed for itself 
 that it applied with equal validity to all ages and 
 social conditions, there might be some reason for 
 the misuse to which it has been put. But it makes 
 no such claim. It is not like one of those slot 
 machines into which a coin may be slipped and 
 from which a card may be extracted, telHng one 
 his fortune, giving him his weight, and in general 
 answering the dearest question of his heart. On 
 the contrarjr, every Bible verse must be read in 
 the light of its context, the stage of religious de- 
 velopment reached at the time it was written ; the 
 national hope, glory, fear, or danger which in- 
 spired the author; the temperamental prejudices 
 which possessed him; and the mental and moral 
 limitations under which he labored. It is probable 
 that not one word In a thousand in the Old Testa- 
 ment and scarcely a quarter of the New Testa- 
 ment were penned with the remotest idea that 
 future generations would ever appeal to them as 
 authoritative. 
 
 III. A Book which Contains All of God's 
 
The Use and Misuse of the Bible 49 
 
 Revelation. Nothing really has damaged the 
 Bible more than this baseless assumption. It has 
 caused the long and bootless and quite disgraceful 
 war with science. It has ahenated multitudes of 
 reverent, truth-loving people from it because it 
 has seemed to arrogate to itself unwarranted 
 omniscience. It has retarded the growth of an 
 Intelligent ministry by casting suspicion upon 
 scholarship. It has perpetuated that baneful dis- 
 tinction between the sacred and the secular. It 
 has put a time-limit upon the revelatory powers of 
 the Almighty. It has made a literature of relig- 
 ious feeling Into an official and Infallible textbook 
 on biology, geology, anthropology, sociology and 
 many other cognate sciences. It has imprisoned 
 the free spirit of the Christian religion within the 
 lids of the Bible and has refused to permit it to 
 step one foot outside. It has erected a dogma of 
 Inspiration which has excommunicated from re- 
 ligious literature much of genuine spiritual value. 
 It is utterly indefensible on any and every ground. 
 Even the Psalmist recognized that the Scriptures 
 did not contain all the truth about God. "The 
 heavens declare the glory of God. . . . Whither 
 shall I go from thy spirit, and whither shall I flee 
 from thy presence?" The flower In the crannied 
 wall, the fossil in the buried rock, the tidal wave 
 of racial immigration, and the faith in the heart 
 of a child, all reveal God. The Almighty was not 
 
50 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 struck dumb when the canon of the New Testa- 
 ment was closed. Paul enjoyed the confidence of 
 God no more than many another later Christian 
 Apostle. The greatest prophecy of the book it- 
 self is that "when the Spirit of Truth is come, he 
 shall guide you into all truth." The splendid ex- 
 periences which God has vouchsafed to hi^ 
 prophets and chosen people are to be enriched and 
 amplified by what his universe of mind and mat- 
 ter reveals to-day. 
 
 In the right use of the Bible there must be the 
 exercise of: 
 
 I. Selection. There Is more in the Bible than 
 we need. Only the antiquarian, theologian, stu- 
 dent of comparative religions, literary critic and 
 preacher have use for the Bible from cover to 
 cover. As a matter of fact, we have a 
 little Bible within the big Bible. Instinc- 
 tively we select and discriminate In our 
 reading of the Book. We prefer John to 
 JudgeSj Luke to Chronicles, Psalms to Esther, and 
 Isaiah to Numbers. Thus we really are doing 
 what the old ecumenical councils did: we are mak- 
 ing for ourselves the canon of Scriptures. This 
 habit Is a sound one. It arises from the Instinct 
 that the measure of the Bible's value for us is its 
 power to unlock the mind, warm the heart, quicken 
 the conscience, and train the will. Not the canon- 
 Icity of a book makes it meaningful, but Its content. 
 
The Use and Misuse of the Bible 51 
 
 The question is not who made it for me, but what 
 does it make out of me? Not "was somebody 
 else inspired who wrote it?" but, "am I inspired 
 when I read it?" Answering these questions hon- 
 estly, we are led to seek our spiritual nourishment 
 here and there within the Book, not impartially 
 everywhere from cover to cover. 
 
 2. Reason. The time has passed when we 
 are afraid to "prove all things" that we may "hold 
 fast that which is good." Submitting truth to the 
 test of reason will only establish the truth, for 
 truth is reasonable. We have "a reasonable faith 
 and a reasonable service." The evidence of 
 reasonableness is the total affirmative response of 
 the entire man. Does a certain belief awaken the 
 favorable answer of thought and feeling and in- 
 tuition and will, all blended and merged? Does 
 it mobilize all the forces of personality? Does it 
 evoke the assent of the deepest voice within? If 
 it does, it is a reasonable belief. But If there still 
 be doubt, the questioned belief may be put to the 
 test of value-producing pov/er. A reasonable eco- 
 nomics is one which is of value to civil govern- 
 ment; a reasonable therapeutics is one which will 
 cure the sick; a reasonable educational system is 
 one which really educates; and a reasonable re- 
 ligion Is one which produces character. Reason is 
 the handmaid of faith, not its assassin. It Is 
 reasonable for a man to believe in an orderly uni- 
 
52 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 verse, a benevolent Deity, a continuance of per- 
 sonality after death, an optimistic view of life, 
 the love of his mother and the fidelity of his child. 
 The broadest, fairest, best-tested view of exist- 
 ence will verify these affirmations. The deepest 
 and best within him assents to these proposals ; and 
 living by virtue of their grace makes for a co- 
 herent and value-full universe. 
 
 When we approach the Bible, we do so as ra- 
 tional beings. Much within its pages neither 
 evokes the total favorable response of personality, 
 nor, tested by experience, makes for life value. 
 Such parts, a reasonable faith would reject. But 
 much of it is as "deep calling unto deep." It 
 awakens the dormant spirit of man, meets his 
 moral and spiritual needs, creates character when 
 given free course in him, and becomes for him a 
 reasonable setting-forth of divine truth. The 
 authority of the Bible resides only in such por- 
 tions as call forth this total affirmative response of 
 man's personality. A mere ipse dixit may compel 
 obedience, but it will not carry conviction, unless 
 its reasonableness is recognized. 
 
 The fact of the matter is that the authority of 
 truth rests upon the capacity of man to assimilate 
 it. The Bible has been master of men because it 
 has said so many things which man's soul has been 
 fitted to appropriate. There has been no coercion 
 in the real process of achieving supremacy. The 
 
The Use and Misuse of the Bible 53 
 
 authority of the Bible does not depend upon any 
 claims to infallibility, upon any dogma of inspira- 
 tion. Rather it rests upon the fact that "man is 
 incurably religious", and setting forth the things of 
 religion, it awakens the spontaneous "amen" in 
 the soul of man. \Yhen God's will is written upon 
 the pages of a book, it finds itself duplicated upon 
 the tables of men's hearts, and in this fact resides 
 Its authority. "Behold, the days come, salth the 
 Lord, when I will put my law in their inward parts, 
 and in their hearts will I write it." If there were 
 no counterpart of the divine within us, to react to 
 the divine without us, the sound of the latter would 
 be as clanging brass and tinkling cymbals ! 
 
 3. A Christian Spirit. A chain may be no 
 stronger than its weakest link; but the Bible is as 
 strong as its strongest part. AnH that part is the 
 Christian part. The presence of Christ in the 
 Bible is the supreme fact. It might be said to be 
 the only important fact. Every inconsistency 
 should be interpreted by the rule of the higher, 
 not lower, revelation; every contradiction should 
 be resolved In the light of the Christian, not pre- 
 Christian or non-Christian ideal. Much in the Old 
 Testament Is of value, even though it Is not dis- 
 tinctly in accord with the highest ethical standards, 
 because it provides a strong background from 
 which the great picture of the religion of the spirit 
 in Jesus Christ stands forth In heroic proportions. 
 
