OI 1 1 i .i 1 1... " JOSEPH M. M. GRAY Ml u m V OCT 4 1915 BR 479 .G73 1915 Gray, Joseph M. M. , 1877- 1 The old faith in the new da^ And all is well, tho* faith and form Be sundered in the night of fear; Well roars the storm to those that hear A deeper voice across the storm. — Tennyson. THE OLD FAITH IN THE NEW DAY JOSEPH M. M. GRAY THE ABINGDON PRESS NEW YORK CINCINNATI Copyright, 1915, by JOSEPH M. M. GRAY The Bible text used in this volume is taken from the American Standard Edition of the Revised Bible, copyright, 1901, by Thomas Nelson & Sons, and is used by permission. TO MY FATHER A PREACHER OF THE OLD FAITH IN A FORMER DAY CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE Preface 9 I. Our Indispensable Inheritance 11 II. The Modern Increment 35 III. The Increasing Christ 93 IW. The Vindicated Scriptures 131 V. Concerning the Church 171 VI. An Adequate Evangel 215 PREFACE No man can claim imperative necessity for a new book on a theme as frequently treated as that of the present volume. In this particular case the author does not so much as recall that anyone has asked him to publish his views, so that even the polite and once popular fiction of being urged by his friends is denied him. There is, however, the extenuating fact that books are by no means like living people: bad ones do not crowd their betters out of the way; so that no other volume is likely to be despoiled of its deserts by this one. The following chap- ters embody the conclusions which some fif- teen years of active ministry, in three quite characteristic and representative cities, have brought to the author; and the sub- stance of them having been received with gratifying response by gatherings of min- isters and laymen of his own denomination, and others, he ventures to present them 9 10 PREFACE somewhat more fully in this less fugitive form. If the reader feels any irregularities of style or disconnections of spirit between the chapters, it is due to say that they have been written at such times as the author could get and not in the congenial leisure of which books are presumably the product. He has written in a downtown office amid the roar of a city's life, on trains, in still watches of the night, and during sunmier days beside the sea. But whatever may be the discrepancies of achievement, his purpose has been single, namely, to pro- voke his brethren of the ministry to some insights into our common faith and its present-day factors, which shall lead them toward that larger certainty and usefulness the Church and the age alike demand. If what he has written shall accomplish such a result, it will be of little importance whether his specific conclusions are accepted or rejected; his purpose in their publication will have been obtained. Kansas City, Missouri. I OUR INDISPENSABLE INHERITANCE You see the great breaker that comes with its white crest rolling in upon the beach. How fine it is! It is the vanguard of the incoming tide, but wherein lies the explanation of its career? It is in the momentum of the sea behind it. It would not come, it would not rise, it would not break, it would not creep up the beach, if it were not for the roll and swell of the mighty sea behind it; and our farthest reach to-day is chiefly because of the swell of the humanity that is behind us. If we are doing nothing noble ourselves, and if we care nothing for what serious men are doing to-day, it is impossible that any part of the past should appear great to us. Because men and women love now, they turn with eagerness to the glorious lovers in generations gone by; because men and women toil, struggle, hope, fear, rejoice and weep to-day, they wish to know of others greater than themselves who went the same wild mysterious way. Earnestness in the conduct of one's own life is the indispensable condition of any deep and true appreciation of the past. — Gordon: Revelation and the Ideal, pp. 108, 284. CHAPTER I OUR INDISPENSABLE INHERITANCE In certain very clearly marked respects the age in which we live is the most notable of human history. The one hundred years and more which have just passed have witnessed the most rapid and marvelous changes in society and life accomplished in any period of time. Up to the year 1800 there had been made seven great discov- eries or inventions; in the century imme- diately following there were added thirteen more. In these one hundred years human- ity passed from the stage coach to the limited express, from the sailing vessel to the Mauretania, from hand-to-hand conflicts beneath the flapping canvas of wooden frigates to the floating fortresses of our modern navies with their incredibly destruc- tive power; from tedious letter-writing and irregular mails to intercontinental cables and marconigrams ; from the silhouette to 13 14 THE OLD FAITH the photograph; from the letter press to the graphophone; from the pantomime to the moving picture; from M. Lecocq to the dictograph. In this century medicine rose from guess-work diagnosis and surgical atrocities to the X-ray and anaesthesia, the whole healing science being revolutionized by the advances of the past fifty years. Within the memory of men who have not yet voted, wireless telegraphy has been developed to scientific and commercial suc- cess, the aeroplane has passed from the dream to the practical deed, and the poles of the earth have been discovered. In world-politics have occurred changes so great that they are not yet fully compre- hended. Japan has become a world-power, China a republic, and the United States has colonies in the Pacific Ocean and the Car- ibbean Sea. Within our own land society has made amazing advances from the polit- ical axioms of its founders. In these one hundred and fifteen years it has moved from the narrowest interpretations of representative government to the broadest popular democracy; from Negro slavery IN THE NEW DAY 15 to a most inclusive theoretical equality before the law; from the seclusion and lim- itation of women to women's suffrage. "Nothing in it (the nineteenth century) was quite so picturesque as the discovery of America, or the circumnavigation of the globe, nor quite so revolutionary as the astronomy of Copernicus, and nothing so beautiful was produced as a Greek Venus or a Gothic cathedral, but it invaded more fields, it destroyed more traditions, it made more discoveries, it did more constructive work, and, in all the range from the work- shop to the library, it scattered its bounties with the lavish hand of enrichment." ^ The peril of an age so enriched and so trans- formed is the peril of every swiftly moving generation, namely, an impatience with what has preceded it. In 1835 Joseph Mazzini wrote: "What we have to do is to fix our eyes upon the future while we break the last links of the chain that binds us to the past. . . . We have emancipated ourselves from the abuses of the past; let us now emancipate ourselves from its > Samuel George Smith: Democracy and the Church, p. 272. 16 THE OLD FAITH glories." ^ With the particular conditions and specific import which Mazzini had in mind, that may have been a fitting declara- tion; but the literal meaning, too widely- avowed now and particularly in respect of religious ideas, leads to personal and social disaster. There is, as we all recognize, a danger- ous clinging to the past. "It were better to have no history than to have the most splendid of its years to be but a succession of iron bands." ^ But that is not the only alternative. History is not law, it is life; life that has been fresh and vigorous and human as our own. The past is not a geo- graphical area which we can cut away with a stroke or isolate wholesale as map-makers discriminate States or countries by print- ing them in different colors. The past is the undying tree, vast and mighty, with great roots that reach far down to the be- ginnings of things, the undying tree of which our day is but the latest bit of new branch, passing into the old even as to- 1 Essays: Camelot Edition, p. 41. ' Fairbairn: Studies in Religion and Theology, p. 49. IN THE NEW DAY 17 morrow comes. And all that we hold rich and beautiful and good has its beginnings in this past, of which we ourselves are al- ready becoming a part. "All that we possess," wrote David Swing, "has come to us by way of a long path. There is no instantaneous liberty or wisdom or lan- guage or beauty or religion. Old philos- ophies, old agriculture, old domestic arts, old sciences, medicine, chemistry, astron- omy, old modes of travel and commerce, old forms of government and religion have all come in gracefully or ungracefully and have said 'Progress is king, and long live the king!' "^ We stand to-day in the flush of a new and expanding civilization. The glamour of great deeds our brothers everywhere are doing shines upon our eyes. The conceit of the contemporaneous is on us. In an age of great wealth, great armies, great industries, great inventions, and great achievements in the realms of natural and applied science, we are too prone to look upon all other generations with impatience, > Quoted by Hillis: Investment of Influence, p. 111. 18 THE OLD FAITH and regard their attainments with the easy tolerance of an obvious superiority. But at most the distinctive and characteristic ele- ments of the present are the increment accumulating upon a rich and splendid inheritance from a noble past. It is that past as it is related to religion which forms the subject of the immediate chapter. By reason of the religious ideas it has bequeathed us the past is the first effective influence in the religion of to-day. "The ancients," said Sidney Smith, the most noted wit of the early nineteenth century, "have stolen all our ideas." In the pride of modern thought we are apt to forget that the fundamental concep- tions of truth, the conceptions which we are wont to consider peculiarly our own, have come down to us by Professor Swing's "way of a long path." It has been for some recent years quite the fashion to descant about the Fatherhood of God; and some of those most concerned to maintain their position as advanced and liberal thinkers iterate their allegiance to the doctrine as if they were turning over a new leaf in the IN THE NEW DAY 19 book of Revelation ; but the Aryan peoples, centuries before the Christian era, had learned to look to the bending sky above them and say, "All-Father." Our age has brought to the thought of human brother- hood a new emphasis, and government, literature, the Church, industry, philan- thropy, and the home are feeling the effects. But there is not a modern stress or passion, not a modern sensitiveness to social wrong or vision of injustice; there is not a modern recognition of the inseparable connection between true religion and its expression in the life of society, which cannot be found in the pages of the Hebrew prophets. Our generation has thought that it was a dis- coverer, sailing like some spiritual Colum- bus to find a new passageway of religious and social substance and interpretation; instead it has been simply a belated voyager landing at last on shores that braver feet had trodden centuries ago. The popular spirit of our age is hostile to the creeds. The doctrinal confessions of the Church, torn from their places in the great movement of Christian history, are 20 THE OLD FAITH flouted by the present daj^ The noble affirmations of belief, so necessary for the very life of the Church and the faith in the battle days of early heresy, are compla- cently regarded as curios of ancient specula- tion, their stately language held to be a burdensome fetter, and their metaphysical discriminations regarded as archaic speci- mens of hair-splitting de luooe, "The day of the creeds is passed," is the modern cry. But is it not significant that the substance of the creeds is not? Amid all the break- ing of ancient forms and the rejection of ancient statements and interpretation, the great ideas the past so clearly disengaged and firmly established are the ideas with which the modern day is yet concerned. Moreover, these ideas of the past have been the determining factors in human life. The truths of religion have been the forces of history. "The empire of Rome," said ex-President Roosevelt in his lecture before Oxford University in 1910, "is the most stupendous fact of lay history; no empire later in time can be compared with it." ^ » History aa Literature, p, 78. IN THE NEW DAY 21 But what was it that conquered Europe and transformed Teuton and Slav and Hun and Gaul and Goth and Saxon from their varied savagery into their better civ- ilizations? Not the Roman empire, for all the tramp of her undefeated legions and the glisten of her undipped eagles from the Mediterranean to the German Ocean, from the vineyards of Hispania to the beaches of the Black Sea. It was Christianity that conquered Europe, the great ideas trans- muted into living forces. In forest and city, on peninsula and island, the Christian gospel with its characteristic ideas went; they met Saracen and savage on the battle- field and fought the better wars of peace in hall and hut, and when the ancient Ro- man empire was long since dead, and the Holy Roman Empire but a fading dream, the constituent ideas of Christianity pos- sessed the transformed field. We may reject and alter the forms in which those ideas have come down to us, but the ideas themselves remain with undiminished force and unimpoverished meaning. As one of our most recent writers on the theme has 22 THE OLD FAITH finely put it, "In the mighty past were fashioned for us great continents of faith, and voyage as men may in search of those islands of the blest about which they dream, the continents will still remain the home of their largest and richest life." ^ We do well to remember these things. Our age is challenging every formula and institution. It is pushing out on new areas of experience and endeavor. It is refashioning its beliefs and theories and restating its ideals. All this is but to say that it is a living age. Its impatience with the past is, in a measure, proper. We must not be fettered to dead men. We must not be imprisoned in outgrown ideas. We must not be fed upon the shells of truth from which the substance has long since withered. But while it is progress to rebel against the bondage of ancient forms, it is suicide to break with fundamental and undying truths. The past is a formative influence upon our modern religion also by reason of the facts and experiences which it furnishes 1 Lyman: Theology and Human Problems, p. 78. IN THE NEW DAY 23 with which we interpret the facts and expe- riences of our own Hfe. Whether we accept the facts in the same mood as the men of the past accepted them, whether we inter- pret our experiences in the way in which the men of the past interpreted their expe- riences, is not important for the truth here. To reject the interpretations of the past is nevertheless to use the past in making our own interpretation. And very subtly, but inevitably, the facts and experiences which the past furnishes have their part in de- termining our attitude toward and our use of the facts and experiences of our own life. They become the standards by or against which we work out our own beliefs and con- duct. There is the history of Israel, her rela- tions to the peoples around her, and the stages in her own development from the patriarchal age into the most thorough- going and articulated theocracy the world has known, with the parallel development out of the current Semitic mythology and belief of the pure monotheism which is Israel's first gift to humanity. There are 24 THE OLD FAITH the facts of her internal history, the build- ing of the nation, the growth of the reli- gious system, the clearly delineated con- ceptions of sacrifice, the social problems which find preservation in the pages of the prophets, the deepening and enriching of Israel's religion and life by events of war, catastrophe, defeat, and exile which swept other nations into atheism. There are the profound expositions of national and indi- vidual experience accomplished in the psalms, the only instance in all human his- tory and literature where the hymns of a single people have become the choicest devotional handbook of the world at large. There is the inscrutable but undeniable fact of Hebrew prophecy, especially the proph- ecy, not of one man or of one age, but of many men of all ages, of a Divine Saviour who should come upon the earth. Then there is the fact, so coincidental as to establish the case for miracle itself, the fact of the New Testament history, the sub- lime ideals and instruction, which, for all the centuries since then, have remained the supreme word for personal character and IN THE NEW DAY 25 conduct and hope. In that history is the fragmentary record of a single life, which, with only this fragment recorded, has yet changed the course of all succeeding his- tory, revolutionized the standards of na- tional and individual behavior, and stamped its imprint on every institution which is characteristic of our modern civilization. Coming for a moment outside of the his- tory peculiarly recorded in the Bible, the past shows us, in secular history, engraved on monuments and inscribed in brick and block and parchment, the universal prac- tice of sacrifice to Deity and continuing in the inherited customs of backward peoples still alive. It is a custom inseparably con- nected with human life as the past reveals it. But with the New Testament history the past advances a still more significant fact — that, within fifty years from Calvary, considered for the moment as simply the place of a Roman execution, the ancient Hebrew commonwealth was dead forever, its sacrificial system forever passed away; and wherever the story of Calvary, and the interpretation of it which the New Testa- 26 THE OLD FAITH ment writings make, have gone, there also, whatever may have been the sacrificial rites and customs, they too have perished. One other fact the past, in this connection, makes very plain — that while with Calvary sacrifices for sin ceased, wherever they have thus ceased the sense of sin has grown immeasurably more real and personally poignant. Added to its service as supplying thus the facts and experiences by which we inter- pret our own, the past is preeminently influ- ential in our present religion because of the vindication it furnishes of the religious ideas it has bequeathed us. "What makes any part of history great," writes George A. Gordon, "is the revelation it contains of the moral worth of man. To look upon that revelation," he continues, "it is not necessary to confine attention to religious history." ^ Here is the lengthening influ- ence of the past upon our modern religion and religious life. It lays upon us the con- straint of the increasing moral worth of man as it shows us the great adventures of 1 Witness to Immortality, p. 277. IN THE NEW DAY 27 the spirit in which, from age to age, he has participated. Eveiy event in the unfold- ing of that moral worth has been a link in the chain which binds us to the centuries which have fled. What mighty deeds have gone to that unfolding! Through what emergencies of strength and sorrow, of pain and pasion, men have passed in the long career of their victorious spiritual advance! It has been said above, that the truths of religion are the forces of history. In what fierce and splendid enterprises we see these truths as we look back upon the past of which too often we are impatient! They gleam from the twilights of all classic peoples and are terribly revealed in flames and blood at the beginning of our Christian era. They shine through the murk and mist of the empire of Constantine, through the black night of the Papal Church with its unspeakable enterprises of filth and crime. They have been proven and prop- agated by the fires of the martyrs and the agonies of the Inquisition. They have been demonstrated in huts and discovered on thrones. They have been witnessed by the 28 THE OLD FAITH fortitude of Puritans and the fervor of Wesleyans. They have leavened com- merce and hberated slaves and softened war. They look out upon to-day from the windows of schools and colleges, hospitals and halls of legislation. "We are in- debted," says Dr. S. Parkes Cadman, "to the men and women who have wisely handled our yesterdays." ^ They have wrought out the victory of the religious ideas we have acquired and in their expe- riences, passionate and tragic, have empow- ered the truths which are the very heart of the religion of to-day. Any honest inventory of the religion of to-day must, therefore, acknowledge an immeasurable debt to the days that have gone. "The notion that the past may be ignored and forgotten is a sure recipe for spiritual smallness." ^ And the greatness of our debt to it and the graciousness of its influence upon us are felt with singular weight when we take account of the great characters of the past with which the his- 1 Religious Use of Memory, p. 10. 2 Lyman: Theology and Human Problems, p. 109. IN THE NEW DAY 29 tory of religion and religious thinking is concerned. "The greatest needs of us all," Henry Churchill King has said, "are the contagion of high and significant person- alities, and the opportunity of sharing in their best visions." ^ And this is true, and the influence of these high and significant personalities is powerful and beneficent, irrespective of our agreement with their particular interpretations of truth or theories of life. Interpretations and the- ories may have only transient value; they may be constructive and profitable for a year or a century, and then be outgrown; but the world never outgrows a great char- acter. Dante's theology is long since dead, but Dante is a living force to-day. We can look back with amazement and something of horror at the logical and pitiless conclu- sions of Calvinism, but we can regard Cal- vin with nothing less than abiding rever- ence and honor. We can do very well to- day without the particular type of mind and conception of the Scriptures which John Bunyan had, but we can never get 1 Religion as Life, p. 105. 30 THE OLD FAITH along without John Bunyan himself. "The first requisites of religion and civihzation," says George Adam Smith, "are outstand- ing characters." ^ There are some signifi- cant personalities whose influence is so definitely incarnate in the work they wrought, the discoveries they made, the readjustment of ideas they compelled, that their value to the world is irrespective of their personal characters. Such a man was Charles Darwin. But there are these others, whose contributions to religious thought and life, vast and definite as they may be, are utterly dependent on their per- sonalities. It may be at first thought diffi- cult, or even impossible, to define in concise statements the influence these characters have brought and still bring to our latest religious life, but one has only to name their names to realize the impoverishment which would follow if they could be struck from off the record of the past. What would be the condition of religion to-day without the life and influence of Luther or Zwingli or Knox? Take away the influence of Wesley 1 Isaiah, Vol. I, p. 251. IN THE NEW DAY 31 and Whitefield, of George Fox and Bishop Rutherford; or, coming even to our later generation, take away the character and influence of Channing and Parker and Robertson, of Dale and Beecher, and how impoverished whatever religion we would have would doubtless be! The truth here has been eloquently expressed by Dr. Marineau: "The glorious persons of human history, imperishable from the traditions of every civilized people, keeping their sublime glance upon the Conscience of ages, create the unity of the faith." There are those who insist that we must remake our religion, reconstruct our reli- gious ideas, revolutionize our theology. They have the attitude of men who would rebuild a house, or remold some metal fig- ure; as if religion were some malleable sub- stance of the mind to be handled in any fashion the vagrant will of men may work. Religion is nothing of the kind. "Religion from one point of view is as firm as the ever- lasting hills; from another point of view it is as pliant and flexible as water, which flows freely into every place and fills everj'' 32 THE OLD FAITH vessel, no matter what its form may be." ^ We need to realize the firmness as well as the pliancy. Like life itself, which, indeed, it is, religion is growth; a coordination of thought, conduct, experience, and hope, developing with the development of human interest. It can be directed here, restrained there, enriched in this fashion, protected in that; its wild growths may be cut off, its temporal or local excrescences removed, its defects remedied. But as long as it is alive for living men it cannot be arbitrarily shaped to the passing moods of any age without regard for the life and experiences of the mighty past. To revert to a former figure, these great characters of years gone by have been husbandmen; they have pruned and protected; they have developed its neglected branches, they have fed the withering roots, they have revived its parch- ing foliage, they have fertilized its hostile soil, they have built around it mighty bar- riers of devotion and apology to defend it from the storms of ignorance and the assaults of evil; while, of all the glorious 1 William Boyd Carpenter: The Witness to the Influence of Christ, p. 132. IN THE NEW DAY 33 persons of the past who keep their sublime glance upon the conscience of the ages, "serenest of the progeny of God" is He, of whom something will be said in the pages which are to follow, for whom are all things and through whom are all things, and who, for all the expanding knowledge and heightening powers of men, is yet The fountain light of all our day, The master light of all our seeing. II THE MODERN INCREMENT No other century that we are able to survey was so full of such glaring contradictions and such sudden changes, as the nineteenth; the period which commenced about the eightieth year of the eighteenth century and has just closed. In it revolution and reaction followed one another in the quickest succession, and, while the masses sank deeper and deeper into Materialism, Atheism, and even Anarchism, Orthodoxy and Ecclesiasticism reached a height of development scarcely con- ceivable at the beginning of the seventeenth century. During the century this division and inner con- fusion permeated increasingly the public life of the people: all were engaged in conflict to obtain the best for the satisfaction of life's needs. The innermost personal life of men became chaotic, and swayed restlessly, often with sudden revolu- tion, from the spirit of the Enlightenment to that of the Romantic Reaction; from an optimism, happy in the enjoyment of civilization, to a wear- iness of life so great as to make men desire death. — Weinel and Widgery: Jesus in the Nineteenth Cen- tury and After, p. 32f. CHAPTER II THE MODERN INCREMENT Out of this colossal past, religion, with its everlasting firmness and its sinuous flex- ibility, poured into the social and intellec- tual ferment of the recent generation. To the multitudinous changes wrought in knowledge and experience during the past century, and particularly in recent years, it could not be indifferent. As all the events of humanity have gone to form it in the past, so all the events of humanity to- day have their bearing on its present. "For us," wrote Brierly, "to make us spiritually, were the first beginnings of thought, the making of alphabets, the making of liter- atures, the struggles of patriots, the death of martyrs, the creations of genius, the re- rearches of science, the whole age-long struggle of the world." ^ It is a truth not of the past tense only. The practice as well 1 J. Brierly: Religion and To-day, p. 135. 37 38 THE OLD FAITH as the beginnings of thought, the use as well as the makings of alphabets and litera- tures, the present as well as the past struggle of the world is making us spirit- ually. The age has its increment as well as its inheritance. The rapid and remarkable changes in thought, life, knowledge, and activity profoundly affect our reception and consideration of the religion which the past has bequeathed us. President Harris, of Amherst College, put the truth not too strongly when he said, a few years ago, that the Protestant Reformation itself did not work a greater change than the last quarter of a century has marked in reli- gious thought, belief, and life.^ Two influences may be discerned in these changes. The first is the influence of science. The application of new knowl- edge to machinery is visible on every side, but the scientific achievements of our age are far more extensive than mere mechan- ism will show. The astronomer of our gen- eration not only weighs and measures stars so distant that light traveling 186,000 miles 1 Quoted by Henry Churchill King: Religion as Life, p. 116. IN THE NEW DAY 39 a second takes years to reach us, but he tests their chemical composition and analyzes their substance as if he held their dust within his hand. At the other extreme is the modern physicist dealing with specks of matter many times invisible to the naked eye. He analyzes one of these specks, to quote a leading scientist of the day, "into billions of molecules; and dissects each molecule into its component atoms; and each atom into a miniature planetary sys- tem of perhaps eighteen hundred elec- trons." Then, to continue the quotation, he "measures these unthinkably minute units of matter; weighs them; tests the speed of their flight and the quantity and quality of the electric charge they bear." ' To go no farther into the various scien- tific activities, but to speak of the funda- mental discovery which has most affected modern thought and life, the theory of evo- lution has utterly altered our outlook on the world and truth. That theorj^ is now so widely known in its general outline and so 1 Williams: Miracles of Science, p. 2, 40 THE OLD FAITH thoroughly accepted that it needs no explanation here. Though evolutionists differ among themselves as to the way in which evolution proceeds, the fundamental theory is an axiom of modern thought. Its author, Charles Darwin, as S. Parkes Cad- man, in his Brooklyn Institute lectures in 1910, said, "created a revolution which has had no equal in the intellectual history of the modern world, since the Renaissance and the Reformation." ^ "Each age," another suggestive thinker has written, "is confronted with new conditions, but our age is confronted with a new universe." ^ Early in the day of this modern science it came sheerly into conflict with religion. Be- cause the evidence religion offered for its characteristic conclusions was not of the kind and quality with which science must neces- sarily deal, science presumed to throw reli- gion out of court. Because the first chap- ters of Genesis did not coincide verbally with the precise geological history of the globe, science would tell us that the entire » Charles Daru-in and Other English Thinkers, p. 42. 