THE NEW 
 
 OPPORTUNITY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 CHURCH 
 
 ROBERT E.SPEER 
 
0^iWmci 
 
 '=?/ 
 
 MAY 29 imo 
 
 BV 600 
 
 .S6 1919 
 
 
 \ 
 
 Speer, ] 
 
 Robert E. 
 
 1867- 
 
 1947 
 
 The new 
 
 opportunity of 
 
 the 
 
 church 
 
 
 
 
THE NEW OPPORTUNITY 
 OF THE CHURCH 
 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NBW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
 ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 
 
 TORONTO 
 
The New Opportunity of 
 
 the Church 
 
 MAY 29 1919 
 ■%OS/CAL StWl#' 
 
 BY 
 
 ROBERT E. SPEER 
 
 Beta gorb 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 1919 
 
 AXL rights reserved 
 
Copyright, 1919 
 By the M^VCMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Set up and electxotyped. Published, March, 1919 
 
PREFACE 
 
 This little book is not an attempt to prescribe any pro- 
 gram or method of reconstruction or to define in any 
 comprehensive way the present tasks of the Christian 
 Church. A good deal more is called for to-day than this 
 little volume at all considers. Good will and earnest 
 purpose are not enough. There must be also careful 
 and competent thinking out of the economic and social 
 problems involved in the next forward steps in human 
 progress. But good will and earnest purpose must be 
 back of all such thinking and it is for good will and 
 earnest purpose that this little book appeals. In the 
 midst of much hesitation and questioning it is a simple 
 word of summons and reassurance, in the faith of the 
 motto written over the door of the old hotel in Duala, 
 in Kamerun, ** The old falls. The times will change. 
 And new life will blossom from the ruins." 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I Some Dangers and Duties of the Present 
 
 Hour i 
 
 II The Present Business of the Church . 17 
 
 III The Effect of the War on Christian 
 
 Convictions and Ideals 32 
 
 IV The Duty of a Larger Christian Co- 
 
 operation 63 
 
 V The War Aims and Foreign Missions . . 89 
 
THE NEW OPPORTUNITY OF 
 THE CHURCH 
 
 SOME DANGERS AND DUTIES OF THE PRESENT HOUR 
 
 There is a military maxim in the First Book of Kings 
 which we know from our own experience to be wise and 
 just. " Let not him that girdeth on his armor boast 
 himself as he that putteth it off." The hour when a man 
 or a nation is about to engage in a great struggle is no 
 time for relaxation and ease. There are three sure perils 
 which confront men then, the peril of over confidence, 
 the peril of underestimating the foe, and the peril of a lack 
 of unity, foresight and vigilance and of willingness to pay 
 all necessary costs. In the face of perils like these there 
 is no room for self contentment or praise. Let these wait 
 until the victory has been won. " Let not him that 
 girdeth on his armor boast himself as he that putteth it 
 off." 
 
 But we have discovered that the converse of this warn- 
 ing is equally true. *' Let not him that putteth off his 
 armor boast himself as he that girdeth it on." The 
 same perils that meet men and nations at the beginning 
 of a war meet them at the end. There is the peril of 
 over confidence. There is the peril of underestimating 
 
 I 
 
2 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 the task. There is the peril of a lack of unity, vigilance 
 and prevision and of willingness to pay the price of peace. 
 And men may succumb to these perils at the end vrho 
 overcame them at the beginning. Again and again men 
 and nations have lost after the struggle the very things 
 w^hich they entered and endured the struggle to achieve. 
 " The morrow of victory," Mazzini said, ** is more peril- 
 ous than its eve." We begin to perceive this to-day. 
 " Gentlemen," said Clemenceau a few days after the 
 armistice was signed to a group of French senators who 
 had waylaid him with congratulations, *' our difficult time 
 is just approaching. It is harder to win peace than to 
 win war." We are realizing now that this is true and 
 that if we are negligent we may lose in the hour of vic- 
 tory some of the very things which the victory was won 
 to achieve. 
 
 We see the dangers of these after-struggle times again 
 and again in those authentic pictures of life of which the 
 Bible as a transcript of life is full. A useful Christian 
 minister in a recent sermon called attention to the vivid 
 touch in Noah's history. The flood had washed the 
 world clean. Old institutions, old lusts, old vices, old 
 wrongs had been wiped out. Men had a chance to begin 
 afresh and to build a new world. And where was the 
 man to whom the duty and the glory of the reconstruc- 
 tion came? Drunk and morally shameless in his tent. 
 We come upon the same failure in Elijah. He had met 
 the organized superstition and corruption of the nation 
 in one dramatic encounter and had defeated it. The 
 ground was cleared for a new order and instead of girding 
 himself to his uncompleted task and establishing the foun- 
 dations of righteousness, the old warrior who had not 
 
Dangers and Duties 3 
 
 been afraid of the massed forces of fraud and wrong but 
 single handed had overthrown them, is cowed by the 
 threat of a bad woman and goes off alone, abandoning his 
 work, to sit down under a bush in the wilderness and 
 comfort himself with the thought of his spiritual isolation. 
 Even so we face our dangers to-day, not less real or 
 subtle or perilous than the dangers of the war. There 
 is the danger of moral relaxation. Four days after the 
 armistice was signed this warning was sent out from 
 Washington : 
 
 " Cessation of hostilities in Europe and disappearance of 
 the prospect of meeting the enemy on the battlefield has brought 
 an immediate loss of morale among American troops at home 
 that is regarded at the War Department as somewhat alarm- 
 ing. It is understood that steps to deal with the situation 
 already are being prepared. 
 
 "Reports from all divisions on Nov. ii, the date of the 
 armistice, without exception contained glowing references to 
 the high spirit of the men and to their evident desire for early 
 embarkation. Upon news that the armistice had been signed, 
 the mental attitude of the individual soldier is said to have 
 undergone a marked change. Instead of bombarding his imme- 
 diate superiors with queries as to the probable date of en- 
 training for the seaboard, he became anxious as to the date 
 of his release from service. More serious are reports by 
 some commanding officers that their men are exhibiting a 
 tendency to view themselves as already released from the 
 strict routine of the camps." 
 
 In some camps the tidings of the armistice led to such 
 disorder as men would have been severely punished for 
 a fortnight before, but the outbreak was so general that 
 nothing could be done. In New York City on the night 
 of the celebration over the premature peace tidings more 
 soldiers and sailors in uniform, it is said, were seen drunk 
 on the streets than had been seen before in all the time 
 
4 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 since the war began. In the trenches the change which 
 took place was revolutionary. Men had been on the 
 keen edge of moral duty, strung to the highest tension 
 of loyalty. They had cast up accounts and waited upon 
 death. God seemed so near in that hour of deepest need 
 and intensest life as almost to be within touch. Then 
 in a moment this flamed up and passed. The common- 
 ness of uninspired life returned. We feel this moral 
 relaxation in ourselves and throughout the nation. Some- 
 thing that was here is gone. Much of it, to be sure, 
 had to go. We are better off with what self-discipline 
 we can secure, than with state discipline under permanent 
 military control. 
 
 We have not only undergone a relaxation of moral 
 tone. We are witnessing sadly a dissolution of our unity. 
 The war bound us together in a new tightness of national 
 will and spirit. There are three things which unite men : 
 a common love, a common task and a common danger. 
 And the common danger seems to be necessary to focus 
 the common love and to impose the common task. The 
 common love is still here. It is pitiful that we do not 
 still recognize the reality and urgency of the common 
 task, as great now as the task in the war and more diffi- 
 cult. But the common danger is past. And our unity 
 is dissolved. It is a good thing to have the imprisoning 
 shackles removed from our wonted American liberties, 
 but it is tragic to see the schisms and partisanships re- 
 opening and the forces divided in antagonism which 
 should be united in common undertakings and against 
 the common foes of the national character. And it is 
 with a sad dismay that we see suspicion displanting our 
 international confidence and trust. 
 
Dangers and Duties 5 
 
 There is also a surrender of idealism. With some it 
 is not a surrender. It is only the open disavowal of 
 sentiments which they never shared but which the tide 
 of the national spirit compelled them to respect while 
 the war was going on. Some indeed ventured to deride 
 the Quixotic idealism which prevailed but they paid it 
 the respect of making their derision anonymous, like 
 "the American Jurist " in his articles in the New York 
 Times which so pleased the Germans because they were 
 the frank application to American politics of the German 
 notion of the superiority of the State to any obligation 
 except that of its own material interest. Now, however, 
 men who rejected the idealism which awakened the 
 nation and sustained its soul in the war do not hesitate 
 openly to repudiate the very ends for which we fought. 
 They propose that we should now belie our professions 
 and betray the good faith of the nation toward the dead 
 who died not for national interest but for principle and 
 for humanity and for a new world. 
 
 As against these dangers, and the other dangers than 
 these which peace has brought, we need two things. We 
 need first the loyalty and patriotism of peace, a more 
 difficult even though less glorious thing than the patriot- 
 ism and loyalty of war, by as much as it is harder to live 
 for a cause than to die for it. It was for such loyalty 
 and patriotism that Lincoln appealed in his Gettysburg 
 speech: " It is for us the living to be dedicated here to 
 the unfinished work which they who fought here have 
 thus far so nobly advanced. It is for us to be here 
 dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that 
 from these honored dead we take increased devotion 
 to that cause for which they gave the last full measure 
 
6 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 of devotion." War did its part. Is peace now to fail 
 and be faithless where war was faithful? There is need 
 still of the same loyalty and love of country which was 
 given in war and which the nation needs not less in 
 peace. And, secondly, we need the desire or purpose of 
 a new world. Mr. Lloyd George expressed the need 
 in an exhortation to a labor deputation in the midst of 
 the war: "Don't always be thinking of getting back 
 where you were before the war. Get a really new world. 
 I firmly believe that what is known as the after-the-war 
 settlement will direct the destinies of all classes for gen- 
 erations to come. I believe the settlement after the war 
 will succeed in proportion to its audacity. The readier 
 we are to cut away from the past the better we are likely 
 to succeed. Think out new ways, new methods, of deal- 
 ing with old problems. I hope no class will be harking 
 back to the pre-war conditions. If every class insists 
 upon doing that then God help this country. Get a new 
 world." ** The triumphant close of the great war," says 
 Secretary of State Lansing, " does not solve all the prob- 
 lems. Society has been shattered in many places. We 
 must rebuild it on a better foundation. Materialism 
 was largely responsible for this war. We must not sink 
 back again to the same level. A strong and vital spirit- 
 uality ought to dominate mankind, so that we may rise 
 above the greed and selfishness which have corrupted 
 mankind and distorted the ideals and purposes of life." 
 The war grew out of the past but it was not fought for 
 the past, it was fought for the future, to clear the way 
 for a different and better world. 
 
 Whether we shall have a better world or not depends 
 upon how we meet now the dangers and duties of peace 
 
Dangers and Duties 7 
 
 and whether we do as effectively the work of winning 
 this better world as we did the work of winning the war. 
 And for what was the war won if it was not for the sake 
 of a better world? What does anybody want with a 
 war ? Why should anybody want to win it ? What will 
 he do with it? He wins it to be done with it. What 
 he wants when he has won it is to lose it. The thing 
 to be kept is the thing which the war stood in the way 
 of and had to be fought through to make possible — the 
 new world behind and beyond it. 
 
 And our present practical question now is what 
 Christian men and women and the Christian Church can 
 do to win a better world out of the war. 
 
 We can believe a better world to be possible. All 
 about us now are the practical men who ridicule the idea 
 that war can be destroyed, militarists, munition makers, 
 political and commercial imperialists, and theologians who 
 think that to try to get rid of war and pestilence is to 
 vitiate the authority of the Bible, and a host of others 
 who think and say that the world we had before the war 
 is the only kind of world we shall have after it. The 
 war did nothing, they say, and some of them say it was 
 intended to do nothing, but defeat Germany. Now that 
 that end has been achieved other things will continue as 
 they were. By the blood of the eight million men who 
 died to make a better world possible they shall do noth- 
 ing of the kind. It is quite true that the war did not 
 introduce the millennium. There were some people who 
 held that the millennium had begun in the Nineteenth 
 Century. But they were mistaken. It had not begun 
 then and it has not begun now. But our effort to make 
 the world better does not have to await the coming of 
 
8 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 the millennium before It can hope to accomplish anything. 
 Christendom has got rid of legahzed polygamy and slav- 
 ery. It is doing away with the saloon and the brothel. 
 The time has come when it can get rid of war. If we 
 do not it will be our own fault. If we don't want to 
 be rid of war it will stay. If we prepare for it we shall 
 have it. But if we want to be done with it we can be. 
 If we prepare for peace it will be peace we shall have. 
 The way to get a world where it prevails, a world of 
 righteousness and truth and progress is to believe in such 
 a world as a possibility, to cherish large and generous 
 thoughts of what can be by man's good v/IU and the grace 
 of God. And as Lloyd George says there is no reason 
 why we should not be bold about it. We can do now 
 just what we want done and will pay the price for and 
 are willing to let God do through us. There are laws 
 of human progress and of social change, no doubt, but the 
 laws that shall operate now will be laws of relapse and 
 of Immobility or they will be laws of progress, as we 
 shall decide. We may indeed drop back Into the old 
 world and carry its principles of suspicion, rivalry, self- 
 interest, on into the future, or we can believe in the 
 possibility of something better. Why not now? We 
 have discarded the authority of the old limitations in 
 nature. As the Panama Canal diggers' song declares : 
 
 " Got any rivers they say are uncrossable? 
 
 Got any mountains you can't tunnel through? 
 We specialize on the wholly impossible 
 
 Doing the thing that no man can do." 
 
 Why not discard the authority of the old limitations in 
 moral and social achievement? Samuel C. Armstrong 
 
Dangers and Duties 9 
 
 discarded them after the Civil War and began a new 
 era of racial education. We may begin a new era of 
 racial and national relationship if we will. The limita- 
 tions and hindrances are not in God or in nature but in us. 
 We can help to win a new world by seeing clearly the 
 evils which are to be overthrown and the enemies who 
 still remain to be vanquished. The war has for a season 
 vividly revealed these. War inflames. It also illumines. 
 The inflammations are dying down. Let us hope that the 
 illuminations may not fade. They showed us what iniq- 
 uity is and what also is its sure fruitage. Incarnated 
 in German militarism and its principles and methods 
 of war we saw just how hideous and deadly certain 
 ideas and moral qualities really are. And well nigh the 
 whole world rose up in horror and self-defense against 
 what we saw. But now that German militarism has 
 been defeated and the war won we need to beware of los- 
 ing the horror and the sense of the need of protection 
 against these same ideas and iniquities. If they were 
 wrong in Germany in the war they are not less wrong 
 anywhere else in peace. They are wrong if they exist in 
 us, and they will as surely bring punishment upon us as 
 they brought it on Germany. Furthermore the war 
 demonstrated to the nation that certain social evils are 
 fatal to the creation and maintenance of an army and 
 that these evils are not invincible. Drink and lust were 
 seen to be deadly enemies of efficiency in war and the 
 nation shut them off from the army. Always before, 
 men said that this could not be done, that soldiers must 
 be fed on drink and lust. Now we know that it is not 
 true. But if drink and lust are bad for soldiers why 
 are they not bad for civilians too? If the nation can 
 
10 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 not afford to tolerate them in time of war how can it 
 afford to tolerate them in time of peace? The same 
 ideal of effective service needed in war is needed now 
 in the civil and industrial life of the nation. As General 
 Pershing said in a message to the home churches through 
 the Federal Council: "We expect not only to vindicate 
 the cause of justice and honor and righteousness but 
 also to lay a solid foundation for world peace. We dare 
 not claim that, as an Army, we have yet achieved that 
 high standard of manhood and conduct upon which the 
 largest human effectiveness should be built, but the ideal 
 of the Nation and of the churches is constantly before 
 us. With sincerity and firm purpose we set our faces 
 toward the goal. After all, it is a common fight — yours 
 there and ours here. What is necessary for the manhood 
 of the soldier is necessary for the manhood of the citizen." 
 By seeing this and insisting now upon the continuing 
 and universal validity of the moral ideals essential to 
 the life of the nation in peace as well as in war, we can 
 help on a different order. It is quite true that men 
 cannot be made moral by law, but immorality can be 
 made difficult and help can be given to that which is not 
 bad, but only weak. 
 