54 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 It gives us an insight into the habits of mind of 
 the forbears of our Christian faith, and supplies 
 us with the grace of sympathy. It indicates the 
 continuity of that growth of religious life which 
 the Jews, In common with all other races, shared. 
 It thus commends the whole process of develop- 
 ment In spiritual culture as something more than 
 national, and links the inner life of many peoples 
 together. 
 
 But to-day, we are not under law, but grace. 
 Christ, not Moses, Is the genius of the Bible. It 
 Is his spirit which Is to be our criterion and none 
 other. We may gain a vivid total Impression of 
 Jesus. About the salient points In his character 
 we may agree. We may come to view life "under 
 the Christ aspect." When we have done all this, 
 let that Christ Ideal govern our Scriptural In- 
 terpretation, correcting all which is both Immature 
 and unworthy. "If Paul had been told that he 
 would be talked of as of equal authority with the 
 Lord, he would have burned his letters," pun- 
 gently remarks the late Professor Clarke. And 
 Paul would be anathema In his own eyes, were he 
 asked to substitute, for twentieth century Amer- 
 ica, his own strongly marked Jewish Interpreta- 
 tion of Jesus. 
 
 We may rest secure, then, upon the hidden and 
 enduring spiritual foundations of Scripture. We 
 know what God has revealed, because God has 
 
The Use and Misuse of the Bible 55 
 
 gifted us with the faculty whereby we recognize 
 it. We may leave the theme, using the noble 
 words of Sabatier: 
 
 "It is not because the Christian religion is in 
 the Bible that it is true. It is because it is in it- 
 self true that when you find it in the Bible you say 
 that the Bible teaches the truth." 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL 
 
 ONE of the most sublime and unruffled con- 
 fidences of Jesus was that goodness could not 
 only take care of itself, but at the same time make 
 more goodness. The leaven might lose its iden- 
 tity, but in the process it vitalized the dead dough. 
 The seed might be disintegrated In the soil, but 
 from it came a whole tree full of more seeds. The 
 talent might disappear in trade, but from the 
 transaction there would result two, five, or ten 
 more talents. The strong man fully armed can 
 not only keep his own goods in safety, but he 
 can, by defeating the marauder, make the safety 
 of the goods of the public more sure. The light 
 on the lampstand not only shines itself, but it 
 makes dark corners bright; the salt not only has 
 savor in itself, but it preserves that with which It 
 comes in contact. In a multitude of ways Jesus 
 illustrates this truth: that goodness can not only 
 keep Itself Intact, but can, by contagion, make its 
 environing envelop good as well. Bushnell uses 
 a quaint phrase to express this truth. ''The church 
 
 56 
 
The World, the Flesh and the Devil 57 
 
 is to possess the world by the outpopulating power 
 of the Christian stock." There is virtue enough 
 in Christian people not only to preserve them from 
 being spoiled from contact with evil, but also, and 
 more, to make them reproduce goodness by con- 
 tagion. 
 
 But in many quarters and for many generations 
 a contrary view has prevailed. Goodness' chief 
 business was to quarantine itself against the devil- 
 ishness of the world. The church was an ark of 
 safety, a city of refuge, a strong fortress of de- 
 fense against the spiritual hosts of wickedness. 
 Thus the church became the official patron and 
 custodian of goodness, which was to be preserved 
 only by keeping its skirts clear of the contaminat- 
 ing influence of evil. 
 
 On the other hand, the viewpoint of Jesus 
 would indicate that goodness Is a therapeutic to be 
 applied to social disease, an antiseptic to arrest 
 moral putrefaction, a prophylactic to destroy the 
 bacteria of sin, a leaven to vitalize the lump of so- 
 ciety, a healthy atmosphere breathing through the 
 miasma of the world, a spiritual free trade, pene- 
 trating every portion of the habitable globe. The 
 one absolutely essential factor In the relation be- 
 tween goodness and evil, is unhindered inter- 
 course between the two. Goodness is for the pur- 
 pose of world sanitation. It Is to establish a moral 
 hygiene. It is to save the world by becoming a 
 
58 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 part of it. 
 
 Two considerations are before us. 
 
 I. The True Alignment. What this is has 
 been hinted already. Not a concrete unified, spir- 
 itually superior organization known as the 
 "church", versus an unregenerate, heterogeneous 
 and immoral mass outside, known as the "world". 
 Rather it is the spirit of love and helpfulness 
 under the direction of Christ, versus the spirit of 
 hate and selfishness in despite of Christ. The 
 "world", as has been aptly observed, is "society 
 organized apart from God". There are not two 
 hemispheres, one of which is inhabited by good 
 and is called "the church", and the other of which 
 is inhabited by evil and is called "the world". 
 George Bernard Shaw, in a preface to one of his 
 plays, pungently has put the case. "The first com- 
 mon mistake to get rid of is that mankind consists 
 of a great mass of religious people, and a few 
 eccentric atheists. It consists of a huge mass of 
 worldly people and a small percentage of persons 
 deeply interested in religion and concerned about 
 their own souls and other people's. We pass our 
 lives among people who, whatever creeds they may 
 repeat, and in whatever temples they may avouch 
 their respectability and wear their Sunday clothes, 
 have robust consciences, and hunger and thirst, 
 not after righteousness, but for rich feeding and 
 comfort and social position and attractive mates 
 
The World, the Flesh and the Devil 59 
 
 and ease and respect and consideration; in short 
 for love and money." 
 
 It is to be feared that Shaw has only too justly 
 caricatured the church here. But he has done us 
 this service, that he cynically has called our atten- 
 tion to the fact that the true alignment is not be- 
 tween an organization known as "the church" and 
 all outside, known popularly as "the world, the 
 flesh and the devil". Rather, let It be repeated 
 the struggle is ever between the Incarnate spirit 
 of love and service under the direction of Christ, 
 wherever manifest; and the Incarnate spirit of 
 hate and selfishness in despite of Christ, wherever 
 manifest. In the words of Graham Taylor: 
 "The world can no longer be considered as a 
 sphere of human life separate from or antagonis- 
 tic to the church. Too much religion has gotten 
 out of the church Into the world to allow us to 
 think of all the good being In the church, and the 
 world as being nothing but evil." 
 
 The religion of the twentieth century will In- 
 sist, as never before, that he who Is not against 
 Christ is for him; and that by a man's fruits shall 
 he be known. On the other hand, it will have 
 stern words for those who cry "We be Abraham's 
 seed", and do not the works of Abraham, resting 
 their hope upon the dead merits of a spiritual pedi- 
 gree, rather than upon the quick virtue of a 
 righteous performance. The spirit of "the world" 
 
6o Unofficial Christianity 
 
 must be exorcised from the church, and the spirit 
 of the Christ must be recognized in the world, be- 
 fore the Kingdom in its right proportions can be 
 defined. For the Kingdom is greater than the 
 church, and its citizens are found without the 
 church. Either the church must expand and take 
 in the Kingdom, or the Kingdom will come into its 
 own without the church. If there are all too many 
 who cry ''Lord, Lord," and do not the works of 
 their Father, there are a growing host who, with- 
 out spiritual banner, sign or symbol, practise the 
 deeds of Christ. Of whom it may once again be 
 said, "They are not far from the Kingdom of 
 Heaven." 
 
 After the true alignment, comes: 
 
 IL The True Task. Goodness is inherently 
 stronger than evil. There is in it the germ of a 
 spiritual contagion. It is more than the posses- 
 sion of a defensive armor. It is more than having 
 a stoutness and robustness of character sufficient 
 to withstand malign forces. Goodness has re- 
 productive as well as self-defensive powers. It is 
 dynamic, not static. It is not a monk; it is a cru- 
 sader. Confronted with specific evil, goodness 
 ahke preserves itself and destroys its foe by con- 
 tact with the world, not by withdrawal from it. 
 Almost it might be said that the only hope for im- 
 proving the health of goodness, is its stern struggle 
 with evil. 
 