2 Lyman: Theology and Human Problems, p. 112. IN THE NEW DAY 41 Bible was unbelievable. Because the solar system of the patriarchs and the psalmists and Saint Paul did not tally with the the- ory of Copernicus and the discoveries of modern solar photography, therefore in- spiration was a cunningly devised fable. Because biology and Darwinism did not confirm the biblical account of the creation of animal life, therefore the whole structure of religious thinking must come down. Because the New Testament miracles seemed to contravene the laws which natural scientists had discovered but could not explain, therefore the New Testament had forfeited its usefulness and Christianity was an exploded hallucination. That was the first challenge of modern science. At the same time a second influence was operative on the age in which these changes were taking place — the influence of demo- cracy. Eighteen years ago Lord Rose- bery as he entered upon the office of prime minister of England said: "I believe that the people are now inclined to think that politics is not merely a game in which the pawns have to be sacrificed to the knights 42 THE OLD FAITH and the castles, but is an elevating and en- nobling effort to carry into . . . practical life the principles of a higher morality. ... I am certain that there is a party in this country not named as yet, . . . which is inclined to say: 'A plague on both your Houses, a plague on all your parties, a plague on all your politics, a plague on all your unending discussions, which yield so little fruit. Have done with this unending talk and come down and do something for the people.' " ^ That is the voice of democ- racy. It had spoken before, for few indeed have been the periods of human history in which some voice of appeal for the greater social good was not raised. "Come down and do something for the people!" That was the meaning of the barons beating up around King John at Runnymede, and of the Puritans sadly, but without flinching, bringing Charles to the block, and of those whirlwind days that stormed around the Tuileries and guillotined a Louis and an Antoinette and drenched the streets of Quoted by Freeman tie: The World as Subject of Redemption, page IN THE NEW DAY 43 Paris in the blood of Bourbon nobles. It was that spirit which beat back Spain from Holland and for eighty years piled up the heroisms of the Dutch republic; that spirit which hurried James the Second into flight, turned a tax on tea into an American Revo- lution, and shattered the sham empire of the third Napoleon. It was not altogether a new spirit when Lord Rosebery uttered it, but never did it speak so clearly and meet so hearty a response as it does to-day. To-day the democratic spirit is vitaliz- ing, as never before, all the social ideals and institutions of our American life. In the political life of our times it is more effective and insistent than ever. Govern- ment in the republic used to be a matter confined to a comparatively few individ- uals, and one of the more instructive spec- tacles of the day is the survival of here and there a man of large affairs holding tena- ciously to the ancient principle that the great body of the people are incompetent of self-government. To cite but two recent achievements in this movement toward complete self-government, the substitution, 44 THE OLD FAITH in many States, of the primary nomination for the convention method of determining candidates for pubHc office, and the amend- ment to the constitution providing for the election of United States senators by direct vote of the people instead of by their repre- sentatives in State legislatures, are indi- cations of the direction in which we are traveling. But they are only indications. Government is becoming more and more a matter not of parties but of citizens. It has come to deal more and more not only with broad federal issues such as the tariff and the currency, but with child labor and employers' liability and the like. It con- ceives its function to be not a business of partisan supremacy only, but an oppor- tunity of popular benefit. It establishes the parcel post and saves the public from the exorbitant charges of the private ex- press companies; it inspects food and drugs, takes oversight and regulation of manufactory and labor, interests itself in the conditions in which miners, seamen, and mill operatives live and work. It studies the conditions of country life with a view to IN THE NEW DAY 45 reviving the attractiveness of the farm. It becomes a general counselor to the farmer, fruit-grower, and stockman, analyzing the soil, battling with disease and insect pests, laying before any man who wishes it the result of expert experiment and knowledge in the realm of his particular interests. It protects game birds and song birds and animals, patrols the thinning forests, re- stocks the depleted waters, and fights, with all the adjuncts of modern science, the enemies of useful plant and animal life. Through its consular offices and special agents it carries on a world-wide scrutiny of commercial and industrial conditions, so that the manufacturer and exporter may best be served. State and city governments project the movement further. They have boards of health and of public help, factory inspection and housing commissions, public hospitals and dispensaries, open-air sani- toriums, and municipal and State farms for the reclamation of the incorrigible youth — a score of activities issuing in the safety, comfort, and prosperity of the general public. Much yet is to be and will be done. 46 THE OLD FAITH The just coordination of capital and labor has not been accomplished; the courts are too far removed from sympathy with and accessibility by the average man and the very poor; the will of the people is too easily subverted from its social aim. But the spirit of democracy, the come-down- and-do-something-for-the-people spirit, is pushing slowly on to the more complete socializing of government and life. It was inevitable that religion should feel the effect of this democratic spirit, for the life of society invariably reflects itself in the conduct of religion. Now, no charge is more frequently made against our gen- eration than that it is irreligious. Again and again its godlessness is emphasized; and the unhappy feature of the charge is the readiness with which substantiating evi- dence can be found. The lengthening of the labor week, under the alleged pressure of commercial necessities, so that thousands of men and women have no Sabbath; the dreariness and monotony of the lives of many toilers driven by the pitiless regime of modern machinery and piecework; the IN THE NEW DAY 47 intensifying of the craving for recreation and the multiplying of cheap amusements; the breakdown, under physical weariness on the one hand and religious indifference on the other, of the sanctity of the first day of the week; the deepening chasm between whole segments of society and industry and the institutions of religion ; the develop- ment of labor organizations into solidly knit industrial groups openly hostile to the present social order and often virulent in denunciation of the Church identified with it — all of these are too actual to be ignored. And in the tempers, tastes, and habits of the more comfortable members of society, as well, there are easily discerned tend- encies and activities pagan in kind and issue. The old simplicity of life, the old reverence for religion and the Church, the old authority of the pulpit and the altar, the old sanctity of creed and confession, all have either gone or shrunken to poor shadows of their former plenitude. In the very midst of these conditions, however, a certain curious fact is to be noted — that religious considerations were 48 THE OLD FAITH never so widely exploited as to-day. Maga- zines devote an immense amount of space to reports and discussions of multifarious phases of religious activity and thought; novels, more numerously than ever, have a religious question at the core, and some of the most popular and appealing plays are dramatic expositions of some form or phase of religious theory. So that, as the presi- dent of Brown University has written, "There is more religious aspiration abroad in our land to-day than ever before, more hearty response to the setting forth of Christian standards of action, more sincere desire to translate the life of Christ into the life of the struggling world." ^ What has hap- pened, what is happening, that this appar- ent irreligious spirit and this almost pas- sionate interest in religion should prevail side by side? The answer can be put in the words of Shailer Mathews: "Democ- racy is stretching over into religion." ^ And whatever may be the final result, this much is certain; the forms in which religion 1 Faunce: What Does Christianity Mean? p. 143. 2 The Church and the Changing Order, p. 162. IN THE NEW DAY 49 must be expressed, the standards by which it is to be judged, the manner of appeal it makes and the kind of authority it is to exercise, are being altered almost to the measure of a revolution. No man seriously concerned with life dare ignore these modern influences and the changes they have made and make upon the religious thought and life of our gen- eration. The discoveries of modern science in the minds and persons of patient, sin- cere, and gifted men are not lightly to be neglected; and whether we consent or not, the new type of social thinking, the grow- ing spirit of democracy, compels us to diverge widely from the religious forms and applications which our fathers found suffi- cient. How is the faith itself affected? And how shall we conceive it after admit- ting all the influences of the widening knowledge and the social spirit of this new and challenging era? How does the old faith stand in the new day? (1) What, in the first place, is the result of modern science on the truths of religion we have to preach? 50 THE OLD FAITH As a sort of preliminary to the main dis- cussion at this point, it is to be remarked that there are two dominant elements in the scientific spirit, for the discipline of which religious thinking may well be grateful. They are its passion for accuracy and its reverence for law. It will have no guesses unsupported by a reasonable array of facts. It announces a theory of natural selection, or of the divisibility of the atom, or the planetary nature of the electron, but not until a thousand observations and experi- ments have given ample ground for the hypothesis. This is in vast contrast with that type of religious thinking which an- nounces unblushingly the whole plan of God and can delineate the aspects and activities of the eternal life after the manner of a census report. Then, too, it discovers the immutable laws of nature, discerns the orderly procession of cosmic events, appre- hends the logic of history, and refuses to double in its tracks after the fashion of many a sermon and religious treatise which vindicate the realities of the spirit only by utter disregard of all the continuities of IN THE NEW DAY 51 premise and conclusion. This passion for accuracy and reverence for law seemed at first to seal the doom of religion, resting, as it does, on foundations often beyond the reach of any of the instruments and proc- esses of exact science. But side by side with them is the significant fact that in the most rigid statements of natural law and the most compelling theories deduced from its discovered facts, statements and theories on which it builds its proudest structures, there is a vast element of unprovable as- sumption. Science, to refer to the illustration used a moment ago, claims to separate a speck of matter invisible to the naked eye into billions of molecules, divide the molecule into atoms, and then find eighteen hundred electrons in the single atom, moving in a complete planetary system. The wildest credulity of religion never equaled that brave hypothesis. The first result of this discovery of the suppositions of science is to show that as long as science permits assumption to have so large a place in its interpretation of the universe it cannot for- 52 THE OLD FAITH bid our moral and religious assumptions to have part in determining our conceptions of the universe. In other words, the first and most significant, perhaps, of the results of the new science upon religion has been to vindicate the place which religion has claimed for intelligent faith. So much in general; now to speak of particulars. "In the beginning," are the first words of the Bible, "God created," and the nar- rative goes on to describe the making of the world and all that is in it in a series of completed events. "And God . . . rested from all his work which God had created and made." And for centuries Bible-read- ing humanity believed that the work was all done then; everything made, and made once for all. To-day Professor DeVries, of Amsterdam, has developed twelve different races of evening primroses from a common stock, a Professor Morgan has subjected the eggs of a certain fly to the influence of radium and has produced a separate species which breeds true; while, to pass by other and equally striking results, Luther Bur- bank has amazed the world with the crea- IN THE NEW DAY 53 tions he has accomplished. He has crossed a Japanese and an American plum and pro- duced the fruit which revolutionized the prune industry; he has made a new fruit, the plumcot, out of the plum and the apri- cot, and it breeds true. He has made three kinds of poppies from a single parent stock, and combined three kinds of daisies to make the Shasta which would rank as an individ- ual species, if found wild. He has pro- duced plums without seeds and cherries for canning that leave the stone on the tree when the cherries are pulled. He has de- veloped a white blackberry and a spineless cactus which reproduce themselves. The normal walnut tree requires eighteen or twenty years before it begins to bear nuts profitably. He has produced a walnut tree which reproduces itself naturally, and which bears nuts profitably at eighteen months. In 1884 there died a priest in an obscure monastery in Silesia who discov- ered a law, known by his name as Mendel's law, by which specific qualities of plant and animal can be reproduced accurately according to the will of the experimenter — 54 THE OLD FAITH a discovery which has ah^eady wrought the most astounding improvements in both plant and stock-raising. Turning away from the earth, the new science, looking through the glass of the astronomer, tells us that it sees worlds in the making. It sees here star shattering against star and so disintegrating into dust of stars, and these particles falling together to form another star, the process of change and growth and life and death endlessly going on in spaces so immense the mind of man cannot imag- ine them. The geologist assures us that there are constant changes taking place in the earth on which we live, new stone forming, old stone crumbling into dust, the granite crest of the forbidding mountain melting surely into the soil from which the flowers of the valley spring, and the slime and clay of buried swamps becoming the solid rock on which a city rests. Science knows nothing of a creative force which made all things and then rested; it knows a creation which is proceeding without end; and when it speaks of a God, speaks of one, not who created all things, but who is creat- IN THE NEW DAY 55 ing things. Does that contradict Genesis? Only to very arbitrary minds. The nar- rative of Genesis is a story of the subHme fact of God making a world. And the book of science is the story of God making a world; the vital fact is in each narrative the same. Science adds simply another chapter and describes not a creation without God, but the process God employs. The truths of religion remain, regardless of the process which it has discerned; but the appeal of religion itself is mightily reenforced by the description science gives. For science has revealed to us a growing universe. In a vaster fashion than the apostle meant it is true that God is not the God of the dead but of the living. Step by step strength and beauty of form and feature have developed; stage by stage the adaptability for use; age by age the keen- ness of sight and power of reason; century by century the constraint of moral con- sciousness. In every realm of life, phys- ical nature, mental range, social habit, reh- gious aspiration, the results have been not a manufacture but a growth. Thought, 56 THE OLD FAITH industry, worship, faith, sacrifice, mar- riage, government, law, all have grown, and grown, and grown ; the whole world of life is progress, and progress betterward. What does that mean for religion to-day? Three great conceptions. First, that in a living universe, growing betterward, moral good which in a human world is the supremely fit, must go on to its complete victory and vindication; and one has only to turn to history to see the life of human society corroborate the conclusions of scientific investigation and theory. Not only in volumes like Lecky's History of European Morals, and Loring's Gesta Christi, but in the general history of humankind written without moral bias, the slow, perhaps, but undefeated growth of moral ideal, experience, standards, and con- duct is unmistakably written. Religion which, in the days when moral concerns were most embattled and the nights when atheism lay heaviest on the human spirit, dared to affirm the victory of righteousness and the certainty of spiritual realities and IN THE NEW DAY 57 their unfolding, finds now its greatest ally in the very force which, half a century ago, was feared as its greatest enemy. Then, without intending it, science, with its revelation of a growing universe and a continuous creative activity, has shattered the old philosophical denials of the reason- ableness of the incarnation of God in Christ. The incarnation is no longer unbelievable by scientific minds. Unbelief has written its volumes on the Christ-Myth and its description of the pagan Christs, and thought to end the business. But read in the light of the science of to-day these books are so much more reenforcement of the faith. They emphasize anew the truth of nature continually moving on and up in a ceaseless quest for higher forms. A thinker like Bergson, without the vision of Christ, delineates the vital impulse pushing out in new developments and creations, till the Christian mind recognizes in it all God toiling under the beneficent bondage of law, which is but the report of the divine method, making a world of nature and men. 58 THE OLD FAITH Here and there in various realms, new and better individuals appear, prophets of kindred life which ultimately follows. And these pagan Christs, Christ-Myths, and the like, also witness to the inextinguishable quest of humanity itself for the highest ; they testify the passion of the world for the god- like man; they illustrate the moving spirit in humanity, passionately insisting on that which is not; "the earnest expectation of the creation waiteth for the reveahng of the sons of God." In line with all this, in a growing universe, where nature and humanity alike are growing betterward, and questing for still nobler issues, Christ may well be not simply the isolated miracle religion has always proclaimed, but even more. Christ may well be the first fruits, not alone of them that sleep, but of this stupendous process of a creating God now going on, the end of which shall not be realized "till we all attain unto the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ." IN THE NEW DAY 59 So too the science of to-day has made a place — the matter is beyond its realm, though it does argue the point — for reli- gion's fundamental contention, the saving power of the cross of Christ and the atone- ment. While we can no longer think of God as an angry tyrant — though the wrath of God has vast and wholesome meaning — who must be appeased by the death of Jesus as a quantitative substitute for the death of all the race; and while the new science shows us the evolutionary process — individ- uals and species developing as they are best suited to endure the conditions of life — it does not show us that surviving which is in itself the best according to our highest human values. The weed crowds out the wheat; brambles choke the berries; the animals more useful in a world of human interests die out amid conditions of food supply and climate where wild beasts easily multiply. We have no promise in the evo- lutionary process alone for the ultimate victory of moral good, or even the humanly useful. It takes a Burbank to make a Shasta daisy and tame the cactus to a 60 THE OLD FAITH food plant. The evolutionary principle plus the recombining power of a govern- ing mind results in the continuous per- fecting of individuals and species. And this is in the realm of nature the principle announced by religion in the realm of spirit. Though Burbank is not outside the unmeasured series of evolutionary develop- ment, but represents its highest achieve- ment, the production of humankind, he, by an interference with the normal course, works within the laws, what to one who was unfamiliar with the natural process would be miracles of perfected nature. So Christ, born of a woman, stands at the head of all humankind, God incarnate, the highest upreach of the lift of life ; and by a mystery we cannot penetrate, as the Shasta daisy cannot fathom the forces that have made it great, and as we cannot under- stand the powers of nature we so readily enjoy, by the mystery of the cross and all that centuries of human experience have meant by atonement, he has given to the onward march of life a supreme and reor- ganizing movement, whereby, in the words IN THE NEW DAY 61 of religion, "if any man is in Christ Jesus, he is a new creature." And science, which some of us have so gr^tly feared, has be- come Hke another disciple, kneeling to say to the vindicated Christ, "My Lord, and my God." Amid many questions crowding for con- sideration here there are for us only two: What, then, about retribution and reward? What has science, in other words, to say about hell and heaven? Let us admit at once that the hell of Calvinism, with God torturing sinners over the fires as cruel boys hold flies on pins above a lamp, as Jonathan Edwards illustrated it, is now out of the question. The old theological idea that sin, because it is com- mitted against an Infinite Being, is itself infinite and must be infinitely punished, is no longer possible. It would be of a piece with supposing, as John Brierly has said, that "a child's punishment for its offenses is to be proportionate to the superior wis- dom, strength, and station of its parent." ^ What conception of sin, then, have we left? 1 Religion and To-day, p. 34. 62 THE OLD FAITH Evolution has been read to mean that sin is a fall upward: that "there are no shadows where there is no light" ; that eventually the race will have sloughed off all moral evil; and so punishment for sin is not to be thought of. Furthermore, the personal and individ- ual evil that is visible and effective now is largely the result of inheritance; the lust- ful reaping the sin of forgotten ancestors, the criminal showing the flower of seeds sown in his blood by progenitors long since dead. And adding to the irresponsibility of the evildoer are the complex influences of surroundings. All of this may be true, though, of course, the fact of personal and willful wrongdoing is too widespread a matter of observation and experience to be ignored in any such fashion. But the biography of an evil does not settle the question of its results. Knowing how sin came to be does not alter the fact that it is here. However it may have originated, the effects are very bitter now. Of the terrible constraints of heredity. IN THE NEW DAY 63 science has proofs enough. Without illus- trating further, consider the summary of one notorious family, that of the celebrateii Max Jukes, a descendant of the early Dutch settlers of New York. He had two sons who married half-sisters. In 1877 the history of 540 of the descendants had been traced and that of most of the others was accurately known. One third of them had died in infancy; 310 were paupers who spent a total of 2,300 years in almshouses; 440 were physical wrecks; more than one half of the female descendants were prosti- tutes; 130 of the descendants were con- victed criminals, 7 of them being murderers ; only 20 learned trades and of these, 10 learned in state prisons. Up to 1877 this one family had cost the state of New York more than $1,250,000 and the expense is still going on. Side by side with the sordid record of the Jukes family read the story of the family of Jonathan Edwards. In 1900 1,394 of his descendants had been identi- fied. Of them, 295 were college graduates, 13 presidents of colleges, besides many 64 THE OLD FAITH principals of similar institutions; more than 100 were clergymen, missionaries, or theo- logical professors; 75 were officers in the army and navy ; 60 were prominent authors and writers, having produced 135 important books and editing 18 publications; 60 were physicians; 100 and more were lawyers, one of them our most eminent professor of law ; 30 were judges, 80 held public office, one being Vice-President of the United States; 3 were United States senators, others being governors, members of Congress, mayors of cities and ministers to foreign courts; one was president of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, and others prominent in business and banking circles; while it is not known that any was ever convicted of crime !^ It looks like a clear case against any doc- trine of penalty. But two facts are yet to be noted. First, that side by side with this record of inherited and continuous evil you have the innumerable narratives of men and women born in sin and reared in damning environments, with criminality and lust and pauperism in their blood, and 1 Cf. Herbert Walter: Genetics, p. 227f. IN THE NEW DAY 65 evil in their associations and outlook; but who, by the power of God, have become men and women of amazing graciousness and goodness of character and life. The story of our great city missions, of London's halls, of Water Street and Hadley Hall in New York, and the Salvation Army bar- racks made popular by Harold Begbie, the story of foreign missions and the uncomited altars of Christian churches everywhere, is a triumphant romance of the possibilities of changed life. And the second fact to be remarked here is that notwithstanding the constraints of heredity and the evil born in the blood, not- withstanding all theories of a fall upward, there remains, insistent and inexorable, the sense of obligation and responsibility. However men may have become what they are, they know they are not what they ought to be; and if there is no story of sin save that of a guiltless inheritance of unavoid- able defects, then science shows us nature producing at one and the same time an utterly inconsistent and useless feeling of responsibility for it. 66 THE OLD FAITH Science has not a word to speak specifi- cally on the reality of hell ; it lays before you the inexorable facts of human character and its silence is an inevitable and searching ques- tion. Can there be a just moral order which would ignore all moral distinctions between these two families ? Does not the simple fact of heredity and its impressive laws, argue for differences in the immortal life correspond- ing to the moral differences in the mortal life? When a soul knows no moral changes, when it comes to the end of its earthly day stained and evil; when under the influence of heredity and its impressive laws argue for and of an environment in which it acqui- esced; or when by deliberate or reckless revolt against recognized moral good it comes to the journey's earthly ending, is not the witness of science to the fact that the inevitable issue is a condition of expe- rience appropriate to the character thus formed and finished, not punishment in the old sense of retribution, but the harvest of life? What kind of a life hereafter could the Jukeses live? What can there be in the next life for a soul that is shrunken and IN THE NEW DAY 67 selfish and lustful and identified with sin? Throw away every notion of punishment, and the best you can get is what John heard from open heavens: "He that is unright- eous, let him do unrighteousness still, and he that is filthy let him be made filthy still." You may put out the fires of the old-fashioned hell in all the pleasant waters of new scriptural interpretations you please, but the profound reality of per- sonal character remains; and if there is no hell to which a soul may go, there is yet the more poignant hell which the soul itself may be. Reversing the terms, you get the argu- ment from the morally good. Science with its impressive reading of natural law, while not pushing it to the extreme, as Henry Drummond did in his notable volume, con- firms religion in its emphasis upon the unflinching spiritual law; and adds to the heaven of religious faith and hope the assurance of the most convincing reason. For here also the silence of science is as eloquent as its voice. It unveils many an ancient mystery and lays bare many a 68 THE OLD FAITH hidden process; it strips the supernatural from many a storied marvel and in place of miracle reveals the operation of calculable law. But some things it cannot explain. It has not told the origin of love, nor of the universal expectation of a life beyond, where those that love, and have lived according to their highest light, shall meet again and live forever. If this were the tradition of a single people, the fancy of a tribe, an expectation local to a continent or commensurate with a certain degree of cul- ture, it might be either explained or negli- gible. But it is the universal attitude, the race-wide expectation. Science shattering the Ptolemaic theory may have destroyed the older localizations of the immortal life, but the hope and certainty it has not touched. At the boundary of that realm it halts. It makes more reasonable than before the foundation-beliefs on which religion stands, and there, where religion leaps to its highest flight, it cannot say No. It may challenge the literalness of religion's descriptions of the life that is to be ; the fact enshrined in those descriptions it cannot IN THE NEW DAY 69 deny. And, made all the more clear and credible by the work which the scientific spirit has wrought in its scrutiny of the New Testament, greater, surer, as the years go by, stands One, for whom are all things and by whom are all things, saying, "I go to prepare a place for you . . . that where I am there ye may be also." And not a word that cautious and credible science utters casts a shadow on the exalting hope of immortahty, which for nineteen hundred years has made life more bearable and worthy, and death less dreadful and to be feared. (2) Turning, then, to the second influence which challenges our religious thinking to- day, what is the result of modern democ- racy on the ancient faith and our proclama- tion of it? The immediate answer is that modern democracy is transforming our theological conceptions. First of all, it is changing our idea of God. There is a sting of truth in the sneer of Feuerbach that man has made God in his own likeness. One can catch the reflection of theology as he looks into the political 70 THE OLD FAITH theories and institutions of humanity, for the theology of every age has comple- mented its prevailing political ideas. The sternness and remoteness of the God of the Middle Ages were a characteristic reflec- tion of the conception and practice of mon- archy. Given the obsession of the divine right of kings and the logical assumption of the temporal authority of the pope, with the corresponding feudal organization of society into lowering gradations of caste from baron to serf, and it is almost inevi- table that there shall come to pass the notion of a necessary series of mediators — priest and Mary and Christ — before the soul can lay its petition before the feet of God, and while this implacable and inaccessible sov- ereignty of God and even of Christ, as it was developed, can be derived from the Scriptures only by neglect of many and au- thoritative passages of completely modify- ing significance, yet that very neglect of modifying passages would be most natural to minds formed under the influence of mediseval conceptions of society. Absolute monarchy was conceived to be the highest IN THE NEW DAY 71 and noblest expression of character and life, and the conception of God would inevitably take that form. Luther's child- ish notion of Christ, that of a pitiless Judge, derived from the stained glass window of the village church, which pictured him as sitting on a rainbow with a flaming sword in his hand, was the ideal in which his whole generation and epoch lived. One cannot always prove which of two conceptions is primary, but it is more than debatable whether Calvin's theology shaped his conception of government, or whether his inexorable theocratic ideas, born of his unflinching allegiance to Old Testament political forms, were not responsible for his stiff and pitiless doctrines of the sovereignty of God, and the immutable decrees. Puri- tanism was in a very real measure the advent of new political ideas and their influence stretching over into religion. The Puritan, says Macaulay, "prostrated him- self in the dust before his Maker, but he sets his foot on the neck of his king." It was inevitable that Puritanism, when it had learned that society was greater than 72 THE OLD FAITH any sovereign, should discern, if slowly, that religion could do better things than prostrate itself in the dust before its Maker. And Puritanism, building a political com- monwealth on a new continent, built also the beginnings of a new conception of reli- gion. So too the theories of the atonement have felt the softening influence of the demo- cratic spirit. The theories of the atonement, of Christ's death as the ransom paid to the devil for the rescue of the world, of Christ as a penal substitute, and the like, theories which have had vast and permanent value in the development of religious thinking and in the building of Christian society and life, are theories which could arise only under the protecting shadow of absolute monarchy. The Puritan however, in this connection, as he debased kingship exalted law; and instead of implicit and castelike submission to a monarch, developed an unrelieved sub- servience to a legal system. In theology the result was a theory of atonement which reproduced much of the arbitrariness of IN THE NEW DAY 73 the older conceptions; only instead of a devil to be bought off or an angry monarch to be appeased, it was a terrible and ma- jestic law which had to be upheld. The result to-day is that there is no theory of atonement to which any considerable body of thinkers can hold unqualified allegiance; and in the reaction from the forbidding and arbitrary doctrines of the past, the fact and doctrine of any atone- ment bade fair to be lost. However, evi- dences are not lacking now of a return to the substance of atonement, though a satis- fying theory is yet unformulated. Perhaps it will never be discerned or formulated, but, as ex-President Roosevelt has pointed out certain analogies between biological processes and the course of national history, our doctrines of theology must follow the analogies of social experience, or, in other words, be discovered from the spiritual and moral processes found operative in the life and activities of society. What is thus true of the doctrines of God and the atonement is true also of other and correlated doctrines — penalty, Providence, and the like; for, 74. THE OLD FAITH whatever may have been the forms in which the older generations cast their confessions of faith, the new day demands restatement of our creeds in terms of modern expe- rience. "No man's theology," says the Rev. George Jackson, in a sermon on "Char- acter and Creed," "is safe that is not brought into constant contact with actual hfe." ' There are at hand certain illustrations that this method of theological interpreta- tion is already in progress. Our new insis- tence on brotherhood ; our renewed emphasis upon the Fatherhood of God ; our recurrent use of the family as the type of ideal society and religious fellowship; our discernment of the social and economic as well as purely religious service and meaning of the historic Jesus; our imperative application to the immediate concerns and conditions of pres- ent day society of New Testament passages which were formerly considered wholly prophetic of the world to come, all indicate the increasing influence and result of the democratic spirit upon religious thinking. 