 We can help by supporting the men, the measures 
 and the movements which are directed to bringing in 
 new times. We can begin this in our own community. 
 Each community is a microcosm of the nation. It is 
 the nation in miniature. In our own community we can 
 support the men and the movements that look forward 
 and not back. We can ask regarding each local measure. 
 Would this, magnified to the scale of the nation help or 
 hinder? Would it sustain the new time? This demand 
 
Dangers and Duties II 
 
 for different ways does not cover everything. The fund 
 of our solid moral and economic achievement is not to be 
 destroyed. Progress is not the dissolution of organiza- 
 tion. It is its development. The human society which 
 represents the highest amount of mutual interdependence, 
 while most difficult, will in the end be the happiest. St. 
 Paul's ideal of humanity is a human body, the most 
 intricate organization which we know. Names ought 
 not to terrify us, nor the inequality of men in other days 
 to meet the demands which some day men must meet 
 if the will of God is to be done on the earth. The 
 men who discredit unselfishness, who hold by mercantile 
 principles alone, who disbelieve in any but the old world, 
 although the old world itself was new in its time, and 
 has only now worn out, who are willing to lead us no- 
 where but backward must understand that the faces of 
 those who once followed are turned in the other direction 
 and that they intend to move forward. 
 
 And a new order is to be won, not by change only 
 but also by a steadfast immovableness. There must be 
 men and women who will stand fast for absolute moral 
 principles without yielding or compromise. It goes with- 
 out saying that there will be need of compromise as to 
 method and process. Compromise in these things is only 
 another name for patience. But when it comes to prin- 
 ciple, progress is made not by abatement or surrender 
 but by unbending loyalty. And inferior men with clear 
 vision of right principles and high ideals are better men 
 for us than the clever sophists who repudiate the theo- 
 logical doctrine of human depravity and whose political 
 philosophy nevertheless uses that doctrine to justify what 
 no theology in which Christian men have ever believed 
 
12 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 can be got to condone. As we face the issues of this 
 time when men have to choose between courses of action 
 decisive in their result for many years to come, we need 
 the creative spirit of the binding grip of right principle 
 which holds fast and will not make sacrifice or com- 
 promise. We need the Webster of January 26, 1830, 
 not the Webster of March 7, 1850. It is good for our 
 weakness and timidity to turn back to these two great 
 days, and to pray that the God of truth may keep us from 
 Webster's mistake on that tragic seventh of March when 
 the foundations slipped and the strong tower stood fast 
 no more. Not now the flashing lightning and the rolling 
 thunder of the answers to Calhoun and Hayne but only 
 a great mountain sliding in the rain! And Webster 
 knew that the blunder had been made. Thenceforth, 
 as Mr. Lodge says, " he was disturbed and ill at ease. 
 He never admitted it, even to himself, but his mind was 
 not at peace, and he could not conceal the fact. Pos- 
 terity can see the evidences of it plainly enough, and a 
 man of his intellect and fame knew that with posterity 
 the final reckoning must be made. No man can say that 
 Webster anticipated the unfavorable judgment which his 
 countrymen have passed upon his conduct, but that in his 
 heart he feared such a judgment cannot be doubted. 
 If the 7th of March speech was right, then all that had 
 gone before was false and wrong. In that speech he 
 broke from his past, from his own principles and from 
 the principles of New England, and closed his splendid 
 public career with a terrible mistake." So far as the 
 past has rested on wrong principles the time has come 
 for breaking from it. So far as the present needs new 
 
Dangers and Duties 13 
 
 principles the time has come for asserting them. It 
 should be done in the new peace. As Life remarked 
 recently, we want none of the old style diplomatic doc- 
 tors around now sewing sponges in the wounds which 
 they are closing up, to fester and breed new trouble and 
 disease. The world wants a clean and just piece of work 
 done now and done once for all. 
 
 And a clean and just piece of work needs to be done 
 in each one of us. We can best bring in a better world 
 by being ourselves better men. As Mr. Balfour remarked 
 when the war was nearing its end, we want a new world 
 but can only have it as we ourselves get new hearts. 
 The limitations of human nature are constantly urged 
 as an insuperable objection to the efforts and the vision of 
 the moral idealists, but those men will worry least about 
 these limitations in events who are most conscientiously 
 seeking to transcend them in their own lives. While the 
 broad social forces are at their renovating work under the 
 hand of God, our personal privilege is to augment them 
 by our own renewal in the image of Christ, the one Right 
 Man and the Head of Humanity. His kind of world, 
 the Kingdom of God on earth, can only be built on His 
 kind of men. If I want a new world I must be the kind 
 of a man I want the new world to be. If I am not 
 willing to pay this price what honesty is there in my 
 talk of a Golden Year? As Newman challenges us: 
 
 " Thou to wax fierce 
 In the cause of the Lord ! 
 Anger and zeal 
 And the joy of the brave, 
 Who bade thee to feel, 
 Sin's slave? " 
 
14 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 If men honestly want a world of good will and brother- 
 hood let them be the men St. Paul demands in his de- 
 scription in First Thessalonians of the Christian citizen 
 — a man of purity, honesty, holiness, brotherliness, in- 
 dustry, modesty, thrift, courage. In personal life and 
 social relationships, in family and business, each of us 
 has his chance to hasten a new human order, by intro- 
 ducing here in the ranges nearest him the principles of 
 a new time, the old principles of Jesus, the Carpenter, 
 the Teacher, the Friend, the Saviour, the whole great 
 Personality and Power whom Isaiah foresaw — we be- 
 lieve it of Him, every word — Wonderful, Counselor, 
 Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. 
 
 If the new world is not to be brought nearer then 
 what was the war all about? 
 
 " With fire and sword the country round 
 
 Was wasted far and wide 
 And many a gentle mother then 
 
 And new born baby died. 
 
 " They say it was' a shocking sight, 
 
 After the field was won. 
 For many thousand bodies here 
 
 Lay rotting in the sun. 
 
 "But what good came of it at last? 
 
 Quoth little Peterkin, 
 ' Why that I cannot tell,' said he, 
 
 'But 'twas a famous victory.'" 
 
 Yes, and the victory had to be won at any cost to end 
 what refused to die till it was slain. But the men who 
 gave their lives to this end had more than this end in 
 view. They were dying, with more or less clear appre- 
 
Dangers and Duties 15 
 
 hension of it, to end an old order and to begin a new. 
 And their sacrifice is calling to us to finish what they 
 began. 
 
 A group of American soldiers were billeted in a little 
 village in Northern France and became warmly attached 
 to the village folk and the villagers to them. At last the 
 lads were called into action and one of them was brought 
 back in the evening to be laid to rest in the soil of France. 
 The village folk spoke to their priest about it and asked 
 permission to bury the body in their own consecrated 
 ground. But the priest said it could not be done. He 
 was a good lad but he had not been of their faith. So 
 they dug him a grave just outside the cemetery wall and 
 laid him to rest there as close as might be to their own 
 dead. The next morning the villagers went by and to 
 their wonder and delight they found the grave within 
 the wall. The old priest had risen in the night and moved 
 the wall. 
 
 The new order makes its demand. The walls must 
 be moved out. There must be room for the spirit of 
 eight million men who died for a larger world. They 
 "bid us to let the old evils go and to bring in the new 
 good, to ring out the slowly dying cause, the ancient forms 
 of party strife, the want, the care, the sin, the faithless 
 coldness of the times, the old shapes of foul disease, the 
 thousand wars of old, and to ring in the nobler modes 
 of life, the love of truth and right, the common love of 
 good, redress to all mankind, the thousand years of peace. 
 The dead ask this of us. They have a right to ask it 
 and to threaten to stir beneath the Flanders poppies if 
 we will not hear. And another and greater One has a 
 right to ask it who taught us to pray, and meant that the 
 
1 6 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 prayer should be sincere and true, — Thy Kingdom come, 
 Thy Will be done on earth, — in America and in the 
 world — to-day, as it is in heaven. It is of man's dis- 
 obedience and failure, not of God's will, if that Kingdom 
 is not brought nearer now by many a long year. 
 
II 
 
 THE PRESENT BUSINESS OF THE CHURCH 
 
 The Church has always the same present business. It 
 faces new problems, new tasks, new duties, new tests with 
 each new generation. But it comes to each new situation 
 with ever the same mission. Old vernaculars pass away 
 and men speak in new language. But the Church simply 
 translates into the new speech its enduring message. The 
 mission and message of the Church, its first and last 
 business is religion. 
 
 The Church is charged with this unchanging and un- 
 alterable business because human need is unaltering and 
 unchanged. The miseries and failures of the world are 
 all traceable, straight past everything secondary and de- 
 rivative, to sin and irreligion, to wrong and ignorance. 
 The present war so far from being an exception is itself 
 the tragic symbol of this. Dr. Wotherspoon of Edin- 
 burgh has undauntedly set this forth in one of the most 
 notable sermons of the times entitled '* The War and the 
 Sin of the World." 
 
 " If we may assume any moral system for the universe 
 or any God who judges the Earth, we may also assume a 
 connection between these two things — the war which desolates 
 the world and the sin of the world. Sin when it is finished 
 brings forth death. The sin, it may be further assumed, is 
 World Sin; not the sin of individuals and not the crime of some 
 
 17 
 
1 8 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 particular date — the war is a world war, the system which 
 has collapsed is a world system; the process leading to the 
 collapse must be traced in world history. It is our general 
 method of life — our relation to that whole scheme of things 
 which includes Heaven with Earth and God with ourselves 
 — which has broken down, and is judged, and is condemned. 
 The relation is false, the method is unworkable — for they 
 have led us to this which we see, and that not by accident 
 but logically and naturally, as (if they persisted) they were 
 bound to lead. It has been coming for long; whoever was 
 not blind to the signs of the times could see it coming — and 
 now it has come, this crash of our life — of which the war 
 itself is only a symptom, and is the beginning rather than 
 the end." 
 
 And Dr. Wotherspoon goes fearlessly on: 
 
 "In spite of our jealousies, racial and political rivalries and 
 divergencies, the group of peoples which share the European 
 culture form a unity, moral and spiritual. Seen in the large, 
 they constitute a single commonwealth. They have one eco- 
 nomic life, one social law, one standard of conduct, and one 
 method of thought. Their science, their philosophies, their 
 literature, their criticism, their art, their religious and spiritual 
 movements — even their fashions and their caprices and their 
 sports — are international. No one of them thinks alone or 
 has originality enough to be capable of intellectual independence 
 or even of any profound social eccentricity. All of us have 
 built upon the same foundations in much the same manner. 
 If there is sin, it is. sin of us all, systematic sin, sin of premiss, 
 from which we have all reasoned to similar conclusions. Not 
 all of us so consistently — not all of us so resolutely — not all 
 of us so thoroughly and joyfully. Whatever credit lies in lack 
 of logic, some of us may claim that credit. We have not all 
 finished and crowned the sin, as one nation has done. But all 
 have sinned, and all in one way. ' The War,' writes Mr. 
 J. H. Campbell, ' is the inevitable outcome of the ideals whereby 
 our Western civilization has been living, and shows in what 
 it trusted, and demonstrated its lack of spiritual consciousness.* 
 
The Business of the Church 19 
 
 Long ago the somber but powerful imagination of Mr. H. G. 
 Wells had discerned this inevitable, and had warned us against 
 * the hallucination of security,' and against the assumption of 
 an automatic ' progress towards which men had no moral 
 responsibility,' and he had predicted — nay, he had almost 
 described — the present debacle, of which he discerned the seeds 
 germinating in our practice. So, too, Mr. E. A. Burroughs 
 finds it: 'The war (he says) is the vengeance of the moral 
 nature upon the material.' ' We had grown accustomed to 
 measure progress in material terms and either to minimize our 
 moral ailments or to treat them with material remedies.' Mr. 
 Burroughs will excuse none of us: — 'British individualism was 
 in its way as much a form of animalism and atheism as 
 German militarism or worship of expedience.' ' No part of 
 the civilization which has perished (he says again) can plead 
 Not Guilty to a share in the responsibility — because every- 
 where the new paganism was already working in greater or 
 less degree or in one form or another.' As compared with 
 Germany, ' the rest of the nations, combatant or neutral, are 
 white only by contrast with black, and would if contrasted 
 with white be very gray . . . the fall of Germany is a common 
 reproach on human nature, rather than ground of congratulation 
 for those other mortals who are not German.' * Others, our- 
 selves included, have deserved the cataclysm,' though only 
 Germany could have engineered it. 
 
 " We can, in fact, learn little from what has come upon us, 
 unless we recognize that the sin which Germany has, in St. 
 Paul's sense * perfected,' is the sin of the world — a radical vice 
 which has run through the entire social detail of our Western 
 system; unless we recognize that the judgment which visits 
 us is not a heterogeneous retribution — as a man might be 
 whipped for stealing, the whipping having no relation to the 
 theft except by sentence of the judge: we have to see that it 
 is strictly the death which that particular sin contained: we 
 are filled with the fruit of our own devices. 
 
 " Nor do we learn much unless we recognize the sin, what 
 it is — that it is the sin of a world which knows God and 
 does not glorify Him as God — which does not like to have 
 God in its knowledge; that it is the sin of a Christendom 
 
20 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 •which confesses Christ, but will not have Him to reign ('His 
 citizens sent after Him, saying we will not have this man 
 to reign over us'), which has limited His authority to private 
 occasions, and has excluded it in social and public affairs; a 
 Christendom which has told Christ to mind His own business 
 (which is the saving of souls), and to let society and the 
 world alone. Germany perfected that sin; are we clear of 
 it? When we saw what the sin perfected is, we revolted 
 from it, and so far have cleared ourselves; to God be the 
 praise. But hear Mr. Burroughs again: * To approve an 
 ideal, or even to fight for it, is nothing unless you also live 
 by it and for it.' We have still that to do — when it is no 
 longer necessary to fight, then to live by the truth for which 
 we have fought." 
 
 This is the honest diagnosis of the well nigh fatal 
 sickness to which we awakened in part at least in the 
 war, from which we have to escape and from which we 
 can escape in but one way, by turning in peace as, in 
 principle, as Mr. Root pointed out, we did turn in the 
 war, from Paganism with its principle of the selfish will 
 to Christianity with its counter principle of the unselfish 
 reason. Colonel Watterson, whose sight grows clearer as 
 the evening shadows fall, sees this among his discernings: 
 
 " Surely," said he, " the future looks black enough, yet It 
 holds a hope, a single hope. One, and one power only, can 
 arrest the descent and save us. That is the Christian religion. 
 
 " Democracy is but a side issue. The paramount issue under- 
 lying the issue of Democracy, is the religion of Christ, and 
 Him crucified; the bedrock of civilization; the source and 
 resource of all that is worth having in the world that is, that 
 gives promise in the world to come; not as an abstraction; 
 not as a huddle of sects and factions; but as a mighty force 
 and principle of being. The Word of God, delivered by the 
 gentle Nazarene upon the hillsides of Judea, sanctified by the 
 Cross of Calvary, has survived every assault. It is now 
 
The Business of the Church 21 
 
 arrayed upon land and sea to meet the deadliest of all assaults, 
 Satan turned loose for one last, final struggle. . . . 
 
 '* If the world is to be saved from destruction — physical 
 no less than spiritual destruction — it will be saved alone by 
 the Christian religion. That eliminated leaves the earth to 
 eternal war." 
 
 The business of the Church as it has always been, and 
 now if possible more than it has ever been, is religion. 
 It is religion more truly and broadly conceived than ever, 
 more conscious of its social responsibility in the nation, 
 alive to its mission as the instrumentality of true racial 
 interpretation and international service but on these ac- 
 counts all the more personal and the more effective in 
 purifying and healing the individual cells of the organism 
 of each national society and of the body of humanity. 
 We may think as freely as we can of the modes of re- 
 ligious application to life but we have to realize more 
 deeply than ever the need of its judging and restoring 
 power. 
 