The World, the Flesh and the Devil 6i 
 
 The practical way in which the religion of the 
 twentieth century is going to deal with evil is not 
 far to seek. There are some forms of human 
 activity which, by common consent, are perceived 
 to have such a preponderating weight of un- 
 adulterated evil, that, like a thoroughly rotten 
 fruit, there is no hope to save them. Enlightened 
 sentiment, under moral tutelage, has relegated 
 them to the scrapheap. Such are legalized prosti- 
 tution, state-protected liquor traffic, state-main- 
 tained lotteries, chattel slavery, and piracy 
 on the high seas. But other forms of 
 activity are evil in their operation only 
 because a certain modicum of taint or poison 
 inheres in them. Through abuse of the principle 
 of moderation or through association with forces 
 themselves irredeemable, these activities which are 
 not intrinsically demoralizing, have become so- 
 cially indefensible. Obviously the task of Chris- 
 tianity is to strain off the virus, leaving the sound 
 body. It is common to say that certain amuse- 
 ments "leave a bad taste in your mouth." Walt 
 Mason, the preacher with the biggest American 
 audience, has put it thus: 
 
 "And every time you see a play 
 And read a book that makes a jest 
 
 Of love or home, you throw away 
 Some part of you that is the best." 
 
62 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 Some forms of business have been so dragged 
 In the mire that a self-respecting man finds it hard 
 to engage in them. Among the ancients, politics 
 used to be an honorable profession, but "profes- 
 sional politician" to-day carries with it an un- 
 coveted stigma. The promoting of amusement 
 parks, seaside resorts, race-tracks and theatres has 
 resulted often In hoodlumism, gambling, and gen- 
 eral looseness of living. A very large number of 
 social activities are in the main innocuous, but 
 handled improperly they become demoralized and 
 demoralizing. The good in them really more than 
 counterbalances the evil. Yet because the vicious 
 Is present, they become a social menace. 
 
 There are two ways In which decent, clean- 
 minded, and high-idealed people treat these so- 
 called "questionable" things. One class, regard- 
 ing them as hopelessly Irredeemable, taboos them 
 in toto. With a quite characteristic interpretation 
 of Scripture to suit their own views, they uphold 
 their action by the Pauline words, "touch not, 
 taste not, handle not." They believe that the 
 world will never be safe for righteousness until 
 these moot forms of diversion are relegated to 
 the limbo of Satan, where by nature they belong. 
 This class of people may not be numerically 
 strong, but in the counsels of the theology of or- 
 thodoxy they are Imposingly Influential. The 
 other class will avow frankly that they have a lik- 
 
The World, the Flesh and the Devil 63 
 
 Ing for the "best" of these tabood amusements. 
 They patronize the movies with wise discrimina- 
 tion; they attend their children to their school 
 dances; they spend an evening with cards now and 
 then in the company of friends. The difference 
 between these two attitudes of mind is more than 
 a superficial one. It strikes to the very root of 
 Christian faith. It is the difference between re- 
 nouncing the world and redeeming it, between dis- 
 carding the dough and leavening it, between the 
 asceticism of the monk and the evangelism of 
 Christ. The former view confesses the impotency 
 of Christianity to transform society; the latter 
 view holds that Christianity is meant to substitute 
 good for evil by fearless contact, the one with the 
 other. In every community there is needed an as- 
 sociation of friends of normal, wholesome life, 
 who shall let it be known that they will vigorously 
 and sympathetically support all forms of amuse- 
 ment which appeal to the fine, true, healthy manly 
 and womanly qualities in people; which promote 
 sane, sound and essentially optimistic attitudes to- 
 ward life; which are not socially disruptive, debas- 
 ing or demoralizing. The proprietors and pro- 
 moters of all such forms of diversion will be quick 
 to note the increased patronage when the bill of 
 fare which they offer is not only palatable, but 
 wholesome. 
 
 The secret of safety is not separation, but con- 
 
64 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 secration. The religion of the twentieth century- 
 will hold as one of its cardinal principles, that the 
 possession of a passion for God will make men not 
 only immune from evil, but creative of good. To 
 be in the world but not of it, is the business of 
 Christ's followers. In the words of the late Malt- 
 bie Babcock, "We cannot know or enjoy or love 
 the world too much, if God's will controls us. . . . 
 Worldllness is not the love of the world, but 
 slavishness to It." 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 TIMES, SACRAMENTS AND THE MAN 
 
 PERHAPS the most fascinating study for the 
 student of Christian origins, Is that which per- 
 tains to those venerable and well-established in- 
 stitutions known as Sabbath observance, baptism, 
 and the Lord's Supper. Because when the student 
 has penetrated a little below the surface in his 
 investigations, he will discover that the roots of 
 these customs run down into pre-Christian pagan- 
 ism. It will appear to him, therefore, that what 
 Christianity has done with them, has been to 
 adapt them to Christian thought, reinterpret them 
 in the light of Christian ideals, and reinvest them 
 with truer spiritual meaning. The Graeco-Roman 
 world possessed its altars, temples, festival days, 
 mystic rites and sacerdotal ceremonies. And when 
 the Christian dynamic moved paganism from Its 
 foundation, It did not annihilate so much as it as- 
 similated. It took the days and places and cults 
 and gave them different content and significance. 
 
 Jesus himself formally established neither the 
 Sabbath nor the sacraments. The former was a 
 
 65 
 
66 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 Jewish religious festival, firmly established in the 
 nation through contact with Babylonian heathen- 
 dom. The latter were developed out of Greek 
 and Jewish rites. Early Christian usage trans- 
 ferred the sanctity from Saturday, the Jewish 
 Sabbath, to Sunday, the Christian day com- 
 memorative of the resurrection. As such it has 
 continued to be regarded with especial favor and 
 partiality. Jesus did not baptize nor did he in- 
 clude that function in the first and greatest com- 
 mission which He gave to His followers when He 
 told them to "preach, saying, 'The Kingdom of 
 God Is at hand. Heal the sick, raise the dead, 
 cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.' " No sub- 
 sequent commission carries the unquestioned tex- 
 tual authenticity that this does, nor in the slightest 
 degree weakens nor invalidates the force of these 
 injunctions. The last and popularly called "great 
 commission" recorded in the two closing verses of 
 Matthew's gospel quite justly is open to the im- 
 putation of pseudonymity, since the disciples, in 
 their earliest labors, followed a policy directly con- 
 tradictory to that of "evangelizing all nations" 
 and using the Trinitarian formula in baptism. This 
 fact, that the primitive church never dreamed of 
 world-wide missionary effort, and initiated its con- 
 verts through the mystic use of the name of Jesus 
 Christ, and not that of the Trinity, militates finally 
 against the genuineness of the Matthew commis- 
 
Times, Sacraments and the Man 67 
 
 slon. It is not for one moment to be believed 
 that had the eleven really received this solemn 
 and final charge, they would have so totally ig- 
 nored it as the record in Acts indicates they did. 
 It is common knowledge that, far from consider- 
 ing the Greek world as equally heir of the gospel, 
 all of the disciples up to Paul strenuously fought 
 the propaganda of "proselyting all nations," re- 
 garding Jesus as a Jewish Messiah, and the prom- 
 ises of the Kingdom limited to the Hebrew race. 
 And touching the baptismal formula, the thought 
 was always Christocentric, as the reiterated 
 phrase "baptize into the name of Jesus Christ" 
 indicates. 
 
 There is likewise strong critical evidence that 
 when Jesus partook of the final passover with his 
 disciples, and added the touching symbol of the 
 bread and the wine, he was not instituting a new 
 sacrament for perpetual observance. Rather did 
 he wish that whenever his friends lifted the 
 broken bread and the red wine to their lips, they 
 should lovingly think of him. "This do in re- 
 membrance of me. ... As oft as ye do this, ye 
 do show forth [i. e. testify to] the Lord's death 
 till he come." To the pious Jew, every meal was 
 sacramental, for there in spirit Jehovah met with 
 him, and Jesus desired his disciples symbolically 
 to feast with him in like manner. The primitive 
 church made the Eucharist a part of the common 
 
68 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 meal and never formally and officially set it aside 
 by a ritual or sacramental name. 
 