1 The Table Talk of Jesus, p. 75. IN THE NEW DAY 75 "Life," as John Brierly has written, "is compelhng us to revise our formulas." ^ As democracy has thus affected theology, so too it has influenced religious conduct. It has made religion not simply a matter of worship or formulated creed or sustain- ing personal hope, but a habit of life. It has brought religion out of the Church and the closet, out of individual experience itself, and made it coincident with all society. Religion used to be a private concern be- tween a man and his God. It is now an affair in which a man's neighbor is included. "The only relationship big enough for any one man is all the rest of mankind." ^ It used to be a matter of one's personal con- science and conduct and transgression and salvation; it is now a matter also of one's acquiescence or participation in the malad- justments of society. It used to be a refuge from a sense of individual guilt; now it is an impetus to social activity. We have learned that "a religion which merely consoles us for the wrongs we have done is 1 Religion and To-day, p. 102. -Bishop Brent, quoted by Roosevelt: History as Literature, p. 273. 76 THE OLD FAITH a menace to moral progress." ^ And slowly, with stress and strain and not a little mis- understanding, democracy is driving reli- gion out to recognize in social injustices and limitations a responsibility and trans- gression, to right wrongs in which every individual shares, and to find its primary task, not in confessing social sins or reliev- ing social wants, but in ending the one and preventing the other. The spirit of democ- racy, however, is not simply a volatile and inaccessible atmosphere permeating and environing men and women in groups; it comes to power only through individuals. It is itself a personal matter. There has never been a reformation of any kind, a cleansing of politics, or curbing of tyranny, or humanizing of theology, or any other service accomplished for society or individ- uals wrought by democracy; whatever of the kind has been done at all has been done not by democracy but by democrats. So too the influence of democracy on religion has been an influence upon individual reli- gionists, and Christianity is changing its * Lyman: Theology and Human Problems, p. 210. IN THE NEW DAY 77 social attitude and expression because indi- vidual Christians are being compelled to change their social attitude and expression. The manner of change can be indicated by three out of not a few possible illustrations. It is a change in the attitude of religion and the religious man toward the corporate task of society, or politics. There has been probably no more glaring contrast between ideals and actions than that between the Christian man's creed and his political habits. There has never been a political evil in American life — the legalized exist- ence of the commerce in alcoholic drinks, the continuance of corrupt officials in power, the administration of municipal, State, and federal affairs for the benefit of public serv- ice and other corporations protected by fran- chise — not a single political evil but could have been prevented or ended at the will of the Christian voters. The Christian voters, however, heretofore have very largely refrained from voting or have voted as party and personal affiliations directed for the maintainance of the existing order. Some few have sincerely been so concerned 78 THE OLD FAITH in the things of the other world that they have honestly undervalued the things of this world, but the great majority have been governed by no such fine and positive spir- ituality. For the most part they have simply recognized no connection between their religious profession and their respon- sibility as citizens. Religion has been a matter of a specific kind and limited in its outreach to a few very distinct affairs. The vote-as-you-pray appeal which was so pop- ular at a certain period and with certain elements in political life, while striking the true note, fell upon deaf ears. The "Church vote" was a matter of jest. The spirit of democracy is altering that to- day. It is breaking down partisan lines and thrusting the question of personal char- acter into every election. It is increasingly difficult for a man of low morals to be elected to office. The Church vote is rapidly ceas- ing to be a jest. The attitude of the churches on political questions, such as the form of city government, the regulation or suppression of vice, as well as their attitude toward the candidates for office, is a matter IN THE NEW DAY 79 of increasing influence. This means that rehgion is invading the whole hfe of men. It is no less otherworldly that formerly, rightly conceived; but it tests itself not merely by a man's personal experience or feeling or belief, but by his life and action and influence in the whole business of being a man. Democracy has so affected religion that no one can be a good Christian who is a bad or even a careless citizen. So too the spirit of democracy has affected the attitude of religion toward the industrial life of society. The labor unions have taught the churches some wholesome if humiliating lessons. Their close-knit or- ders, by which the interest of one becomes the interest of all; their heroic battles and sacrifices for their members' welfare; their system of strikes, direct and sympathetic, mismanaged and ill-timed and even unjust as they have often been, but breathing the living spirit of brotherhood; their money gladly shared from scanty wages to reen- force their comrades battling perhaps across the continent for justice, misappropriated and misused as oftentimes the money may 80 THE OLD FAITH have been; all of these features of modern labor unions have shown the churches a larger but neglected duty. And the churches are learning the lesson. Democ- racy is showing religion that the conditions in which the other half of society lives are of vital importance to both halves; and is insisting that Christians cannot ignore their neighbors and have access to their God. Religion to-day is discovering that it can- not profit by cheap garments if the cheap- ness is wrung from sweatshop labor; it dare not be silent or inactive before the spectacle of the broken children of the mine and colliery and mill. Eighteenth-century religion put its ban on smuggled goods, on profits stolen from the government; twen- tieth-century religion is discovering that it must ban profits stolen from childhood and unfortimate mothers, overworked shopgirls and underpaid workmen. To put it in per- sonal terms, we are coming to see that Christian women dare not profit by bargain- counter sales made possible because of star- vation wages; Christian men dare not con- sent to or help to maintain profits of any IN THE NEW DAY 81 kind which necessitate injustice and hard- ship anywhere down the hne. That is democracy revising the attitude of rehgion to industry. It has wrought a third change, namely, in the attitude of rehgion toward poverty. Rehgion has always been philanthropic, and there has been no greater or prouder argument for the wholesome motives of the Church than its institutions of charity and social help. It has listed its hospitals, asy- lums, homes, schools, orphanages, dispen- saries, and poor funds; it has mustered its multiplying organizations for community help and indiscriminate benevolence, and has concluded the story was done. Democ- racy has begun to illuminate that idea. As Professor Olin A. Curtis, of Drew Theo- logical Seminary, has finely said in a paper privately printed, "The democratic spirit is different from the philanthropic spirit, which cares for all men and tries to help all men. It is quite possible to be a philanthro- pist and yet not to be a democrat at all." ^ Democracy is teaching us that as Christians 1 Personal Paper, Febniary, 1914, p. 13. ... 82 THE OLD FAITH we must not simply help the poor ; but must remove the necessity and conditions of pov- erty. Religion can no longer be proud of its distribution of money to men and women who have no work; it must be reorganizing industry so that they shall have work and not need poor funds. Democracy is com- pelling religion to see that to bring about milk inspection and adequate sewage and ventilated and uncrowded housing, public playgrounds and kindergartens, is more religious than to give away coffins for the babies of the poor, or provide nurses and medicines to the fever-stricken of the ten- ements, or eggs and' milk and sanitariums for the helpless victims of preventable tuberculosis. That is religion's latest les- son. Some of us are learning it with grave difficulty and much protest and very slowly. But we are learning it, and must learn it thoroughly or by our refusal be exiled from any fellowship in contemporary reli- gion, which has discovered that it is no longer a segment of personal experience and interest alone, but the very stuff and substance and spirit and atmosphere of the IN THE NEW DAY 83 ideals, functions, and responsibilities of society at large. But when we have seen in this fashion the influence of democracy on religion; when we have noted the changed conceptions of theology, the humanizing of the doctrine of God, the artificiality dropping away from the conceptions of atonement, the more practical interpretations of sin and penalty, the more social character of experience and immortality; when we have marked religion going out into life's commonplaces — the courts and commercial houses and streets and factories and voting booths — and be- coming not a segment or phase of life but the whole atmosphere and attitude of life, under the revolutionizing influence of the democratic spirit; when we have seen this, then we discover another and arresting fact. The expanding and effective spirit of democracy reveals anew the unique and unalterable character of religion itself^ Democracy alone introduces man to him- self. It shows him his weighty obligations to those around him. It reveals the other- wise unsuspected dignity of his human re- 84 THE OLD FAITH lationships, and the disciplining joy of mutual service. It gives him the inspira- tion and responsibility of brotherhood and transforms the world from a battlefield into a home. But democrac}^ is a servant and not a master. It draws its commission from a source beyond itself. While it claims and seems to have influenced religion, it has been, after all, only a porter opening the door through which religion has passed from the cathedral into the market, from the cloister into the midst of toiling men. This is a truth affirmed alike by the witness of history and the voice of personal expe- rience. The history of the American people is not a greater testimony to the power and value of the democratic ideal than it is to the constraints of religion. We are people born in religious passion as well as bred by the enthusiasm of democracy. The May- flower brought a new political idea to New England, but only because its chief cargo was an unappeased religious conviction. With the exception of Virginia, which was a commercial experiment, and the Spanish IN THE NEW DAY 85 settlements, which were estabhshments of imperial avarice, the moving force behind the enterprise of American colonization was religion. "Religious zeal swept the Jesuit missionaries across the northern wilderness to the Mississippi; German pietism made the AUeghenies ring with hymns ; Moravian missionaries consecrated the soil of Ohio; the Society of Friends gave a State the name of Penn, and a city the name of broth- erly love; English Puritanism stamped its tradition on the conscience of New Eng- land." ' So much for the founding of the nation. These modern movements and ideals which have been thrown in apparent contrast with the Church and Christianity to the supposed discredit of the latter, have what source? The newer conception of government enunciated in the imperishable language of Lincoln's Gettysburg speech, "government of the people, for the people, by the people," from what fountain did it stream? It is a conception imheard of where the Christian religion has not come to sovereignty. It is iPeabody: Approach to the Social Question, p. 160. 86 THE OLD FAITH sprung from but one source, the New Tes- tament, and from but one mind, that of Him who said: "Ye know that they who are accounted to rule over the Gentiles lord it over them; and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it is not so among you: but whosoever would become great among you, shall be your minister ; and who- soever would be first among you, shall be servant of all." From what ultimate human sources have come the new interest and zeal and sacrifice on behalf of a reor- ganization of society to secure justice both in labor and its rewards for the men and women in our great industries, for the deliverance of women from the bondage of bitter conditions of employment, to rescue childhood from the crime and tragedy of child-labor? Only from the New Testament and the religion it inspires and of which it is the charter; only from Him who set a child in the midst and said, "Of such is the kingdom of heaven." The workman, the woman, and the child were alike negligible before the New Testament came, and are negligible to-day where it has not been IN THE NEW DAY 87 carried to influence and power. India, Africa, and China, to name none of the many others, are majestic witnesses to the sole and singular ministry of the New Testament and its religion on behalf of womanhood, childhood, and toil. And cry out as the enemies of the Church and reli- gion do, vehement as may be their hostility to the name of Christianity and the profes- sions of Christians, it is nevertheless the spirit of the New Testament, the spirit of the Christianity which they assail, that has taken form and voice in the forces oper- ative now in the social redemption of our day. In clear and compelling fashion before our very eyes the parable of Jesus is being fulfilled, that the kingdom of heaven is as a bit of leaven which afterward leavens the whole lump. Back of the boisterous and passionate sense of brotherhood and comradeship with which men to-day are fighting so madly though sincerely for the rights and privileges of labor, unacknowl- edged perhaps but no less vital and potent, is the accumulated drive of nineteen hun- dred years of Christian ideas slowly but 88 THE OLD FAITH inevitably pushing on to the salvation of society. Whence, then, comes our increas- ing solicitude for the unfortunate, our enlarging interest in the criminal, our wide- spread conviction that penalty shall be remedial ? From what source have come our world-wide activity against the diseases which prey particularly upon the the poor, our ever louder demands that society shall guarantee housing, milk, and food supply, recreations and sanitation to those unable to secure them for themselves? They are unheard of except in Christian civilizations. This sense of solidarity with the less for- tunate, this pressure of obligation to those for whom life's battle has been unjust and imequal, come only from Him who drew his picture of the final judgment as pro- ceeding on the basis of our ministry to our brethren in temporal things; who said that "Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these . . . ye did it unto me." The new democ- racy, in other words, is the world rediscov- ering religion ; it is humanity coming farther forward unto Christ. A parallel result of democracy, seen IN THE NEW DAY 89 thus clearly in its subordinate position, is to show the unalterable and unique char- acter of religion in personal experience. Democracy alone never satisfies the soul. Those whose temporal conditions are in every way comfortable are not thereby made content. The social and material conditions of men and women have steadily improved year after year, but their personal satisfac- tion is as remote as ever. Democracy can get men better wages, build them better homes, secure them better laws, provide them better schools, eliminate some of their diseases, surround them with a hundred advantages and acquisitions of comrade- ship and comfort, but it cannot minister to a mind diseased; it cannot defend them from a bitter conscience; it cannot comfort them in sorrow, or deliver them from sin, or light the darkness of the grave. Democracy cannot guarantee the virtue of woman or the integrity of men. It can produce liberty but cannot prevent lust. In the midst of perfect democracy, if that be all, there will still be broken hearts and blasted hopes, and sinful, shameful deeds, and the fear of 90 THE OLD FAITH death. In the supreme reahties of the per- sonal Hfe democracy is but a name and the shadow of substance that is passed. As Matthew Arnold whispered to himself the last day of his life on earth, "The cross still stands, and in the straits of the soul makes its ancient appeal." And the cross is not the symbol of democracy but the seal of reh- gion. Democracy, I said, introduces man to himself. Religion introduces man to God. This is the fundamental necessity without which democracy can only deepen discontent as it satisfies the body while leav- ing the soul impoverished. "Thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart finds no rest until it rests in thee." Amid the pomps and pageantry of England's world-wide empire, Rudyard Kipling saw the truth: The tumult and the shouting dies, The captains and the kings depart; Still stands thine ancient sacrifice, An humble and a contrite heart. The age in which we live, with its passion- ate enthusiasm for brotherhood, for polit- ical justice, for social opportunity, for IN THE NEW DAY 91 industrial righteousness, its sacrificial labor for the oppressed, the unfortunate, and the poor, confirms as never before the supreme and inevitable character of religion and the world's need of it. The age in which we live is crying with a thousand voices the inexorable question of our Lord: "What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" Ill THE INCREASING CHRIST Less introspective than our fathers, more con- cerned with the problems of social than of indi- vidual sin, we find in Jesus our leader in the struggle for social righteousness, the prophet of spiritual de- mocracy, the preacher and founder of the kingdom of God. But for us, too, as for earlier generations, his personality retains its perennial freshness. For us, as for them, he is Saviour as well as leader, the one in whom we find the answer to our indi- vidual as well as our social need. If we are to define God in terms of a single character, it is to Jesus that we must turn. This appeal is independent of the fluctuations of critical opinion. However the critics may recon- struct the story that hes back of the Gospels, they cannot alter the picture the Gospels present. Here, in the pages of the evangelists, we meet a figure so individual and distinctive that after all the lapse of centuries he still speaks to us with a spiritual authority as direct and compelling as that which won him his first disciples by the lake shore. For us, as for them, he expresses in terms of a human life our highest thought of God. — William Adams Brown: Modern Theology and the Preaching of the Gospel, p. 207f. CHAPTER III THE INCREASING CHRIST The age in which we Hve is a complex and questioning age. It is fed, in spite of itself, from these streams which flow from out an unappreciated past, and swept at the same time by these cross currents of modern knowledge and feeling. It has de- veloped new powers and evolved new hopes. It has uncovered many falsehoods and discovered many truths. It has been in- spired by many experiences and disillu- sioned by many more. It is an age of vaster resources and greater accomplish- ments in many directions than of any before it. To what conclusion, then, may we come, if to any, concerning what, with all these changes, the age accepts as the irreducible and adequate finality in religion? Science has changed the terms in which the truths of religion can be satisfactorily ex- pressed, and democracy has thrust its once 95 96 THE OLD FAITH restricted axioms into the broad and temper- ing activities of social relationship. Reli- gion has become a matter of the laboratory and the street, of the astronomer's instru- ments, the biologist's microscope, the voter's booth, and the craftsman's bench, where formerly it was perhaps too much an affair of manuscripts and altars and personal introspection. But religion at heart and in substance has not changed. It is constantly revitalized, not destroyed; vindicated in surprising fashion, but not banished. It is as always the revelation of and relation of the soul to the personal God. And that means what? The preceding chapters have already indicated the answer the present writer will make to the question. It is the answer of the Christian Church since the Church be- gan. Dr. Gordon has voiced it in a sin- gularly beautiful sentence, saying, "We are here under the shadow of an Infinite Name ; we are living and dying in the heart of an enfolding Presence." ^ The age, to use a well-worn word of theology, is Christocen- i The Christ of To-day, p. 61. IN THE NEW DAY 97 trie. Not long ago the statement was soberly made, in some quarter, that science will be the religion of the future. It would be fairly difficult to say just what that means; Israel Zangwill tried to tell us, though with not an amazing success. But whatever it means, science will be the reli- gion of the future only as science becomes the revelation of Christ. The author of a letter which lies upon my desk as these words are being written says, "I am a Socialist, and to me . . . Socialism is God's way out." No one can say what Socialism is going to be; but if it is ever going to be God's way out, it will be so only when it becomes the reincarnation of Christ. Nor is this simply the bold and prejudiced declaration of one who pleads a case. Mr. Winston Churchill, surely a very modern Saul among the prophets, in an address at the University of California, said, "It will be strange indeed if we do not arrive at the conclusion that the world has still in Jesus Christ something to grow into instead of out of, and that when we shall have reached the new boundaries he has set, it will be 98 THE OLD FAITH time enough to think of a new prophet and a new rehgion." From quite a different direction, and one to which a large part of Christendom has been looking with great apprehension and not a little fear, comes the authoritative declaration of the Rev. George Jackson, that "the net result of the fierce conflict which has raged for the last seventy-five years around the New Testa- ment documents has been to make clearer than ever the solidity of the historical basis of Christianity and the incomparable posi- tion of Christ as the supreme Person of historj^" ^ Than this subject of the Person of Christ, there is none before the thoughtful minds of our generation more imperious and im- portant. Unless all signs fail we are well into the beginning of a controversy con- cerning it comparable only to the mighty debates of the fourth century. "Who was Jesus? What was the purpose of his life and teaching? What significance have he and his message for the striving multitudes of to-day?" These are the questions which 1 Jackson: The Preacher and the Modern Mind, p. 104. IN THE NEW DAY 99 the authors of a recent able review of liberal thought say "are becoming matters of the greatest consequence to the whole of hu- manity." ^ To them other inquiries are added: "Have we still the right to preach this Jesus to others? Has he not become the object of the greatest doubt on our part?" And it is in an attempt satisfac- torily to answer these questions that the volume cited has been produced. But liberal theology, as it is technically called, can never answer these questions. It confines itself to too restricted an area of investigation. It seeks "to present an ac- count of Jesus as he appears in the light of a scientific study of the historical records" — which is very good, with certain serious qualifications, one of which is that it shall be guided by the records and not emasculate or distort them, that it may reach its precon- ceptions. But the main weakness of this liberal Christology is, as the Rev. Maurice Jones has well written, "that it draws a portrait of Jesus which does not overstep 'Weinel and Widgery: Jesus in the Nineteenth Century and After, p. 27. 100 THE OLD FAITH the limits of the human, and yet claims for this conception of the Ideal Man the very- extremes of spiritual value, and sets him up as an object of religious worship." ^ The fault with this school of scientific theology is that it has too exclusively a backward look. It is well to search for and to find the historical Jesus; but the mighty effects which have followed his exaltation into the theological Christ, against which liberal Christology protests, are too real, too per- manent and powerful, to be dismissed as having flowed from nothing more than the mental aberration or social enthusiasm or religious fervor of the first-century disciples of the Ideal Man. The historical Christ is more than a figure in the New Testament records and the chance allusions of a Roman historian; he is a force in the history which has followed down these nineteen centuries, and it is in them, as well as in the docu- mentary records, that he is to be discovered. There has been comment enough on the theological cry of modern years, "Back to Christ !" but this much may yet be said : that 1 Maurice Jones: The New Testament in the Twentieth Century, p. 21. IN THE NEW DAY 101 when you have gone back to Christ you find that he has gone on. He is the same yester- day, to-day, and forever; but it is not a sameness either in size or meaning or power. It is a sameness in motive and spirit. Christ comes to the world, out of a thousand wist- ful dreams and prayers and hopes of men, and takes his place as a figure in history, a man of Galilee, the citizen of a Roman province, a member of a Hebrew tribe, a participant in an historic religion already centuries old. He never travels beyond the little land in which he was born ; is untouched by the literature and art, the civilizations, politics, and cultures which lie out beyond his own people; he knows nothing of alien life or faith or customs ; speaks no language but the provincial tongue of the common people of his race. He lives the life of an artisan and is familiarly known as such until the age of thirty; then for not more, and probably for less, than three years wanders from city to city and town to town and field to mountain, a prophet without honor in his own country. In the capital of his people he comes into collision with the 102 THE OLD FAITH ecclesiastical system and authorities, and on a charge of treason to Rome, is executed as a common criminal by the Roman govern- ment. A man of specific time, in a restricted geographical area, of a marked and isolated race, of a strict and exclusive religious sect — that is the historic Jesus. Immediately, however, he becomes more. In all the vary- ing expressions of our religion, through all its changing moods and emphasis, suited to every age, appropriate to every condition, the citizen of every country and the spirit of every advance, he fulfills the farthest interpretations of his own declaration, "I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly." He fits perfectly into the scheme of the first century of our era, and yet the latest and most progressive mind has not over- taken him. Simon Peter, in the days of his flesh, said: "Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life." And eighteen hundred years later Johann Fried- rich Strauss, who began the long hostility of destructive criticism, wrote that "Christ is the one character without the idea of IN THE NEW DAY 103 whom in the mind personal piety is impos- sible," ' while John Stuart Mill, who, if ever a man could be cold intellect devoid of religious experience and sympathies, was that man, has left on record his judgment, saying, "That which, after all, to me would be the best and highest form of life would be to live as Jesus Christ would have ap- proved." Whatever forms, amid the streaming influences that beat upon it now, our religion shall from time to time assume, unless it shall utterly cease to be, it can never be separated from Jesus Christ, who is "the image of the invisible God, the first- born of all creation: . . . and he is before all things, and in him all things consist . . . that in all things he might have the pre- eminence." Nor is this in the narrower limits of what we designate as "religious" life and thought. "Christ is the creator of our human world. The worth of the indi- vidual, the reality of social union, the sanc- tity of home, the infinite meaning of love, the eternal validity of our ideas of right- eousness, freedom, and God, all the ultimate 1 Cf. Carpenter: Witness to the Influence of Christ, p. 30. 