 To these ends It is the business of the Church to-day 
 to discern clearly and to preserve the true sense of Its 
 own mission. This has been greatly confused by the 
 war. In which the Christian Church has been enlisted 
 on both sides of a struggle. In which with all necessary 
 qualification we believe that one side was morally right 
 and the other morally wrong. And the Church's concep- 
 tion of Its mission was already sufficiently blurred. There 
 were too many among us who saw no clear distinction 
 between the three great divine institutions, the family, 
 the state and the Church. Confusion was not unnatural. 
 The same man belonged to all three and could not sepa- 
 rate his own functlonings In his home, as a citizen and as 
 
22 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 a Christian. In a sense they can never be separated. 
 Each of them is an institute of life and of religion, and 
 history is the development of each in itself and of all in 
 their interrelations. But the three institutions are there, 
 nevertheless, and every error that men make in judging 
 and relating them brings in its train its own judgment. 
 The Church at least must realize this and seek to protect 
 itself and human society from its peril. In the war, 
 in the shaping of peace and in the new conditions of 
 politics and industry following the war the Church needs 
 to know that it has a mission and what its mission is. 
 The Church is not a mere agency of government, nor a 
 convenient channel of publicity, nor an echo of the state, 
 nor a political judge and divider. It is a ministry of 
 service, a fountain of moral life and duty and a witness 
 to enduring and universal principles. 
 
 There is no room here to deal with all these functions 
 but let us single out two elements of the Church's busi- 
 ness and seek to make them clear. It is the business 
 of the Church, for one thing, to supply ideals for society 
 and for humanity and the convictions which must sustain 
 such ideals. This is a hopeful time in which to proclaim 
 the generous and courageous ideals which men heard from 
 Jesus on the hills of Galilee and which the first Christian 
 missionaries carried through the Roman world. The dis- 
 tortions of those ideals which were seen in the French 
 Revolution are abroad in the world again and this time 
 they are closer to their originals. Mankind has a heart 
 for hopes and dreams and endeavors which recall the eager 
 days at the beginning of our national history. But a cen- 
 tury has brought a richer and truer understanding of many 
 things. Old vagaries and fallacies and false trust and de- 
 
The Business of the Church 23 
 
 ceptions and self deceptions are with us still, wearing new 
 faces and speaking a subtler language. But this is only to 
 say that the need as well as the opportunity for the Church 
 to go about its business of proclaiming the principles of 
 the Kingdom of God is greater than it has ever been. 
 
 And what are the fundamental ideals which the Church 
 must express? Professor William Adams Brown has 
 stated them with sure Christian discernment in " The 
 Way Out " to be righteousness, repentance, service and 
 faith. 
 
 (i) Righteousness. Our Lord stated this clearly 
 as the primary thing without which there would be 
 no beginning and no going on except to evil and dis- 
 aster. " Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His 
 righteousness." It was the central principle of His own 
 life and conduct. *' It becometh us to fulfill all right- 
 eousness." It is what God is before He can be thought 
 of as being anything else. " Righteousness and jus- 
 tice are the foundation of His throne." It is the 
 only foundation of human society, of family life, of 
 national character, of a world order. The first thing is 
 not honor or glory or gain or power. It is righteousness. 
 The business of the Church is fearlessly to proclaim this 
 and if any nation commits itself to courses of unrighteous- 
 ness then the Church has its work set before it which it 
 must do and take the consequences. The Church may 
 be sure that in the end it will suffer less for defending 
 righteousness than for supporting a state in wrong doing. 
 To-day especially the message of the Church needs to 
 be conceived as a message of moral and social and economic 
 and political righteousness. The Lord Jesus is compas- 
 sion but He is also truth. And it is refreshing to see 
 
24 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 that latltudinarian interpretations of the Gospel to which 
 we have been accustomed in the United States have 
 grown very distasteful during the war and that some of 
 the most influential preachers of a lax gospel are now 
 become the prophets of the righteous law of God and the 
 messengers of the judgment as well as the mercy of Christ. 
 They see now what Mr. Ikeda, the heroic suffering 
 Japanese pastor, saw when in pain and poverty he spent 
 his ebbing strength on the Japanese biography of St. 
 Bernard. A friend suggested to him that St. Bernard 
 was but little known in Japan and that a life of St. 
 Francis would be more popular and more acceptable to 
 the publishers. Mr. Ikeda said that he felt that, too, 
 and had long revered St. Francis, but there was a reason. 
 '' St. Francis," said he, " stands for Love — selfless, gentle, 
 self-sacrificing love, — love alone. There is great power 
 in that, but it is not enough. There is evil in men's 
 hearts, and that evil must be fought against and subdued. 
 Only so can men be saved. Not St. Francis, but St. 
 Bernard is the man who combines in himself both these 
 principles, love and the aggressive, fighting spirit, and so 
 I thought it would perhaps serve Christ best if I intro- 
 duced St. Bernard to the Japanese Church." It is the 
 principle of righteousness alone which has justified our 
 participation in the war. To the nation believing this, 
 the whole claim of righteousness between nation and 
 nation, and class and class, and man and man, and of a 
 righteous God, and the sin of all unrighteousness may be 
 proclaimed with new power. 
 
 (2) Repentance. That word was so instantly inter- 
 twined with righteousness by our Lord that some may 
 dispute whether with us as with Him it does not belong 
 
The Business of the Church 25 
 
 in the first place. At any rate it is for unrighteousness 
 that men need to repent. We need it. Germany and 
 Austria and Turkey need it to be sure. But men and 
 nations must do their own repenting. Others can not 
 do it for them. We need to do our own. One of the 
 most curious phenomena of the war has been the resent- 
 ment which this idea has encountered in Great Britain 
 and America. Any reminder that we had motes or beams 
 in our own eyes, that the hands that held the chalice 
 of freedom in the name of God must be clean, that the 
 strength of ten belongs only to the pure heart, was 
 denounced as the seditious talk of a pacifist, forgetting 
 that the battle is in God's hands and that we have Him 
 to deal with as well as the enemy. Perhaps now the 
 word of truth may be endured. God knows how deeply 
 it is needed. The war has led to a great moral cleansing 
 in America but the work has only begun and with such 
 unflinching exposure of our sins and such sincere peni- 
 tence and such purpose of a new obedience as will alone 
 avert God's judgment and receive His blessing men 
 await the call and moral leadership of the Church. ** I 
 do not know when this war against the German Empire 
 will come to an end," said the Secretary of War on 
 November 4th, " but I know this, that the war for the 
 salvation of young American manhood has only just 
 begun, and that it is going to keep up." The spirit of 
 penitence alone, not the spirit of the Pharisee, can sustain 
 this war. 
 
 (3) Service. The participation of our country in the 
 war was simply an act of service on the part of a whole 
 people. We saw more and more clearly as the struggle 
 went on that we had vital interests at stake but it was not 
 
26 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 for interests that America entered. It was to serve the 
 righteous cause and mankind, and never before has a 
 nation poured out such energies of service in armies, in 
 relief, in welfare ministry. We have expressed in time 
 of war the enthusiasm of human brotherhood, of the equal 
 liberty of mankind. Whence came this ideal of unselfish- 
 ness, of laying down our life for others, of using strength 
 for service, of living and dying for truth and for hu- 
 manity? Does any one doubt whence it came? That 
 ideal of service at any cost, of doing duty for nothing, 
 of counting the individual in his interest and his life as 
 only a means of advancement for the whole human cause 
 — this the Church must hold up in peace when it will be 
 vastly harder for men to live by it than it was in war. 
 (4) Faith. The world has wrecked its material in- 
 terests for the sake of moral ideals and ends. Wealth 
 and ease and comfort and all things have been conceived 
 in their true character as means to invisible ends. The 
 world, as will be pointed out later, has accepted the con- 
 tention of the Christian faith that the supreme values 
 are moral and unseen. How long will the acceptance 
 last? We may be sure that the struggle is not over. 
 It is as old as history. The eleventh and twelfth 
 centuries saw it in strangely confused form between St. 
 Anselm and William the Red. We shall never see it 
 in that form again. It is a struggle of far purer prin- 
 ciple now. If we are to have a new world it must be 
 built upon the foundation of faith, Jesus Christ Him- 
 self being the chief corner stone. To speak this word 
 of faith is the present business of the Church — faith 
 in God, in the reality and supremacy of the moral and 
 spiritual values, interests and forces, faith in man. This 
 
The Business of the Church 27 
 
 last not least. We need to acquire the human faith 
 which Paul held and to which he called men, ** faith 
 in the Lord Jesus and unto all saints." (Eph. 1.15.) 
 We have reaped enough death from human envy and 
 distrust. 
 
 It is the business of the Church to be the deliverer 
 of this message of righteousness, repentance, service and 
 faith in each nation. It is to be also an international 
 instrumentality, the institute of humanity, as the family 
 is the institute of the affections and the state the institute of 
 rights. One great source of our troubles has been our 
 racial and national isolation and selfishness. The war has 
 been at once the fruit and the corrective of this. For the 
 corrective we have every reason to be thankful. We 
 have been taught that there is no such thing as comfort- 
 able separation from the rest of the world. We may 
 disbelieve in entangling alliances but there is no escape 
 from the entanglements. We see that our own safety 
 depends on conditions without. We do not talk now 
 of saving America to save the world but of saving the 
 world in order to save America. To make American 
 democracy safe we have had to wage a war in Europe. 
 The Church has a work of redemption to do among these 
 interests and ideas. It ought to conserve the good of 
 nationalism, disciplining and inspiring the genius of each 
 separate nation. And it ought to master its evil in the 
 interest of humanity and reveal to each nationality its 
 true glory which is to be found in the perfection of 
 national character and the fulfillment of national power 
 as the essential contribution of each people to the full 
 life of the whole of mankind. 
 
 The Church's universal business was never clearer. 
 
28 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 The central organizations of Islam have broken down. 
 Mecca remains but not the Mecca of old. Some day 
 even the long sealed city will be a mission station, while 
 already the iron bands that girt the Mohammedan peo- 
 ples and the Mohammedan faith have been rent. New 
 ties of sympathy and of confidence relate the Latin Ameri- 
 can nations to us and new realizations of moral and social 
 need open them to the Bible, and the Living Christ. 
 The streams of democratic influence and of moral energy 
 springing from one great fountain, though flowing through 
 various channels, are pouring up through the forms and 
 institutions of government and society in Japan. The 
 critical period in Chinese history is too analogous to the 
 corresponding years in our own national past to leave us 
 cold or unsympathetic toward the struggle of the contend- 
 ing forces of corruption and progress in China, where it 
 can not be that God will allow the evil to prevail, and 
 where all that is true and honest calls for Christianity 
 as the one hope of the nation. In India the British Gov- 
 ernment is redeeming its pledges of the past and providing 
 for a measure of self-government that will put great 
 sections of India's affairs in the hands of the Indian 
 people themselves, and that will reveal to India more 
 clearly than it has yet been revealed the incompatibility 
 of Hinduism and Islam alike with free institutions and 
 democratic brotherhood. And the war clouds which have 
 darkened Europe have not illuminated Africa, although 
 they have helped Africa to realize its need of light. And 
 in South Eastern Asia — the Philippine Islands and Siam, 
 so alike and so different, a people awakened and a 
 people to be awakened, want what politics and trade 
 can give in part but yet can not give at all — a new 
 
The Business of the Church 29 
 
 quickening of life, a new strength of soul, a salvation 
 which can come by Christ alone. 
 
 There may be diversity of judgment as to the method 
 by w^hich the Church shall function as the institute of 
 humanity, whether, as some think, by seeking to spread 
 an international ecclesiastical organization or, as others 
 of us believe, by fostering in each nation its own living 
 Christian agency, which shall supply the directing principle 
 of the national genius. But however we may differ as 
 to the method, the end is clear. We must replace the 
 ideals and fears and organizations of war by the ideals 
 and hopes and organizations of peace. Cooperation and 
 common gain must be substituted for conflict and partisan 
 advantage. '' Peace to find United States ready for War 
 of Trade," in the " War after the War " — these are 
 phrases from a newspaper account of the Fifth National 
 Foreign Trade Convention held in Cincinnati in April, 
 19 1 8. But the Church must preach a new order of 
 helpful association from which all shall gain, not a war 
 of interest against interest in which both must ultimately 
 lose. In government as in trade, the Church has an 
 ideal and a spirit to offer to men. And the wise and 
 true men are laying hold upon it. Viscount Grey is 
 uttering a religious word when he lays it down as one 
 of the foundations of the League of Nations " that the 
 Governments and peoples of the States willing to found 
 it understand clearly that it will impose some limitations 
 upon the national action of each, and may entail some 
 inconvenient obligation. Smaller and weaker nations will 
 have rights that must be respected and upheld by the 
 league. Stronger nations must forego the right to make 
 their interests prevail against the weaker by force, and 
 
30 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 all States must forego the right in any dispute to resort 
 to force before other methods of settlement by confer- 
 ence, conciliation, or if need be arbitration, have been 
 tried. This is the limitation. The obligation is that if 
 any nation will not observe this limitation upon its na- 
 tional actions, if it breaks the agreement which is the 
 basis of the league, rejects all peaceful methods of settle- 
 ment and resorts to force against another nation, they 
 must one and all use their combined force against it." 
 This is only the word of order and of righteousness. 
 
 And not in commerce and government only but in race 
 relationship, which is the hardest problem of all, the 
 Church's principle is our only salvation. Race must 
 be subordinated to humanity. The power of the crude 
 results of Darwin's influence must be broken and we must 
 reestablish Christ's. The end of humanity is not race 
 warfare eliminating the weak. It is race fellowship per- 
 fecting the family life of God upon the earth. In our 
 new and consolidated world the present business of the 
 Church is to supply humanity with its instrumentality 
 of self-fulfillment. 
 
 And yet how can the thing that needs to be redeemed 
 be its own self fulfiller? This is the tragic problem of 
 the new day. How can the new world that is to be 
 hereafter be made out of the old breed of men? Saint 
 Brice, caustically criticizing President Wilson's address 
 before the Senate on January 24, 19 17, declared in 
 the Paris Journal: ** The situation would appear in- 
 extricable if we did not realize how the pursuit of a 
 fixed idea may lead astray. Wilson is haunted by the 
 idea of inaugurating the golden age of universal brother- 
 hood. Naturally, general disarmament is the basis of this 
 
The Business of the Church 31 
 
 system. The only thing lacking for the realization of 
 this admirable conception is a new humanity. Does 
 Wilson pretend to be able to change humanity?" Hu- 
 man progress does not need to wait for the total perfec- 
 tion of humanity. We have got rid of many evils even 
 if humanity has not as yet been so greatly changed and 
 we hope that we can get rid of war too with humanity 
 as it is or as it is becoming. But Saint Brice's demand 
 is just. Man himself is still the greatest element in 
 his own problem. How is he to be made new? What 
 agency but the Church knows where the power to effect 
 the change can be found? We are back once more at 
 the beginnings and the last word is the first. " Ye must 
 be born again." What greater business could the Church 
 have than to lead men to the one Source and Strength 
 adequate both to generate the new life which they need 
 and to provide that life with the forms of action through 
 which it shall do its work and bear its fruitage in the 
 nation and throughout the world? 
 
Ill 
 
 THE EFFECT OF THE WAR ON CHRISTIAN CONVICTIONS 
 AND IDEALS 
 
 But has not the war produced an atmosphere in which 
 the Church if it conceives its business in the terms just 
 described, will be speaking without any audience? And 
 are not the values which now appeal to men utterly 
 diverse from all that the Church can offer? Not a bit 
 of it. The experience of the war has clarified and con- 
 firmed our fundamental religious ideas and revealed the 
 power of their appeal to the present day mind. It has 
 unmistakably set in the supreme place those moral and 
 spiritual principles which constitute the message of the 
 Church and it has revealed the responsiveness of men to 
 the essential ethical ideals of Christianity. 
 
 The war has not dissolved the great convictions of 
 Christianity about God and man, about the Church and 
 the Cross, about prayer and about Jesus Christ. 
 
 It has disclosed the depth of our human belief in God. 
 One met no atheists in the army and navy. The skep- 
 ticism and materialistic doctrine of the last fifty years 
 may have left deep moral scars upon the western world. 
 It undoubtedly made the war possible. But it evidently 
 affected only in the most superficial way the real instinct 
 of men toward the idea of God. It was never necessary 
 in the camps or in France to prove the existence of God. 
 