 The derivation of these three Christian insti- 
 tutions — the so-called "Sabbath," the rite of bap- 
 tism and the communion of the Lord's Supper — 
 has been dwelt upon at length for this purpose, to 
 point out how free the apostolic church was in 
 adapting old customs to present needs. The su- 
 preme demand was for vehicles of thought and 
 feeling adequate to convey spiritual truth. The 
 Sabbath, baptism and the Supper were to be trans- 
 parent media, through which the grace of God 
 was to shine upon his children. If, in the chang- 
 ing circumstances of time and place, these media 
 became inadequate to perform that function, it 
 certainly would be the part of common sense to 
 modify them until they again could accomplish the 
 task for which they were devised. The house in 
 which one lives is the same house the year round. 
 But in summer it answers the purpose of keeping 
 one cool; in winter it answers the opposite pur- 
 pose of keeping one warm. Once, men scratched 
 the ground with a pointed stick; now they tear it 
 deep with a plow. Their object is the same in 
 both cases. Thus in the matter of the institutions 
 and sacraments of Christian faith, the great prin- 
 ciple is that of accommodation, making the means 
 adequate and efficient to produce the end. 
 
 Take the Sabbath first. The classic and all- 
 
Times, Sacraments and the Man 69 
 
 sufficient word of Jesus is "the Sabbath was made 
 for man, not man for the Sabbath. Therefore the 
 Son of Man is Lord also of the Sabbath." A cor- 
 rect understanding of the latter phrase will throw 
 much light on the whole question. Jesus spoke in 
 Aramaic, the popular dialect of the Jews. And in 
 this tongue, the expression "son of" commonly- 
 meant a single, individual member of a generic 
 group of things. Thus the above-quoted phrase 
 may well mean, "each man is Lord of the Sab- 
 bath," — a quite natural conclusion from the dec- 
 laration that "the Sabbath was made for man." 
 The kernel, therefore, of this logion of Jesus 
 about the Sabbath, is that the day, as an institu- 
 tion, is a means to an end. The complete welfare 
 of man is that end. If the Sabbath, as an ob- 
 served institution, truly ministers to the all-round 
 good of man, it should be preserved. If it does 
 not, it must be modified or abandoned. Now our 
 trouble to-day is this: we do not so much abuse 
 the Sabbath as we abuse man. We place a low, 
 cheap, and unworthy value upon him, and then 
 modify all our Sabbath usages to meet this new 
 demand, justifying our procedure by the declara- 
 tion that we are thus making man "lord of the 
 Sabbath." But we grossly slander man when we 
 map out his regeneration by means of a program 
 of more amusement, warmer clothes, better food 
 and greater leisure, — and stop there. When we 
 
70 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 do this, it is inevitable that "Sabbatarianism" ap- 
 pears as a check in our effort to reform men in 
 this material way. So we exultantly quote Jesus* 
 words about "the Sabbath being made for man," 
 and sweep aside all the conventions as being prud- 
 ish, "Puritanical" and out of date. It would be 
 well for us tq' remember that we never shall 
 do justice either to God or man, until we esti- 
 mate man at his highest value. So long as we take 
 materialistic and "pleasure" views of life, and 
 try to fit man, the "noblest work. of God," into 
 such a petty scheme, just so long shall we degrade 
 man and misunderstand God's purpose for him. 
 What are life's supremest values? Fun, food, 
 money, might? If we are after these, we shall 
 have no use at all for any kind of an institution 
 called the "Sabbath." But if honor, truth, sym- 
 pathy, love really make men, then the influences 
 of Sunday as a day apart from other days are 
 needful in his life. If we think of man as Christ 
 thought of him, we shall try to conserve in him 
 those traits which mark him as different from the 
 animals. If the Sabbath laws help to do this, we 
 shall keep them; if they do not, we shall discard 
 them. This cuts both deep and wide. If Sab- 
 batarianism works for the physical, mental, moral, 
 social, and spiritual uplift of the modern man, the 
 religion of the twentieth century endorses it. But 
 there can be no inflexible rule for all. What 
 
Times, Sacraments and the Man 71 
 
 fits one community may not lit another. Men who 
 rot in skims, who feed machines, who are bound 
 to the stupifying treadmill of monotonous manual 
 toil, need a kind of rejuvenation and revitalizing 
 on Sunday that most others do not. "Sabbatarian- 
 ism," as commonly understood, would be a mill- 
 stone about the neck of the industrial classes. To 
 run everybody through the same mould of Sabbath 
 legislation would be as stupid, disastrous, and 
 wicked as it would be to establish a national com- 
 pulsory bill of fare, irrespective of the ages, tem- 
 peraments, appetites and physical peculiarities of 
 the one hundred and more million people of this 
 country. We should eat food to sustain life, and 
 we should observe Sunday for the same reason. 
 When we take an eternally worthwhile view of 
 life, we shall know how to nourish ourselves on 
 Sunday as well as on every other day. 
 
 In like manner, we shall regard the sacraments 
 as binding and indispensable, only as they effectu- 
 ally teach certain great and deathless truths to 
 heart and mind. Baptism is in itself nothing. 
 Jesus never made it a means of salvation. It may 
 have absolutely no illuminating or instructing 
 power for a not inconsiderable number of people 
 who are so constituted as not to need the help 
 of symbol or object-lesson in order to assimilate 
 truth. In either form, immersion or sprinkling, 
 the baptismal formula impresses the twofold truth 
 
72 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 of a cleansed past and a spirit-filled future. "As 
 in a figure" the recipient of the rite sees his sins 
 washed away and is assured of the incoming grace 
 of God. To many, this sacrament is truly a 
 "means of grace." The reality of God's forgive- 
 ness and re-enforcing power becomes vital and 
 concrete through the act of immersion or sprink- 
 ling. But to many others it adds nothing to the 
 experience which is already theirs. They have 
 felt the cleansing effect of God's love; they are 
 convinced that God is in them, "the hope of 
 glory." The rite of baptism, therefore, neither 
 adds to the solemn joy of an experienced new 
 birth, nor detracts from it. To the sacrament 
 they passively submit, as a conventional formula. 
 Others there are, and they are a growing num- 
 ber, who actually resent the imputation that any 
 form, symbol, or sacrament is needed when they 
 have come to reahze that they are God's children 
 and the recipients of his favor. 
 
 The question, therefore, becomes an insistent 
 one : in view of the variety of honestly differing 
 opinion, and bearing in mind the original failure 
 of Jesus to inaugurate this rite and the impossi- 
 bility of insisting upon this symbol as an indispen- 
 sable means of salvation, can the religion of the 
 twentieth century continue to make baptism a uni- 
 versal and compulsory method of initiation into 
 the realm of God? If what has b^en above con- 
 
Times, Sacraments and the Man 73 
 
 tended is true, then we may be confident that if 
 and when men come to experience vitally the 
 cleansing power of God's love and forgivness, and 
 the quickening effect of his continued presence 
 within their hearts, — the twofold truth which is 
 symbolized by the rite of baptism, — they will be 
 found more and more generally discarding the 
 sacrament while exalting the truth. 
 
 The same line of argument holds for the sacra- 
 ment of the Supper, with this difference. Whereas 
 it must inevitably fall into disuse as a mystic 
 means whereby God's grace is conferred upon 
 the believer, it will persist and grow in meaning 
 as a memorial or fellowship meal. Baptism is an 
 act quite foreign to our normal living, but men will 
 continue to break bread and take the cup so long 
 as life shall last. It is therefore quite possible 
 to stress the sacrament of the Supper, as it is not 
 possible to exalt that of baptism. Only in doing 
 the former, the twentieth century religion, mind- 
 ful of the symbolic nature of the rite, will more 
 and more insist that the whole occasion be one In 
 which the same kind of spiritual fellowship with 
 Christ be recognized, as men recognize with one 
 another when they eat and drink in love and help- 
 fulness. As an essential, indispensable, and offi- 
 cially established means of salvation, the Supper 
 never can hold the hearts and minds of modern 
 men. As a touching reminder and symbol of 
 
74 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 that larger fellowship of men with men, and men 
 with God, it will continue to make its appeal. 
 