104 THE OLD FAITH realities of our human world, are the crea- tion of Christ." ' He is the one constantly increasing per- sonality and influence in the social life and institutions of humanity. All local, tem- poral, and sectarian characteristics slip away from him. He becomes the universal figure. Set him beside the teachers and religious leaders of the world, and the differ- ence is immeasurable. Buddha is always the same. He is a figure of a remote cen- tury, of a singular social order, of a specific type of thought and feeling. Confucius never changes. He is Chinese to the core and never otherwise. He makes no appeal beyond his own race. The walls of China are down but he does not cross the border. Mohammed is Arab to-day, as he was when he fled for his life. Millions of people name him as their souls' Lord, but they are not world-wide people. He too speaks to cer- tain minds and aff'ects certain kinds of sym- pathies. All of these are separate from the religion they brought. Cut Buddha out of Buddhism and it will make no difference. I Gordon: Christ and To-day, p. 31. IN THE NEW DAY 105 Discover that Confucius borrowed all his wisdom and Confucianism is as strong as ever. Mohammed passes and may be for- gotten, but Mohammedanism is unimpaired. It is not so with Christ. Born a Hebrew, his language knows no provincialisms. He speaks to men of all ages, climates, coun- tries, degrees of culture, and depths of deg- radation. His truth and its disciples live under the skies which Mohammedanism calls its own, multiply among the followers of Confucius and the languorous India of the Buddha. The morals of these other teachers are colored by the customs, char- acter, and traditions of race and society. The morals of Jesus have neither modifi- cations nor adjustments; they are the same in all continents and among all peoples in all social orders. This Jew of a distant century and a minor province has become the chief figure before two hundred and fifty millions of people, of all races, lan- guages, and customs, and to none of them does he seem to be either a Jew or a figure of the past or with provincial and restricted sympathies. Neither can he be disassoci- 106 THE OLD FAITH ated from the religion which bears his name. The disciples of these other religious teach- ers have recourse in the experiences of life to the words of their book, the sayings of the sage, the formulas of the saint. The author of the book, the sage, and the saint are immaterial. In the experiences of life his followers turn not to Christianity but to Christ. Through Him the first fond prayers are said Our lips of childhood frame; The last low whispers of our dead Are burdened with His name. And this expansion of the personality of Christ until he is the universal figure, the native of all countries, the Kinsman of all men, is reflected in the extension of the prin- ciples and spirit which he has enunciated and incarnated in the life of nations. Certain supercilious folk, whose wide travels in the flesh have not removed the insulation from their minds, are fond of remarking that Christianity is only a minor quantity com- pared with the other great religions of the world; and they quote the numerical strength of Buddhism with its 400,000,000 IN THE NEW DAY 107 adherents and Mohammedanism with its 140,000,000. But the test of rehgion is not its numbers but the kind of Hfe it produces. And by that test how do these rehgions stand? In five hundred years their adher- ents and the civihzation they have produced have not made a single contribution to the sum of human knowledge, have not written a new law, developed a new tenderness, broadened by an inch the sympathies, or uplifted for a moment the hopes of society and men, except as they themselves have been stimulated, though perhaps uncon- sciously, by some influences of Christianity. In the life of the world and its institutions they are a negligible quantity. The world at large, its thought, its art, its politics, all its multiplying activities are dominated by the Christian nations. Going a step farther, the standards and ideals of social and national life which are universally recognized as the best and most elevating, are standards and ideals derived from the teaching and the spirit of Christ. One of the striking sayings of Jesus, quoted by John, is that "the prince of this world 108 THE OLD FAITH hath been judged." It was never so true as now. Diplomacy, commerce, adminis- tration, society, all have been judged; they measure their permanence and worth by their approximation to the spirit and the motive of Christ, and even now amid the noise of navies, the tramp of armed men, the roar of forge and factory where munitions of war are being made in increasing quan- tities, amid the din of battle shouts and threats, steadily the tide of human senti- ment is rising against war as it rose against slavery, and when the day shall come when battles shall be only memories and guns be mute, the world will own the triumph of the Prince of Peace. This seems to lie a long time ahead. But the time is on the way. The transformation of humanity takes a long time. Christ called men brothers, and Paul said that in Christ there is neither bond nor free; but it took eighteen hundred years before there were no slaves in North America. A long time ahead, but it is there and swinging nearer with every revolution of the planet! The famous mosque in Saint Sophia, now a Mo- IN THE NEW DAY 109 hammedan stronghold, was formerly a Christian church, one of its chief features being a great fresco of Christ. In 1888 the Sultan of Turkey, seeing it, said, "Cover it ! His time is not yet come." ^ "Not yet come" but coming! In greater fashion than ever his forerunner dreamed, "He must in- crease," till the knowledge of God shall cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. But this expansion of the life and spirit of Christ in the society and institutions of humanity, great and fruitful as it is, is not the sum of his increasing influence. He is the increasing influence and personality in the intellectual life of the world. Philos- ophy for all its centuries has been seeking for a clue to the existence and order of the world, but one after another its systems fail. Each makes contribution to the quenchless onreach of the minds of men, but all end in and tacitly admit their incompleteness. It is to be remarked, further, that those artic- ulated schemes whereby the sages think to light the problem are found to be of con- tinuing value in proportion as they square > Quoted in Noble: Redemption of Africa, volmnel, p. 78. 110 THE OLD FAITH with the rehgious instincts of humanity, and particularly as they square with the reli- gious instincts which are confirmed and cul- tivated in the New Testament. All of them, however, are inadequate. On Her- bert Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy, with its Christless evolution, the dust has already begun to gather. From the majesty of Hegel, with his spirit coming into conscious- ness through history, to the misery of Hart- mann, the pessimism of Schopenhauer, and the madness of Nietzsche, even the solid enduring dignity of Kant — with all that they have done in disciplining human thought and quickening the human spirit, all are incomplete, the best of them haunted by the wistful unacknowledged appeal of Chris- tian faith. Our little systems have their day, They have their day and cease to be; They are but broken lights of thee, And thou, O Lord, art more than they. Philosophy has found no permanent and satisfying explanation of the world; but a philosophical scientist like Bergson is mak- ing place for Christ in his theory of its con- IN THE NEW DAY 111 tinuous unfolding, and the later writers are almost all influenced by Christ's pres- ence, and compelled to shape their specu- lations to account for him. It is philos- ophy catching up with the New Testament, modern intellect overtaking Saint John to hear him say: "All things were made through him; and without him was not anything made that hath been made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men." It is the writers of modern thought translating in spite of themselves the writer to the Hebrews, who nineteen centuries ago spoke of Jesus as one "for whom are all things, and through whom are all things." It is Christ increasing in the intellectual life of humanity. This increase is demonstrated perhaps more practically by the increasing alle- giance to Christ on the part of the intellec- tual men of modern times. President George R. Grose, of De Pauw University, is authority for the statement that three of the most prominent scholars of Harvard University of the past decade — one a phi- losopher, one a psychologist, and one a geol- 112 THE OLD FAITH ogist — began their careers as materialists or agnostics, but before the close of the nineteenth century were avowed Christians. "Fifty years ago," he says, further, "the drift of philosophic thought in the univer- sities of Europe and America was toward the side of unbelief; to-day the great lead- ers in education and the large majority of the student body are Christian believers." ^ President Remsen, of the Johns Hopkins University, he quotes as saying with great earnestness: "I think I have some right to speak on this question, having devoted my life to the study of science. And I say to you the most scientific life that I know is the Christian hfe." " Turn to that body of formulated think- ing which most easily shapes and reflects the thought-life of the age, literature and the drama, and the discovery there is striking. Granted that never before was there so much frivolity and trash exploited in fiction, and never so much that is tawdry and cheap on the stage, yet no earlier age ever wit- 1 Outlook for Religion, p. 17. 2 Op. cit. 18f. IN THE NEW DAY 113 nessed an enthusiasm for Christ on the part of literature and the drama such as our age witnesses. Hall Caine's White Prophet, Marie Corelli's Master Christian, Elsa Barker's The Son of Mary Bethel, Suder- mann's Magda, and Maurice Maeterlinck's Mary Magdalene, and the whole phase of the literature of New Testament themes; Moody's The Faith Healer, Jerome's Pass- ing of the Third Floor Back, Kennedy's Servant in the House and The Terrible Meek, and Churchill's Inside of the Cup, Peabody's The Piper, and a whole school of European prose, poetic, and dramatic literature of the last twenty years are wit- nesses to his enlarging place in modern thought. It comprises a body of writers so notable and significant that already books are being written about it, and the author of one of such critical and reviewing volumes characterizes his work and the age itself as The Promise of the Christ- Age in Recent Literature. And this increasing influence and place of Christ as a motif in the liter- ature of men is not more marked and signif- icant than the place in literature occupied 114 THE OLD FAITH by the few fragments of his utterances which have been preserved for us. Alto- gether apart from the influence of the New Testament, and particularly the Gospels, in the whole life of succeeding centuries; apart from the fact that behind every sig- nificant movement, institution, and reform in society, government and religion have been the New Testament and its specific declaration and spirit, the words of Jesus, themselves, hold high position among the literary masterpieces, and are gathering an increasing estimate and appeal. "What is the most touching story ever told?" Charles Dickens was asked. He replied at once, "The story of the prodigal son." Coleridge counted the Beatitudes the finest passage in all literature, and Booth, asked by a friendly company to recite, melted all the circle as he repeated the Lord's Prayer. Edmund Burke once declared that the supreme docu- ment on the rights of man was the Sermon on the Mount. "Look on our divinest Sym- bol: on Jesus of Nazareth, and his life, and his biography, and what followed therefrom. Higher has the human thought not yet IN THE NEW DAY 115 reached: this is Christianity and Christen- dom." ^ And Goethe, the supreme intellect of German literature and life, a few days before his death prophesied the passing of all divisions among men in anticipation of the time when they should have reached their largest life and freedom through hav- ing fully comprehended and inwardly expe- rienced the pure teaching and love of Jesus Christ.^ Not yet, but coming! we have not yet discerned the fullness of his stature, but in the widening life of mind and thought, as in the realm of nations, governments, and society the day is hastening on by prophet bards foretold when "of his kingdom there shall be no end." In the details of the practical conduct of life, as distinguished from the verified but no less personal generalizations and the intellectual moods and movements cited above, Christ is increasingly the determin- ing, if unacknowledged influence. It is almost trite at this late day to remark that the payment of twenty millions of dollars 1 Carlyle: Sartor Resartus, p. 170. * Compare Hillis: Influence of Christ in Modern Life, pasaim. 116 THE OLD FAITH to Spain for the Philippine Islands, and the expenditure of money and men in the pa- tient, sacrificial development of the Filipino people toward self-government and, what is more vital, capacity for self government, was an immeasurable advance upon any- thing the Old Testament in its highest vi- sion of national ethics had ever seen, or urged. It was far in advance of any prec- edent the world had offered in the relations of a victorious to a vanquished nation. It squares only with the spirit of Christ inter- preted in a larger way than even the first century interpreted him. The passion for brotherhood also, which to-day is working out, in turbulent as well as peaceful forms, the industrial reformation and social heal- ing which bulk so large in the business of democracy, finds its germ in the human life of Christ and its charter in his new commandment to love one's neighbor as oneself. It has often been remarked, and not infrequently with an emphasis too little qualified, that the discontent and hostility of the industrial order, however bitter toward the Church, is never other than cor- IN THE NEW DAY 117 dial and reverent toward Christ. There are exceptions, of course, to this repeated declaration, though taken broadly it is un- doubtedly true. But the significance of the place of Christ in the social thinking of to- day is even more clearly seen in the inability of even the least reverent schools of thought to get along without him. The daring voices of an earlier generation, which in their en- thusiasm for man and their hatred of injus- tice, unrebuked by ecclesiasticism, cried out against God, religion, and the Bible, are now growing faint. The Industrial Work- ers of the World, it may be said in paren- thesis, carry banners inscribed, "No God and No Master," but for all the tumult they make from time to time, like many other turbulences, history is against them. The forces of sanity rather than of violence make the enduring contributions to life, and the dangers to human institutions are not those of destruction but of disin- tegration. The leaders of modern social movements, antagonistic as they may be to the established forms and uncompromis- ing as they may be with the traditional 118 THE OLD FAITH conceptions of society, turn Christward for reenforcement and inspiration. Kalthoif and Bouck White and their industrial and hterary comrades, are neither pro- found thinkers nor accurate expositors; their apparent knowledge of the New Tes- tament is happily free from many salient facts; the Christ of their strabismic vision is singularly independent of much of the express declaration of the Gospels. But their exposition, inadequate as it often is, only emphasizes the impossibility of main- taining any humanitarian enterprise of large effectiveness and permanence, apart from the reenforcements of his character and teaching, while the undisputed spring and power of the modern social program derive from its appeal to the Hebrew prophets as they are interpreted by the Christian mind, and to the words of Christ. Here, however, we face the commonest peril of much of our modern thinking about Christ, namely, that we shall think of him as a presence and influence and spirit in these vaster historic and racial movements — in society and government and literature IN THE NEW DAY 119 and philosophy — and lose sight of his pri- mary and supreme meaning for the indi- vidual soul. The older artificial expressions and standards of religion no longer serve; the elder, stiff er, precise, and binding form- ulas are no longer received. We conceive of God in different fashion, we have another view of the Bible, we regard the Church dif- ferently, we put professions of personal reli- gion to different tests. We see Christ after a manner other than the generations before us saw him. How, then, does it stand with the individual soul and the person of Christ ? Here too he is the increasing Christ ; as out of all their scientific theory and social exper- iment men are learning with new emphasis that the old needs of the soul remain unal- tered amid whatever new conditions of life may be and new outlooks of mind. I do not name all the phases of personal expe- rience wherein the proof may be made, for two will be sufficient. Christ is increasingly the power and hope of the individual soul in its experience of sin. Whatever else may be swept away by the amazing researches and achievements of the 120 THE OLD FAITH modern mind, this remains. Science may- seem to trace the biography of sin and take away its ancient meaning; but science can- not take away the sense of responsibihty, the pressure of guilt, and the instinct for retribution. Democracy may locate the social sources and spread the individual re- sponsibility upon society at large. But beating past all the bulwarks modern thought has presumed to raise around the soul, the sense of individual and personal obligation and misdeeds and failure crowds home upon the heart; and there is no help or healing in all the fine and gracious theories and conduct of the Christless day. From them a soul may learn, if it need to learn, the way to health and service; from them it may gather, if it need to gather, wise counsel and alluring hope. But what the soul finds it needs is not knowledge but strength. It does not care how it got in this way, and it is not enough to learn how it is possible to get out ; it must somehow have the power of getting out. It is not information a soul needs but enduement; not a map but an energy; IN THE NEW DAY 121 not a description but a deliverance. "Who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?" This is the cry of the soul, a cry not all the streaming influence of modern knowledge and enthusiasm can stifle. "I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord." That is the abiding answer and experience. "We have some beautiful reli- gions in China," a Chinese student said, "teaching us the loftiest morality, but they have no dynamic behind them, no driving force to help a man to victory. Christianity not only calls us to a noble life — it enables us to live it. It not only tells us to be good — it gives us, by the power of the crucified and risen Jesus, the strength to be good." ^ That is the unalterable personal experience — the experience of sin and responsibility and impotence; and here is the unaltered complement to that experience — the re- deeming power of Christ in personal life. Yonder it is Jerry McAuley transformed in a cell in a New York jail; there it is Governor Patterson, of Tennessee; here it is an outcast at some Helping-Hand Mis- 1 Atkins: Life Worth While, p. lOlf. 122 THE OLD FAITH sion; everywhere, through all gradations of society and self-respect and culture, in all variations of circumstances and opportunity and habit, the witness of the passing years is to Christ of personal experience and per- sonal power. So too Christ is increasingly the hope and refuge of the soul in its quenchless, death- less hunger for conscious and personal life beyond the grave. It may be that in the years past the achievement of personal im- mortality bulked too exclusively in the thought of religious men and was too ex- clusively the business of the organized Church. In legal proceedings instituted in Kansas City some time ago, the petition de- fining the Holy Roman Apostolic Church affirmed that "The object of this society is to obtain eternal happiness for the individ- ual after death." And that has been, not only for Romanism but for too much of Protestantism, the only apparent object of the Church. That, as we have come to see, is one of the objects, but only one; the pri- mary object is not happiness in the next world but holiness in this. And yet the IN THE NEW DAY 123 hope of future happiness is one of the great- est inspirations to present holiness. "Im- mortahty," as Dr. Gordon has written, *'is the leverage of righteousness, the power by which humanity is raised out of the depths of habits and vices worse than animal; it is the vast support of the spirit against the flesh, the infinite ally of love against bru- tality, the necessary and mighty postulate of the true life of mankind." ^ Thomas Huxley might very well regard with horror, as he wrote to John Morley, the prospect of annihilation. And yet, for all the wistful- ness and quenchlessness of the desire for im- mortality, where is there any convincing ground of hope of it? John Fiske put the whole case for man apart from Divine revelation, when he said, "I believe in the immortality of the soul, not in the sense in which I accept the demonstrable truths of science, but as a supreme act of faith in the reasonableness of God's work." ^ That is better than nothing, though Huxley, a greater scientist than Fiske, could not find ' Witness to Immortality, p. 299. » The Destiny of Man, p. 116. 124 THE OLD FAITH even that much. But how poor and unsat- isfying that is! Beside that stands Christ, a figure, the supreme figure, of history and yet a very living personal reality to the indi- vidual soul. "Who . . . brought life and immortality to light." "I know him, whom I have believed, and I am persuaded" — not as to the reasonableness of God's work — but "that he is able to guard that which I have conmiitted unto him." The mystery of it may be admitted at once; and for all our theological dexterity and the rhetorical ease with which it is possible for not a few inter- preters to explain in detail the whole proc- ess of Christian faith, the explanations do not explain. But with the mystery ad- mitted, the fact remains that with him in personal experience, death becomes a door- way into life; its night falls but to usher in the endless morning where those . . . "Angel faces smile Which we have loved long since, and lost awhile." It is not simply a theory which has to be accounted for; it is this indubitable fact of personal certitude and peace which must be IN THE NEW DAY 125 reckoned with in any portrayal of the posi- tion of Christ in hfe. It is not a matter of scholarship or special insight or singular training; it is the experience of men and women without regard to condition of life or knowledge or social inheritance, that they and their dead shall live by the power of their personal relation to Jesus Christ. No man w^ho has observed even casually the procession of bereavement among the lives with which he comes in contact but will be impressed increasingly with the ineffable force with which Christ, as Matthew Arnold said of the cross, in the straits of the soul makes his ancient appeal. A single illus- tration will be permitted as typical of the form in which the fact of certitude univer- sally expresses itself and vainly demands ex- planation from those who would believe that the day of Christ is waning. The writer sat one sunmier evening on the deck of a freight schooner lying at anchor in a North Carolina port. The captain sat beside him. The day's work was done, and together they watched the shadows deepen on the shore and turn what Homer would have called the wine- 126 THE OLD FAITH dark water of the sound into black. "One by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven, blossomed the lovely stars." The wind stirred softly in the cordage while the schooner swung with the changing tide. In the frank confidences which twilight so sing- ularly brings to even reticent souls, the cap- tain talked much about his past. A strong man he was, toughened by forty years upon the water, knowing every nook and corner of the bays and coasts and inlets where he sailed, a master of winds and tides and cur- rents. His had been a life of hardship and exposure, of labor and loss and disappoint- ment. He had read little. The intellectual movements of the day were out of his ken entirely and he was equally a stranger to its political and social activities. He had no theories and no sentimentality. He read the Old Testament and understood little of it; much of the New was beyond his com- prehension. As he talked of the past it was doubtless inevitable that he should speak quietly of his greatest personal sorrow, the loss of his little girl; and with that painful detail which is characteristic of untrained IN THE NEW DAY 127 minds he spoke of the blue of her eyes and the gold of her childish curls. He told of her death, with the pathos of her winsome attempt to ease their grief as she whispered, "You needn't be afraid; there isn't any river, there's only a little stream," and then she crossed it while they held her hands and wept. And that had been twenty years be- fore, but there on the deck of the swinging schooner the captain was wiping his tears on the back of his knotted hand. "I tell you," he said, "it's going to be good to see her when I get there." At the other extreme of life, to complete the illustration of this insistent certitude, is Lord Acton, with his encyclopedic learning, saying to his dying daughter, "Be glad, my child, you will soon be with Jesus Christ." ^ Where do men get this hope and confidence and peace in the long stress of unforgettable bereavement and the harassing adventure of their dying? Not from any thought of the reasonableness of God's work; not from any theory of probabilities; only from the historic Christ become a living presence and ^ Letters to Mary Gladstone, chap. izxv. 128 THE OLD FAITH power in personal experience. It is here, then, that we find the only answer to the question with which the chapter began as to what the age is accepting as the irreduc- ible and adequate finality of religion. It is the living Christ. Here are the sense and experience of sin and the quenchless hope of immortality ; and religion, if it is to make any appeal whatever, must meet and an- swer that experience and that hope. They constitute the supreme constraints of human experience. They must find their satis- factory answer in another experience deep enough and supernatural enough and self- evidencing enough to command humanity at all times and in all conditions, and they find it only in Christ. "If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous : and he is the propitia- tion for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world." "And this is life eternal, that they should know thee the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ." Amid our busy generation many voices call. Men and women earnestly intent on IN THE NEW DAY 129 an intelligent faith and an effective religious conduct do well to heed. We dare not lose touch with the day in which we hve, or grow deaf to its characteristic appeal. But in it all our confidence, our strength, our hope, our victory, will lie, as they have lain down nineteen hundred years of tumultuous his- tory, in the faith once delivered unto the saints; for we are "built upon the founda- tion of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the chief comer stone." IV THE VINDICATED SCRIPTURES We must know what it is that we want to verify before we attempt the process of verification. . . . That revelation is a process in history prepares us to believe that it will find its verification in life. And especially I would emphasize that much in Scripture is the direct creation of experience. The Bible is preeminently a book of experimental re- ligion. What experience has created we may expect experience to verify. . . . But obviously the religious element in the Bible is all that religious experience can directly verify. — PeaJce: The Bible: Its Origin, Its Significance, and Its Abiding Worth, p. 470f. CHAPTER IV THE VINDICATED SCRIPTURES The question which the present age in- sistently demands concerning the Scriptures is, Are they true? It is practically a modern question, for the time has not long passed when, except by the heretic, it had not been even raised. There was a time not long since when the Bible stood before the Protestant as the Church stands before the Roman Catholic — the absolute authority for thought and life, concerning which a doubt was a deadly sin. This is not the place to trace the history of modern thought con- cerning the Bible. It will be sufficient to say that the study of the Scriptures, under the new light and with the new instruments, at the hand of later scholars, from the crit- ical and historical viewpoint, has given us practically a new Book. What kind of an influence the Bible used to have and what was the common method of reading it, may be best seen through the mind of John Bun- 133 134 THE OLD FAITH yan, who writes in that marvelous autobio- graphy of his: I was almost made, about this time, to see some- thing concerning the beasts that Moses counted clean and unclean. I thought those Beasts were Types of Men; the clean, types of them that were the people of God; but the unclean, types of such as were the Children of the wicked One. Now, I read that the clean beasts Chewed the cud; that is, thought I, they show us we must feed upon the Word of God. They also parted the hoof; I thought that signified we must part, if we would be saved, with the ways of ungodly men. And also, in fur- ther reading about them I found, that though we did chew the cud as the Hare, yet if we walked with Claws like a Dog, or if we did part the Hoof Hke the Swine, yet if we did not chew the cud as the Sheep, we were still, for all that, but unclean; for I thought the Hare to be a type of those that talk of the Word, yet walk in the ways of sin; and that the Swine was like him that parteth with his Outward pollutions, but still wanteth the Word of Faith, without which there could be no way of salvation, let a Man be never so devout.