 Z2 
 
The Effect of the War 33 
 
 The enormous tide of life which was running swept men 
 past the traditional intellectual difficulties and made the 
 mechanistic chatter of the past generation seem meaning- 
 less. Men knew God was awaiting just beyond the 
 next moment. Or they had a rendezvous with him the 
 day following or that day fortnight. What nonsense was 
 this that there was no God? They knew better. They 
 felt, confused as the idea might be, that they were en- 
 gaged in His business and expected to report to Him 
 soon. A Belgian chaplain told me that in the first year 
 of the war the Belgian soldiers, free thinkers, Roman 
 Catholics and men of no thought at all poured in their 
 questions for help and strengthening and their ideas cen- 
 tered on four great themes — God, sin, prayer, and nour- 
 ishment, not for the body but for the soul. So among 
 our own soldiers and sailors the outstanding fact has 
 been an instinctive trust and assurance regarding God. 
 And the war has not only revealed this widespread, almost 
 universal, theistic attitude, it has strengthened it. It 
 has done so by assuring men of a righteous moral govern- 
 ment of the world. They have seen in the war the 
 judgment of God striking home upon the third and fourth 
 generation of Frederick the Great who pretended to 
 believe in Him and who mocked the law of His righteous- 
 ness. Sin has paid its penalty before their eyes, the sin 
 of Germany, their own sin. There is God, they have 
 said to themselves, and He is a just and almighty God. 
 Furthermore the very sufferings of the war, its pain and 
 agony, have helped many men in their faith in God. 
 The suffering and pain of the universe have often been 
 a difficulty in the way of a theistic belief. And the 
 agony and blood of war have made it hard to reconcile 
 
34 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 war with a divine government of the world. But why? 
 Is, there not anguish and blood \x\ maternity? And yet 
 maternity is the divinest and holiest thing we know in 
 human life. It brings God nearest. St. Paul even made 
 a bold declaration about it, which theologians have been 
 busy ever since in explaining away, to the effect that 
 it had a redeeming grace in it. Now men have experi- 
 enced a sort of moral equivalent of the pain and peril 
 of childbirth. So the soldier has found the suffering of 
 war not a stumbling block in the way of a faith in God 
 but a positive reassurance. " God is righteous and He 
 suffers," the wounded man has said to himself, " I am 
 suffering and I have been ready to die for righteousness. 
 I know a bit about God. I am sure He is there." The 
 soldier knows the truth which Walt Whitman put in 
 words : 
 
 " And I say to Mankind, Be not anxious about God, 
 
 For I who am curious abojt each am not curious about God. 
 No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God 
 and about Death." 
 
 And this is not all. The soldier and sailor believed in 
 God indeed. But also it is the God of the Bible they 
 believed in, not the God of natural theology or the differ- 
 ent God of the new theology. The war has influenced 
 more than the soldier in this. It has been interesting 
 to see the change that has passed over some of the liberal 
 theological journals. Some of those which before the war 
 could not tolerate a God of judgment and righteousness, 
 but would allow only a God of such good nature that He 
 could be trusted to pass over everything, are now sternest 
 in their faith in a God " most just and terrible in His 
 
The Effect of the War 35 
 
 judgment; hating all sin and who will by no means clear 
 the guilty." The war has restored and made clear and 
 firm to multitudes of men, for a little season at least, 
 the assurance of a just and good and real God. 
 
 As to man, also, the war has confirmed the traditional 
 doctrine of the Church. The Christian doctrine of man 
 has quite openly and boldly asserted a paradox. It has 
 denied that man holds by the beast. It has taught that 
 he was a son of God, that God Himself took on his 
 nature in the Incarnation, that he was made a little 
 lower than the angels, that he was not of the order of 
 nature alone but had kinships out of nature in God, that 
 however sin and moral failure might have damaged him 
 there were still indestructible possibilities and moral ca- 
 pacities, which would respond to the call of God or to 
 the summons of duty which is the Voice of God. Christi- 
 anity flatly denied the materialistic theory as to the nature 
 of man. On the other hand it unflinchingly recognized 
 the facts of man's appalling gift for moral degradation. 
 It knew and proclaimed the untruth of those transcen- 
 dental exaggerations of the loftiness of human nature 
 which still lingered among us and of all those rosy pictures 
 of man's character which forget sin and the deadly realities 
 of moral deficiency. Christianity, which began with the 
 experience of the rejection by men of the highest and 
 holiest character ever known and which saw in the cruci- 
 fixion of Christ the limit to which human nature could 
 sink in its self revelation of shame and cowardice, simply 
 told man the truth about himself, that he was the son 
 of a brute with a brute's possibilities latent in him. 
 This double, self-contradictory view, constituted the tra- 
 ditional anthropology of the Church. The war has sub- 
 
36 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 stantiated ft in every detail. It has revealed the divinity 
 in man. The w^orld itself, wt may say, to borrow a 
 phrase of St. John's, could not contain the books that 
 might be written of the heroism, the unselfishness, the 
 modesty, the good cheer, the love, the sacrifice, the loy- 
 alty, the devotion, the honor, the kindness, the forgiveness, 
 the courage, the tenacity, the justice, the goodness, the 
 true Godlikeness which have been displayed by soldiers, 
 sailors, civilians, fathers, mothers, wives, boys and girls, 
 young and old. *' When I think of this war and of the 
 hell which men are making of the world," said a woman 
 at the beginning of the struggle, " I wish I were a dog." 
 *' Was there ever a more glorious day," said a man who 
 heard of her remark. "' I am proud to be alive now. 
 Why, you can get a man to die for anything." Man- 
 kind has shown itself to be capable of any task or sacri- 
 fice however great. Out of the lowest, leadenest lives 
 the golden and shining deeds have come. The trans- 
 forming influences of duty, of a comrade's call for help, 
 of hardship without resting, of dogged persistence in a 
 cause seen to be God's cause and worth life and death, 
 have worked in hundreds of thousands of men the miracle 
 of glorified character, of character glorified at least in 
 the moment and article of utter loyalty, derisive of all 
 melodrama, simply and stodgily doing what had to be 
 done and what was right, that God's truth might not be 
 trampled down. The war has shown what a glorious 
 work God did in making man. But it has shown too 
 what a beastly, degraded, unspeakable thing man can 
 be. War itself in its reality, not in its idealization, is 
 of the dirt. It requires dirt life. *' Yes," said an 
 experienced Belgian soldier, " there are glories of war 
 
The Effect of the War 37 
 
 but war is blackness. The glories are like a few stars 
 shining in dark night and the dark night is war." War 
 has shown the soldier's responsiveness and his irresponsi- 
 bility, his willingness to give up everything and his easy 
 subsidence into the idea that everything must be given 
 to him, his tenacity and his vacillation, his self control 
 and his self indulgence, his good nature and his ingrati- 
 tude, his discipline and his disloyalty, his thrift and his 
 wastefulness, his nobility and his bestiality. The atroci- 
 ties and crimes which have been perpetrated have shown 
 what man will do to make war frightful and to prove that 
 man is not a son of God but a son of the devil. But 
 apart from these evidences of man's depravity we see 
 against the background of honor and light among our own 
 people, soldier and civilian, those who have gone and those 
 who have stayed, the shadows of weakness and reaction 
 and failure. The war has reaffirmed the Christian view 
 of the anomaly of the dignity and depravity of man. 
 
 But has not the war once for all discredited the Church? 
 We have been told that it has, that it has won for the 
 Y. M. C. A. and the Y. W. C. A. and the K. of C. 
 and the Salvation Army a place of undying affection and 
 gratitude in the mind of the soldier, but that the absence 
 of the Church as such and of its direct representatives 
 from the camps and from the army and the recollection 
 among the soldiers of the sectarianism and dead tradition- 
 alism, the negative morality and the religious selfishness 
 and want of democracy in the home churches contrasted 
 with the unity and vitality and unselfishness and brother- 
 hood of the army, have bred in the soldier a disgust with 
 the Church from which it will suffer for many a day. 
 All this and a great deal more we have heard over and 
 
38 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 over again from all sorts of people and in all sorts of 
 places, troop-ships and troop-trains, hospitals, pulpits and 
 magazine articles. But the facts, what are the facts? 
 I venture to say in the teeth of all this that the Church 
 and its ministry came out of the war with more of the 
 respect and affection of the soldier and the sailor than 
 any auxiliary agency, however useful and efficient it has 
 been. A great deal of criticism has fallen upon some 
 of those agencies, but not more than the soldiers and 
 sailors have poured out on the army and navy them- 
 selves. Some of it has no doubt been warranted: most 
 of it wholly unjust. It will soon pass over and the 
 good and faithful service rendered will be forever remem- 
 bered. But the Church has not been dishonored by their 
 usefulness. They have avowed their right relations to 
 the churches and have acknowledged that all their service 
 was in the name of the Church. It was the Christian 
 Church which accomplished whatever good was done and 
 as they reflect upon it soldiers and sailors will see this. 
 And the Church was there in army and navy not only in 
 all forms of auxiliary service but also in the 3,000 chap- 
 lains, including the pick of the younger men in the min- 
 istry and the priesthood. Hundreds of these men won 
 the eternal love and admiration of those they served, and 
 represented to them the noblest ideals of character and 
 comradeship. Whether the soldier has learned to abhor 
 sectarianism, selfishness, negative morality, and the want 
 of democracy in the Church will remain to be seen. Let 
 us pray that he has. If he has it will be to the vast advan- 
 tage of the Church. For there is scarcely one American 
 community where there is not more factionalism in poli- 
 tics, in racial and national sentiment and in society than 
 
The Effect of the War 39 
 
 there is in any church in the community or between all 
 the churches of the community, where there is not more 
 selfishness in business and in social life than there is in 
 theology and religion, where the churches do not repre- 
 sent more ethical positiveness than the courts, the local 
 philanthropies and especially the modern agencies of social 
 service, and where the ordinary Christian congregation 
 does not represent a meeting place of more classes and 
 social groups than are brought together in any other 
 association of the community and of far more democracy 
 than characterizes ordinary personal or neighborhood re- 
 lationships. All impulses such as these in men's hearts 
 to-day are helpful, not hurtful to the Church and to the 
 churches, even as they are, with all their shortcomings. 
 But in deeper ways than these the war has confirmed 
 the doctrine and ideal of the Christian Church, has re- 
 vealed the strength of its appeal to men's hearts and has 
 prepared the way for a more effective approach on the 
 part of the Church to the men as they return home. The 
 word " Church " is a word used in many meanings. I 
 am speaking of it now as a mystical body, visible in partial 
 and defective forms, representing as in a human body unity 
 of life rather than uniformity of function, and embodying 
 in the richest and subtlest ways of which we can conceive 
 the social, collective principle. The war has shown the 
 reality of forces in which the mechanistic interpretation 
 of life has disbelieved and which may be partially de- 
 scribed but cannot be accounted for by genetic psychology. 
 It has demonstrated the reality of the unity of the life 
 spirit, its immense momentum, the power of corporate 
 interests and sentiments to pick up individuals and endue 
 them with the energies and ideals of the body. There 
 
40 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 has been something mystical and infinitely hopeful in the 
 evidence of the truth of social character, social purpose, 
 social consecration. Society has furnished multitudes of 
 men with spiritual conceptions and ethical impulse of 
 which they had been individually wholly incapable. The 
 army picked up the weakling, the helpless, the incompetent 
 and again and again by the sheer upholding force of the 
 mass bore these men along on a tide of service and achieve- 
 ment possible only to a corporate and communized devo- 
 tion. We have seen in military and political life proof 
 of the reality, and faint illustration of the measure, of 
 the truth of the New Testament idea of the Church as 
 the body of Christ, in which the life of the body controls 
 and feeds and uses all the members. What we felt after 
 in the war under the necessity and compulsion of national 
 unity the Church of Christ was established to interpret 
 and to provide. Men have experienced now its possi- 
 bility and have seen what any small measure of its pos- 
 session may do for the nation and for mankind. 
 
 And still further the war ought to have dispelled com- 
 pletely the foolish idea that historic and sacramental 
 religion is an anachronism, to be displaced by pragmatic 
 or purely ethical religious conceptions. The religion 
 which appealed to men was a religion of full loyalty to 
 the actual person, Jesus Christ, which could speak an 
 authentic word about Him, which could say, " I know 
 Him. Let me introduce you to Him." And it was the 
 Churches which could feed men upon Him in the sacra- 
 ment, and nerve them by the power of the sense of His 
 communicated life, to which men came with hunger and 
 respect. In the British army there were regiments that 
 would not go into battle without their chaplains or until 
 
The Effect of the War 41 
 
 they had been led to the Lord's Supper. Among our 
 American troops the Communion Service filled an ever 
 enlarging place. A friend who was serving at Camp 
 Merritt, the embarkation camp at Tenafly, N. J., told 
 me that one night he had gone to bed weary at mid- 
 night. About one o'clock he was awakened by the open- 
 ing of his door and the shining of a light on his face. He 
 opened his eyes and saw an officer standing in the door- 
 way. *' I am sorry to trouble you," said he, '' but the 
 men are leaving to-night and they do not want to go 
 without a prayer. Would you come out to them?" It 
 was customary for the troops to be sent out during the 
 night to the trains or to the lighters which took them to 
 the transports at Hoboken. My friend rose at once to 
 go out to the men for a last prayer before they started 
 overseas. The officer waited for them. As he came out 
 of the door the officer said, " If it could be, sir, they would 
 like the sacrament too." My friend took his chalice and 
 a package of wafers which he felt sure would suffice 
 and went out into the night. The moon was shining and 
 the men were standing in the company street with their 
 packs beside them. He spoke a few words and offered 
 prayer and then invited those who wished to partake to 
 pass by and as they passed he dipped the wafers in the 
 wine and served them one by one. Soon he realized that 
 his supply would run short and he broke the wafers in 
 halves and then in quarters and then as the men still came 
 could only touch the wine to their lips. They were not 
 all church members. Probably only a few of them were. 
 There may have been elements of superstition in their 
 desire. But there was reality. And when the last man 
 had come they stood for a moment of silence and then 
 
42 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 passed on Into the night and across the sea to France 
 and to death and to the life that is beyond death where One 
 drinks wine new with men in the Kingdom of His Father. 
 Incidents like these happened by the score. Men wanted 
 the nourishment of the body and blood of Christ. The 
 idea of it was no fanciful idea to them. The sacramental 
 service of the Church gained a new recognition and a 
 grateful acceptance amid the horrors and night of the war. 
 But the symbol of Christianity which the war made 
 most conspicuous was the Cross of Christ. Three of the 
 great principles which are embodied in the Cross were 
 dominant principles in the war, the principle of abandon- 
 ment, of the letting go of all agencies and tasks but life, 
 of achievement by life and by the power of the spirit; 
 the principle of freedom, of contempt for all accouter- 
 ment and acquisition ; and the principle of atonement, of 
 the work of unity by means of surrender, of the use of 
 death to end death, (a) The Cross represented the 
 principle of abandonment. '' When He had by Himself 
 purged our sins," says the writer of the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews, *' He sat down on the right hand of the Maj- 
 esty on high." The later texts reject the words " by 
 Himself " as a gloss, but the idea is there none the less 
 in the mood of the verb. He did it by Himself, not by 
 anything outside of Himself. He used His life for it. 
 That was the central lesson of the war. We have read 
 all over the nation the challenging signs, *' Food will win 
 the war." " Ships will win the war." " Bonds will win 
 the war." But while the war would not have been won 
 without bonds and ships and food, they did not win it. 
 Why were they needed at all? In the interest of men. 
 Bonds were needed to equip them, ships to transport 
 
The Effect of the War 43 
 
 them, food to sustain them. But it took life, not the 
 weapons or agencies of life, to achieve victory. The w^ar 
 has shown, as Paul taught, that we are saved by His 
 life, poured out on the cross, poured out now through 
 men. (b) The Cross represented the principle of free- 
 dom. Jesus Christ moved on an orbit of liberty. Neither 
 property nor tradition nor conventions ever bound Him. 
 He and His disciples lived an unencumbered life. He 
 was no foe of private property. He believed in it and 
 sanctioned it. But He never allowed Himself to be 
 enslaved to it. It was for use not for impediment. 
 When He died the only loot for His murderers was 
 the one robe that He wore. One secret of the soldier's 
 joy and fellowship lay in this freedom from the trammels 
 of possessions which need to be guarded and which deflect 
 action. In the war and for the nation's life all things 
 were held common and valueless except as they were 
 ministers to life and to human ends, (c) The Cross 
 represented the principle of Atonement. Christ suffered 
 that men might not suffer. He met the anguish of separa- 
 tion that man might be delivered from it. " In my 
 thinking," writes a thoughtful Christian lawyer, '* I have 
 felt that perhaps the most succinct statement in reply to 
 the suggestion that it is inconsistent for those who are 
 opposed to war as itself an evil, yet not only to submit to 
 the war, but enthusiastically to support it, is to point out 
 that a war to end war is no more anomalous than is the 
 death of the Lord Jesus Christ to end death. The whole 
 scheme, as I interpret it, of our Christian faith, implies 
 that. The sending of the Son of God to earth was, in 
 the purpose of the Father, to make him a Saviour and 
 Lord; to destroy the enemies of man, sin and death; in 
 
44 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 the accomplishment of that purpose, He who knew no sin 
 was made sin for us, and He who was the conqueror of 
 death died for us. If this war is really waged as a 
 righteous war, it has in it all the elements, not of a 
 crusade to recover an empty tomb, but of a sacrifice unto 
 death to break the bonds of human enslavement, and with 
 a new meaning we can sing the old stanza of the Battle 
 Hymn of the Republic: 
 
 " ' In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, 
 With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me: 
 As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free! ' " 
 
 Men who could not put this in words felt it. They 
 knew that it was right and reasonable to die to diminish 
 death, to suffer pain that there might be less pain to 
 suffer, to accept the contradiction and separation of the 
 grave for the sake of the affirmation and unity of life. 
 Deeper and more religious meanings than we have ever 
 proclaimed are discerned in the Cross of Christ, revealed 
 and illustrated in the war. 
 