 The world is hungry, not for signs and symbols, 
 but for truth and reality. We are to be "trans- 
 formed by the renewing of our minds, that we 
 may prove what is the good and acceptable and 
 perfect will of God" ; we are to bring it to pass 
 that "Christ may dwell in our hearts by faith . . . 
 that we may be filled with all the fulness of God." 
 Do the sacraments efficiently minister to this end? 
 If they do, we shall hold them; If they do not, they 
 must go. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 JUST BEING GOOD 
 
 IT is significant that when Jesus desired to 
 show the real connection between religion and 
 morals, he quoted an Old Testament prophet. He 
 was being criticized harshly for the Infraction of 
 the caste system which decreed that pious relig- 
 ionists should not break bread at the same table 
 with the non-conformists and unorthodox. In re- 
 ply to his detractors, Jesus called their attention 
 to the fact that they did not know what religion 
 in its essence was, if they could pursue such prac- 
 tices. Fellowship, kindly consideration and com- 
 radeship are of infinitely more worth than ritual 
 and sacrament. Out of the mouth of their own 
 revered prophet would he confute them. "Go," 
 said he, "and get truly acquainted with the mean- 
 ing of this word — 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice.' " 
 Not from the prophets had the Pharisees 
 drawn their sanction for the violent and unnatural 
 divorcing of morals from worship. From Elijah 
 even unto MalachI the burden of the prophetic 
 message was the abhorrence of Almighty God for 
 
 75 
 
76 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 any ritual that was not productive of justice, 
 mercy, and truth. In this respect, Jesus simply 
 reiterated with a supreme emphasis the sermon 
 messages of these ancient preachers of social 
 righteousness. In the mind of Jesus, religion and 
 morality were absolutely inseparable. They were 
 like the tree and the fruit which it bears; like the 
 thought and the word which springs to the lips 
 to express it; like the music in the heart of the 
 composer and the song which he sings for the 
 world; like the mother's love and the tender care 
 which that love inspires. Devotion, worship, 
 love, loyalty, faith, — these are the ingredients of a 
 religion that is imperishable. Justice, mercy, ser- 
 vice, goodness, — these are the moral fruits of 
 such a religion. From the days of the prophets 
 even until now religion has been done to death 
 in the house of its friends, who have not hesitated 
 to recommend, by precept and example, a course 
 of life based upon cultus, ritual, and ceremony 
 alone. As a result there has been a vast deal of 
 altogether superfluous sneering at "mere moral- 
 ity" on the part of those professing to be "re- 
 ligious." Youth have been warned solemnly that 
 "morality alone cannot inherit the Kingdom of 
 God." Blameless characters outside the church 
 have been held up as fearful examples of the un- 
 worthy end of non-Christians. To such an ex- 
 treme has this been carried that literature has 
 
Just Being Good 77 
 
 freely caricatured the man of religious pretensions 
 devoid of moral actions, and It has besmirched the 
 fair name of morality by calling such a man 
 ''moral" when as a matter of fact he was neither 
 religious nor moral. 
 
 Hence there has arisen the startllngly unchris- 
 tian assumption, that good as a man may be. If 
 he Is not religious there Is something the matter 
 with him. By a curious perverseness of reason- 
 ing It has been believed that an Impeccable char- 
 acter Is something to be rather ashamed of If Its 
 possessor can not show a card of membership in 
 an evangelical church. 
 
 Leaving for the time being all further discus- 
 sion of the relation between religion and ethics, 
 let us ask this question: "Who Is the good man?" 
 If we are able to answer this query, it will be 
 easier to show how morals are grounded In faith. 
 Nothing will throw more light upon this matter 
 than the temper and attitude of Jesus. Whatever 
 else he was, he was supremely good. He demon- 
 strated this goodness, for one thing, by: 
 
 I. Altruistic Attentiveness. He was sensitive 
 to a vaster w^orld than his fellows were. The 
 circle of his interests included infinite dimensions. 
 His relation to life was wide-eyed and far-sighted. 
 He answered a cosmic, not a local appeal. In It 
 all, his position was uprightly and downrightly 
 unselfish. We absolve him from any and every 
 
78 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 mercenary end. His awareness of the universe 
 was not that he might make the universe serve 
 his ambitions. His one injunction, "love thy 
 neighbor as thyself," when interpreted by his Hfe, 
 summed up this characteristic of disinterested vis- 
 ion. For necessity, not propinquity, is the con- 
 dition of "neighborness." To know this need, 
 wherever around the world it may be, and to 
 know it to alleviate it, is altruistic attentiveness, 
 the first requisite of goodness. 
 
 This, it should be noted, is exactly opposed to 
 the motive and conduct of the Caesars, Napo- 
 leons, and Kaisers. Their view, to be sure, is 
 world-wide. Their circle of interests takes in all 
 nations. They concern themselves with the af- 
 fairs of mankind. They are aware of the gigantic 
 proportions of human relations, and project their 
 plans upon great canvases. But the sole aim 
 and end of their prodigious adventures, is egotistic, 
 not altruistic. Personal glory and aggrandize- 
 ment is the sum of their efforts. The world is to 
 be their football, with the goal posts directly 
 ahead, and their toe at the leather. They scorn 
 small views, but think In world terms only to loot 
 the world. 
 
 Others there be who, eschewing narrow out- 
 looks on life, plan to accomplish heroic things for 
 a small and select circle of friends. These men 
 are sometimes called patriots, because they aim to 
 
Just Being Good 79 
 
 exalt their country and their countrymen. But in 
 doing so, they are willing to trample upon the 
 rights of other states and races. They are wide- 
 eyed not for selfish reasons, perhaps, but surely 
 not for broadly altruistic reasons. They would 
 have their interests and those of their fellow citi- 
 zens triumph at the expense of the rest of the 
 world. None of these men can be convicted of 
 a lack of attention to the world about them. The 
 difference between them and the good man is 
 this : that the former acquaint themselves with 
 the world to consume the world, and the latter, to 
 uplift the world. 
 
 This indicates the criterion whereby we judge 
 of a man's "public spirit." Without this admir- 
 able personal characteristic, a man thinks in a 
 small circle, is aware of a limited world, or else, 
 conceiving of life in large dimensions, puts him- 
 self, like a spider in his web, at the centre of the 
 whole scheme. But possessing public spirit, he is 
 first convinced of the fact that his fellow citizens 
 are interesting people, their occupations, recrea- 
 tions and careers in general are as vital to the 
 community as his own, and their rights to be as 
 firmly respected as he would have others respect 
 his. He is thus a man of more than one idea, 
 who includes humanity in the field of his interest- 
 ing review, and who believes that his own life is 
 worth nothing if not a part of the larger world- 
 
8o Unofficial Christianity 
 
 whole. 
 
 Another characteristic of the good man is: 
 II. Absolute World-Sensitiveness. He is 
 touched with the feelings of the world's infirmi- 
 ties. The pain of all mankind is his pain, and the 
 joy of all mankind is his joy. Jesus gazes at 
 Jerusalem and weeps the bitterest tears ever shed 
 from mortal eyes. Why? Because it is the city 
 which is soon to take his life? No. Because it 
 is callous to God and deaf to righteousness. Sa- 
 vonarola agonizes over Florence. Why? Because 
 it is preparing the faggots and stake and torch 
 for him? No. Because it has returned to its 
 vanities and sensualities, like a dog to its vomit. 
 Francis of Assisi breaks his heart over the monks 
 of his new order. Why? Because they turned 
 their backs on that which was dear to him? No. 
 Because they have forsaken the Christ for wealth 
 and honor and power. Why should Jesus con- 
 cern himself about the fate of Jerusalem? Why 
 should Savonarola be troubled about licentious 
 Florence? Why should Francis mourn for weak 
 Italian monks? They were responsible for none 
 of these evils. They had tried to avert them. 
 Why not wash their hands, Pilate-wise, of the 
 whole transaction? Why worry when one is not 
 blameworthy? Enough for a man to feel re- 
 morse for his own delinquencies, without adding 
 superfluous misery for misdoings which cannot 
 
Just Being Good 8i 
 
 be charged against him! In short: why expect 
 that In the domain of moral evil a man should feel 
 sorrow for that which he neither commits himself 
 nor for which he Is In the slightest degree respon- 
 sible? The world would be a good bit nearer the 
 millennium if every culpable man and woman in 
 It recognized his and her culpability and tried to 
 atone for It. 
 