^ It is not to be questioned that the conclu- sions which Bunyan reaches concerning 1 Grace Abounding, ^71. IN THE NEW DAY 135 personal religious life are sound, and true to scriptural teaching; but it is no longer possible to draw those conclusions from that particular scripture or those like it, in that highly artificial and allegorical fashion. To leap a long line of detailed criticism which has become a commonplace in modern think- ing about the Bible, our later scholarship has shown it to us as a collection of liter- ature, separable into various kinds, distin- guishable as to purpose, circumstances, authorship and date, a Hterature to be ap- proached as such and to be subjected as such to the same standards of criticism to which other literatures are subjected. For it must be borne in mind that it is the liter- ary quality of many portions of the Bible which keeps its figures and the influence of their lives so widely before us. Ex-Presi- dent Roosevelt called attention to this in his lecture before the University of Oxford — "The ruthless death scene between Jehu and Jezebel ; wicked Ahab, smitten by the chance arrow, and propped in his chariot until he died at sundown; Josiah, losing his hfe be- cause he would not heed the Pharaoh's 136 THE OLD FAITH solemn warning, and mourned by all the singing men and all the singing women — the fates of these kings and this king's daughter, are part of the common stock of knowledge of mankind. They were petty rulers of petty principalities ; yet, compared with them, mighty conquerors, who added empire to empire, Shalmaneser and S ar- gon, Amenotep and Rameses, are but shadows; for the deeds and the deaths of the kings of Judah and Israel are written in words that, once read, cannot be forgot- ten." ' This critical study of the Scriptures, as carried on by the specialists into whose labors we have entered, has transformed the Bible from being an object almost of wor- ship into an inspiration for life, and has given Protestantism at last the spiritual liberty of the individual which it long ago professed to have won but really had not. The change of attitude toward the Bible, however, was not without serious perils, as the Church immediately discerned. The danger of this present-day attitude is that 1 History as Literature, p. 24. IN THE NEW DAY 137 the method of approach shall be regarded as the paramount interest ; and that the crit- ical character of our general Bible reading shall rob us of our spiritual reenf or cement. The present generation as it reads the Bible at all insists on what it calls the new point of view and spends much of its time on matters of date and authorship, distinguish- ing in the narratives between the legendary and the historical, between the actual and the metaphor. Instead of Moses penning the solemn story of creation and recording the sublime procession of Israel from Eden to the promised land, we are shown dim figures of seer and poet toiling in the pre- historic mists, and the cold hands of cal- culating priests shaping a code of religion and social conduct. Instead of revelation chiefly by miracle we are given revelation through history; for the ancient prophets foretelling in magic fashion the events of years and centuries to come, we have a line of statesmen wrestling with political and social problems, and a series of unknown editors rearranging into permanence their literary and forensic work. For the pyro- 138 THE OLD FAITH technic splendors of some sudden burst of vision such as we were brought up to beheve was Saint John's experience, we have dis- criminated a special body of apocalyptic lit- erature, after patient scrutiny of which we are led to believe the seer formed his own supreme production. Instead of the mys- terious and illogical but remarkably persist- ent theory, expressed or tacitly presumed, of verbal inspiration, we have version after version and revision upon revision. Getting back through the errors, imaginings, and misconceptions of generations past; laying bare the life out of which the Book has come; searching, with growing apprecia- tion, through the social and intellectual processes, the historical sequences, the racial aptitudes and popular languages out of which and by which the revelation has been made, we are more and more approximating to the mind of the Spirit. We are getting a Bible to speak to men, no longer of the eighth century before Christ, or the first or the fifteenth century after Christ, but to men in a new world and a new day. We are getting a vessel large enough to carry the IN THE NEW DAY 139 hopes and loves and longings of men and to reveal God and Christ and salvation to men, not in a narrow world with shallow skies and mysterious seas and feeble hands and shortened outlooks, but in a world of infinite spaces and infinite time, of seas their thought has spanned, and skies their minds have rifled, to whom God and the universe are vaster by an immeasurable degree than any men before them ever dreamed. Eut, however necessary this is to a com- plete understanding of the documents with which we are dealing, at most it is only preparatory to the real business of the sin- cere reader. In these pursuits the scholars have only been making possible a more in- telligent and spiritual appreciation of the Scriptures as a whole; they have been mak- ing straight in the desert of no little con- fusion a highway for our God. Unhappily, not only scholars but young men and young women in the schools and churches, and older men and women in the hard and testing bewilderment of practical life, have permitted the peculiarities of the highway to obscure for them the presence of God 140 THE OLD FAITH upon it ; they have become so concerned with the criticism of the Bible that its message is miheard. Another and even more threatening danger, to the superficially informed mind, is that presumed in some quarters to have arisen from the discoveries of modern science. The former conflict between reli- gion and science was long since seen to be unnecessary, and, indeed, impossible, except by a few belated intelligences, but the matter is adequately summarized by Pro- fessor Peake in his volume on the Bible: "First geology," he writes, "and then the theory of evolution were imagined to have disposed of the claims made on behalf of the Bible with its six-days' scheme and its doctrine of special creation and the brief period that it allows for the existence of man on this planet. And in this conflict with the Bible the physical and biological sciences have been reenforced by archaeol- ogy. We have now evidence not simply for the antiquity of man but for the develop- ment of an elaborate civilization at a period earlier than that to which the Biblical chron- IN THE NEW DAY 141 ology assigns the creation of the human race. I pass over the other points in the quarrel, such as the creation of the heavenly bodies on the fourth day, or the questions raised touching the historical character of the Deluge. And here in particular it is thought that the advance of these sciences has hit Christianity in a vital place. The Pauline theology, we are told, is built on the assumption that the third chapter of Genesis contains a record of literal fact, and this assumption has now been proved to be incorrect." ^ Long ago it was realized by the leading minds of the Church that the criticism of the Bible from the viewpoints of literature, history, and science has empowered instead of impoverished it; and the most searching critics have again and again proven them- selves to be the most devout Christians. They have not changed the message of the Book, but the emphasis. "Once we have grasped the principle that revelation has come as a process in history," to quote again from Professor Peake's thorough- iThe Bible: Its Origin, Its Significance, Its Abiding Worth, p. 6. 142 THE OLD FAITH going volume, "Scripture is invested for us with a new significance." ^ There are, how- ever, many honest-minded men and women who have not yet apprehended this, and who can see only disaster from a method of judg- ment which seems to pick and choose among what they have been accustomed to consider the whole Word of the Lord. There are Bible readers, for instance, who say that if the early chapters of Genesis are not actually historical; if the story of Jonah and the whale is the literary form into which the majestic truth of the universal love of God is cast instead of being an actual event in the biography of Jonah and the physiology of the whale; if the Gospels are not single-minded and direct stories of the life of Jesus, written, as it were, at a sitting and by the very men whose names they bear, but are the final result of the apostolic age, preserving through various stages of de- velopment the figure and the message of Jesus Christ; if, in other words, the Bible is to be thus separated into its various forms of literature, the product of the same his- 1 Op. cit., p. 468f. IN THE NEW DAY 143 topical and racial forces out of which all other literature springs, and if it is to be judged as other literature is to be judged, then it can' exercise no more authority over us than any other literature can exercise; and, saying that, and concerned with the results of the literary criticism of the Bible, to the exclu- sion of its other and profounder meaning, it becomes a literary classic, read, if at all, with the same spirit and attitude which they bring to the literature of India or China, to the poetry of Homer or the history of Thucydides. Then there is a second class — men and women who go further, taking the position that either the Bible is true or it is not true. They do not distinguish, save in the most superficial manner, between different books, in their criticism; they make no allowances for differences in the portions of the Bible as to date, place, purpose, and circum- stance. But they declare, for instance, that if the first chapters of Genesis are not lit- eral history; if the story of Jonah and the whale is not literally true; if a real angel of the Lord did not smite the hosts of Sen- lU THE OLD FAITH nacherib in a single night, but the figure is a metaphor for the plague arising from the noxious swamps of Pelusium — ^if, in short, a shadow of suspicion can be cast upon the most extravagant statement of Scripture, then the whole Bible is untrustworthy, and the Christian tradition and the individual Christian belief are without foundation. To these two classes of minds certain re- plies may be made in passing. To the men and women who accept the methods and results of modern criticism, and who, there- fore, decide that the Bible can have no authority other than that of any literature, it must be candidly answered, in the words of Principal Fairbairn, that "authority be- longs to the Bible, not as a book, but as a revelation ; and it is a revelation, not because it has been canonized, but because it contains the history of the Redeemer and our redemp- tion." ^ It must also be said that the only authority to which the human mind dare sub- ject itself is the authority of the truth, and that the truth is truth wherever it may be found, and, furthermore, it is to be con- 1 Fairbairn; Place of Christ in Modern Theology, p. 508. IN THE NEW DAY 145 fessed that the only element in the Bible which demands our assent is the truth of it. To the other folks who will throw overboard the whole body of the Scripture, if the most suspicious fragment is deemed questionable, the reply must be made that the truth can- not be thrown overboard, and everything but the truth ought to be. *' Truth, in short," as it has been put in one of the most suggestive chapters on the subject, "is the only thing which has author- ity for the mind, and the only way in which truth finally evinces its authority is by tak- ing possession of the mind for itself." ^ At this point the question, so much in the air if not under discussion. What of in- spiration? will intrude itself on many minds. And to that it must be answered that, what- ever inspiration is, it cannot change the con- stitution of truth. That two and two make four is just as true whether you claim in- spiration for it or not. A thing is true not because it is inspired, but because it is; a thing is untrue not because it is uninspired, but because it is; and no amount of inspira- 1 Jackson: The Preacher and the Modern Mind, p. 97f. 146 THE OLD FAITH tion and no lack of inspiration can make the truth more true or the false less false. The problem, then, before the individual mind to-day, restless one way or another under the influence of modern biblical crit- icism, is not to decide off-hand as to the authority of the Scriptures, nor to define in- spiration and its result, nor to determine the date and authorship of a book, nor to build defenses around some miracle, nor to tear some miracle from the record; the problem is first to discover the truth of the Bible. And what is the test of truth ? Not the form in which it is stated, nor the identity of the author of the form, nor the presence or ab- sence of certain miraculous elements in the formula. Outside of the realm of pure mathematics, which are so called because we are not able to apply them to the practical bread-and-butter business of life, there is no test of truth except the results which follow the practical application of the formula. How do we know that two and two make four? By accepting and applying the formula, with no previous question as to the probability of the truth, or the miraculous or IN THE NEW DAY 147 unmiraculous elements, or the authorship of the statement. How do we know the exist- ence of the force defined in the law of gravi- tation ? By seeing, as Newton saw, an apple fall. The test of truth is its results ; and the truth of the Bible must be discovered or dis- proven by its results in life. It will not be out of place in a volume of this kind to quote two passages from the Gospel of Luke which will serve to illustrate the only adequate method of discerning the truth of the Bible : And it came to pass, when he drew nigh unto Bethphage and Bethany, at the mount that is called Olivet, he sent two of the disciples, saying. Go your way into the village over against you; in which as ye enter ye shall find a colt tied, whereon no man ever yet sat: loose him, and bring him. And if anyone ask you, Why do ye loose him? thus shall ye say, The Lord hath need of him. And they that were sent went away, and found even as he had said unto them. — (Luke 19. 29-32.) And the day of unleavened bread came, on which the passover must be sacrificed. And he sent Peter and John, saying. Go and make ready for us the passover, that we may eat. And they said unto him. Where wilt thou that we make 148 THE OLD FAITH ready? And he said unto them, Behold, when ye are entered into the city, there shall meet you a man bearing a pitcher of water; follow him into the house whereinto he goeth. And ye shall say unto the master of the house. The Teacher saith unto thee, Where is the guest chamber, w^here I shall eat the passover with my disciples? And he will show you a large upper room furnished: there make ready. And they went, and found as he had said unto them: and they made ready the pass- over.— (Luke 22. 7-13.) The problem imposed on the disciples in each of these instances is exactly the problem imposed on us — the discovery of truth. The various bypaths v^hich are open to our minds as we face the Bible v^ere open to their minds as they faced Jesus, at the very beginning of their journeys into the city. What reason had they for believing that they would find the colt? Was this certainty of Jesus the result of some miraculous adjustment he had wrought beyond their knowledge, or merely the result of a prearrangement of which they were ignorant? Was it likely that any man would permit two strangers to take his property in this free-hand fashion? And was it likely that any man IN THE NEW DAY 149 with a water pitcher would be at the place designated just at the time they would be there, when they did not even know just when they would arrive? When everyone in the city was preparing for the feast in much the same fashion, was it probable there would be only one man with a water pitcher there ? How would he recognize them as be- ing sent; and, in any event, was it at all likely that he would give two strangers pos- session of his guest room, without more definite and detailed identification? All these questions might naturally arise before them; and if they had sought to determine the trustworthiness of Jesus by the specu- lative method so disastrously applied to the Scripture by those who mistake the province and purpose of literary and historical crit- icism, they would never have gone into the city at all. They did nothing of the kind, however. They made a personal test. "They went, and found as he had said unto them." Experience, in other words, is the test of truth. Somewhere James Russell Lowell has written, 150 THE OLD FAITH Experience is a dumb, dead thing; The victory is in beheving. Which is true enough so far as it goes, but it is not complete ; the victory is in believing, but the victory of belief is its issue in expe- rience. Here, of course, one comes sheerly against the peril of the misinterpretation of experience; and the possible different inter- pretations which may be given of the same experiences by different minds. There is, for instance, a certain well-defined protest on the part of many men and women, whose sincerity is not to be questioned, against the special interpretation which Christian folk are in the habit of giving to daily life. The Christian mind is continually finding in- dubitable evidences of some providential leading in life, certain inscrutable marks of God's interest and care. Good fortune comes to such a one, and he says, "God is good to me." Disciplining experience of loss or disappointment or pain or sorrow falls ; and he gravely affirms that God is do- ing everything for the best. He feels within him some rich and jubilant spirit and he bears witness then to the companionship of IN THE NEW DAY 151 the Lord. He feels some peculiar oppres- sion of the mind on account of which he for- goes certain purposes, or performs certain tasks of charity or service; and he says the Spirit was guiding him. He feels a certain humiliation and sense of rebuke after a hasty word, or ungenerous action or questionable activity, and he says that God was condemn- ing him. Side by side with this man is an- other who experiences the same fortune and ascribes it to his own labor and merit; who has the same trouble, but sees in it only the ill to which all flesh is heir; who is chari- table but recognizes no leading; who is un- generous and bitter and wrong and feels no condemnation; who is jubilant and finds the cause in his own physical health and social circumstances. He lives his life side by side with the Christian man, and the two lives coincide as to experience, yet he finds no evidence of God and recognizes no mark of Providence. Such a man protests against the interpretation which the Christian has given of his life. Enthusiast, fanatic, hyster- ical, hypocrite; such are the terms with which these folk are pilloried who witness 152 THE OLD FAITH to a divine experience. What answer can be made to this protest? First, that one's own failure of vision does not give him the right to call his neighbor blind ; and, second, that the man whose life is a series of events unconnected with any divine relationships is a man who may be looking accurately on the externals, but who has not the primary requisite for discovering the divine reality beneath. Imagine, what is quite possible, that as these two disciples journey toward the city where they are to find the colt, they are joined by two other men who know nothing of the presence of Jesus in Bethany and are ignorant of his words to the disciples. They will see the same incidents along the way, and, coming with the disciples, they will look at the same time on the colt standing with its patient mother; but the impulse to un- loose the animal will not come to them, and the spectacle of their companions' boldness will amaze them; while if they know the ownership of the beasts they will remonstrate with these strangers for the liberty they are taking, and to the reply, "The Lord hath IN THE NEW DAY 153 need of him," they will return only impatient inquiries and urgent opposition. Imagine two strangers overtaking the other disciples as they journey into the city, a few days later, to prepare the Last Supper. They will traverse the same public square, before their eyes the man with the water pitcher will pass, but the impulse to follow him will be wanting, and his upper room will not enter their thoughts ; the connection by which that man appears to them with the two disciples whom they have overtaken will not occur to them — in short, that mysterious procession of sublime events which are to culminate on Calvary will begin to move before their very eyes and they will be ignorant of it all. It does not follow, however, that the two dis- ciples are foolish or fanatical or in error when they interpret these common circum- stances after a special and personal fashion. The difference is in the observers; they have totally different bases of observation and judgment; the disciples have entered the city on certain conditions, have, as the begin- ning of their activity, a certain primary be- lief, and are acting under the impulse of that 154 THE OLD FAITH belief; and the common and the conmion- place reveal to them on every hand the mind and purpose of their Lord. In the same fashion the Christian of to- day who reads in all the experiences of his life a divine meaning and rests his life upon the reality of God's interest in his common fortune, has premises of a certain kind; he has admitted into his conduct of experience a certain primary belief; he has taken life on certain clearly defined terms; and his experience of life vindicates his belief; he finds the afiirmations of that primary faith — Providence, divine leading, the presence of the Spirit — coincident with his expe- rience. It is in that fashion that the Bible is to be put to the test. For what is the Bible ? Lit- erature, you say, and the word is granted gladly ; but it is literature with a special pur- pose. It is not a book of science, though touching here and there on the objects of scientific research; and it makes no claim to scientific accuracy. Its references to scien- tific themes are openly to illustrate and em- phasize certain kinds of truth totally out of IN THE NEW DAY 155 the realm of scientific investigation. It is not a book of history, though it contains large portions of deliberate and serious his- torical character, but those portions admit, on their very face, that their historical record is written with a special and not a historical aim. It is not a book of poetry, though some of the world's greatest poetry is in it; but its poetry, like its history, makes a specific kind of an appeal, and that not a poetic appeal. What is the Bible? Not simply a body of literature ; for when you have separ- ated it into its books and parts and kinds and forms, and judged them by purely literary and historical canons, there is a reality there which your instruments have not touched and which your standards have not reached. As Coleridge said, the Bible finds you, and finds you at greater depths than all other books. "What other book like this can awaken dumb or sleeping consciences, re- veal the secret needs of the soul, sharpen the thorn of sin and press its cruel point upon us, tear away our delusions, humiliate our pride, and disturb our false serenity? AVliat sudden lightnings it shoots into the abysses 156 THE OLD FAITH of our hearts! What searchings of con- science are hke those which we make by this hghtr^ For the Bible, as a whole, presents, and claims to present, in the various forms of lit- erature which make its volume, by precept and example, by warning and exhortation, infallible principles only for the conduct of the spiritual life; and it is worthy of more than passing remark that what have been called the "myths of creation," over which so many critical minds have stumbled, "are among the most searchingly religious parts of the book." ^ If one will compare them with the parallel myths of creation current among other peoples, he will discover at once that there is something more than a record here; there is a spirit present. Out of its entire sweep of literature, legend and his- tory, psalm and sermon, biography and epistle, the Bible makes one distinct and cer- tain appeal — that of the spiritual to the spir- itual life. "Testing this sacred volume by human experience, we shall find no words too 1 Sabatier, quoted by King: Religion as Life, p. 112f. sHorton: My Belief, p. 123. IN THE NEW DAY 157 strong to express the difference in degree between the spiritual, enhghtening, search- ing power of the Bible and that of all other religious books. Its influence confessedly stands unique as an inspiration to holiness and righteousness; unique in its quality of invoking in human hearts the consciousness of the Divine, the call to the higher life of the Spirit." ^ Coming to it, then, on its own terms, not unmindful of the fallibility of the human instruments through which it has been brought to us; but coming, not simply to discover the evidences and results of that fal- libility as seen in the historical improbability of certain episodes — without which the grand message would not be impoverished — or the unlikelihood of certain supernatural inci- dents, the only question concerning which is a question of evidence, for the power that has wrought the miracle of life surely could ac- complish any wonder of its manifestation; coming to the Bible, not to discover its falli- bility, nor, on the other hand, to vindicate a preconception of minute and mechanical ac- ^Seaver: Through Criticism to Christ, p. 39£. 158 THE OLD FAITH curacy in subordinate and casual details; but coming to it on its own terms, to discover its meaning for personal life — then one shall find certain definite personal results prom- ised, altogether out of the sphere of literary or historical criticism. One shall find that on certain conditions there are promised to the soul peace, forgiveness, providential care, consolation, the recognizable presence of God. By the conduct of life on the con- ditions laid down, and the vindication or dis- proof of the results promised, and in that way only, will you put the Book reasonably to the test. It is no argument against the truth of the Lord's word in these incidents I have cited, that other folks did not find the colt waiting for them, or the man with the water pitcher to lead them to his house ; other folks had not the primary basis for such ex- perience. That one taking his place outside the sphere of Christian belief and allegiance has been imable to discover in life the Chris- tian content and character, that one ap- proaching the Bible from the critical or questioning point of view alone has not been able to discover the authority of the Book, IN THE NEW DAY 159 is an argument not against but for the Chris- tian claim. When one has fulfilled the con- dition of life such as the Bible demands he will be able to discern the realities on which the Bible stands ; when one shall have taken upon his life the requisite attitude of belief and obedience he shall discover in life all those companionships of God to which the Bible witnesses and which one outside has not discovered. "They went, and found as he had said unto them." Experience is the vindication of truth. Immediately this unqualified assertion de- clares itself inadequate as a test of truth. In the first place, there are whole areas of truth in the Bible which experience cannot touch, and not a little on which experience throws suspicion. We can never, for instance, test by experience the meaning of the number of the Beast in the Apocalypse or the accuracy of the unknown author of the book of Esther. "We must not overlook the inher- ent limitations of experience, even when in- terpreted in the largest way, as an instru- ment of verification. Experience cannot verify alleged historical events in a sacred 160 THE OLD FAITH book; they must be left to historical inves- tigation. It cannot directly verify the au- thorship of books; that is the province of criticism." ^ But we need spend little time discussing the personal verification of the historical and scientific declarations of the Bible. It has already been shown — indeed, it is a truism of all thinking about the Scrip- tures — that neither the character nor the purpose of the Bible, as a whole or in its sev- eral parts, is historical or scientific, but spir- itual and ethical — in a word, religious. It stands or falls not by its scientific or histor- ical accuracy, but by its religious power. The great thing about it is "not that it can survive the assaults of hostile criticism, but that it is able to endure the assaults of life." ^ There are not a few folks who labor hard to discover and debate the difficulties in the Old Testament narrative; What were the "days" of creation ? Whom did Cain marry ? Why does one chapter say that Noah took seven animals of each kind into the ark and another chapter say that he took two? Did iPeake: Op. cit., p. 470f. 2 Gordon: The Christ of To-day, p. 162. IN THE NEW DAY 161 the prophet's ax head really float? — and go on down the long line of hoary difficulties. But while they halt and debate these ques- tions, they are not able to escape the fact that their personal responsibility toward the Bible does not depend on any or all of these, however they may be answered. The Bible for us — and every unprejudiced reader recognizes the truth at once — means its total spiritual, moral and ethical message com- pleted with the New Testament. That re- mark immediately takes us further. The New Testament is not merely a collection of books, but a series of intensely human documents, reflecting a generation's social and religious phenomena, a series of docu- ments connected by the most constraining personal interest ; a diversity interwoven into a unique and living unity. It is a volume of historical and personal literature gathering around a singular and self -witnessing life. The total impression of the New Testament is not drawn from the events in history which it records, or the ethical and religious teach- ing which it preserves, but from the powerful and perfect Character to whom it is all due ; 162 THE OLD FAITH so that its complete meaning — and every honest reader of it recognizes the fact — is the life and person and work of Jesus Christ. Toward this unique and personal unity the Old Testament is also drawn as all the plunging rapids of Niagara are drawn into the resistless whirlpool toward which they rush. What is true of the New Testament imme- diately becomes true, by retroaction, of the entire body of Scripture; and every sincere reader well knows that his vital concern with the Bible is his personal attitude and re- sponse to Jesus Christ as foreshadowed and revealed. The question which everyone must face is not, Did this miracle happen? or. Is this history? or, Did John write this book? but What does this whole volume, what does this New Testament and what does this Christ say to me, in the personal and pressing experiences of my religious re- sponsibility and need? "The real and ter- rible test of the Word of God," to quote again from Dr. Gordon, "is applied by the sinner who cries out for forgiveness, by the spirit crushed with the consciousness of IN THE NEW DAY 163 moral infirmity in the presence of eternal ideals, by the heart under the shadow of a great sorrow, by the soul looking in bewilder- ment into worlds beyond time." ^ Regardless of criticism and debate that rage in the remoter forums of a minute scholarship, the whole and human appeal of the Bible is an appeal not to knowledge but to life. It is because of that fact that its vindication is so easy and its constraints so unmistakable. Mr. Silvester Home, in his biography of David Livingstone, is respon- sible for the statement that Sekeletu, one of the African chiefs, "had no desire for the Bible, fearing that it might compel him to content himself with one wife," ^ which leads to the complementary truth so aptly illus- trated that the man who reads the Bible with a sincere and quiet spirit does not need any- one to tell him what portions of it are author- itative over his life, and so are revelations of God. It is said that a woman once told Mr. Moody that she was troubled with doubts as » The Christ of To-day, p. 161. » Op. cit., p. 60. 164 THE OLD FAITH to the Bible and asked him what she should do. And that wise prophet of practical reli- gion told her to read her Bible till she came to a command to her in it, and then not to read any more until she had obeyed that com- mand. And then to read further till she found another commandment, and to stop again till she had fulfilled that. The sequel of the story is of the amazing revelations of God which came to her as she read, and the satisfying experience which descended on her as she fulfilled the Word. One cannot recommend this uncompromising formula without qualification, for it is quite conceiv- able that so hard-and-fast a literalness would land one in dubious straits; but it is truly that spirit which commends itself to the modern mind and life as it was the effective principle in the mind of Jesus. "He saith unto them, Come, and ye shall see. And they went, and found as he had said unto them." That is the unchanging law for the discovery of spiritual truth. "If any man willeth to do his will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it is of God." It is in that way alone that one has right to test the Bible IN THE NEW DAY 165 or to investigate the life flowing from the Bible. For if, when one has met the condi- tions demanded by the Bible, nothing of the result it promises to those conditions comes to pass, then we may disbelieve it wholly — though its scientific utterances and historic statements be proven absolutely correct. But if, when we have fulfilled the primary condi- tions of belief and obedience, those grave and happy experiences come to pass within our lives; if we repent heartily for our sins, and rest wholly on the life and mystery of the death of Christ, and under the impulse of the new motives supplied by that new belief and repentance we lead new and humble lives; and if then there follow peace such as we had not before, and the sense of forgiveness, and a certain strength by which even the bitterest temptations are overcome, then we may be sure that the Book is true, and that Christ is present in the Spirit, and that Providence watches over our lives, and that somehow the mystery of salvation is an ac- complished fact, regardless of who wrote the documents, and what date they bear, and what miracles did or did not take place. 