 Prayer is another of the Christian realities which has 
 been unquestioningly accepted. All the theoretical objec- 
 tions to prayer which have grown out of modern inter- 
 pretations of the universe were simply ignored. No one 
 needed to advance an apologetic for prayer. Men just 
 prayed. It did not matter whether they had ever prayed 
 before or not. They did it now. They did it m thou- 
 sands of homes from which the sons had gone out to battle. 
 They did it in the aviation bases before the men went out 
 to peril in the air. They did it on the war ships and 
 the transports and the submarines. They did it in the 
 camps at home. The lads who had known how were 
 
The Effect of the War 45 
 
 sometimes diffident about beginning but the diffidence dis- 
 appeared and men who had not known how came under 
 a contagion of prayer which was new to them and which 
 with many seemed so natural as, in the moments of su- 
 preme danger at least, to become irresistible. Henry B. 
 Wright who has done a piece of work at Camp Devens 
 whose results will be enduring, early in the war had the 
 following experience: ''Two recruits came to him one 
 night with the request that he give them a little advice. 
 
 * You see,' said one of them, * we don't exactly know 
 what to do about praying. Both of us have been in the 
 habit of saying a short prayer at home every night before 
 we got into bed, but since we came to camp we've cut 
 out the kneeling and said them after we were safely 
 between the blankets. Do you think this is all right, or 
 ought we to kneel, as we always have done since we were 
 boys, regardless of what the other fellows may say or 
 think?' Professor Wright hesitated a moment, realizing 
 that the situation might be a delicate one. He didn't 
 exactly like to advise them to kneel and perhaps call 
 down the ridicule of the entire barracks upon what might 
 easily seem to some to be a flaunting of their religion, 
 but on the other hand he admits that he was anxious 
 to learn what the result of such a course would be. 
 ' That's really a personal problem for you to settle for 
 yourselves,' he finally replied, ' but it would certainly do 
 no great harm to try kneeling once, and see what happens. 
 If the result is satisfactory you can keep it up. If it 
 isn't, why go back to saying your prayers after you have 
 gone to bed.' The young men thanked him and departed. 
 A few days later he ran into one of them on the street. 
 
 * Well, how did you come out ? ' was his first query. 
 
46 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 'What happened when you knelt the other night?' 
 * Nothing at all — nobody made a sound,' said the sol- 
 dier, * only last night three other men knelt when we 
 did.' * And,' said Professor Wright, in ending the story, 
 ' if you will believe it, at the present moment in that one 
 barracks, where 167 men sleep, every one with the 
 exception of about a dozen kneel regularly at night and 
 say their prayers.' " 
 
 And at the front, prayer was as natural to men as 
 danger. " O God, give me courage. Don't let me flinch. 
 Go with me now. Help me, O God, help me. Don't 
 let me get killed if it can be so. I wish I were home 
 but I am glad I am here. I want to do my duty. Help 
 me to do it. Bring me back safe. But help me to do my 
 part. And if this is my end, don't let me drop. Save me, 
 O God, and keep me. Here goes." How many thousands 
 made such prayers in those last moments and then when 
 the shock had been met and they were going on, or lying 
 still waiting for help to come, men who had never thought 
 greatly of God in peace, felt that He was there and 
 prayed for the power that could not be stopped or for the 
 patience that could bear all pain and wait. It is quite 
 true that the instinct that prays in danger often dies down 
 in security. But even so it has borne its testimony. The 
 man has believed and there can be no disavowal of his 
 belief. 
 
 Above all, the war has illumined and glorified the 
 figure of Christ. A good many persons and institutions 
 and ideas have been discredited by the war. Philosophies 
 which jauntily assumed that they had conquered the world 
 are a laughing stock now. But Christ towers alike over 
 all the wreckage and all the glory of the war. Some 
 
The Effect of the War 47 
 
 soldiers thought they saw Him on the battlefield. Others 
 know that they saw Him in the hospital. The one prob- 
 lem which thousands of them regarded as the fundamen- 
 tal problem and which had to be answered for them was, 
 ** Would Christ approve of this war?" And the death- 
 less determination which came to them arose from the 
 conviction that Christ did approve. They came to see 
 clearly, also, that until Christ is made the real master 
 of human life there can be no assurance that it will not 
 have to be done all over again. Christ's friendliness, 
 His superiority to race prejudice. His unselfishness, His 
 righteousness. His forgiveness. His truth, His principles 
 of a new and different human order, they realized, are 
 the only hope of the new world. Men have discovered 
 also that something more is necessary than pronunciamen- 
 toes, programs of Utopia. The world needs a Saviour, 
 a Redeemer, a Master, a Person who is new life to men 
 and nations, who can say the words, and do the deeds 
 which only Christ can say and do. Mr. E. S. Martin 
 who has written with wisdom and earnestness throughout 
 the war bore testimony to the truth in his Christmas edi- 
 torial in Life: 
 
 " If you ask who was the greatest mind that humanity has 
 produced, most people hereabouts, after considering whether 
 it was Napoleon or Caesar or Lincoln or some one else, will 
 assent if you suggest to them that it was Christ. For us of 
 European descent, at least, Christ is the great mind that is 
 the basis of the civilization that we live in and practice to 
 improve. The life and teachings of Christ conferred new 
 importance on the individual, and in that way they are the 
 foundation of modern democracy. Christ saw in every man 
 the expectation, or at least the possibility, of immortality, and 
 a chance to attain to fitness for it. To Christ no one was 
 
48 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 unimportant. Rich or poor, slave or free, every man had in 
 him the germ of immortality and the making of a saint, if 
 only the spirit of him could be caught and inspired. What 
 wisdom, what manner of conduct, what aspirations would 
 be the fruit of such inspiration, Christ showed by His own life. 
 
 " Now wars, of course, do not make people Christlike by 
 wholesale. They do diffuse very widely a certain sort of con- 
 secration. They do withdraw people from selfish concentra- 
 tion on their own prosperity and comfort and make them 
 spend themselves and all they have for a common object. 
 This war we have had part in has done that to a wonderful 
 degree. It has drawn together antagonistic persons and peoples 
 and set them to work in a common cause. It has gone won- 
 derfully far to abolish selfishness for the time being, and that 
 has been a Christian result. 
 
 " But what we may reasonably expect of wars is not so much 
 the immediate Christianization of individuals, as the bring- 
 ing of world politics into better accord with the Great Mind, 
 so that the kind may have a better chance to enjoy the natural 
 fruits of goodness, and the greedy may be hindered from 
 harrying them. When a war has increased and extended the 
 authority of the Golden Rule, that war is a success. . . . 
 
 " Extraordinary, most extraordinary, are the changes that 
 have been accomplished by this war. Even men have been 
 changed to a remarkable degree. Many have been persuaded 
 to new views, and millions have been convinced against their 
 will by weapons that they devised to convince others." 
 
 The war has swept away a great deal. With the storm 
 have gone some of the fogs with which men had hid them- 
 selves from the authority and the necessity of Christ. 
 
 I venture to say again, accordingly, what was said at 
 the outset of this chapter, that the war has clarified and 
 confirmed our fundamental religious ideas and revealed 
 the power of their appeal to the present day mind. The 
 war also has unmistakably set in the supreme place those 
 moral and spiritual principles which constitute the message 
 
The Effect of the War 49 
 
 o-f the Church. It has revealed the responsiveness of 
 men to the essential ethical ideals of Christianity. Chris- 
 tianity proclaims that moral and spiritual values are ab- 
 solute and dominant. Much of our modern teaching de- 
 nied this. The war has affirmed it. It has shown that 
 these values are supreme over personal loss and material 
 interest. Fathers and mothers have given up their only 
 sons to die for a cause. Soldiers have served in the war 
 for pay so small as to be negligible. Thousands of men 
 have served for nothing. More than that, they have made 
 untold sacrifices. In the case of Belgium we have seen 
 a nation give up its material interests utterly and lay the 
 very body of its national existence upon the altar. For 
 four years it was a national soul without a body or a 
 home. The war itself in its essence was a moral not a 
 material struggle and it was moral ideas which prevailed. 
 The very materialism of the struggle was marked by the 
 idealism of self denial. It avowed itself as nothing but 
 the vehicle and weapon of a righteous purpose and a 
 human hope. What is idealism but the belief in the pos- 
 sibility of the best, a confidence in the good faith of all 
 w^ho love liberty and are ready to die for it, the brotherly 
 trust of the democratic principle? We succeeded in the 
 war whenever and wherever this was our spirit and else- 
 where and always we failed and will fail. The war says 
 that what Christ said is forever true. 
 
 The common axiom and assumption of war is the Chris- 
 tian principle that life is not the great value, neither the 
 lives of others nor our own. " Thou shalt not kill " is 
 not the whole law and it does not forbid all killing. 
 The very code in which the law is found prescribes cap- 
 ital punishment and sets many moral values over human 
 
50 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 life. It may even be a good thing for some men to be 
 killed. Jesus said it was profitable for a man who was 
 about to offend a little one that he should be drowned 
 first. On Jesus' authority one may believe that it is a 
 kindness to a villain about to rape a child to kill him be- 
 fore he does the deed of desecration and shame, if he 
 cannot be otherwise deterred. And it was better for 
 Germany to have her soldiers slaughtered in the effort 
 to usurp criminal dominion over the world than to have 
 spared their lives and allowed her to succeed. Nor is life 
 the first value to its owners. The commercial theory was 
 fast teaching us that it was, that men and nations alike 
 were free to sacrifice anything else rather than their own 
 lives. The war preached the contrary Christian doc- 
 trine, that life is only a means, not an end, that men have 
 a right to lay it down. The scorn of the crude, familiar 
 lines written long before the war is an accepted scorn to- 
 day. 
 
 "A man must live! We justify 
 Low shift and trick to treason high, 
 A little vote for a little gold, 
 To a whole senate bought and sold, 
 With this self-evident reply. 
 
 "But is it so? Pray tell me why 
 Life at such cost you have to buy? 
 In what religion were you told 
 
 * A man must live'? 
 
 " There are times when a man must die, 
 Imagine for a battle-cry 
 
 From soldiers with a sword to hold — 
 From soldiers with the flag unrolled — 
 
 * A man must live.' " 
 
The Effect of the War 51 
 
 Life is not the great value. Truth and loyalty are 
 above life. The correct estimate of the value and use of 
 life which prevailed in the war ought now permanently 
 to stiffen our resistance to the old sophistries which justi- 
 fied lies to save life and to clear the atmosphere for the 
 doctrine and demand of Christianity which is a doctrine 
 of pure veracity and a demand for the absolute devotion 
 of life to enduring sacrificial service. The loyalty of 
 peace also ought to inherit now the loyalty awakened and 
 offered in war. Loyalty like truth is above life. There 
 are times when men have truly felt that even loyalty 
 to loyalty, though the object to which that loyalty was 
 attached was unreal to it, was worth more than life. 
 Sir Alfred Lyall's poem, " Theology in Extremis " is the 
 tale of such a loyalty. An Englishman taken prisoner in 
 the Indian Mutiny is offered life if he will abjure Chris- 
 tianity. He does not believe in Christianity and he has 
 no religious faith for which to die. A word which he 
 can easily speak will set him free. 
 
 " Only a formula easy to patter, 
 And, God Almighty, what can it matter?" 
 
 The memories of home come back to him — 
 
 " Showing me summer in western land 
 
 Now, as the cool breeze murmureth 
 In leaf and flower — And here I stand 
 
 In this plain all bare save the shadow of death; 
 Leaving my life in its full noonday. 
 And no one to know why I flung it away. 
 
 "Why? Am I bidding for glory's roll? 
 I shall be murdered and clean forgot; 
 Is it a bargain to save my soul? 
 
 God, whom I trust in, bargains not; 
 
52 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 Yet for the honor of English race, 
 May I not live or endure disgrace. 
 
 " Ay, but the word, if I could have said it, 
 
 I by no terrors of hell perplext; 
 
 Hard to be silent and have no credit 
 
 From man in this world, or reward in the next; 
 None to bear witness and reckon the cost 
 Of the name that is saved by the life that is lost. 
 
 " I must be gone to the crowd untold 
 
 Of men by the cause which they served unknown, 
 
 Who moulder in myriad graves of old; 
 Never a story and never a stone 
 
 Tells of the martyrs who died like me 
 
 Just for the pride of the old countree." 
 
 If for this, how much more for the pride and the love 
 which include this? '* How much more? Unlimitedly," 
 answers the war. " Life is the working stuff of God. 
 Men's blood is the stream of power for His purpose." 
 
 And in this also there is fresh support for the col- 
 lective obligation which Christ in His Church lays on 
 men. The war declared the primacy of the corporate 
 claim of society over the right of individual personality. 
 The constraint of the body is upon the members. What 
 gives the flag its power is its symbolization of this col- 
 lective life and its claim. The sacredness of the indi- 
 vidual conscience is a holy thing but not more so than 
 the sacredness of the corporate life. Human good has a 
 right to ask for all that the individual has. If it can 
 demand his life, it can demand aught else. It is recog- 
 nized that he can refuse it and no unjust penalty must 
 be laid upon him if he does. Life itself will judge him 
 and he will know the full mercy and the full righteous- 
 
The Effect of the War 53 
 
 ness of God. If he is right against society's false claim 
 upon him, life and God will justify him and by his pain, 
 if need be by his death, he will have forwarded the prog- 
 ress of mankind even against its unseeing will. 
 
 The central act of Christianity was the accepted and 
 unavoided death of Christ. He had a right to lay down 
 His life. But, more than that, He conceived His right 
 to be His duty. The duty of a man to die for his nation 
 saves the principle of the supremacy of collective obliga- 
 tion and interest from any endangerment of the right of 
 the individual person. The good man like the Good 
 Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, whatever the 
 manner or occasion of the dying. We have seen the 
 glory and joy of the happy acceptance of this duty. The 
 war has revealed it and even more vividly it has been 
 revealed in those accessory services which have glorified 
 both the center and the outskirts of the great conflict. 
 There has been no more shining instance than the life 
 and death of William A. Shedd in Western Persia. Dr. 
 Shedd was the senior member of the mission station of 
 Urumia. From the beginning of the war its horrors 
 fell nowhere more darkly and fatally than upon the 
 Christian population of northwestern Persia. They were 
 driven first northward toward Russia and then southward 
 into Mesopotamia. They were shut up in Urumia City 
 in crowded mission compounds. Their villages were 
 destroyed, their property pillaged and their daughters 
 ravished. One can hardly wonder that when power 
 came to them there were unwise and unjust retaliations. 
 Here and in other Persian cities the typhus and typhoid 
 cut down the missionaries remorselessly as they cared 
 for the persecuted and famine stricken people. They were 
 
54 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 free to come away and save their lives and they stayed 
 and laid them down. Dr. Shedd had been called on by 
 the American Government to act as vice-consul and for 
 months had been the one center of order and justice, 
 restraining wrong doing, whether by Moslem or by 
 Christian, relieving suffering, and seeking to secure the 
 maintenance of at least some form of nominal govern- 
 ment. At last panic-stricken, against his persuasions and 
 appeal, 60,000 Assyrian and Armenian Christians set 
 off in a great flight from Urumia to the south. Unable 
 to deter them Dr. Shedd resolved to accompany them 
 as a rearguard of protection against pursuing Turks and 
 Kurds. They fled without food or transportation over 
 consecutive ranges of mountains, through a barren coun- 
 try without grain or fuel or roads, leaving a trail of 
 death and disease behind them. Those who came last 
 died by thousands. Dr. Shedd like a faithful shepherd 
 followed his flock to shield and protect it and at Sain 
 Kala, a little village, south of the Urumia Lake, he fell a 
 victim to cholera. It had been open to him and his asso- 
 ciates at any time to leave Persia and seek safety, but like 
 his Master, he could save others but he could not save 
 himself. One may justly adapt to him such words as 
 Matthew Arnold used of his father in " Rugby Chapel ": 
 
 "But thou would'st not alone 
 Be saved, our brother, alone 
 Conquer and come to thy goal, 
 Leaving the rest in the wild. 
 They were weary, and they 
 Fearful, and they in their march 
 Fain to drop down and to die. 
 Still thou turnedst, and still 
 Gavest the weary thy hand. 
 