 But It Is right at this point that the truly good 
 advances beyond the merely respectable. It Is 
 not enough to mourn for your own sins and make 
 atonement for your own transgressions. Not thus 
 will the eternal realm of God come. Respecta- 
 bility owns to Its faults when It has been con- 
 vinced of them, and seriously attempts rectifica- 
 tion. But goodness feels pain for the faults of 
 others, for which It Is not In the slightest degree 
 responsible, and disinterestedly tries to restore 
 the sinner. It Is just this extra sensitiveness to the 
 sin of the world that marks the good man. No 
 man Is really moral who does not feel some of 
 the pain of the evil and sting of the sin which has 
 never come nigh him and which he never has 
 committed. 
 
 This Is vicariousness. It is the capacity to 
 enter Into the world woe arising from world sin, 
 with the end of promoting world righteousness. 
 It Is the real, poignant agony of good men and 
 women everywhere to-day. The divine power to 
 
82 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 feel the tragedy of life, from which one is per- 
 sonally immune,- — this it is upon which the hope 
 of the world rests. In this sense Jesus "bore our 
 griefs and carried our sorrows." In this sense 
 "he was wounded for our transgressions and 
 bruised for our iniquities." And in that same 
 sense the good man carries the cross of the world 
 to-day. Too often the malefactor is callous to 
 his own sin; he is indifferent to the wreck and 
 misery which it causes. Who feels the pain the 
 deepest? The one who is free from all blame 
 and removed from all the direct consequences, — 
 the good man. The crime of the city rises as a 
 reek to heaven, and who wears out the night 
 watches in prayer and fasting and the day season 
 in hoping and planning for cleaner things? The 
 men and women who have not stained the fair 
 name of the city nor turned it into the way of 
 death. Why should they distress/ themselves? 
 There are no painful consequences which they 
 should fear from the hand of the law. They are 
 innocent of great transgression. They are even 
 sure of escaping the misery and material loss 
 which follows in the train of civic misdeeds. But 
 their passion for civic righteousness is so con- 
 suming that even though they are themselves 
 blameless and immune from the disastrous conse- 
 quences, they cry over the disgrace of their city 
 with a great and bitter cry. A morality which 
 
Just Being Good 83 
 
 cannot shake a man out of his own smug immacu- 
 lateness and complacent respectability is as dead 
 as the mummy of Pharaoh. The good man loves 
 goodness so much that it is as a sword piercing 
 his heart to see it scorned anywhere. He is cruci- 
 fied afresh to save the world. He would lay down 
 his life to lift up the ideal. 
 
 A third and final trait of the good man is: 
 III. Creative Social-Mindedness. Note what 
 this ideal follower of morality has done. First, he 
 has broadened the domain of his observation un- 
 til it includes all humanity, and in his observation 
 of men and manners he is actuated by good-will 
 and magnanimous interest. Second, he not only 
 feels a sensitiveness to wrong for which he is re- 
 sponsible, but a pain for the tragic consequences 
 of others' misdeeds, from the inconveniences or 
 misfortunes of which he may be totally Immune. 
 But to altruistic attentlveness and absolute world- 
 sensltlveness must be added a constructive faculty, 
 that of creative social-mlndedness. Viewing the 
 world and feeling for the world from the most 
 generous angle are not enough, — there must be 
 action toward the Ideal. The good man must 
 take counsel with others of like disposition for 
 the organization of righteousness, for the co-ordi- 
 nation of right thinking and feeling, — In short, 
 for the creation of a new heaven and a new earth. 
 The age of an Individualistic goodness is by. 
 
84 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 There never was such a thing, although men 
 thought there was. Mere decency and conven- 
 tional respectabihty are content to keep the law, 
 pay tithes of mint, anise and cummin and thank 
 God that they are not as other men are. Such 
 making broad of phylacteries and general apothe- 
 osis of Pharisaism will not save a man against the 
 day of reckoning, neither will it build up a so- 
 ciety that is worth the saving. No man can grow 
 good alone. All goodness is social in its genesis 
 or its exodus. So long as plums grow together on 
 trees and men live together in society, so long 
 will both plums and men ripen and rot collectively. 
 Cashing in the remark, with a certain discount off 
 when we remember the source, we may accept 
 Shaw's words for what they are worth, that "a 
 man who is better than his fellows is a nuisance." 
 Surely a man who is devoid of creative social- 
 mindedness, and solemnly labors to be good 
 by himself in a corner, is at least an "undesirable 
 citizen." But he who would surround the indi- 
 vidual with the restraints and encouragements 
 necessary for an organized, corporate, and collec- 
 tive righteousness, takes the final step in the pur- 
 suit of goodness. For he brings it into line with 
 the processes of race and state and family develop- 
 ment, which are in their essence and in their ex- 
 pression purely social. 
 
 The mainspring of such morality is religion. 
 
Just Being Good 85 
 
 However true it may be that the church and offi- 
 cial Christianity are not indispensable for the 
 creation and fostering of altruistic attentiveness, 
 world-wide sensitiveness and purposeful social- 
 mindedness, it cannot be maintained that these 
 ethical ideals grow out of the air or out of the 
 rock. They take root in the good ground, which 
 is religion in its deepest and most far-reaching 
 sense. We are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses 
 to this truth, for wherever we find men and women 
 laboring most sacrificingly and perseveringly for 
 human welfare, we find men and women who be- 
 lieve that humanity has an eternally worth-while 
 destiny. This is to believe in the permanence of 
 the spiritual, which is essentially religion. Bald 
 materialism and unblushing atheism do not sup- 
 ply a platform broad enough to support a thor- 
 oughgoing and consistent ethic. The social con- 
 sciousness is possessed by those who know that 
 God is, and that he is working out his eternal pur- 
 poses in the stumbling pilgrimages of men, his 
 children. The day is past when religion may say 
 to ethics, "I will have none of thee," or when 
 ethics may reply, "And I am not of thee." A 
 faith in the divine order and the ultimate benefi- 
 cent end of the universe, is a faith in God, and 
 this faith it is which always has and always will 
 nerve the arm of the moral man to service, and 
 fill his heart with an unquenchable courage. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE MATTER 
 
 OFFICIAL Christianity has had its day. 
 That which is to be will not need the sanc- 
 tion of established authority. It will be because 
 it must be. It will be the renascence of that pro- 
 phetic oracle, — "I will put my law in their in- 
 ward parts and in their heart will I write it, saith 
 the Lord." And it will be characterized broadly 
 by the following traits. 
 
 I. Democracy. Now is the judgment of this 
 world on autocracy. Now is the emancipation 
 of the imprisoned spirit of democracy. The king- 
 doms of the world are becoming the common- 
 wealths of the people. The twilight of the im- 
 perial gods is here. Into every department of 
 life and thought is the spirit of democracy filter- 
 ing. Can religion escape it? Not for long, else 
 it will pass into that limbo of myth and fable re- 
 served for the worn-out superstitions of inani- 
 mate races. 
 