166 THE OLD FAITH The question for the moment, then, be- comes, Do such experiences follow the ac- ceptance of and obedience to the conditions which the Bible lays down? The incidents quoted from the third Gospel are indicative of the reply which may be written under- neath the innumerable lives of Christian men and women: "They went, and found even as he had said." It had been thought to illustrate this with the narrative of some of the conversions of men, but where would we begin and where would we stop? The late Commander Alfred T. Mahan, at the time of his death the most noted authority on American naval matters, bore witness to his conversion in Boston by accepting the Scrip- tures on their own terms ; and John Ruskin has told of the power of the Bible over his own life. "I resolved," he wrote in a letter to his father, "that I would believe in Christ and take him for my Master in whatever I did; that assuredly to disbelieve the Bible was quite as difficult as to believe it; that there were mysteries either way ; and that the best mystery was that which gave Christ for a Master. And when I had done this . . . IN THE NEW DAY 167 I felt a peace and spirit in me I had never known before, at least to the same extent; and everything has seemed to go right with me ever since, all discouragements and diffi- culties vanishing, even in the smallest things." Since Professor James's Varieties of Reli- gious Experience, illustrations of what the fathers called the power of grace have once more become popular; what would have oc- casioned no purely intellectual curiosity or interest at the time of the Evangelical Re- vival or the Great Awakening of the forties, and are indeed the normal effects of the mul- tiplying evangelistic activities since the days of Moody, have recently been seized upon as a new field for literary hunting. Mr. Harold Begbie has proved most voluminous in his narratives of the Salvation Army, and the Water Street Mission has its character- istic book. One may therefore cite an in- stance recorded by the Rev. R. F. Horton, and cite it all the more properly because of his own sane and thoroughgoing sincerity. It is of a man serving a term of penal servitude at Durham, England, for at- 168 THE OLD FAITH tempted murder. He had been born and raised a Roman Catholic, but because it was supposed that Protestants were given some shght privileges Catholics in the prison were not, he had registered on his imprisonment as a Protestant, and so found a Bible in his cell. Having nothing else to do, he read it to pass away the time. But one day, reading the New Testament, he grew strangely inter- ested and the conviction came to him, as he has testified, that if this book were true, the priest was not, and he could pray to God for himself. Under the compulsion of the Book he prayed for forgiveness, and the response came. He vowed that when he should be free he would go back to the village where he had committed his crime and show that he was changed. He did so, watched with sus- picion by the police and the neighborhood until suspicion gave way to confidence. He began to speak as a local Methodist preacher, and at the time Dr. Horton re- corded the incident he was a missionary in India, known and loved and honored and abundantly successful.^ Any evangehcal » Horton: My Belief, p. 120. IN THE NEW DAY 169 pastor can cite similar instances, and the records of the noble company of the evan- gelists are replete with authenticated ac- counts of personal transformations as note- worthy ; and not from what we call the lower orders only, but from the most cultured areas of society. "And this surely is the true mir- acle of the Bible : that a book slowly put to- gether in a way that we are now coming to understand, bearing in it the traces of its human origin and growth, should yet have such power to bring God to men, to bring men to God." ' A book which works in that way when accepted on its own terms must be true, re- gardless of the verbal and historical inac- curacies which minute and painstaking scholarship finds in it. Its truth must be far more vital and divine than that dependent on mechanical conceptions of inspiration and literal acceptance of all narratives, however improbable, with no discrimination as to source. And a book which, in its own sphere, works such permanent and tremendous ac- tivities in human life and character must be 1 Jackson: The Preacher and the Modern Mind, p. 119f. 170 THE OLD FAITH tested neither in the cloistered coldness of a scholar's study nor by the flippant challenges of half -ripe minds, nor by unyielding pre- conceptions as to what authority and inspira- tion and the faith of the fathers mean, but in the sphere of its distinctive activities and power. I have a life in Christ to live. But ere I live it must I wait Till learning can clear answer give Of this and that book's date? Nay, rather, while the sea of doubt Is raging wildly round about. Questioning of life and death and sin, Let me but creep within Thy fold, O Christ, and at thy feet Take but the lowest seat. V CONCERNING THE CHURCH And when the living creatures went, the wheels went beside them; and when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up. Whithersoever the spirit was to go, they went; thither was the spirit to go: and the wheels were Ufted up beside them; for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels. When those went, these went; and when those stood, these stood; and when those were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up beside them: for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels.— Ezekiel 1. 19-21. CHAPTER V CONCERNING THE CHURCH The new day and the faith developing in it, the new reading of the Bible and the newer conceptions of life evolving from and through them all, not only imply but make imperative a changed and changing theory and conduct of the Church. At this late day to say even that much is to render oneself liable to the charge of antiquity ; for the gen- eration out of which we are just passing has probably been as industrious in its attacks on the Church as in any other form of intel- lectual activity. Criticism of the Church has been the sport of kings and the pastime of the honest poor. It has furnished maga- zines with copy and pulpiteers with popu- larity ; it has been a fount of eloquence to the self-appointed apostles of the oppressed, and a ready-to-hand excuse for the morally indolent or brazenty evil. The indictment of the Church at the bar of public opinion by 173 174 THE OLD FAITH the vociferous voices of present-day criticism has lacked neither definiteness of charge nor number of counts. The Church, so runs the accusation, is active in immaterial things, in dogmas and forms and bloodless meditations on remote themes. It exercises perhaps some oblique influence on minor segments of life, an influence which is negligible in the great and pressing currents which make up our human society and problem. The Church is moving, but it is in the bypaths of the world's business; along half- forsaken walks of emotional and perhaps aesthetic in- terest; along narrow and inadequate roads of obsolete charities; or even in its most splendid and aggressive enterprise, the mis- sionary propaganda, which has at once the glamour of a crusade and the fascination of a business and professional challenge, it is hardly more than at the edge of the great national and social movements which are so stirring the peoples of the world. All around the Church to-day is the noise of the new warfares of humanity, the battle of brotherhood in industry, the passion of social readjustment, the insistent campaigns IN THE NEW DAY 175 against diseases which arise from social neghgence, the commanding adventures in pohtical reform, the dehcate yet intrepid movements for the reorganization of a judi- cial system which has crushed its heart in the case-hardening of its forms — all the mani- fold and compelling interests that are inter- woven in our changing social life. All these are calling men and women to chivalrous activity on behalf of their disadvantaged brethren; the whole area of human life is swept with the strong winds of moral imper- ative and ideal; but the Church is lingering on the edge of reality, singing of remote and impractical experiences. These are some of the charges which the most honest, and some- times the kindest, of the Church's critics bring against it. And this criticism of the Church, while generally exaggerated and often irrelevant, and not infrequently ludicrous, has had nevertheless a very real cause. One of the few temperate and sensible remarks discov- erable in Mr. E. F. Blanchard's passing volume on The Readjusted Church, puts the case against the Church almost accurately. 176 THE OLD FAITH "The present defects/' he writes, "are threefold — the one-sided conception of the meaning of rehgion ; the out-of-date methods which become an open door to corruption and evil, and the nonprogressive character of the Church whereby she fails to fulfill her whole mission in the present-day advance- ment of society." ^ The corruption and evil which the author claims to find from the methods of the Church are more imag- inary than real, and, at the worst, neg- ative rather than positive; and it would be quite difficult to find any satisfactory una- nimity as to what methods will fulfill "her whole mission in the present-day advance- ment of society." But the criticism is at heart sound, and out of the stream of criti- cism, honest and searching and reverent, as well as blatant and foolish and hostile, which has been poured upon it for the past genera- tion, slowly at first but now with accelerated motion, a new form and method of church life are shaping in and pressing on the changing social life and religious convic- tions of the world. What the characteristic • Op. cit., p. 15f. IN THE NEW DAY 177 form, what the dominant method shall be; whether there shall come to pass any one form or method so preeminent as to give name and direction to the whole Church, the present writer does not make bold to say. The purpose of this chapter is far more modest; it is to suggest simply some con- siderations which, whatever may be the forms and methods the new age shall de- velop and employ, are involved in its very hfe. The fragment of Scripture presented at the beginning of this chapter will serve as a fitting introduction to or illumination of the pages to follow: "And when the living creatures went, the wheels went beside them ; and when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up. . . . When those went, these went, and when those stood, these stood; and when those were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up beside them: for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels." It is a passage singularly germane to much of the present-day thought concern- ing the Church, and especially the Church 178 THE OLD FAITH that is soon to be. It reflects in terminology the spirit of our characteristic thinking, and implies very largely the fundamental and vital truth so commonly overlooked and without which much of the modern Church program is patently inadequate. Ours is a wheel age. We speak and think and act largely in terms of machinery. The human spirit which, a few decades ago, found its supreme expression in literature and art and music, now signalizes its pres- ence and delineates its activity in the inven- tion and use of multiplying and stupendous machinery. Goethe, to go further back, has given way to Krupp. Cardusi has been el- bowed out of the way by Marconi; Haw- thorne, and Lowell, and Emerson and their immortal fellows have been crowded out of sight by Edison, and Westinghouse, and the Wrights. For the quieter recreations of the mind which gave to yesterday its thought- fulness, we deafen thought amid the in- numerable tumult of the motor car. That immortal scene in Helen's Babies where Toddy desires to see the wheels go round is the unintentioned picture and personifica- IN THE NEW DAY 179 tion of our present day. Our language is drenched with the atmosphere of the factory ; it smacks of the machine shop. This intrusion of machinery into thought and hfe is not surprising nor to be hastily condemned. It is not now a matter for criticism but simply for recognition; the more easily and imperatively because it has affected other realms than those of current speech and common industry, influencing as well our conceptions of and attitude toward government. We have come to live and act, as every one knows, as if any evil in society large or small, could be rectified automat- ically by the machinery of easily enacted law. In the California Legislature of 1912, for instance, according to the public press, there were introduced four thousand bills seeking to regulate all sorts of matters, some of them as personal as the size of one's chicken coop and the shape of one's clothes. This obsession of the mechanical idea mod- ifies our social activities. We seek to meet conditions which call for improvement or obliteration by the appointment of a com- mittee and conduct ourselves not infre- 180 THE OLD FAITH quently as if the universe were to be regu- lated by statute. The first step and too fre- quently the last in many a worthy social movement is the calling of a convention, and few objects of observation are more interest- ing than the commendable misuses to which mass-meetings are put. Our age insists upon wheels; and so far, so good. But it imagines them to be inher- ently automatic, and there is no truly auto- matic machinery of law or government or industry. Machinery, whether it be a mate- rial creation to produce some physical com- modity, or a system of legislation, or an or- ganization of society, is only a tool. By itself it is a dead weight. There must be beside it and in it the living creature; and there is no efficiency or service in a machine of any kind whatsoever except as, in the words of this prophet quoted above, the spirit of the living creature is in the wheels. Here is the well-nigh fatal weakness in the larger part of the modern criticism of the Church; it is concerned, even when it most seems to emphasize the spirit, with the con- duct of the wheels; and it offers its rebuke IN THE NEW DAY 181 and presents its advice in the manner of the innocent or aggrieved bystander, with the air of one who gazes from the pavement at some spectacle which interests and provokes him, but for which he has not the sHght- est responsibihty. What, however, is the Church, and of what and whom is it made? The answer is that we are the Church; it is made of us: not simply of those who are recognized as the formal and recorded mem- bers of the organization, but of all of us whose lives are shaped by its inevitable, if unacknowledged influences, and who react upon it in the unescapable relationships and conduct of our experience. It is a far broader and more embracing fact than the visible and delimited institution we call by the name. "The history of our Western civilization was largely but the life history of a particular form of religion and of wide- extending and deep-seated social movements connected therewith." ^ This implies inevi- tably a very real reaction of the social move- ments upon the form of religion which was thus connected with them; and it is at least 1 Kidd: Social Evolution, p. 91f. 182 THE OLD FAITH questionable as to whether the form of reli- gion has more affected the social drift which is expressed in our changing civilization, or the social drift more affected the form of religion. There has been always a very vital reciprocal influence. Government illus- trates the same truth. Americans have been born with an infatuation for democracy, and there is probably no intolerance like that which conventionally prevails in this country against the idea of monarchy. But there is nothing inherent in the one which guaran- tees its right to exist, and nothing inherent in the other to warrant its decease. It is worth asking, indeed, whether, if instead of the three Georges there had been a series of rulers like Victoria or Edward VII on the British throne, we would not still be colonies of the motherland. There were not lacking a few far-sighted English statesmen who per- ceived a better way, from the British view- point, than the course of enactments which drew to the Revolutionary War. To see democracy trying to stand on its own right of existence one needs to look at some of the republics of South America or at Mexico IN THE NEW DAY 183 since the exposure and abdication of Diaz; the former are dictatorships in everything but name, and at the time these hues are being written the latter is a Confused alarm of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night, out of the seething currents of which no man is wise enough to prophesy what figure will at last take shape. The strength of democ- racy is in the spirit of the democrats who compose it; the weakness of monarchy has always been the defective and distorted char- acters of the monarchs by whom it has been administered. The fancy of the Church as a sublime and changeless institution, having a certain real though ghostly and invisible form and a vast and mysterious life drawn from the immemorial past and indifferent to the vary- ing and multitudinous life of the passing age — that fancy has long since passed away save from the most mediaeval minds. The Church draws its divine life from Christ, its divine and living Head, but in its forms and service and doctrine and characteristic ex- 184 THE OLD FAITH pression it is the creation and the creature of every generation. In an age when tyranny was the principle of government, and the obsession of the divine right of kings lay unrelieved upon the hearts of men, then God and the spiritual world were inter- preted after the same fashion, and there was the temporal lordship of the popes, or the Inquisition and the crime of heresy, or the immutable decrees. In an age when mon- archy had broken down of its own incompe- tence, or given way by slower movement to democracy, or had been restored but bound hand and foot with the new limitations a democratic ideal had fastened on the old monarchial figure, then independency of some sort or another sprang to life and power, and while their beleaguered brethren at home were making nonconformity to be felt, out from them the more pioneering spir- its crossed the sea and built those heroic and heartening religious democracies of New England Congregationalism. There is no changeless and abiding form of Church, apostohc or otherwise. There is the abiding spirit of Christ; and the form of institution IN THE NEW DAY 185 in which that spirit shall be manifest and effective among men is the work of a chang- ing hmiianity. Every age in a very real fashion makes its own Church or modifies the Church bequeathed it by its progenitors, as every age develops new ideals and activ- ities and character, or remains a more or less approximate counterpart of that which preceded it. It is profoundly true, as a modern preacher has put it, that "The man who is in the Church and mocks at it is both foolish and sinful — foolish because he de- rides himself; sinful because he could make it better if he would improve himself." ^ One can go even farther and say that the man who is outside the Church and sneers at it is both ignorant and cowardly — igno- rant because he does not realize that the Church is just what he permits it to be, and cowardly because he will not accept the Church's living challenge to make it what it ought to be. "The spirit of the living crea- ture was in the wheels.'* It is here, then, that the clue to the activ- ities of the modern Church are to be found ; IB. F. Stockdale: Sermons, p. 119f. 186 THE OLD FAITH for the question which every member of the Church ought honestly to ask from the in- side, and every critic ought sincerely to ask from the outside, is not, "What is the Church going to do?" but, rather, "What am I go- ing to do?" Doubtless there are too many church leaders and too many individual church organizations still out of touch with the characteristic moods and movements of the present generation, but the Church as a whole is not to be indicted in this thorough- going manner. It would be easy to show that the fires of enthusiasm with which all the humanitarian movements have begun and have been maintained were kindled at the altars of the Church ; it would be easy to show, to change the figure, that the waters of human kindness now rising toward the flood in the multiplying agencies of con- structive and preventive as well as remedial brotherhood, have started in the divine stream that flows within the Church, though this, of course, is the very point in dispute, for the most specious charge against the Church is that other agencies are csLrrying on the vital and saving work of society: feder- IN THE NEW DAY 187 ations and associations and clubs, organized charities, boards of public welfare, labor unions, state benevolences and institutions, even industrial and commercial corporations — these, we are told again and again, are the effective agencies in the lifting of life to the higher levels of opportunity and recompense and experience. The Church, we are in- formed, has let its task and tools fall from its idle and withered grasp, and, like Bun- yan's Pope, "can now do little more than sit in his cave's mouth, grinning at pilgrims as they go by." In reply to this, two remarks are to be* made. First, that so far from being true in the broad fashion of the modern indictment, the one great obstacle in the way of the spir- itual power and influence of the Church, as not a few men of the most catholic and modern spirit and interest have recognized, is the high-minded but unwarranted sur- render of the Church to the ethical revival which has so completely filled the horizons of our present-day prophets. That there is such an ethical revival now in progress, that it is terribly and sadly needed, and that it is 188 THE OLD FAITH the very hope and salvation of society and its institutions, few with eyes open to the new day will deny ; and that the Church must be, as never before, in the forefront of the activ- ities for the promotion of the new spirit of real democracy and brotherhood and indus- trial justice and good citizenship, is an axiom of common thought. But that the Church must do all of this as its first and supreme business ; that its conduct of purely social service — the most threadbare phrase in our current speech — is its one great task; that we are to resolve our churches into societies, clubs, federations, conmiunity leagues, self-improvement organizations, and transform our church life into a whole- sale administration of preventive philan- thropy and the reformation en bloc of a much-bewildered industrial order, after the ideals of young men who have drifted out of the pulpit and into the street rnd of others who have never been interested or sym- pathetic with the Church at all, is an ut- terly dangerous as well as foolish fallacy of much present-day agitation. Wliatever the Church is to do, it must never abandon its IN THE NEW DAY 189 primary duty, not to administer life as by a machine, but to leaven life by truth incar- nated in regenerated personalities. The Church must, indeed, be first in the field in any and every opportunity for the promo- tion of good citizenship, good society, good business, good amusements; for the promo- tion of anything and everything good what- soever. The words which aroused a Roman amphitheater to enthusiasm must blaze upon its front: "Nothing human is foreign to me" ; but it must never forget, as it has seemed of late to be forgetting, that into all these broadening opportunities for ministering to society, it must go with a special and dis- tinctive gospel dominant and unmistakable upon its lips. These new activities are, after all, its opportunities, not its aim. It must renovate the world that is, but it must thunder on its renovation the terrors and the splendors of the world that is to be. The second remark to be made at this point follows hard upon what has just been said. It is that by as much as the social and educational work of the age is being done by individuals and institutions apart 190 THE OLD FAITH from the Church, by so much is there a wit- ness to the enlarging success of the Church itself. For the Church is here as a leaven to leaven society, not as an authorit}^ to compel it or a machine to crush it to a predetermined and inflexible form ; and when on some higli^ mount of an unerring judgment the insti- tutions and individuals now doing the work the Church is charged with failing to do, are questioned as to the final sources of their inspiration and interest and sympathy and purpose, it will be seen that from the Church their spirit drew its strength and at the un- recognized altars of the Church their pur- pose and the inspiration for their tasks were formed. It was the Church whose voice spoke loudest for the moral issues of our war with Spain, as it was the Church which, half a century before, had sounded the clearest note concerning the Civil War. It was the Church which ham- mered hardest at the fetters of the slave, and while a section of it stood for quite the opposite point of view, it was against the judgment of Christendom at large and but a local illustration of the inextricable en- IN THE NEW DAY 191 tanglement of the Church with the society in which it stands. It is the Church which has hewed the wood and carried the water, which has marched and fought and bivouacked amid the laughter and corruption of the world, in the bitter warfare with strong drink. In the new crisis of an aroused and inadequately compensated industrial order, in the new emergency of widely organized commercialized impurity, in the new di- lemma of cumbersome and outworn forms of government, it is the Church which, through a hundred voices of men and insti- tutions, is speaking the conflict and the vic- tory which must be fought and won. And when one remembers how in every great movement of the Church for a mighty moral purpose it has been awakened, stirred, and at last led by a small but increasing number of envisioned people until the whole organ- ization advanced level with or ahead of the pioneering minority, it is occasion for satis- faction that the Church, amid all the criti- cism poured upon it, is so largely alive to the modern spirit and purpose and ideal of society. Cardinal Newman, in one of his 192 THE OLD FAITH Parochial Sermons, calls the Church "the Home of the Lonely." It was that in a spe- cial way for him — a great, dim-lighted re- treat, where the broken soul could hide ; and it is that to-day in its measure and modern- ness, because it is still made up, in part, of the lonely. It is, however, vastly more. The lonely are in it now, not to nurse their loneliness amid the somber beauty of shad- owed aisles and flickering lights and the sob and wail of cathedral organs ; the lonely are in it now to lose their loneliness in a large and active life. The Church to-day, in the fine phrase of Professor Peabody, is "not so much an association of saints as an associa- tion of saviors." ^ What, then, are the men and women in the Church and those out of it who are earnestly scrutinizing its pro- gram and movements, going to do with it in this pressing modern day? There are not a few of them, as has already been intimated in the foregoing pages, who would deny Professor Peabody's statement. That, they would reply, is an ideal; the reality is far otherwise. It is the preponderance of saints 1 Approach to the Social Question, p. 198. IN THE NEW DAY 193 rather than of saviors which di'aws their critical fire. The only adequate reply is that on which this chapter has been insisting, namely, that the spirit of the living creatures is in the wheels. If the Church seems but tardily awakening its membership to social duty, how many of them are being earnestly and intelligently aroused by the critics within and without its gates ? If the Church seems indifferent to the moral issues in municipal government and life, how seriously are its critics interesting their comrades in those moral issues, and tearing away the fetters of tradition and hostility which so long have held the Church from direct participation in the practical affairs of society? If the Church is not sufficiently enlisting the youth and protecting the inexperienced from the perils and pitfalls of our present day's too liberal social habits, how vigorously are those who recognize its failure inviting and warn- ing the young men and women of the times and constructing within the Church a more adequate security and strengthening a more sufficient inspiration? It will be said, natu- rally, that the critics of the Church are not 194 THE OLD FAITH to be expected to remain within what they believe to be a f aihng institution, though the most severe and valuable of them are within its membership and activity; but that fact does not alter the responsibility. The recog- nition of a fault implies an obligation. And it would be a quickening discipline if all of those who have refused to be identified with the Church and yet have asserted an inalien- able right to criticize what they have de- clined to help, should be compelled to answer frankly the question as to how far they have thrown their influence on the side of those moral issues for which the Church has con- tended and for which they have demanded its entire effort. How far, for instance, has the "practical business man," who is quoted so incessantly in complaint of the Church's inefficiency, favored his own free speech when it might cost him advertising, or fought a saloon when it might affect his trade, or in- sisted on law enforcement when it might have involved unpleasant publicity? Some such practical business man, noting the in- creasing number of houses given to vice in a neighborhood around a certain Church, IN THE NEW DAY 195 asked one of the women of the membership what the Church could do to help those girls? "When you men," was the immediate reply, "quit compelling girls to work for four dollars a week, then the Church can do some- thing for them." His interest in the girls and the Church's relation to them ended at that point. If one is to be utterly frank about this matter of the Church and its critics, notwithstanding the perfectly just criticism which comes to it, the average man inside the Church and out criticizes it for not counteracting the wrong he persists in allow- ing or committing; he demands that it shall be courageous where he is cowardly and do the unpleasant work of which he is to reap the benefit while escaping the embarrass- ment of reform. The business of the Church, as one of its sympathetic but searching critics has said, is to "bring society and God together." ^ But how can it do that unless society wants to meet God? And it may be laid down as a rule for the judgment of all pious profession both of individuals as such and self-constituted » Mathews: Church and the Changing Order, p. 111. 196 THE OLD FAITH prophets claiming to voice the aspirations of the age, that society does not want to meet God until it is willing to pay the price of the encounter. The misinterpretation of the doctrine of free salvation takes many forms, but none more specious than the current pre- sumption that the Church is to renovate the world and sanctify its immediate member- ship without any regard for the attitude of the world and the cooperation of its membership. We may well remember an old Greek saying, "The gods sell us all the goods they give us." ^ The wheels go, but only as the living creatures go. "Whither- soever the spirit was to go, they went." The responsibility resting upon the churchmen of the day, and upon those who reject the name but are awake to the chang- ing conditions of society, is made the heavier and more ominous by the fact that the Church is going. To make use of a phrase of a singularly frivolous song of recent popu- larity, it may not know where it is going, but it is on the way. It is true, in part at least, that the Church has failed in the immediate > Brierly, Ourselves and the Univerae, p. 271. IN THE NEW DAY 197 past to enter upon the opportunity it had, as the men and women in and out of it failed to meet the privilege and obligation their new age and new thought opened to them. But it needs no prophet to realize that the Church is moving now. It is more domi- nant in the intellectual world than it has been in a generation. Of the two leading philosophic writers of the day, when all qualifications have been made, one is reem- phasizing the primacy of the spiritual life — the old message of the Church since the first century — and the other is making a new place for and a new insistence on the spirit- ual interpretation of the universe. Within the last five years one of the conservative British journals made the statement that of all the books published in England during the preceding twelve months more than fifty per cent dealt with religion and the Church ; while a recent analysis of the number and kind of books published in the United States during the year 1914 shows that the volumes devoted to religion and theology number 1,032, six fewer than those of sociology and economics, and only 24 fewer than those of 198 THE OLD FAITH fiction, which ranks first in total output with 1,056 titles. The very criticism of the Church is indicative of the paramount place it occupies in modern life and thought. In practical concerns the story is of un- paralleled advance. The missionary enter- prise, for instance, is to-day more extensive, better equipped and manned, better organ- ized, and more successfully carried on, showing more results in the redemption of individuals and the illumination of society than ever before. The two great forces back of thie unparalleled events which have trans- pired in China have been the Christian Church and the Western education it has brought and inspired. In our own country, immediately after the passage of the Webb bill by the United States Congress, in 1913, a piece of legislation which is universally regarded as the beginning of the end of the traffic in alcoholic drinks, the official publi- cation of the organized liquor interests said editorially that the organization and influ- ence of the Churches far surpassed their own and made certain the ultimate destruc- tion of the liquor business. Taken in con- IN THE NEW DAY 199 trast with the jocular and contemptuous pro- nouncements of these same interests less than twenty years earlier, this is highly signifi- cant. To cite one more illustration: the president of De Pauw University is respon- sible for the statement that a judge of the Supreme Court of North Carolina in a public address has declared "that it would be utterly impossible for the courts, in any adequate manner, to enforce the laws of the land but for the influence of the Church." ^ The real problem of the Church to-day is not concerned with its social task or its doctrinal faith, but with the awakening of its mem- bership within and its critics without to the recognition of their own responsibility. A membership and community awakened to the social vision which the leaders of the Church already have, and to the responsi- bility which the social ministry and inspira- tion the Church has exercised in the past lays upon them, will mean the power of the Church returned tenfold upon it for the splendor of a constructive service and an imperial conquest in the things of the spirit. 