The Effect of the War 55 
 
 " If, in the paths of the world, 
 Stones might have wounded thy feet, 
 Toil or dejection have tried 
 Thy spirit, of that they saw 
 Nothing — to them thou wast still 
 Cheerful, and helpful, and firm! 
 Therefore to thee it was given 
 Many to save with thyself; 
 And, at the end of the day, 
 O faithful shepherd! to come, 
 Bringing thy sheep in thy hand." 
 
 There are still other lines in Arnold's tribute to his 
 father, which might justly be applied to William Shedd, 
 true missionary, lover of Christ and of men, good shep- 
 herd like his Lord. One of the Syrian people, Professor 
 Yohanan of Columbia University, who knew and loved 
 him, has himself used just such speech of him and of his 
 father: "Dr. Shedd," says he, "was a scholar, and 
 thoroughly equipped for the work with something more 
 than the surface-teaching of the ordinary theological doc- 
 trines. His book, ' Islam and the Oriental Churches,' is 
 an able piece of work. He laid, however, his literary 
 ambition and all his scientific attainments upon the altar 
 of God from whom they came, counting them loss for 
 Christ. . . . He did not work for stipend, or honor, or 
 the praise of men, but was impelled by higher motives 
 to the service of his Master. He was the champion of 
 the oppressed, the shepherd of a gentle and humble spirit, 
 to whom the poorest of his flock was not too poor. His 
 greatest joy was in bringing a stray sheep into the fold." 
 
 The end came to him on August 7, 19 18, among the 
 mountains of Persian Kurdistan. Mrs. Shedd has writ- 
 ten from Hamadan an epic letter of the closing days : 
 
^6 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 " The roads were crowded with nearly every kind of animal 
 that walks and thousands of vehicles. We estimated that 
 there were about 70,000 Christians in Urumia, or perhaps 
 more, but some stayed with Moslem friends, and some did 
 not get warning. We pushed on rapidly and got along fairly 
 well until the third day when about an hour from Memetabad, 
 in Sulduz, a man came up and told us that the Turks had 
 reached Heydarabad an hour or two behind us. We had been 
 hearing firing but could not locate it. It seemed as if our last 
 hope had vanished and there was nothing but massacre for 
 the thousands of frightened people. We whipped up our tired 
 horses to try and reach Memetyar hoping that Dr. Shedd could 
 find the prominent men there and get them to intercede for 
 the people. Great crowds were encamped there. The report 
 was false. The Turks were not behind us yet, but there had 
 been an attack at Heydarabad and the people left there and 
 ran off leaving their loads and their money. But we did not 
 dare to stay at Memetyar over night and hastened on. Later, 
 those coming after us were fired upon by cannon on that road, 
 and again they ran off leaving their loads which was evidently 
 what the attackers wanted. 
 
 ** On the fifth day we reached Mianduab, distress increasing 
 day by day. The Van Armenians with most of the mountain 
 tribes, including nearly all the fighters, were ahead, so that 
 those of us in the rear were almost unprotected. On the fifth 
 day we heard that the English were really at Sain Kala so 
 we took heart and camped that night in a garden with a few 
 others at Kara Waran. The next morning we took our time 
 thinking that since the English were near we would be safe. 
 About six o'clock firing began. It was evident we were being 
 attacked from the rear. Dr. Shedd jumped on a horse and 
 tried to rally the few gun men left. We found that nearly every- 
 body had moved on and we were in the extreme rear. 
 
 " With great difficulty we got our wagons through the narrow 
 streets of the village and on to the main road by a short cut 
 for the firing was going on behind us and we did not dare 
 to go around. Then fighting began on our front and from the 
 right. After some driving we found ourselves at the tail end 
 of the crowd which was jammed in between two walls where 
 
The Effect of the War 57 
 
 we had to stay for some time. The fighting in the rear was 
 stopped and I was greatly relieved to have Dr. Shedd appear. 
 One of our attacks was from the Majd i Saltana who had 
 small cannon. Our leader claimed to have taken one and 
 showed us the shell. The attacks were repulsed sufficiently to 
 allow the crowd to move forward, but the fighting kept up 
 three or four hours as we traveled on. We ourselves were 
 not in the place where the bullets were thickest. We saw 
 several dead bodies, mostlj' women. 
 
 "Again in the aftciuoon we were attacked, but one of the 
 Syrian leaders with his men who had been sent back reached 
 us in time, and he soon got possession of the mountain ridges 
 and protected the long line of refugees. This time too, Dr. Shedd 
 got on a horse and tried to rally the men with guns to protect 
 the crowds so that by night he was very tired. 
 
 " That night we stopped at a threshing floor a few hours 
 from Sain Kala, and made an early start reaching the English 
 camp at Sain Kala about 9 A. m. August 6th. Thousands and 
 'thousands, perhaps fifty thousand (I can't say) refugees were 
 camped about Sain Kala, in the orchards, yards of houses, and 
 spread out over the surrounding hills. And still the long line 
 of stragglers reached back for miles. 
 
 " From Urumia to Sain Kala, six days' journey for us, I saw 
 perhaps not more than 20 bodies of Moslems lying along the 
 road, evidently shot by the Armenians or Mountain Syrians 
 who were leading the flight. At nearly every village we had 
 the same complaint of plunder and murder by those in advance, 
 so those of us in the rear suffered the penalty. Villages nearly 
 everywhere were deserted. We could buy nothing and were 
 always in danger of attack. 
 
 " When we reached the English camp at Sain Kala, August 
 6th, we were received by Major Moore and Captain Reed, the 
 latter for many years connected whh the English Mission in 
 Urumia. They had been sent with ammunition, Lewis guns, 
 money and a handful of men, to save the Urumia situation, 
 but came ' too late, too late.' Dr. Shedd had longed for months 
 to be able to shift some of his heavy responsibilities and he 
 was wonderfully cheered when we reached Sain Kala, thinking 
 now that the people would be safe and there would be some 
 
58 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 authority that could maintain order. Ever since the middle 
 of February he had been giving himself without reserve, try- 
 ing to save life and property in the midst of anarchy, but 
 that is a long story. We had hardly been in camp at Sain 
 Kala an hour before all hopes of rest vanished. 
 
 " A small force of Englishmen sent out about 16 or 18 miles 
 to protect refugees in the rear had been attacked by a larger 
 force. Immediately the camp was astir, and a body of cavalry 
 was sent out. There were only about 150 fighting men in the 
 English detachment at Sain Kala, but they had rapid firing 
 guns which saved them more than once. They tried to get 
 Syrian and Armenian leaders to get their men out but it was 
 very difficult as they were with their families and a terrible 
 panic had begun. The thousands camped around us started 
 to move forward slowly, irresistibly, like a great avalanche. 
 Some armed men were sent back to the town of Mahmudjik 
 to rescue the people there and help the struggling rear of 
 the line of refugees which had been cut off. I am told that 
 quite a number on both sides were killed in Mahmudjik, the 
 Moslems attacking from roofs and windows. They had great 
 provocations for as usual they had been robbed, but the attack 
 was repulsed, all the refugees moved forward and by evening 
 only the English camp remained. 
 
 " An hour or so after reaching camp I noticed that Dr. Shedd 
 did not look well. Soon he complained of the great heat in 
 the tent. I told him I would fix him a place to lie down in 
 our Red Cross cart which had a canvas cover, where it was 
 cooler. After a time I saw he was very weak and miserable so 
 I had the baggage taken out and arranged a bed for him with 
 quilt and pillows on the floor of the cart. The English doctor 
 was out with the cavalry. Dr. Jesse Yonan was there but had 
 no medicine. I feared cholera and suggested calomel which 
 I had. We gave him several doses of that. 
 
 *' About four or five o'clock Captain Reed told me they were 
 going to move their camp to a place under the shelter of the 
 mountains. I made arrangements for our baggage and we 
 started before dark so that we could see the road and Dr. 
 Shedd would not be jolted so much. The three or four Syrians 
 besides our two drivers were with us and I thought they under- 
 
The Effect of the War 59 
 
 stood perfectly well that we wanted to stop at the English 
 camp where we would see the English doctor. It soon grew 
 dark and I was entirely absorbed in my care for Dr. Shedd and 
 did not watch the road. After what seemed like hours, I 
 noticed that the riders behind were leaving us, and I called 
 out and asked if we were not near the English camp. They 
 replied we had left it several miles behind. I cannot tell you 
 my feelings; the roads were too rough and uncertain to return. 
 We got into a gully and could not go on. It was very dark. 
 
 " We called to the riders who were leaving us to come 
 back and help us back the cart up to the level, but they went 
 on. However, the men who were with us succeeded in backing 
 the cart up to a level place where we decided to stay until 
 morning. Then we were alone on that desolate mountain road 
 in the darkness with my husband dying and no medicine, no 
 nourishment, no comfortable place for him to lie, and only a 
 limited supply of water. I lighted the lantern and looked at 
 his face, saw he was very bad and told the men some one 
 must go back for the English doctor. Two of them went, but 
 the doctor did not reach us until midnight. There was an 
 old cart left by the roadside and the men set fire to it to have 
 heat and light. The lantern had only a few drops of oil so 
 we could not keep it lighted. I had some coffee which the 
 men made and Dr. Shedd drank it eagerly. He was very weak 
 but we had no nourishment to give him. From the first he 
 had severe cramps in his legs and was very cold. I heated 
 the water bottle for his feet. The doctor came and suggested 
 ptomaine poison and left us saying we should wait till they 
 came up in the morning. Dr. Shedd was not conscious after 
 that. A little after light the man said we could not wait 
 there as there was firing behind and the English were probably 
 attacked, so we took him in his dying hour over those rough 
 mountain roads, two hours or more, when Captain Reed and 
 the doctor caught up with us. We drove the cart to the side 
 of the road. The doctor pronounced it cholera and at my re- 
 quest gave him a small injection for I still hoped that God 
 might let him stay. In a few minutes he breathed his last 
 about 10 A.M., August 7th, just one week after leaving Urumia. 
 Captain Reed said we had better go on as far as the carts 
 
6o The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 could go and find a burial place. We went on for an hour 
 or so and found a place on the mountain side near a rock. 
 There was nothing to dig with but a small adz. But with the 
 aid of fingers and sticks they made a shallow grave quite 
 a distance above the road. We sewed him in a blanket and 
 then wrapped him in a heavy canvas from the cart and bound 
 it with ropes. Dr. Yonan read a part of i Corinthians xv 
 and led in prayer. After a layer of earth we placed stones 
 and again on the top and then smoothed it over so that no 
 enemy might know where the grave was. We cut a cross 
 on the top of the rock and on the front, and Captain Reed 
 had a drawing made of the place so that it can be found. It 
 is about six or seven miles west of Sain Kala. It was terrible 
 to leave him there in that wild desolate place but I hope to 
 take him to Seir some time." 
 
 This is what life is given for, that men may lay it 
 down for their fellow men. The awful sacrifices of the 
 war sanction and support the call of Christ for men's 
 lives now in peace. 
 
 For the setting of duty and truth and glory above life 
 does not mean always that we are to die for them. More 
 often it means that we are not to die at all but to do 
 the harder thing and live for them. That will be our 
 problem and our testing now. It is easy to draw mis- 
 leading inferences from the war analogies. We think 
 that because war beheld such unity of national purposes 
 and readiness of national sacrifice we shall now see the 
 same in peace. War has always been able to draw out 
 what peace commands in vain. War is a transient in- 
 terest. Peace is an unending task. War appeals to all 
 that is worst in men as well as to all that is best. Peace 
 can only call upon the highest and truest self. War 
 can use the unifying energy of a common hate. Peace 
 knows that it is the hater who is hurt by his own hate. 
 
The Efect of the War 6i 
 
 What war brought forth had its splendor. One can 
 understand what the British officer meant, of whom Mr. 
 Masefield spoke, who wrote, " I do not know what I will 
 do when this lovely war is over." It had its glories and 
 they are gone. But if that which passes away, as Paul 
 said, is glorious, how much more glorious is that which 
 remains. And what remains? The great religious con- 
 victions and moral ideals of which we have been speaking, 
 remain. The need of loyalty and devotion and sacrifice 
 remains. The task and summons, and the test and en- 
 treaty of peace remain. Can men meet these as they 
 met the challenge of death? Can the man do this harder 
 thing? 
 
 " So he died for his faith. That is fine — 
 
 More than most of us can do, 
 But, say, can you add to that line 
 
 That he lived for it, too? 
 
 " In his death he bore witness at last 
 
 As a martyr to truth. 
 Did his life do the same In the past 
 
 From the days of his youth? 
 
 " It is easy to die. Men have died 
 
 For a wish or a whim — 
 From bravado or passion or pride. 
 
 Was it harder for him? 
 
 " But to live — every day to live out 
 
 All the truth that he dreamt. 
 While his friends met his conduct with doubt 
 
 And the world with contempt. 
 
 " Was it thus that he plodded ahead, 
 
 Never turning aside? 
 Then we'll talk of the life that he led, 
 
 Never mind how he died." 
 
62 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 The war has borne its testimony to the truth of 
 Christianity and to the vahdity of its ethical ideals. And 
 now the war is over and gone. But the testimony is 
 still here to be used by the Church as it seeks to lead 
 men to achieve the manhood and to render the service 
 which shone with so bright a glory in the war and which 
 are needed not less but more by the nation and by mankind 
 in the long days of peace. 
 
IV 
 
 THE DUTY OF A LARGER CHRISTIAN COOPERATION 
 
 The war has been in its noblest aspects an education 
 of the world in some of the fundamental Christian prin- 
 ciples. It has also been for the Church an extraordinary 
 educational discipline. The Church has learned from 
 its own experience what a penetrating and relentless 
 teacher war is. War tests persons and ideals and insti- 
 tutions in ways in which they have never been tested 
 before. It reveals. It rejects. It demands. And there 
 never was a war that did these things so penetratingly 
 and relentlessly as the war which has now come to its 
 end. We shall be examining the lessons of this war, and 
 the experiences it has brought to us all the rest of our 
 days, and men will be pondering them for many genera- 
 tions yet to come. There is not a department of our 
 national life that will not show the effects of this experi- 
 ence. Our theology, our education, our politics, our 
 social ethics, everything that is related to our life in 
 any way will bear the impress of what we have been 
 through. 
 
 I wish to single out here one aspect of the Church's 
 experience — namely the lessons that have come through 
 the Church's work in the war, that bear on the prin- 
 ciple of interdenominational cooperation, its spirit, its 
 limitations, and its possibilities. That is not the only one 
 
 63 
 
64 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 of the problems we face to-day. For there is first of 
 all the spiritual problem and the lessons of the war 
 relating to that. That is the fundamental problem of all. 
 It is not the question of whether we can think out some 
 new coordination and rearranging of activities and rela- 
 tionships, but, are the dynamics here? Are the energy 
 and the power now available which are adequate to do 
 the work of to-day? We can think of many possible 
 manipulations and adjustments. They will get us no- 
 where unless God's men are now here, and God's power 
 is in these men to do the work that waits to be done in 
 this hour. One thinks back to the days after the Civil 
 War. In many ways we are immeasurably in advance 
 of those days. We shall not see in our time anything 
 like the political corruption that followed the Civil War. 
 Our civic life is projected on an entirely different level 
 to-day. We have great moral forces beating through 
 the nation now, vastly more powerful and beneficent 
 than those the nation knew at the end of the Civil War. 
 But one asks one's self again and again other questions. 
 It seems to me one hears them wherever he goes. 
 "Moody, where are you? Where is Moody?" One 
 thinks he hears that voice coming out of the sky and from 
 the problems on every hand. Where is he, the man of his 
 faith, the man of his masterful power, of his creative 
 leadership? Have we got such men here to-day? That 
 is our first problem, and it would be well worth our 
 while to spend thought on that problem. 
 