 But some will say, "Religion is and always 
 has been democratic." Unpatronized by kings 
 
 86 
 
The Conclusion of the Whole Matter 87 
 
 and unformulated by councils, this may be true. 
 True religion "bloweth where it llsteth, and we 
 hear the voice thereof, but know not whence it 
 cometh and whither it goeth." Religion in a dog- 
 matic straight-jacket has been and is the religion 
 with which the world is most familiar. Religion 
 formulated, crystallized, conventionalized, hob- 
 bled by the weight of majority votes in ecumeni- 
 cal councils, dressed out In obsolete verbiage and 
 pranked out in disproved philosophies, — this is 
 standardized religion, which would bend the free 
 human spirit to wear Its inflexible yoke, and in- 
 tended by God to be a moving river of truth, be- 
 come instead a stagnant dead sea. 
 
 The undemocratic aspect of modern official 
 Christianity is plainly noted in two directions: 
 first, its creeds are rigid. Democracy demands 
 that all forms of government, platforms of social 
 relations, and expressions of faith, shall be flexi- 
 ble enough to accommodate themselves to genuine 
 and vital changes in men. An unmodifiable creed 
 is as monstrous an anomaly as an unmodifiable 
 machine. As the hand-press of Gutenberg, with 
 its rough wooden types, is related to the multiple 
 Hoe press with its linotype auxiliary to-day, — so 
 should the creeds of the time of Luther be to the 
 creeds of the present. A most casual glance at 
 ecclesiastical dogma will satisfy the most sanguine 
 reformer that this is not so. Instead of being an 
 
88 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 Instrument to express thought, the official creed 
 to-day is one which represses thought. It should 
 be elastic, mobile, responsive to needs, sensitive 
 to creative ideas. With every turn of the wheel 
 of time, new aspects of God's truth are brought 
 to view. Is a stereotyped creed adequate Intel- 
 lectually and emotionally to set forth this new 
 aspect? With every wind which blows from over- 
 seas come tidings of triumphs of the democratic 
 principle. Is an official creed competent to pic- 
 ture forth the new soul relations which those vic- 
 tories mean? Let any man, In his unsophisti- 
 cated enthusiasm, attempt to mobilize the fixed 
 creeds of Christendom In the Interest of fresKly 
 discovered truth, and he will discover speedily 
 how worse than vain are all his honest efforts. 
 The unofficial and freely working thought-forms 
 of the future, candidly reflecting the experience 
 of the growing race, will be democratic in their 
 spirit. They will be open to revision from below 
 up, and not from above down. Prelates and 
 potentates will listen when the people rise up to 
 say what they have learned about God. 
 
 The second ground for a belief that official 
 Christianity is not democratic, is the undeniable 
 hostility of the proletariat toward It. A demo- 
 crat will be quick to detect the spirit of democracy 
 everywhere, and if he saw it in the orthodox 
 creeds of the day, he would show his friendship 
 
The Conclusion of the Whole Matter 89 
 
 for them. It is a matter of common knowledge, 
 however, that wherever two or three of the par- 
 tisans of democracy are gathered together, there 
 is no official creed of Christendom In their midst. 
 In their planning for the ideal state, wherein 
 dwelleth righteousness, these passionate souls can 
 find no corner where they may set up an orthodox 
 dogma. The man who toils with his hand looks 
 upon official Christianity to-day, and asks why the 
 men with whom he can have no truce until a bet- 
 ter industrial order prevails, are all in the places 
 of honor and responsibility within the sacred in- 
 stitution. This man who labors would worship 
 (jod and serve him but finds no comfort in the 
 forms which are the breath of life in the great 
 churches about him. The simple fact that the 
 mass of our church-membership is composed of 
 the so-called middle class — the salaried, profes- 
 sional, and capital-owning classes — is an evidence 
 that the original purpose of Christianity, which 
 was a solvent of all ranks and artificial distinc- 
 tions, has been rather lost sight of. Rightly or 
 wrongly, the average unchurched workingman re- 
 gards the doctrines of official Christianity as 
 shrewd attempts to becloud the bread-and-butter 
 issues of life by exalting the virtues of "other- 
 worldliness" and inculcating the doubtful grace of 
 meekness under present injustice. Religion thus 
 is considered as a comfortable device to keep the 
 
90 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 poor man contented with his lot, while promising 
 him a doubtful posthumous felicity. It is thus in- 
 jurious to the framework of society by virtue of 
 its platform of pure speculation and intangible 
 rewards and punishments. Lulled to sleep by 
 these poppied promises, and stranded upon the 
 shore of the Lotus eaters, the proletariat may be 
 regarded as safely disposed of while their heredi- 
 tary antagonists, the employers and capitalists, 
 pursue their predatory purposes, without molesta- 
 tion or indictment. 
 
 Untrue as this accusation against official Chris- 
 tianity may be, the very fact that it can be made 
 with a certain plausible passion, proves that all 
 is not as it should be with the orthodox creeds and 
 their defenders. When once the latter have been 
 willing to democratize the former, and stand by 
 such radically revised platforms, consistently bear- 
 ing out in their lives the professions which they 
 make in their dogmas, then those who to-day are 
 implacably hostile to religion as they know it may 
 find it in their hearts to change their views of that 
 institution inspired by the greatest Friend that 
 the laborer ever had. 
 
 IL Idealism. The pristine splendor of Chris- 
 tianity was tarnished early by a lust for material 
 possession. Conceived in the fires of a passion 
 for universal good-will, truth, and righteousness, 
 it bade fair to win the world to the most exalted 
 
The Conclusion of .the Whole Matter 91 
 
 moral and spiritual standard ever lifted among 
 men. Then came popularity, power, official rec- 
 ognition, opulence, and the vision splendid faded 
 into the common light of day. Christianity im- 
 perialized became Christianity demoralized. The 
 unique ethical elements which distinguished it 
 from all other religious movements that ever had 
 been, were lost in a mad scramble for place and 
 worldly emolument. The Holy Roman Empire, 
 the embodiment of the hierarchical system 
 throughout the world, had sold its spiritual birth- 
 right for a mess of pottage. The poison with 
 which the body of Christianity was at that time 
 infected has not been drained off since. Insen- 
 sibly the church even to-day models her polity and 
 constructs her creeds upon the lines laid down by 
 the civil, temporal, and military powers. 
 
 But what the world is really hungry for is some 
 food which is not drawn from the granary of the 
 carnal and material. It is just those men who 
 have believed in the impossible, who have caught 
 the attention of a jaded and harassed world in all 
 ages. Never more than to-day, when pomp and 
 circumstance and kings and captains and guns and 
 drums pall on the appetite of nations, are weary 
 peoples asking, "Has religion anything for us 
 more than the false philosophies of force and 
 fury have?" The terribly practical, the prosai- 
 cally efficient, the coldly expedient, — these have 
 
92 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 been the shibboleths of the nations. Now the hour 
 has struck when the world must be saved by the 
 forces of the spirit. Now is the appointed time 
 for the rebirth of the idealism of Christ. Out of 
 the welter of world war come voices more and 
 more insisting that the discarded virtues of honor, 
 truth, faith, patience, and sacrifice are to be the 
 eternal foundations upon which a new civiliza- 
 tion must be erected. Good for men as they have 
 been found to be in the microcosm of the home and 
 community and state, — they must be good for man 
 in the macrocosm of inter-racial intercourse, and 
 international reactions. And who is ordained to 
 herald this new day more logically than the Chris- 
 tianity which has wept to see its Master crucified 
 afresh on the fields of Europe? Is she adequate 
 to the task of proving that *'love is the greatest 
 thing in the world", that faith is sufficient to re- 
 move mountains, that "he who loseth his life shall 
 find it", that "righteousness exalteth a nation, but 
 sin is a reproach to any people", that the founda- 
 tions of the universe are laid in truth and justice, 
 and that the Golden Rule is the supreme law of 
 safe and sound world life? In brief, that "man 
 does not live by bread alone, but by every word 
 that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." For 
 this is idealism,* and in the waning of every other 
 
 * The word "idealism" is used throughout in the above sec- 
 tion in the popular sense, as opposed to that practical material- 
 
The Conclusion of the Whole Matter 93 
 
 philosophy and the failure of every other panacea, 
 to this solution of the way of life the weary world 
 must come. 
 