1 Grose: The Outlook for Religion, p. 113. 200 THE OLD FAITH The primary requisite for such activity on the part of men and women, as the fore- going discussion has suggested, must be a clearer understanding of the Church's busi- ness in the world than is usually displayed by the people who rush into print and other publicity with their cut-and-dried plan of what the Church should be doing. The Church ought to touch and contribute to and in its measure fashion every form of human experience and activity — government, com- merce, industry, pleasure, education, health ; and to this we are all agreed. But the Church as it admits its responsibility thus far, dare" not end its responsibility here ; it must touch all these forms of experience and activity, not for the creation or direction of them for themselves alone, but as the instru- ments and agencies of something quite be- yond them. It must fashion and direct these in the interest of individual and social char- acter. The passionate reformer of the Church from without demands that it shall effect all these aspects and enterprises of life for themselves ; if anything further is to eventuate, that is a matter with which he IN THE NEW DAY 201 is not concerned. He demands that the Church shall fight the battle of the working man for the sake of securing to him a larger share in the product of his labor, that it shall create or support or direct the amusements of men and women of certain social limita- tions for the sake of getting them amused; that it shall force its influence directly into the government of cities, states, and the nation for the sake of getting them gov- erned; anything more than these immediate issues are quite beside the way. But the Church's business can never be simply to get men well paid, and nothing else; the well- paid man may be all the more a lustful man, or a selfish or cruel or turbulent man. The Church's business can never be simply to get men and women amused, and no more. The men and women for whom amusements are provided may become thereby all the more frivolous and superficial in thought and materialistic in purpose and careless in the affairs of home and life. The business of the Church can never be solely to get men better governed and nothing else; the well- governed man may all the more easily be- 202 THE OLD FAITH come indifferent to other interests and issues than his own, a man of satisfied and sleek and indolent mind. The business of the Church is to get men and women well paid and responsive to the commensurate obliga- tions of their larger opportunity and com- fort. It is to get men and women amused, in order that they may react the more easily and effectively to the more serious concerns of human life and relationship and thought. It is to get men well governed, so that they may the more readily become and remain good citizens, and not only good citizens but good men. The supreme business of the Church is to make Christian character in time and for eternity, and it must use all the varied opportunities and interests of the age that now is as avenues and agencies of that one supreme business. That, it is obvious, can never be done simply by social service committees and organized efforts in social and political activ- ity and federation. It can be done only as men and women, inside the Church and out, avail themselves of the immeasurable ad- vantage of the Church's history and organ- IN THE NEW DAY 203 ization, the authority of its message and meaning in the accumulated experiences of the race, the inspiration of its Bible, and the power of its pulpit, and, perhaps more than all else, the personal impact of its member- ship, thus envisioned and inspired, in grip- ping the men and women of the present day and its conditions, in those ways which they themselves have discerned to be the most im- mediate and effective. It goes without saying that the inspiration to all of this must come from the pulpit. The characteristic demand of the enthusi- astic and active participants in our genera- tion's reform and social movements is that the preacher shall throw himself bodily into the practical working and organization of those reforms and social movements; and it is past gainsaying that many a preacher would be humanized in character and illu- mined in utterance if he should come into close and practical contact with the machin- ery and operatives of modern social activity. But there is a far greater, if less spectacular work for him to do. He is not to preside at board meetings nor take his place on the 204 THE OLD FAITH front rank of committees ; but he is to study with so keen and sympathetic an apprecia- tion the conditions of his times and place, to coordinate so sincerely the various knowl- edge and ideal of his changing generation, to speak so truly and with so sane yet bold a message, that the men and women who hear him shall cry like the multitudes of old, "What shall we do?" This seems an easy program, but, on the contrary, it presents the hardest and most perilous of tasks. The rejection of the pulpit by the present gen- eration, to whatever extent that the pulpit is rejected, is due to two grave faults. First and most common, of course, is the pulpit's failure to appreciate the new age, not only as regards its social passion and program but as regards its intellectual life as well. There are still not a few preachers whose relation to current thought is implied in their eoo cathedra utterances that evolution is godless and that they believe the whole Bible. To the ever increasing number of men and women who accept in whole or in part the principles of modern criticism and yet find the Bible the exhaustless source of IN THE NEW DAY 205 their spiritual life and Christ their personal Redeemer, and who discern in evolution the more amazing witness to the majesty and love of God, such utterances can have but one effect, and that obvious. But even worse in their repelling influence are the still more numerous preachers whose public utterances give no hint that they have been so much as touched by the day in which they live ; whose themes, vocabularies, illustrations, intellec- tual processes and presumptions are appar- ently as remote from the present generation as from the first century. On the other hand are those preachers of pure purpose and admirable enthusiasm and courage, across whose vision the wrongs and pathos of our social order have smitten so bitterly that they can speak of nothing else, can throw themselves passionately into nothing but immediate and manifold cam- paigns for social reform; whose pulpits are indeed prophetic, but so monotonous in their reiteration of the needs of the life that is that there is no whisper in their sanctuaries of the life that is to be; whose emphasis is so overwhelming on the material emergencies 206 THE OLD FAITH of society that the spiritual obhgations, priv- ileges, and eventualities are overlooked. In the chapter which follows the subject of the preaching for the times will be con- sidered ; and the business of the preacher will there be more fully dealt with. Here it is enough to indicate briefly what his duty is as the intellectual and spiritual leader of the major portion of the community. For while the agencies which go to the forming of public opinion have greatly multiplied, on account of which it is freely said that the preacher is no longer a vital factor in the intellectual and social life of the age, if that is true it is because he has failed of the opportunity which the age most cordially offers him. It is to be emphasized again at this point, and repeatedly, that the supreme message of the pulpit remains what it always was — to proclaim the gospel of personal salvation through the life and death of the Divine Lord; but that message must be voiced in modern language, must be related to modern knowledge, and shown to be socially oper- ative in the preventive, constructive, and IN THE NEW DAY 207 remedial movements of modern brotherhood. With this clearly understood as the funda- mental purpose and program of the Church, the Church's business, through its pulpit, is threefold. It is, first, following not an in- evitable but a convenient order, to translate the ever new readings of science into the language of the spiritual life, and to inter- pret the substance of the faith in terms harmonious with the new knowledge. Again, it is to relate religion to democracy in so vital a fashion that spiritual character and experience, whatever other expressions it may take, will inevitably find its imme- diate expression in the practical forms of good citizenship and in just and honest com- mercial and industrial relations. In the third place, and perhaps more important even than the former functions, if that be possible, it is to mediate between the scholar- ship of the college and university and the personal spiritual life, to coordinate the life of learning and of piety in a scientific yet spiritual exposition of the Bible, so that the wholly unnecessary contradiction between the college classroom and the Bible school 208 THE OLD FAITH and sermon shall be ended; and the hosts of young men and women who come from insti- tutions of higher education shall not be asked to stifle their intelligence and deny the spirit, facts, and instruments of modern culture when they cross the threshold of the Church, With this as the occupation of its pulpit, the Church as an association of saviors will not long remain simply an ideal. It will be inevitably and intensely real. The spirit of knowledge, the spirit of democracy, the spirit of truth — for these, and not boards and com- mittees and platforms, are the character- istic instruments of the Church — through the practical insight and labor of truly awak- ened and saved men and women, will work out in large and satisfying measure the Church's contribution to the justice and health and harmony of the now turbulent and bewildered social order. I have not for- gotten the presence of Christ and the Spirit in the Church; but Christ gets to men only as other men reveal him. The Spirit of God works in society and life only as he works through men who are in society and have IN THE NEW DAY 209 part in life. We are the tools of God; toil- ers on the highway on which alone he has to travel to our brethren; channels through which alone his fructifying grace can vivify and ornament the vaster acreage of human experience and enterprise. The chapter has been emphasizing the truth that the character and activities of the Church depend upon the personal attitude of the men and women who compose and re- enforce it; but there is a parallel truth we have come utterly to ignore to-day, namely, that the life of society and the individual de- pends upon the Church as well. "The spirit of the living creature was in the wheels," and "whithersoever the spirit was to go, they went"; but it is equally true that the spirit did not go without the wheels. There is a violent mood among those who are hostile to the Church; they say that the Church has lagged behind and they will leave it behind. We are warned from many a quarter that humanity, in its warfares of brotherhood, its passionate march On, to the bound of the waste. On, to the City of God, 210 THE OLD FAITH will abandon the Church as an outworn and useless thing. They make bold to challenge the Church, "Either come with us, or we go on without you!" And there are weeping prophets in plenty who cry pathetically over the impending doom of Zion. The real doom from that brave and confident attitude is not for the Church but for those who abandon it. The Church goes with humanity in its highest and hardest and holiest quests and conquests, or humanity cannot go. His- tory speaks plainly to the point that not a single great moral enterprise of man since Christ has been established without the Church's interest and adventure ; not a single desolating power has come face to face with the Church and the influences springing from it but has eventually gone down to hopeless defeat. Moslem civilization, French infidehty, English deism, the institu- tion of slavery — all have been crushed and conquered beneath the wheels of a Church actuated by that infilling spirit, but a spirit which, without the Church, would have been an aspiration and perhaps a passion, but an indeterminate and footless thing. In our IN THE NEW DAY 211 impatience with the more superficial aspects of the Church and its forms we have well- nigh forgotten the abiding substance of its mysterious life. Its form is shaped and fashioned by every age as suits that age's spirit and discernment; but, without contra- dicting what was said earlier in the chapter concerning it as an institution, its substance is a permanent and divine reality which de- fies the temper of men's ignorance and the violence of their hostihty. The Church's one foundation Is Jesus Christ her Lord; She is his new creation By water and the word: From heaven he came and sought her To be his holy bride; With his own blood he bought her And for her life he died. The mysticism of the language and idea may seem, at times, unsuited for our day, and there may be some to resent the upthrust of this old conception into our new and sput- tering programs of tireless activity. But the conception persists, as Christ abides and the New Testament makes its ancient ap- 212 THE OLD FAITH peal. To think that men will leave all this behind as a bit of rusted and obsolete ma- chinery, to think that men will get away from this and live any vital and permanent ethical and spiritual life, is to confess oneself either hopelessly ignorant of or congenitally blind to the patent witness of history and experience. When the Church does not save society nothing will ; when men break with the Church in order to save so- ciety they break themselves, illustrations of which are not lacking even as the words are being written. Men and women, however earnest and impassioned, have not the alter- native of inspiring and using the Church or working without the Church. They have the alternative of inspiring and using the Church or doing nothing permanent and effective in exalting the spiritual aims and activities of society and life. The spirit is in the wheels or it is nowhere ; and if the wheels do not go whithersoever the spirit is to go, not even thq spirit will go. But "when they went, I heard the noise . . . like the noise of great waters, like the voice of the Almighty, a noise of tumult like the noise of a host." VI AN ADEQUATE EVANGEL . . . That a man stand there and speak of spir- itual things to men. It is beautiful; — even in its great obscuration and decadence, it is among the beautifulest, most touching objects one sees on the Earth. This Speaking Man has indeed, in these times, wandered terribly from the point; has, alas, as it were, totally lost sight of the point: yet, at bottom, whom have we to compare with him? ... I wish he could find the point again, this Speak- ing One; and stick to it with tenacity, with deadly energy; for there is need of him yet! — Carlyle: Past and Present, p. 233f. CHAPTER VI AN ADEQUATE EVANGEL No man has more advice given him than the preacher. Like the profession of author- ship, or the editing of a paper, from some points of view the ministry seems to be an occupation singularly free from technicality, and preaching a matter of exceptional ease. From another aspect it appears to be a call- ing in which the masters exist only in the past, or are now engaged in enterprises out- side of the regular pastorate. On either con- ception the result is an amazing output of published counsel intended to make every preacher a paragon of pulpit effectiveness and administrative power. Any one, then, who attempts even a chapter on the subject of preaching is under the embarrassing dis- advantage of addressing men who very likely know more about the subject than he does, and who have good right, humanly speak- ing, to resent the intrusion of more advice, especially if it happens, as it very often does, 215 216 THE OLD FAITH that the adviser has achieved no more suc- cess than they have. The problems of the pastor and the tasks of preaching are the easiest of problems and the simplest of tasks when observed from the safe distance of detached service. But to the man in the heart of the city, hearing the tramp of un- numbered feet going past his church doors to the gates of hell ; to the man in the fashion- able community, feeling the sting of the so- cial patronizing and artificiality in the atti- tude of a large proportion of his member- ship; to the man in the smaller to^vn or country charge, knowing the arctic pressure of indifference outside and inconsistency in- side his church; to all of us who feel the injustice of criticism sprung from the com- mercialized insincerity and ignorance of many present-day novelists and magazine seers, the problems and tasks have larger proportions. The modern Church is pressed upon by many and distracting, yet impera- tive obligations of service. The cause of good government, of the reinterpretation of truth in terms of modern science and litera- ture; the development of the social spirit IN THE NEW DAY 217 and the training of the membership to large missionary insight and benevolence ; the evo- lution of a modern Sunday school; — these are some of the activities with which the Church of to-day must be concerned. We modern preachers are set at the head of so much machinery, we have had our organiza- tions so multiplied that it seems to take al- most all our time to lubricate the works, and as William Adams Brown has tersely put it, "The institution which should be our serv- ant has become our master." ^ All of which should convince the most "modern" type of preacher that his first business is to preach. The Church and the world undoubtedly need administration, pastoral oversight, social organization and activity, but first of all they need preaching. Everything depends on the pulpit. And in an age which emphasizes almost ad nauseam the importance of organ- ization, the remark of Charles E. Jeffer- son ought never to be forgotten, that "men who cannot preach have ordinarily little to organize." ^ » Modern Theology and the Preaching of the Gospel, p. 251. » Building of the Church, p. 278f. 218 THE OLD FAITH The aim of preaching, of course, remains the same from age to age. It is to win men and women to the personal experience of and allegiance to Christ. It is to be, in a word, evangelistic. "The Christian minister,'* as William Adams Brown has said in a single sentence in the volmne just quoted, "exists for the single purpose of making real to men the purpose of God for the salvation of the world." ^ This conception will do away with a far too popular idea of evangelistic preach- ing as a "simple gospel message," in which the mercy of God will make up in some amazing manner for the unmerciful empti- ness of the preacher. The "simple gospel message" of which we have heard so much never really existed. What has been intended by the phrase is usually a collection of plati- tudes in scriptural accent put together with- out much labor, and amply illustrated by more or less relevant anecdotes of senti- mental nature; and, generally, the product has been simple enough from every point of view. But that is not the gospel. The gospel is Christ — the stupendous mystery iQp. cit., p 252. IN THE NEW t)AY 219 of God on earth, the amazing paradox of God dying and yet alive, the unfathomable wonder of men delivered from sin and seized for immortality ; and there is nothing simple in it. It took all there is of God to make it possible, and when you read the story it is in terms of miracle, darkness over a cross, and sunlight streaming into a grave an em- pire could not keep shut. Real evangelism recognizes the magnitude of its terms, and always has a basis .in profound thought ; it always springs, if it is effective in any large and permanent way, from a deep back- ground of thoughtful, not "simple" preach- ing, though, of course, simplicity of expres- sion is the very goal of profound thought. It is quite obvious, of course, that there cannot be too great emphasis upon this busi- ness of evangelism as we have come to think of it, apart, of course, from any question of ways and means. The living Church is a Church to which are added continually those who are being saved ; and the epochs of reli- gious power have been epochs of practical and successful evangelism. The evangelism of to-day, however, notwithstanding the 220 THE OLD FAITH marvelous numerical successes reported of special campaigns, and the repeated seasons of protracted efforts in individual churches, has not been sufficient as yet to redeem the Church from the charge of indolence nor turn the tide of what, particularly in the cities, is keenly felt to be its failing influence. These special campaigns have wrought large results in their immediate localities, and have contributed not a little to the rapidly in- creasing power 'of the prohibition move- ment; but they have not communicated their impetus and spirit from place to place until a characteristic wave of spiritual interest and intensity has swept the country. This re- mark takes into account the notable conta- gion and success of the Gospel Team Move- ment, originating in Wichita, Kansas, a movement, however, which up to the present is restricted to comparatively small area; while, on the other hand, the practical failure of the Men and Religion Forward Move- ment is also remembered. No one can say that the men who have led and are leading these campaigns with their varying successes are not as consecrated as their predecessors IN THE NEW DAY 221 were, and the aim and motif of their preach- ing has always the same fundamental appeal, shaped more or less to seize the characteristic temper of the age; but the evangelism of the pastor in his intermittent "meetings" and that of the professional evangelists in their mammoth "campaigns" alike too largely fail of the large and constructive results of the great revival movements of the past. The Lutheran revival followed the proc- lamation that the just shall live by faith; the Wesleyan movement sprang from the quickening gospel of the witness of the Spirit; the awakening under Jonathan Ed- wards was wrought by his and his col- leagues' terrible preaching of New Eng- land's awful God, a deliverance which rolled back the rising tides of American infidelity; followed then the great revival led by Finney proclaiming the wrath of God; and, after a generation, the work of Moody with his mes- sages of God's infinite love. Here is the dif- ference: the evangelism of to-day lacks the single and commanding message; it deals with pieces of truth instead of a whole mastering truth ; it incites men to moral ac- 222 THE OLD FAITH tions instead of overwhelming them with the inexorable spiritual order. The reasons for this may be several, but one of them, at least, is that we have not clearly apprehended the social nature of the antireligious spirit; we have not recognized, as our fathers did, that the spirit hostile to religion and the Church is a matter of the whole of society as well as an individual attitude. Wesley faced the sordidness and brutality of English society as a whole, as historians of the day present it; Edwards confronted the unbelief engen- dered by the influence of Thomas Paine and his fellows; Moody smote on the calloused conscience of a whole generation that had learned to harden itself against the orthodox f ulminations of hell and eternal punishment. But the evangelism of our day has not felt the social nature of the antireligious spirit. It has no message for a generation but only for a neighborhood, and the results are neighborhood results. There is practically no body of doctrine in the preaching of the present-day evangelists. They deal largely with homilies, exhortations, ethical precepts, illustrations of past conversions, and tales IN THE NEW DAY 223 that draw tears; they accomphsh an im- measurable good in the quickened hves of already Christian people and the conversion of men and women who are within easy reach of the immediate and special services. But they do not spring from nor create a perma- nent body of social seriousness and do not inspire a social earnestness in the things of God. It goes without saying that this is not a criticism of the evangelist or the evangel- istic campaign. Their task is not con- structive but inaugural. They are not to edify the Church or direct the community beyond the Church; they are to arouse the indifferent and subdue the hostile to the things of the spirit. Back of them, back of their evangelism of the occasion, there must be a fundamental and consistent body of Christian preaching, a coordinated and time- less, yet progressive Christian message of which the evangelism of the occasion shall be the concrete and smiting application. It is this body of coordinated and consistent preaching which is meant by an adequate evangel, and of this the chapter will attempt 224 THE OLD FAITH an exposition. It is to be said at once that the shaping of this vaster message and, with it, the creation of a social seriousness and interest in the things of God, are the business of the stationed preachers. They can feel, as no itinerant evangehst, or contemplative student, or distracted church official, the very pulse of everyday thought and life; and they can preach, week after week and month after month, an accumulating and constructive gospel, as no man with stated messages or unimpassioned books can ever hope to do. This adequate evangel which is our hope to-day will be, then, a body of consistent preaching creating a social earnestness in spiritual things. It will be drawn from and react in an individual experience of awaken- ing and penitence and aspiration and conse- cration to personal religious life. What will be the features of such preaching? First of all, there will be in it the note of authority. The word strikes strangely on our vmaccustomed ears, for it is a bad time nowadays for authority in religion. It is getting to be a bad time for authority IN THE NEW DAY 225 anywhere. It has gone from the home, and our cities are passing ordinances to regulate the conduct of young men and women after dark instead of bringing them up to a decent sense of self-respect. It has gone from the courts ; they can coerce us but they cannot command our reverence. Long ago it went away from the Church. The legend on the banner carried in the Law- rence strike of 1912 and a year later in the Seattle riots, as well as elsewhere, was a crystallization of one of the moods of the age: "No God and no Master." But for all of that, there is an intrinsic authority in the Christian message, and that authority must speak again. No one took away the author- ity of the Church and the gospel; it was thrown away by the leaders of the Church and the spokesmen of the gospel. The writer is quite aware that we have innumer- able sages and infallible men who tell us that the pulpit lost its commanding position be- cause it was too doctrinal, because it dwelt too much on matters of mere belief rather than interesting itself in the immediate emergencies of conduct and life. But there 226 THE OLD FAITH has been no more thoroughgoing and fruit- ful fallacy proclaimed against or accepted by the preacher than this. The pulpit lost its authority when it ceased to speak author- itatively on the things in which it is supreme. The pulpit can be authority in only one realm — in the proclamation of fundamental moral and religious fact, in the announce- ment of the commanding and abiding obliga- tions of the spiritual mind and life, in a world where other obligations change with the changing years. The average pulpit speaks to-day of social service; and trained welfare workers and philanthropic experts regard it rightly as an amateur. It speaks of industrial ideals and activities; and the leaders of organized labor and the masters of corporate wealth regard it as an intruder. It speaks of those generous and pervading cultures of life to refined experience and character; and the professional teacher smiles with tolerant amusement from his chair of specialized knowledge. It plunges with reforming zeal into the windy arena of practical politics bent upon some service to the city or humanity at large; and expe- IN THE NEW DAY 227 rienced legislators and trained politicians sneer at the Church vote. It ought to go into all these realms and speak to all of these occasions — of that there is no doubt; but it can go and can speak at best only as a com- rade, and generally only as a servant. And it is the open secret of us all that in any movement for civic righteousness we count it the better wisdom to avoid the impres- sion that such movement originates with the Church. It can speak with authority only on the things of God; and the deeper the things, the more vital are they to the life of men indifferent to them, and the more authoritatively can it speak. This generation past, however, has seen the rise and vogue of a school of preaching which has too much seized on one element in the gospel and has emphasized it to the ex- clusion of all others; it has seized and em- phasized the message of tenderness, and has talked of the wooing note and the appeal of love, and has rhapsodized about loving men into the Kingdom. It has clothed its strained appeal in tears and pathetic illustrations and sobbing tones till a real man could find 228 THE OLD FAITH little to stir him to worthy convictions or conduct. Underneath a wholesale senti- mentalism the sword of the Lord has been lost ; the word of command has been drowned in tears of entreaty; and one would think the Christian life was of strange and doubt- ful value when it must coax and plead its place before men in such a fashion. The prophets entreat, but the}^ thunder as well; they invite, but they command with a shout and a summons. John the Baptist will cry, "Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world !" but you can hear him driving home to the curious and impetuous multitudes in which most of us would have found much comfort to-day, the sterner epithet and question: "Ye offspring of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" There is no sob in his throat when he preaches ; it was a Kingdom at hand and the authority of the Kingdom that at- tracted and subdued the multitudes which thronged to his ministry. Jesus weeps over Jerusalem; but you can hear beside his sor- row a whole chapter of woes and warnings, and the relentless authority of moral judg- IN THE NEW DAY 229 ment beats through all the New Testament. I do not find Simon Peter wooing men at Pentecost. "Ye denied the Holy and Right- eous One, and asked for a murderer to be granted unto you, and killed the Prince of hfe . . . Repent!" That is his message. You can discern great tenderness in our brother Paul, but you will find no lightening of the stress of authority in all he has to say. "See- ing ye . . . judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles." Saint John is not for nothing called the Divine, and there is a strain of compassion that runs like music through all he writes; but he has sharp discriminations. "There is a sin unto death : not concerning this do I say that he should make request." "We know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in the evil one." The hesitant and over- courteous modern preaching which, as Hugh Black condenses it, announces that "If you do not repent and believe, as it were, you may be damned, so to speak," has no warrant in the New Testament and no recommenda- tion in its results. The age which has so rejected authority 230 THE OLD FAITH needs it now more than ever ; not the author- ity of an institution, though even that would be preferable to the license into which society seems to have fallen, but the insistent and undeniable authority of moral obligation and the inevitable command of the New Testament and Christ. One of our religious papers some years ago published a simple story of two young men returning from a lecture against Christianity delivered by a noted infidel. One of them said, "Well, he swept everything before him to-night, didn't he?" The other answered, "There was one thing he did not touch." "What was it?" "My mother's religion." If you will give to that invincible experience an adequate ex- pression; if you will make vocal the expe- rience of the vast majority of the men and women of God, it will be the note of com- mand. It does not plead with men to be deaf to the words of the infidel; it thunders its authority over life and into the souls of men so imperatively that the onset of unbe- lief does not even make its voice to be heard amid the higher summons and appeal. What we need, as preachers, in order to IN THE NEW DAY 231 preach once more the gospel of authority and command, is, if not a new, at least a revised conception of God and of Christ. I do not mean to intimate that our age is intentionally atheistic. As Dr. W. H. P. Faunce, in his Cole lectures, said. Men "grant the theistic argument, but live an atheistic life." "It is not the denial of God," said he, "that ails our generation, it is the slow fading of the vivid sense of God out of men's lives." ^ The generation in which we live has watched the universe expand so wonderfully, has seen the stars multiply and the solar spaces deepen past all comprehen- sion, and human history immeasurably lengthen so that the six thousand years of our fathers are but a holiday amid the mil- lenniums that have passed over earth; and its thought of God has not kept pace. Its world to-day is too big for its God of yester- day and it has no other God. John Fiske has somewhere written that as a child, when- ever the word "God" was mentioned he saw "the image of a venerable bookkeeper with white, flowing beard, standing behind a high 1 What Does Christianity Mean? p. 61. 