 Then there are problems of constitution and relationship 
 which ought to be studied regarding every institution by 
 itself and which inevitably are raised about institutions 
 by others without and yet related to them. We have 
 
The Duty of Cooperation 65 
 
 seen with joy one reaction of this sort among the great 
 Lutheran bodies of this land, the war having undoubtedly 
 advanced measures already under way looking toward the 
 consolidation of three great Lutheran agencies into one 
 of the most powerful and promising forces in America. 
 
 It is not of these things that I wish to speak here but 
 of what we have learned concerning the question of inter- 
 denominational cooperation, looked at from the angle, 
 not of our present spiritual problem, although that is 
 involved, nor from the angle of constitutional function 
 and relationship, but from the plain point of view of 
 activities and personal relationships and interdenomi- 
 national policy. I wish to speak of five great lessons 
 which I believe the experience of the war has taught us 
 in regard to the problem viewed in this light. They 
 are not new lessons but they have been newly brought 
 home to us. 
 
 L First of all, we have been taught clearly the absolute 
 indispensableness of an adequate unselfish instrumentality 
 for cooperation, in the name of the Church and with 
 the consciousness of the Church in its richest historic and 
 spiritual significance. I have chosen all these words care- 
 fully. Let us eliminate the word unselfish for the mo- 
 ment. I will return to it later. Let us first concentrate 
 our thought on what the year has shown us concerning 
 the absolute indispensableness of an adequate instrumen- 
 tality for cooperation in the name of the Church, and 
 with the richest Church consciousness. The year has 
 taught us that lesson beyond all cavil or question. It 
 has shown us that there are ways in which we are abso- 
 lutely necessary one to another, that we need one an- 
 other's encouragement and inspiration and faith. One 
 
66 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 body will have a vision that has been hidden from an- 
 other body which was meant to get it from this body. 
 This man in one communion will see an obligation clearly. 
 It is meant of God that other communions should catch 
 the vision from him. There are men to-day who can tes- 
 tify to the vision that came to their communion last year 
 through the encouragement, through the challenge, may 
 be through the spiritual rebuke they received as 
 they compared what they were attempting to do with 
 what other bodies were planning. We need our mutual 
 faith and encouragement that both our collective and 
 our individual purpose may be what otherwise it could 
 not be. We have discovered also that cooperation is 
 necessary to protect ourselves from one another's mis- 
 takes. No communion by withdrawing itself can escape 
 the consequences of the mistakes of others. It will simply 
 sacrifice the great gains that would accrue from coopera- 
 tion. It will not relieve itself from any of the hardships 
 and difficulties that come from errors made anywhere in 
 the field of Christian action. We realized during the 
 war that for simple self-protection it was necessary for 
 all the Christian bodies working in the war problem 
 to work closely together. We see now that churches 
 can reject the benefits of cooperation but they can not 
 escape the penalties of separation. In the third place 
 we were driven to cooperation because the nation 
 had been forced to unite. It would have been an intol- 
 erable thing if Christian elements in the nation, bodies 
 that had everything in common, a bond of unity more 
 deep than anything else on earth, in spite of all that 
 may divide, could not work together. Also the churches 
 realized from the beginning that we had a task bigger 
 
The Duty of Cooperation '67 
 
 than all of us together could do and parts of which 
 were indivisible. I mean that there were sections of 
 the task that could not be denominationalized. There 
 were duties which had to be done that could not be 
 taken up by anybody in isolation. They had to be dealt 
 with by all. It would be an easy thing to multiply 
 these grounds of evidence of the indispensableness of an 
 adequate instrumentality of interdenominational coopera- 
 tion. 
 
 All of these reasons still remain. We still need 
 mutual encouragement and help as we face the tasks of 
 peace. The tasks of peace are vastly more intricate and 
 difficult than the tasks of war. Whatever necessity there 
 was during the time of war that we should help one 
 another by the measure of our discernment of duty, 
 that we should bring to one another the support of our 
 mutual faith, we have to-day under much more trying 
 and exacting circumstances than in the days of the war. 
 We have to protect ourselves to-day against one an- 
 other's mistakes and we will have to do it more and 
 more as the days go by. Anybody who tries to draw 
 himself off will not escape the sure penalty that is going 
 to follow the blunders any of us may make. In spite 
 of the dissolution of the unity of war the nation will 
 pull itself together again before its tasks of peace. New 
 communities of interest are growing up in our national 
 life. These unities must not be allowed to rebuke us. 
 Whatever pressure there was upon the Church in the 
 days of war to lead the nation and the world into a 
 large and deeper unity, that pressure is on us still. The 
 tasks we face now are greater than the war tasks. You 
 can exchange every task we had to face in war with a 
 
68 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 greater task still that we must face In peace, and with 
 the added duty of supplying now resources of moral unity 
 other than war with its mechanical pressure of outward 
 danger to the life of the nation can provide. We have 
 learned afresh through the experience of the war the 
 indispensableness of an adequate continuing agency of 
 interdenominational cooperation in the name of the Church 
 and with the richest consciousness of all that the Church 
 historically and spiritually stands for in our deepest life. 
 We have seen also that cooperation must Include three 
 things. It must Include obviously the coordination of 
 the forces which aim at common ends and of programs 
 which cover common ground. Whatever cooperation we 
 have, whatever Instrumentality of cooperation, must secure 
 this first of all. It must bring together forces that will 
 be more in their aggregate than the total of these forces 
 added together separately. The principle of unity itself 
 increases the sum of the units. It must bring together 
 programs in the making rather than In the days of hard- 
 ened completion. Secondly It must provide full inter- 
 change of knowledge and purpose. It must secure full 
 liaison among the Christian forces. That is a word 
 that the war has brought Into a new significance, an old 
 and sinister word to which the war has given a new 
 and abiding meaning. It was the essential condition of 
 efficiency In every department of our national and inter- 
 national experience these last three years. You can write 
 the history of these years In the effort of men to achieve 
 this kind of correlation, the Interchange of knowledge, 
 of plan and of sympathetic purpose. The churches 
 made some progress In this matter during the war. We 
 may thank God for the friendships that had been pre- 
 
The Duty of Cooperation 69 
 
 pared against this hour between men who stood in places 
 of responsibility in the denominational and interdenomi- 
 national services of the war time, between whom there 
 were relationships of a generation of understanding and 
 love so that it was possible to maintain by personal 
 relationships an interchange of knowledge, plan, and pur- 
 pose, without which problems would have arisen the grav- 
 ity of which can hardly be exaggerated. We must delib- 
 erately plan permanently for this liaison in the future. I 
 do not know how this can be done, whether by some coor- 
 dinating committee of men who know and absolutely trust 
 one another, who can throw strands across the chasms 
 that divide these great moving activities of our day and 
 keep them in constant personal touch one with another 
 or in some other way. It is not altogether a matter of 
 trust. In part it is simply a matter of magnitudes. No 
 one man is in position to keep in touch with all that is 
 going on. We must secure either in existing agencies or 
 by some new piece of machinery a correlation of knowl- 
 edge and plan between the different denominations and the 
 interdenominational agencies which will meet this second 
 need in an adequate instrumentality of cooperation. I 
 say we must have an instrumentality of cooperation which 
 will provide first for a coordination of interpenetrating 
 forces and overlapping programs; in the second place for 
 an interchange of intelligence, for a complete and trusted 
 liaison between the agencies operating in these fields, 
 and in the third place which will supply a wise, collec- 
 tive guidance. We need a collective guidance. No one 
 of us has wisdom enough to handle his own duty alone. 
 There are problems rooted in all the fiber of humanity 
 that cannot be dealt with by segments of humanity or 
 
70 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 of the Church. We must think out a method of wise, 
 capable and trusted leadership that will supply the collec- 
 tive wisdom we need to confront the problems of this 
 day. 
 
 All this has been a great gain. It never can be an 
 open question again as to whether the Federal Council 
 of the Churches of Christ or something that fills that 
 ground is an absolutely indispensable necessity. It is 
 settled once and for ever by the experience through 
 which we went in the war that we must have an agency 
 of denominational cooperation that will be adequate to 
 supply these needs of which I have been speaking. 
 
 II. In the second place the experience of the war has 
 thrown a great deal of light on the principles and prob- 
 lems of this interdenominational service and coordination 
 which is necessary. It has shown us how we need it for 
 the ends to which I have just referred. It has shown 
 us also how it can be secured, and that it is not by re- 
 adjustments of constitutional relationships nor by deter- 
 mination of theoretical allotments of power and authority. 
 These have their place. But this problem which the 
 churches are facing now is a problem of service and per- 
 sonal relationship and cooperative adjustment, and we 
 will get off on false quests if we follow the other lines. 
 If we solve the problems of service and friendship the 
 other problems will work themselves out wisely, and in 
 order that that may be done, may I bring out that word 
 unselfish already spoken of. It is evident that the only 
 kind of instrumentality that will adequately meet this 
 need and fill this field must be one that is marked by 
 institutional disinterestedness. One recalls the three qual- 
 ifications of leadership of which Emerson speaks in his 
 
The Duty of Cooperation 71 
 
 essay on Courage, — first, disinterestedness, second, prac- 
 tical power, and third, courage. These are the three 
 qualifications of leadership in individual men and they are 
 the qualifications of leadership in movements and insti- 
 tutions as wtW. Let anybody have the credit. The 
 important thing is that any agency that sets out to do 
 Vfoxk for the churches should lose its life in the doing of 
 it. It should seek no honor whatever of its own. Some 
 of our problems spring from our forgetting that. Let 
 honor be given where honor is due. It is no sign of 
 strength or efficiency to seek to monopolize glory. " In 
 honor preferring one another." We remember what 
 comes next! There is no intimation whatever that this 
 honoring recognition of others impairs one's efficiency in 
 his own task. '' In honor preferring one another, not 
 slothful in business." They go together inevitably. 
 They go together in personal leadership. I am not 
 speaking now of that. Thank God that there is so much 
 disinterested personal service. But they go together in 
 institutional leadership. 
 
 We have learned through the war one other thing, 
 namely, that the churches must frankly face and solve the 
 problem of supplying among themselves a leadership that 
 is neither too strong nor too weak. You can not have 
 a leadership that is too strong and that breaks away 
 from its following or coerces it, nor too weak to fill 
 Emerson's third requirement of leadership, that there 
 must be courage in it. 
 
 Now these are not easy things to bring about. They 
 are difficult because they run down into fundamental 
 principles. They lead us into difficulty but that is the 
 only place that it is worth while for us to go, because 
 
72 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 our problem is not one of mechanics, nor of external 
 adjustments, but the hard problem of love, of confidence, 
 of the freedom, power and strength that invariably go 
 with life. This is the second thing the churches have 
 learned. 
 
 III. In the third place we have learned even more 
 clearly that the pathway of cooperative advance lies 
 through the field of action and embodied activity and serv- 
 ice, rather than through the field of discussion or of the at- 
 tempt to settle the theoretical principles of such activities 
 and service. We are united as together we face tasks and 
 by the magnitude and urgency of the tasks are drawn 
 together to their doing. Not that I do not appreciate 
 theory. In the last analysis that is all it comes down to. 
 A friend said recently that the more he saw of what we 
 were trying to do, the more convinced he became that 
 the only thing the Church needs is the theologian, and 
 in the highest sense that is true. I have been thankful 
 for a word spoken a year or two ago at a meeting of 
 alumni at Princeton when some reflection or discredit 
 had been cast on the idea and all value had been attributed 
 to action, and Dr. Richardson had quoted in reply the 
 saying of Jesus, " The words that I speak unto you, 
 they are spirit and they are life." We will ever be 
 brought back to this even if we do not start from it. 
 But what we have learned this year is the power of 
 embodied undertakings. We have been discussing a great 
 deal the matter of enlisting young men for the Christian 
 ministry. How are we going to get them? We are 
 not going to get them simply by laying before them prin- 
 ciples. That will do very well to help a man, but it is 
 not going to win him to unaccustomed action. We are 
 
The Duty of Cooperation 73 
 
 not going to get him by telling him the reasons why a 
 man should live his life unselfishly. We will get him as 
 the nation got him. We have to go to young men and 
 say to them, " You can not go to France to-day, but 
 you can finish the war which is still unfinished by going 
 out into the world and building Christ's Kingdom, by 
 accomplishing other tasks which are as real and as neces- 
 sary as those you were going to France to accomplish." 
 I think we are going to get men in just that way. One 
 has thought a good deal — every one must have thought 
 — why it was that the nation was able to secure such 
 sacrifice and service in the war, while the Church has 
 not been able to get it before the war or now. How 
 did the nation succeed in getting men to give themselves 
 away, in getting the nation itself to give everything, its 
 money, its life? It succeeded, some say, because it asked 
 for everything. But the nation did not ask for everything, 
 and it did not get everything. There were areas of men's 
 minds atrophying in the camps, which the nation did 
 not ask for at all. Many of the very finest aspects of 
 life the nation did not ask for, and couldn't use. It 
 did ask for men's bodies. I believe when you get down 
 to the truth that that is the explanation. This is what 
 St. Paul asked for: "I beseech you by the mercies of 
 God that you present your bodies a living sacrifice." 
 That is what we may reverently say God had to have in 
 his greatest piece of work — a body. The Incarnation 
 was God in a body. The Atonement demanded the 
 body of Christ's flesh through death. The Resurrection 
 included the resurrection of His body. All had 
 to be done through a body. We see clearly from 
 this point of view the reason for the emphasis on 
 
74 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 certain types of sin, the sin of evil speech, the sin of 
 theft. Evil speech is the one sin you can bite. Stealing 
 is the one sin you can do only with your hands. In 
 many lands the punishment for theft is cutting off the 
 hand so that men can not steal any more. Sin and re- 
 demption alike are done in the body. Our Saviour needed 
 a body to reach us. He reaches us in our bodies. By 
 the same principle we deal best with our problem of 
 cooperation as we embody our ideals, objectify our ends, 
 and set before men tasks to be done, ends actually to 
 be traveled to, and arrived at. 
 
 The war has laid before us with luminous clearness 
 more of these tasks that demand one approach through 
 action. Let us pick out four or five of these before which 
 the churches will be impotent if we can not adequately 
 deal with them in cooperation. There Is the problem 
 of the rightful place of religion in the American Army. 
 It is one of the distressing problems which the churches 
 still confront. I wonder whether we are one inch ahead 
 of where we were when the war began. It took months 
 and months before the churches could get, against in- 
 difference or opposition, one chaplain to every twelve 
 hundred men, and then we did not get them. There 
 never was one chaplain to every twelve hundred men 
 in the army. We should have had almost to double 
 the maximum number of chaplains we had in France 
 before we would have had one to twelve hundred. 
 The chaplain has been able to get no status. Every 
 other branch of the army In the United States has 
 a satisfactory relationship which army chaplains have 
 not been able to get. Maybe It can be secured when 
 General Pershing and the Chaplains' organization in 
 
The Duty of Cooperation 75 
 
 France come back from the other side but we simply 
 have not had it here and we seem unlikely ever to get 
 it unless the churches seek it unitedly in some different 
 way. Indeed they have hindered themselves by such 
 division in their approach to the problem as there was 
 during the war. 
 