 III. Intelligence. Official Christianity may not 
 be acquitted of an attitude of suspicion toward ripe 
 scholarship. Ceasing to burn heretics, it abuses 
 them. Stupidity has been termed less dangerous 
 than learning. Orthodox theology and heterodox 
 science have fought and bled and lived to fight 
 again. Loyalty to the pet phrases of creeds has 
 been more lauded than loyalty to the hard de- 
 mands of truth. When Genesis and geology dis- 
 agree there is a verdict in favor of the former 
 only. Schools and colleges which teach their 
 students to think are dangerous to religion. These 
 and countless other professions of distrust and 
 hostility have been hurled at the head of that In- 
 telligence which sometimes contradicts the tenets 
 of dogma. But such cannot continue long to be 
 the case. If Christianity as a virile force is to sur- 
 vive. If the processes of a sound and well-or- 
 dered scholarship do not verify the assurances 
 of an official creed, It is at least open to discussion 
 whether the former may not be as near the mark 
 as the latter. This much is true that creeds, which 
 are supposed to be rational expressions of relig- 
 ious faith, must be intelligent in their methods of 
 
 isni which makes physical good the goal and enlightened self- 
 interest the way of life. 
 
94 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 arriving at results, or they stultify both them- 
 selves and their makers. 
 
 No institution changes its methods of doing 
 business more slowly or with greater protest than 
 the church. Experience which has proved df 
 value in secular activities has been able to make 
 few suggestions to the church because of its in- 
 nate conservatism. In the organization of its 
 Bible School, to mention only one instance, there 
 are many weak links which make the whole chain 
 liable to break under special strain. It has been 
 computed carefully that fully fifty per cent of its 
 students are lost, never to reurn, at the high school 
 and adolescent age. Between 1908 and 19 14, in 
 England, the leading free church showed a de- 
 crease of nearly 260,000 members in its Sun- 
 day-schools. To what shall the decline be attrib- 
 uted? To antiquated methods of administration 
 in part. But in larger measure to the unsym- 
 pathetic attitude of many religious leaders toward 
 more effective pedagogical methods based on the 
 newer psychology, and their insensibility toward 
 the results of the soundest scholarship as it re- 
 lates itself to the Bible and the literature of 
 morals. When pupils of the Sunday-schools reach 
 the age of mental discrimination, it will not an- 
 chor their faith in the teachings of Holy Writ to 
 affirm dogmatically that their moral intuitions 
 are untrustworthy because they do not endorse 
 
The Conclusion of the Whole Matter 95 
 
 some Old Testament program of indiscriminate 
 slaughter of enemies; or that the apparent incon- 
 sistencies in the Bible are in the mind of the 
 reader; or that the Scriptures are ethically as well 
 as historically infallible; or that the signal dis- 
 play of favor on the part of the Almighty toward 
 Israel has not been repeated toward non-Hebrew 
 nations even unto this day; or that no other litera- 
 ture save the Bible contains revelation which is 
 profitable for salvation. The thinking student 
 knows better than to believe all this, and to in- 
 sist upon his accepting it can result only in lower- 
 ing his opinion of the intelligence of the Sunday- 
 school and alienating his affection from it. There- 
 after it will be in vain that committees meet and 
 bewail the defection of their youth from the 
 church. Like school, like church; and when it 
 comes to believing a teacher of Scripture on Sun- 
 day, or a teacher of history or science or ethics 
 the rest of the week, there is no shadow of doubt 
 whom they will follow. 
 
 Whatever may be the path which official Chris- 
 tianity will tread through its orthodox pronounce- 
 ments, it is evident that the Christianity which is 
 to grip the heart of the present age will be one 
 which hospitably welcomes the alliance of sound 
 learning, and does not despise to throw the light 
 of wisdom upon the road it follows. 
 
 IV. Service. Religion is ubiquitous, not local; 
 
g6 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 universal, not insular. This means that reUgion 
 is not only for all people, but for all departments 
 of life. If it points to a super-mundane destiny, 
 it provides for a mundane economy. "Thy king- 
 dom come on earth" is its watchword. However 
 splendidly it rears its head among the stars, its 
 feet are planted firmly on the ground. Official 
 Christianity has conditioned salvation upon be- 
 lief in the Lord Jesus Christ, and let the matter 
 rest there. Unofficial Christianity supplements 
 this indispensable condition by the word which 
 shows how one is to believe in Christ. The 
 former is the call to profession; the latter, while 
 not belittling profession, makes it terminate in 
 action. The Scriptural beacon-lights of the 
 former are, "Ye must be born again," and "with 
 the mouth confession is made unto salvation." 
 The Scriptural beacon-lights of the latter are "not 
 every one that saith unto me 'Lord, Lord' shall 
 enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, but he that 
 doeth the will of my Father who is in heaven," 
 and "he that heareth these words of mine and 
 doeth them, shall be likened unto a wise man." 
 The fatal fault of the salvation of orthodoxy is 
 that it has always been too much of a "gabe" 
 (gift) and too little of an "aufgabe" (task). It 
 has been saturated with the mysticism of Paul, 
 and has recognized too little the ethicism of Jesus. 
 This may be demonstrated easily to the most seep- 
 
The Conclusion of the Whole Matter 97 
 
 tical, by an examination of the official creeds of 
 Christianity. In practically every case they will 
 be found to be expositions of the doctrines of the 
 apostle. Union with Christ and confession of 
 Christ, justification by faith, baptism into the new 
 life, the antinomy of the flesh to the spirit, the 
 reconciling death on the cross and the personal 
 second return of Jesus, — these and other doc- 
 trines, which are pre-eminently Pauline and not 
 those of the synoptic Jesus, are the material out 
 of which the ecumenical creeds of history have 
 been built. 
 
 Now without stultifying itself by repudiating 
 these tenets, which represent an intellectual ap- 
 proximation of the richest Christian experience of 
 the past, the unofficial beliefs of Christendom are 
 to be more and more drawn from the personality, 
 example and teaching of the Jesus of the synoptic 
 gospels. Men in his day who sought the way of 
 salvation were directed into the pathway of self- 
 denying service, because all men were brothers 
 and God was their Father. The touchstone of 
 loyalty to Christ was helpfulness. "Follow me" 
 was the one unconditional demand of disciple- 
 ship, and following him, his friends were taught 
 to "heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, cast out 
 devils," preach the good news and give of them- 
 selves in service as freely as they had received. 
 The Golden Rule was the cornerstone of a per- 
 
98 Unofficial Christianity 
 
 manent and worthy Christian edifice, and the as- 
 surance, "inasmuch as ye have done it unto one 
 of the least of these my brethren, ye have done 
 it unto me," was the all-sufficient explanation of 
 the meaning of belief in Christ. 
 
 It would be hazardous to deny, therefore, that 
 unofficial Christianity, while not renouncing the 
 crystallized doctrinal expressions of a glorious 
 past, will make short work of any system which 
 minimizes Christ and magnifies Paul. "Christian- 
 ity" has been too long a misnomer. Paulinism, 
 Augustinism, Athanasianism, medievalism, — any 
 and all of these have made creeds out of the dust 
 of the ground and breathed into them the breath 
 of their own life. 
 
 That "inward eye" which is "the bliss of soli- 
 tude" has revealed to the mystic poet who worked 
 his visions out in practical helpfulness, what is 
 the Alpha and the Omega of Christian living. 
 
 "Our friend, our Brother, and our Lord, 
 What may thy service be? 
 Nor name, nor form, nor ritual word, 
 But simply follov/ing thee. 
 
 "We bring no ghastly holocaust. 
 We pile no graven stone; 
 He serves thee best who loveth most 
 His brothers and thine own," 
 
Princeton 
 
 Theological Seminary Libraries 
 
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