232 THE OLD FAITH desk and writing down the bad deeds of John Fiske." Many a child's notions of God have been of a gigantic man dressed after the fashion of the men in the Dore illustra- tions in the family Bible, sitting on a co- lossal throne with uncountable myriads of people all in robes bowing perpetually be- fore him. To hold such conceptions now, or the conceptions which have developed from them by the mental discarding of the details of clothes and occupation, to hold even the saner conceptions of God which honest but more limited knowledge of the world im- posed, is now impossible in a world which has been as magnified as modern science has magnified ours; and unconsciously, but no less fatally, for much of the present genera- tion "God is lost among his stars.'* This, of course, is not the place for the formation of an exact and preachable and adequate doc- trine of God; but this much is not out of place, that the lesson to be learned from the failures of Herbert Spencer and the success of Bergson, from the dust of What-Is- Christianity ? controversy, from the modern- ist movement in European Romanism and IN THE NEW DAY 233 the philosophical analyses of Eucken, is that humanity is searching for a greater concep- tion of God. The pulpit of the age is facing a task of reinterpretation, the beginning and the end of which, whatever may be the read- justments of thought which a reverent science finds necessary, we have in the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. To rein- terpret God in terms of personality, so great, so inevitable, so commanding, as to press down upon the moral life of men with the inexorable authority of a living presence, that is the task far back at the beginning of whatever evangelism the preacher may covet for special occasions and specific opportu- nities. That means inevitably that a more virile conception of Christ is needed than has been preached in many pulpits. "Nobody," as Dr. Denney has said, "has any right to preach who has not mighty affirmations to make concerning God's Son, Jesus Christ." ^ No reference is intended here to the philosophic problems of the incarnation as they are re- newed by the later readings of science, but, 1 Second Epistle to the Corinthians, Expositor's Bible, p. 41. 234 THE OLD FAITH more practically, the representation of the character of the Jesus of the New Testa- ment, who is the most virile figure in history when the New Testament is read aright. "I came not to send peace, but a sword," is one of the unmistakable words of Christ, but we have let it drift almost entirely out of our estimate of his character. We have spoken and written and read so much of the tenderer qualities of Jesus that we have for- gotten the heroic in him. He has been made so much the Man of Sorrows that we have lost sight of the Son of God with power. But if one will put away his latent precon- ceptions of the effeminate Christ, formed largely by lifelong acquaintance with senti- mental imaginations of sacred art and mushy verses of too many of our sacred songs; if one will read the Gospels with an eye open to the facts before him there, he will see a figure vastly different from that which artists and song-mongers have produced. He will see a man sitting in front of his neighbors — the fiercest tribunal of personal character and the severest test of personal fortitude — in the synagogue, and reading a prophecy IN THE NEW DAY 235 of their anticipated Messiah, and then with all the sublimer and inspiring reaches of that rich national tradition in their minds, charg- ing against all the prejudices of acquaint- anceship and familiarity by saying, "To-day hath this scripture been fulfilled in your ears." He will see a man walking boldly into the temple amid officers duly appointed and in the heart of a fellowship of unscru- pulous gain, bound together by the bonds of self-defense and personal profit, swinging his lash about him, overturning tables and driving the frightened, angered company before him as he would drive a panic-stricken flock. He will see a man facing enemies whom he knows to be pitiless, unscrupulous, and bent upon his death, and his words hiss like another whiplash as he lays bare their inmost thoughts and character — "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" He will see a man coming out of a garden at midnight, with the marks of some sublime and unutterable tragedy upon his face, meet- ing a mob with staves and sullen voices and the ominous flicker of swinging lanterns, saying, "I am he." He will see a man 236 THE OLD FAITH standing before a magistrate brutalized by race and profession and long since calloused to the finer feelings of compas- sion, hearing outside the shouts of men that clamor for his death; and to a specious question he deigns no reply, and to a threat he answers, "Thou wouldst have no power against me except it were given thee." Can it be thought that the voice of such a one is always a voice of entreaty ? God forbid that the infinite compassion in the heart of Christ should seem to be slighted, but there is rea- son to fear that religion too often has been made a mendicant when it should go as an ambassador with authority. We have put into our hymns a divine and saving tender- ness, but we have too constantly forgotten that the other side of love is wrath, and that love itself must have a searching and indu- bitable sternness. Christ's voice is a com- mand. There is an end to God's coaxing of men. He gives them judgment and will and a summons. Christ issues an order; you may take it or go. It is a young man of wealth who came to Jesus to discern an en- trance into the kingdom of God; one does IN THE NEW DAY 237 not read that Jesus sought him out and har- ried him to his knees. He came to Jesus and asked an entrance into the kingdom of God, and learned the meaning of it; and Jesus loved him. But when the young man turned away sorrowful, Jesus did not call him back. An opportunity and an order ! A vision and a summons! And for all his sorrow and all his self-destruction, Jesus had no other terms. With a greater God in a greater world than ever before; and a Christ of command and summons, the pulpit must sound again the older and authoritative note. The evangel of our day has stood too much Uke one asking alms amid indifferent popula- tions, calling mournfully to the passing throngs; and the populations are still indif- ferent and the throngs still pass by. The lust of the eye and the lust of the flesh and the pride of life still attract them ; an age of pleasure- seeking has made them pleasure- seekers. The break-down of the old author- ity of the home, the loss of the family altar from Christian firesides, the multiplication and cheapening of amusements, the widen- 238 THE OLD FAITH ing scope of State and municipal responsi- bility and interest in public welfare, the mob- passion of the industrial orders cherishing a deeply rooted hostility against the Church with its capitalistic sympathies, the fervor of socialistic ideals as a substitute for religious experience — all of these go trampling hot- footed over the invitations of a religion which only invites and a pulpit which only sug- gests and pleads. The world, perhaps some- what unconsciously but no less inexorably, demands leadership; it hears the masterful voice; its Jeremiahs weary it beyond pa- tience, but its Amos and Saint Paul com- mand it at their will. The first note in the preaching which con- stitutes an adequate evangel for to-day is this note of command. But the preacher has to concern himself not only with the tone of his preaching, its atmosphere and impress of authority, but with its impact on those who hear. The fault with all our failing pul- pits has not been that they have not con- vinced the reason. That, of course, has been too largely true, but it is not the fatal defect. The fatal defect is that they have not com- IN THE NEW DAY 239 pelled the will. The second feature of this adequate evangel is that it will command men to a worthy task. We live in an age which challenges all the strength and aspiration of men; an age in which new continents of opportunity are opening, new chivalries of public service are summoning, new worlds of knowledge and industry and achievement are inviting. The air of our day is electric with great changes ; it stirs and stings like the salt of the sea with the spirit of adventure and conquest. There is the quickening sense of surprises just ahead vibrant through all our social expe- rience. Our standards have magnified with the expanding of the world. Life, labor, and possessions, ambitions and lusts alike have reached colossal measurements. There is the intoxication of a greater greatness in our American experiment than ever before. No one alive to his day can escape the sum- mons. The men of the present world have lost nothing of the daring of the old heroic breed. The conquest of the arctic, the mastery of air, the making of an empire, the financing of a nation, redressing the world's 240 THE OLD FAITH wrongs, the battle of an industrial order, the wedding of the oceans, the enterprises of foreign missions — these are the tasks that call once more for the Viking spirit, and something of the wine and iron of them has penetrated our commonest and most sordid living, so that the bondmen of the common- place redeem their drab and heavy days with dreams of mighty things that move around them. We are living, we are dwelling In a grand and awful time; In an age on ages telling To be living is sublime. The Church must come with a call to something as vast and commanding; the preaching and authority must offer a per- sonal venture not out of keeping with an age of stupendous standards and activities. We have made our gospel, oftentimes, too small; we have made it an isolated expe- rience ; we have emphasized the shortness of the step to be taken ; we have wasted tons of paper and oceans of breath in talking of the simple gospel, when the subject of it and the process of it is the biggest business God IN THE NEW DAY 241 could find to do. What, then, shall be the personal content of the preaching to beget an adequate evangelism to-day? Salvation, of course, and salvation from sin, but salva- tion which issues not simply in personal peace, or fearlessness of death, or a satisfied conscience, or an eternal heaven, or a busy- body sort of puttering at neighborliness, but salvation which, gathering together all of these in an ever-deepening experience and conduct, issues progressively in what, in the preaching of Phillips Brooks, who saw the truth from afar, would have been the su- preme dignity of the Christian life. Rightly expounded, the supreme dignity of the Christian life will open the vision of a task commensurate with the age in which we live, and preeminently commanding to the most masterful of the men who now re- gard the business of religion as a side issue for a woman's occupation or the protective education of their children. "Thank God," says Robert Browning, "I find it hard to be a Christian." That is the note of the new and winning evangelism which must be lifted once again by our Christian witness and for 242 THE OLD FAITH which the weekly pulpit must prepare. The summons of the commanding Christ is to a conflict worthy all a man has. We have been more or less unconsciously paring our conceptions of Christian character, shrink- ing our standards of Christian conduct, dwarfing our measurements of Christian ex- perience, smoothing away the entrance to the Christian society, until there has been little to shock and grip men in our appeal. "Strait is the gate and narrow the way," said Jesus; not, of course, in the sense of unyielding articles of creeds and relentless confessions of former days, but in the indu- bitable distinctness of the Christian witness and Christian life. John Bunyan, you will remember, saw armed men at a palace door, and one sitting at a table-side with his books and inkhorn to take the name of him that should enter. And he saw a man of stout countenance saying, "Set down my name, sir," and then draw his sword and charge upon the armed men. And not until he had received and given many wounds, did he press forward into the palace. John Bun- yan is doubtless a back number; but in an IN THE NEW DAY 243 age which challenges as our age does, it is that vision of conflict and battle which men must see in the task to which the gospel sum- mons the individual soul. Every now and then some benevolent minded essayist sobs over the loss of the heroic out of life, and the impending peril of our becoming flabby, bloodless folk like Mr. Kipling's allitera- tively flanneled fools, if the stimulus and in- spiration of war shall be done away. As these words are being written, however, the German troops are entering Brussels after two weeks of bitterly contested struggle, the French frontier is alive with allied forces, Russia is marching well-nigh a million men on Prussia, the English navy patrols the seas and English regiments are engaged on foreign soil, while the Japanese fleet awaits the word which spreads the most gigantic conflict of history from Europe to the Far East. The danger of an immediate end of war is not apparent, in spite of the person- ally conducted tours of peace conferences de luxe. But if any apprehensive essayist will master his fears long enough to attempt the Christ life as it is and ought to be lived, with 244 THE OLD FAITH its depths of sacrifice and its heights of vision and its breadth of consecration and its length of service, he will forget all about the necessity of war. That heroic note has too largely perished from our preaching and conception of the gospel; and we get in- stead, a Harold Bell Wright with his Call- ing of Dan Matthews, and a Winston Churchill with his Inside the Cup. It is reported that the latter got his theology from a noted American churchman, but it is obvi- ous that he made his preacher all by himself. As for Harold Bell Wright, he never seems to have glimpsed the meaning of the New Testament or the Church. His Dan Mat- thews is a hero whose experience is so futile that he cannot answer a criticism such as the average minister meets every month of his life ; a preacher who has cut the cleansing of the temple clear out of his New Testament, who conceives it to be heroic to whip phys- ically a man of whom morally he is afraid, and prefers to run away from a Church rather than spiritualize it. Dan Matthews is Gehazi among the prophets, and the sub- title of the book ought to be "The Spiritual IN THE NEW DAY 245 Biography of a Jellyfish." It is, however, that conception of Christianity which the preaching of to-day must overcome ; and we have that wherewith to overcome it — a great message of a great task. Wendell Phillips answered a sophomoric remark that Jesus was weak, by saying: "Weak? Look at the men he has mastered!" It is a foolish boast of a few strangers to history and life that the progress of the world in civilization and its nobler ethics has been accomplished by men who were indifferent to the claims of the Christian life. They are wont to name Huxley and La Place and Shelley and Edi- son, and a few of the kind, but you can put to-day beside an Edison, Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir William Ramsay and Lord Kelvin, the three greatest names in modern physical science. Reference has already been made to the remark of President Remsen, of Johns Hopkins University — "The Christian life is the most scientific life I know anything of." Beside an indifferent Darwin, you can put an impassioned Romanes and a sober- minded Wallace. Outside the eddies in the stream, the great current of modern poetry 246 THE OLD FAITH comes from the Christian Hugo, Tennyson, and Browning. For every licentious Lord Chesterfield or debauched James Fox, you have a Gladstone and Shaftesbury, a John Hay and James Bryce, and taken by and large, the destinies of the world are in the hands of Christian men. When the greatest American financier lay dead, they found his last will and testament a witness to the power of Christ over his inner life. No man ornaments the gospel, but great men become significant witnesses to its character. What won these men? A command and a task; a summons to big business for their souls. Their lives commanded; they themselves spoke as in authority. They were captured only by strength and surrendered only to superior force. Among the men of to-day the Church and the Gospel have their greatest and most inspiring opportunity. Never were the highways to splendid service so many, or so open ; never were the areas of society so un- barriered to the influence of a Church with a command and a task, and so responsive to the impress of a positive Christian spirit. IN THE NEW DAY 247 Never were the demands of the world on the Church so imperative and high. And where the Christian witness has failed to win the men and women of the age, it is because the Christian appeal and program have seemed unworthy the adventurous and mili- tant modern temper. The world is calling for hard tasks and offering to men and women stupendous things; and it will have no gospel of an easy religion. To invite men to the Christian life and suggest that it is an easy and simple thing is to win a few narrow or burdened or broken souls with half a lie, but it is inevitably to repel the great mass of earnest folk who are hungry for hard things and looking for something worth while. When Lieutenant Hobson wanted seven men to attempt with him the sinking of the Merrimac at the supposedly certain loss of their lives, the sailors of the fleet volunteered literally by the hundred and had to be chosen personally. And the sailors who were not chosen offered their wages for months, and even for the cruise, for the chance to go ; but not a man who had been selected would sell 248 THE OLD FAITH his opportunity of being blown to death. It was with truly infinite wisdom that Jesus set hard barriers in front of the discipleship. He knew what was in man. There is a Divine shrewdness in the gospel of the Cross. Men run from roses to grasp a sword; they refuse to sit on cushions, but will climb crosses with a song. And that gospel of the cross and cross-bearing must be interpreted in keeping with the colossal spirit of the age in which we live. There is a time in every life when the thought of rest is winsome and the vision of the harps and palms is like heartsease to the beleaguered and bewildered soul. But those are only individual moods. For winning a world and capturing a generation and seizing on so- ciety and creating in it a great social ear- nestness we want no palms and harps, but a cross and a trumpet. To the note of author- ity must be added the command to task as the second feature of the evangel adequate to the day. It would be a signal failure, however, if the impression were to be left that all the winsome beauty and appealing tenderness of IN THE NEW DAY 249 the gospel must be thrown away as an out- worn thing. The note of authority and the command to task are the preeminent features in the preaching of an adequate evangel ; but they will be utterly unfruitful if they are presented in a wholly stern and intolerant fashion. Bugles command regiments to charge on battle lines but there is a music in them which makes even battle sweet. W. H. Morrison, in one of his sermons, quotes an old Jewish legend that in hell Satan was asked what he missed most of all that he had had in heaven before his fall; and he replied, "I miss most the sound of the trumpets in the morning." The preaching of to-day must command like a trumpet but have a music in it like the winsomeness of harps. There will be this difference, never- theless, between the appeal which the gospel of to-day must make and that which for several years past has seemed so futile, it will be dignified both in source and form. A God as great as ours, a Christ as imperial as ours, a life as masterful as we must preach the Christian life to be, will have a tender- ness and consolation in their appeal in keep- 250 THE OLD FAITH ing with greatness and the mastery and the supremacy to which they call. I saw and heard one of the foremost of our Methodist preachers move a great audience to tears by a story of the faithfulness of a she-dog; and from those stirred emotions he thought and seemed to make much headway in the pre- sentation of Christ. It was a good story, but you thought of the dog and not of Christ, and the mood it evoked and the imagination it aroused, were very far below the mighty theme of the saving Son of God. The eif ect produced was evanescent — it was a specious tenderness thrust on those who heard by a tricky appeal, not to their need or the char- acter of God or the ministry of Christ, but to their pity; and the preacher mistook that transient sentiment for the hallowing emotion which ought to rise within, from sober contemplation of the profound and saving tenderness of God. The peril of such sentimentalism is that it deadens the souls of men to the legitimate and constructive appeal of the truth; and we get therefrom a more hopeless kind of "gospel-hardening" than our fathers had. The third feature in IN THE NEW DAY 251 the preaching which constitutes an adequate evangel will be tenderness, but a tenderness as profound as the great themes from which it rises, as august as the God and the Christ of whom it witnesses, as dignified as the con- duct of experience and life to which it in- vites. These, briefly considered, are the features of effective modern preaching; but they are features of manner rather than of substance, marks of appeal rather than matter of thought. They are the qualities by which, through subtle agencies, the will is cap- tured. Before the will stands the buttressed stronghold of the reason, which must be taken, or the response of the will is hesitant and temporary, if it responds at all. The profound concern of the preacher will be not only with the manner but the matter of his message, not only How, but What shall he preach? What, then, will be the kind of preaching which is to be at once authoritative and com- manding to a task and appropriately tender in its appeal ? It will be what our theological textbooks and lectures call doctrinal preach- 252 THE OLD FAITH ing. It will not reproduce the stiffness of theological methods; it will not be the pre- sentation of sectarian difference or the expo- sition of fragmentary topics offering hom- iletical ease and applicability. It will be the presentation of those great fundamentals of the Christian faith and experience which lie like the granite structure of the range be- neath all the spurs and peaks of separate mountain formations. The preaching which permanently attracts and constructs the characters of men, the preaching which meets the basal need of every changing social hour, the preaching which has in it most of grip and seizure for the spiritually indifferent, is not, for any considerable period or abiding influence, the so-called up-to-date discus- sion of current events, which has its minor place in the modern pulpit, but the incisive and commanding exposition of the timeless truths of God and the soul. The doctrinal content of the preaching which inspired and prepared for the great revival periods of the past has already been suggested: Luther's doctrine of justification, Wesley's of the Holy Spirit, Edwards's of the personality IN THE NEW DAY 253 of God, Finney's of divine retribution; and it is still and forever true that the preach- ers w^ho in their weekly pulpits most com- mand and capture men are doctrinal preach- ers. Frederick W. Robertson, Guthrie, Chalmers, Bushnell, Storrs, Dale, Bishop Simpson, Bishop Foster, Jowett, Morgan — their sermons are drenched in great doctrinal affirmations. We have been for some time in a day of so-called ethical preaching, a day in w^hich the Church, as never before, has been awakened to its ethical duties; but is it not a singular coincidence that the time of the Church's greatest practical activity in and for society is the time of its slightest hold and smallest influence over the thinking and conduct of society? The fault is not with the ethical conduct of the Church or its new crusade of social service ; it is in the fact that we have not originated and maintained our ethical activities in great doctrinal convic- tions. The evangelistic preachers of the past won their amazing victories over the consciences and wills of men by their tre- mendous proclamation of tlie great doctrines of the faith. And where will you find more 254 THE OLD FAITH authority, more command and inspiration, more tenderness of appeal than in them? What will more subdue and invite a way- ward soul than a commanding vision of the character of God? What will more quickly win a soul to penitence and prayer and sur- render than an appealing exposition of the atonement in Christ ? What will more surely summon a man to wholesomeness and dig- nity of personal living than a noble preach- ing of the incarnation? What will more woo and win a soul with a tenderness which is not pretty but august and splendid, than a triumphant declaration and defense of the resurrection ? Out of what other themes will authority be so calmly voiced, will the stu- pendous task of Christian living so confi- dently assert itself, will a deep and welling tenderness arise to open the spirit of a man to the advent of the Spirit of God? To unfold, not in piecemeal fragments but in a sober yet illumined message, the fact and conse- quence of sin as science joins with revelation in disclosing it ; to take of the reenf orcements of a physicist like Sir Oliver Lodge and pub- lish the New Testament doctrine of immor- IN THE NEW DAY 255 tality with the dews of a new certainty upon it ; to reread the New Testament in the hght of Josiah Royce, and Henri Bergson, as well as Orr and Denney and William Newton Clarke, and Haring, and to bring therefrom not a recurrent simple gospel but a great and compelling evangel of the spiritual order ; in other words, to light the ponderous and majestic doctrines of the faith with the glow of the newest thinking and at the chal- lenge of an expanding world — that is the surest constitution of an evangel to the age which is more and more impatient of the fragmentary and the superficial. This is a great task; and who is sufficient for these things? But the writer is con- vinced that our preaching has failed of the evangelistic note because we have cultivated the note rather than the evangel; we have been more intent on forms and phases than on the fundamental gospel we are commis- sioned to proclaim. Whatever place the evangelism of special occasions or the con- tinuous Sunday night service may occupy, our preaching which prepares and inspires it must be not a matter simply of invitation 256 THE OLD FAITPI and altar and inquiry rooms; it must aim at the creation in society of a spirit for God as social and felt and fervent as our present gracious spirit for humanity. The contrast which has shocked and baffled us has been the vision of society as a unit pouring its energies of mind and heart and hand into the ethical reconstruction of life and almost as a unit indifferent to the Bible, scornful of the Church, and impatient of what has seemed the limited and fragmentary salva- tion proclaimed by the pulpit. We are to shape the world into the kingdom of God, to fashion an indifferent yet honest genera- tion into a holy priesthood. One may con- cur in any program of special features, in any use of particular periods, or any employ- ment of unstereotyped methods for the awakening and capturing of men and women to the Kingdom. The present chapter has not touched on these more familiar elements in our customary discussions of the theme, though they have their place. But these will have large and constant success only as they are projections in special directions and at special occasions of the greater and coordi- IN THE NEW DAY 257 nated body of preaching dominant in the steady business of the regular pulpit; and the more pressing task upon us who are im- patient for the evangelistic result is the cul- tivation of this greater preaching of the greater truth in the sublime routine of the Sabbath ministry. Preaching, not by a method or a phase of service, but as the presentation from the pulpit in forms an- swering the challenge and appropriate to the spirit of the age, of the full body of Chris- tian truth ; for the creation in the individual, but, more broadly, for the maintenance in society as a unit, of the perpetual acknowl- edgment of and passion for God — that is the substance of an adequate evangel for the day in which we live. And the author of these humble pages dares to believe he hears the footsteps of the coming Kingdom marching grandly down the files of time that is to be, and not now far off. It seems to him that we men of the pul- pit are continually finding our enduring message in the deeper things of God; that more and more the day of the sensationalist on the one hand and the dilettant on the 258 THE OLD FAITH other, is passing; that more and more our churches are returning to the older tradition and demanding that those who lead them shall be men of the pulpit rather than of the parlor and the marketplace. And more and more in the earnestness of multitudes of men and women unidentified with the institutions of religion, but thronging to the message of commanding preachers, as well as in the quieter loyalty of stable congregations in comfortable environments, he seems to recognize the heartening spirit of inquiry and interest in and response to the procla- mation of the deepest truths of the New Testament and the spiritual life. Princeton Theological Seminary Libraries Theological Seminarv 1 1012 01249 8426 Date Due AP?:Vfj| 1 f