 In the second place there is the problem of recruiting 
 men for Christian service. There were nearly five mil- 
 lion young men in the army and navy of the United 
 States. Practically all of the men that we are going 
 to need for the Christian ministry, for foreign missionary 
 work, for the Association secretaryship, for all of the 
 other forms of Christian and philanthropic service were 
 there in these five million young men in the army and 
 navy. The churches never had before such a chance 
 with all the body of supply physically brought together 
 and under psychological conditions such as we had not 
 known before, to reap such a harvest of leadership as 
 had never been garnered in the history of the nation. 
 There were also the men in the camps on this side who 
 never got to France and who are rapidly being sent 
 back to their homes. There are among them many 
 men cast down and filled with disappointment and 
 chagrin. They are going back to their homes in a few 
 days or weeks and they will be asked, " What battle were 
 you in? What were your experiences in France? " And 
 they will have to say, " I was never in France." They 
 laid all they had on the altar of the nation in utter and 
 absolute sacrifice and never had the chance to have that 
 gift used in actual service. There is going to be perma- 
 nent moral damage done to some of these men if their 
 great impulse of sacrifice and devotion can not be given an 
 
76 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 adequate object, if we can not supply something that will 
 atone for the bitterest disappointment of their lives. We 
 can go to them to-day and say: " Men, you do not need 
 to be cast down. The war is not over. The hardest part 
 of the war is yet to be fought, the part that calls for the 
 highest heroism, the deepest courage, the hardest sacrifice. 
 The war is just beginning. Will you not throw your- 
 self into it now for life and death?" 
 
 There are the men on the other side, doctors, lawyers, 
 teachers, ministers, from all classes and occupations at 
 home, foot-loose now, as men have never been, to give 
 themselves to the unselfish service of mankind, who are 
 coming home rapidly. Let me quote a few paragraphs 
 from a letter from a friend who is a Lieutenant Colonel 
 in the Medical Corps in France: 
 
 " With the end of the war and the actual signing of the 
 peace compacts, which is now surely not far off, all the mil- 
 lions of men in our armies will be, sooner or later, returned 
 to the home-land, to face the problem of their future employ- 
 ment or activities. Among them will be some thousands of 
 medical men. Most of these men will return with their old 
 positions and practices calling for them, but still footloose. 
 Many of them, and especially the younger ones, will come back 
 to begin life entirely anew, free as no like body of medical 
 men in our experience have ever been to choose the field of 
 their activities. All of them will return with wider views of 
 life and of the possibilities of their work than have heretofore 
 been common among medical men. 
 
 " There can be no doubt that the world will be open as a 
 field for the efforts of these men. You know how many places 
 have been waiting for the end of the war to release the medical 
 men they are in need of. The question of deepest interest to 
 us is how many of them can be enlisted in the missionary service, 
 how many the mission societies are prepared to seek and employ. 
 
 " I know well that the problem of the extent and character 
 
The Duty of Cooperation 77 
 
 of the medical work that could properly be made part of the 
 missionary effort has long been the subject of much study and 
 consideration on your part. It seems to me that this calls for 
 definite decisions of the utmost importance to the future of 
 missions at this time. There is no doubt that if the Church is 
 ready to go forward, there is an opportunity the like of which 
 will never within our lifetimes come again. Never again will 
 there be so many men, peculiarly fitted by their experience to 
 listen to the call to world-wide service and also qualified 
 by their experience to meet the call with unusual ability. The 
 question the Church must face is how far it is prepared to go 
 in enlisting medical men for work in foreign fields and also 
 what scope it will seek to give to the men it secures." 
 
 We have our chance to present to these men the ideal 
 of going for\^^ard with that with which they had begun. 
 
 And there were the lads in our colleges and universi- 
 ties. Never were the colleges more open to appeals offer- 
 ing men unselfish service, the moral equivalent of war, 
 as they were at the time of the demobilization of the 
 Students' Army Training Corps. Unless one was with 
 them then he can not imagine the state of mind in which 
 these boys were. If ever they were ripe for some great 
 and heroic appeal they were ripe for it then. You could 
 not denominationalize the appeal to them. They had 
 heard the united voice of their country speaking and 
 they replied to that united voice. If the churches wanted 
 those lads for Christian service to-day, it was necessary 
 for them to approach the problem unitedly with one heart 
 and one appeal. The boys would have found their own 
 appropriate place of personal service afterwards if we could 
 have made the command adequate enough and spoken to 
 them with an adequately appealing and united voice. 
 As a matter of fact the opportunity was allowed to pass by. 
 
78 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 In the third place there is the problem of Christianity 
 and education. He is a blind man who does not see that 
 one great lesson that this war has taught is the importance 
 of education to national character and purpose. Never 
 again will the State be willing to allow the education of 
 the nation to slip out of its fingers as it has let it 
 slip out in the past. '' What is the next lesson of the 
 war?" asked Lloyd George in a speech at Manchester, 
 and he answered, " We must pay more attention to the 
 school. The most formidable institution we had to fight 
 in Germany was not the arsenals of Krupp or the yards 
 in which they turned out submarines, but the schools of 
 Germany. They were our most formidable competitors 
 in business and our most terrible opponents in war. An 
 educated man is a better worker, a more formidable 
 warrior and a better citizen. That was only half com- 
 prehended here before the war." What some have been 
 criticizing in Japan is just what w^e may anticipate that 
 many nations will seek to do in the days that lie ahead 
 of us. We see what the education of a nation skillfully 
 guided can accomplish. Processes, carefully thought out 
 by men who know the principles of genetic psychology 
 as this war has illustrated them afresh, are going to play 
 on us and our children after us. State supervision and 
 other secular administration of these processes and of 
 the ordinary forms of education are inevitable. The 
 Christian churches are facing a problem the right solution 
 of which is vital to the very life of Christianity. And we 
 are never going to solve that problem along our old lines 
 of division and separation, of not bringing our forces 
 together in a way to meet the consequences of secularized 
 
TJi,e Duty of Cooperation 79 
 
 education with which we shall have to deal. I have a 
 friend who has taught for some years in the philosophical 
 faculty in one of our five largest American universities. 
 This friend has told me that out of twenty-six professors 
 and associate professors of philosophy there were only 
 two in the faculty who did not teach a mechanistic view 
 of life. And this university is perhaps doing as much 
 as any other to shape the educational life of America. 
 And it is only too representative. The Christian churches 
 have to deal unitedly with the problem of Christian 
 education, if they do not want the ground cut from under 
 them by processes of secularized education which will 
 teach philosophical theories that are absolutely fatal to 
 all which we most dearly believe both in politics and in 
 religion, and if the \\ ork of a moralized American educa- 
 tion of all the people is to be achieved. 
 
 In the fourth place consider this great complex of 
 problems which are developing on the home mission hori- 
 zon. The new home mission responsibilities need to 
 be interpreted in the richest way. It will be a great 
 loss if after the war we do not accept a far ampler view 
 of the functions of all our home mission agencies. We 
 can easily name some of the problems. Again and again 
 to-day we refer to the problem of the returning soldier. 
 The problem of the returning soldier can not be handled 
 in a divided way by a score of competing denominations. 
 Of course the soldier who goes back to his own communion 
 will be welcome there, but there are tens of thousands 
 of these men who had no denominational attachment be- 
 fore they went abroad. Are they all to be scrambled 
 for by the churches, each one offering its own wares? 
 
8o The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 The problems can be met only as with a comprehensive 
 spirit and united approach, the Church of this land deals 
 with them in sincerity and unselfishness. 
 
 And the problems are far more complex than the mere 
 issue of associating the soldier with a particular Christian 
 organization upon his return to his community. Is he 
 to be a different sort of citizen in the light of his experi- 
 ence, different in his own ideals and demands, different 
 in his contribution to the community and the nation? 
 And the problem of the community to which he returns 
 is a greater problem than he is. Is it to be the same 
 kind of community it was before and what is the Church 
 going to do to deal with it? Are the old American 
 ideals of democracy, tolerance and respect to be perpet- 
 uated? There is the problem of community Christian 
 education. There are hopeful experiments already being 
 made in this field to effect the adequate coordination and 
 guidance of all Christian forces. The day has gone by 
 when the denominational Sunday School alone, one of our 
 most valuable Christian forces, isolated from other agen- 
 cies and unsupported by all the Christian energies which 
 can be poured into it, can cope with the problem of re- 
 ligious education in the American community. And 
 there is the problem of community Christian service as 
 well as of community Christian education. Some are 
 foolishly proposing schemes which involve the abrogation 
 of the home as a Christian and social institution, but 
 between the home and the nation there do lie areas of 
 social life covered vaguely by the term " community " 
 which are to be Christianized. The community to be 
 sure is not a unit. It has its horizontal and its vertical 
 stratifications but these do not conform to the denomina- 
 
The Duty of Cooperation 8i 
 
 tional divisions and they are unified by common inter- 
 ests and common social issues which require of the Church 
 a community consciousness and a community approach. 
 There is also and on a national scale the problem of our 
 moral and social health. The churches can handle such 
 a problem only as they handle it unitedly. The war has 
 given them such an opportunity. It has shown that 
 certain things are essential to the highest efficiency of 
 soldiers, that if we are going to fight a successful war, 
 we can not do it with drunken and diseased men. If 
 we can not fight a great war with that kind of men, can 
 we build a great nation in time of peace with that kind 
 of men? We have discovered that the type of man we 
 need in time of war is the type of man we need in time 
 of peace. We see new ideals in this matter and not only 
 new ideals but new possibilities as well. We have real- 
 ized that there are certain moral achievements not to be 
 left in the realm of the impracticable; that it is possible 
 to wipe out the saloon and that it is possible to wipe out 
 the brothel. If for eighteen months of war it was demon- 
 strated that it was possible to keep the brothel and saloon 
 five miles away from our men in the Army, why shall 
 it not be possible to destroy them and keep them away 
 from the young men outside of the Army for all time? 
 But who dreams that it can be done by disunited effort? 
 And there is the problem of the unification of the national 
 spirit and the true American education of all the foreign 
 elements in the national body. We may describe it in 
 all sorts of terms, assimilation, Americanization, nation- 
 alization. It is a common task that can be worked at 
 of course by all kinds and groups of people, but they can 
 work it out efficiently only as they unwastefully coordi- 
 
82 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 nate their forces in a common service and to one great end, 
 and as they face the economic and psychological elements 
 of the problem in the spirit and with the principles of 
 Christianity. How otherwise are just grievances of the 
 negro race and of those who suffer from economic in- 
 justice to be dealt with and cleared away? 
 
 In the fifth place there are the new demands for coop- 
 eration and coordination in connection with the foreign 
 missionary undertaking and the need of the organic con- 
 solidation of whatever can be organically consolidated. 
 We started the foreign missionary work in America with 
 a great ideal, with the ideal that one organization might 
 operate foreign missionary work for the American 
 churches, and the American Board for some years embod- 
 ied that ideal. It proved premature. And there has been 
 enormous gain in the last one hundred years from the 
 denominational differentiation of foreign missionary re- 
 sponsibility, but we may be coming around now to a re- 
 turn in part at least to those great ideals with which 
 we began. We are clear at any rate that there ought 
 to be the closest consolidation of our approach to the 
 non-Christian world. There is also the whole problem 
 of missionary education at home. We are coming to 
 unity of mind in this matter, for the missionary obliga- 
 tion is one obligation. The motives that lead Methodists 
 to give to the support of foreign missions are identical 
 with those that lead the Presbyterians and Baptists to 
 give to the support of foreign missions. In effecting the 
 full pressure of the missionary obligation on the Church 
 at home, only united action can avail. It is the universal 
 Christ who is to be made known to the world. The 
 views of all of us about Him are still less than He, and 
 
The Duty of Cooperation 83 
 
 our combined apprehension of Him alone can furnish 
 adequate and commanding motive to any group or division. 
 The war revealed in many different spheres the power of 
 united pressures. 
 
 And further, there Is the necessity In the United States 
 of our supplying through the foreign missions' concep- 
 tions the ideas that must underlie the basis of peace 
 which must be laid if this war is not to have been waged 
 in vain. It is the foreign missionary enterprise which 
 is the custodian of the principles on which alone the 
 League of Nations can ever be built up. These principles 
 can not be isolated as the property of any one group. 
 No one group can adequately proclaim them. If they 
 belong to one they belong to us all. It is what is the 
 property of us all in those principles which can alone 
 sustain a friendly world order and by as much as we 
 believe In that, by as much as we believe that the blood 
 of eight million men will have been shed in vain unless 
 that is to be achieved, by that much are we under obli- 
 gation to accomplish any new pressure of coordination 
 necessary to our supplying to the world the fundamental 
 conceptions that underlie a new and brotherly interna- 
 tional relationship. 
 
 The third lesson from the last year accordingly is that 
 we have before us certain great indivisible tasks; that 
 these tasks if we will attack them together will supply 
 us with the most effective path of advance In denomina- 
 tional cooperation. 
 
 IV. A fourth lesson which the experience of the year 
 has taught the churches relates to the processes and 
 the forms of their cooperative action. There has not 
 been any new discovery. There has been only a larger 
 
84 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 application of what had already been ascertained and 
 was already existent in the forms of organization and 
 service in the Federal Council of the Churches. Only 
 the emphasis was changed somewhat. There had been 
 two types of associated action through the commissions 
 of the Federal Council. In one the Federal Council 
 selected individuals and brought them together in a 
 commission w^ith considerable freedom of action and with 
 responsibility to the Federal Council alone. In the other 
 method the attempt to correlate the organic activities of 
 the denominations and to bring them together did not 
 give the same freedom that the first method did, but it 
 did give a larger weight of responsibility. The General 
 War Time Commission of the Churches, the central war 
 agency of the churches, made use chiefly of this second 
 method during the war. The committees which it estab- 
 lished, the Committee on Training and Recruiting Men 
 for the Ministry, the Committee on War Production 
 Communities and the work which they did constituted 
 some of the best work of the war. They represented the 
 attempt to bring together the organic activities of denomi- 
 nations. There has been during the last few years a great 
 growth of the sense of denominational personality and 
 we do not want to break that down unless there is some- 
 thing better to take its place. The danger is that it is 
 breaking down and dissolving in some directions before 
 it has entirely fulfilled its functions. In the war work 
 of the churches the effort was honestly made to conserve 
 all that is good. Some said that the churches were mak- 
 ing a mistake and emphasizing denominationalism. All 
 that those who ever acted for them were trying to do 
 was to bring together in an effective cooperative way the 
 
The Duty of Cooperation 85 
 
 really responsible denominational agencies. That method 
 may hold back some of the more far-visioned and en- 
 thusiastic men. Perhaps it is wise that they should be 
 held back a little, while we keep together the men who 
 represent the organic responsibility of the different com- 
 munions and seek by mutual interchange to get forward. 
 And it will be a great pity if as we go forward we do 
 not conserve all the gains of the past in this regard, even 
 if it makes some of us impatient because the progress is 
 not so rapid as it might be if we might detach ourselves 
 from these responsible relationships. The Foreign Mis- 
 sions Conference of North America and the Home Mis- 
 sions Council of the United States illustrate the strength 
 of this method of cooperation. 
 
 We should learn to-day from the war a further lesson 
 as to the process of leadership that one might not per- 
 haps learn so readily in days of peace. The problem 
 in the war has been not so much to create energies, as 
 to guide and shape them. The war split open the soul 
 of America, and great tides of moral and spiritual power 
 have come gushing out which needed only wise guidance 
 and relationship. This may not be so true in the future 
 days of peace, but for the present these tides are still run- 
 ning. The next great step which is to be accomplished in 
 the name of the Church and under the guidance of some 
 agency of the Church which represents the full con- 
 sciousness of the Church, is to bring these forces to- 
 gether in this time. It is amazing how many of them 
 there are loose to-day in American life and the need is 
 great of drawing them together and giving wise guidance 
 to these energies. There is also much bewilderment in 
 America to-day. Is there one who has not been hearing 
 
86 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 from the younger men In the ministry of the perplexity 
 with which they are facing their problems? Some device 
 must be set up which will accomplish the correlation of 
 all these energies and give men's minds wise and united 
 guidance in the common task. 
 
 V. And lastly, there is a fifth lesson. We have learned 
 from this war that men have no business going into a 
 war unless they intend to stay in it until it has been won. 
 There was a time, some months ago, when the President 
 recommended a " peace without victory," but his recom- 
 mendation was not accepted by one section of those to 
 whom it was addressed. The section willing to accept 
 the suggestion reminds us of the story of the two women 
 who appeared before Solomon. One of them, we re- 
 member, was ready for a peace without victory. And 
 we remember which one it was. If anybody had ad- 
 dressed to the President after we had entered the war 
 such an exhortation he would have met it exactly as the 
 allied nations of Europe met it from him. We know 
 that a nation has no business to go into a war if it is 
 not ready to choose between two alternatives, either 
 to win the war or to be destroyed. Only the willing- 
 ness to make such a choice can justify the extremity 
 of w^ar. And I believe we went into it on that prin- 
 ciple. Once we had gone into it nothing until the end 
 of time would have brought us out until the war had 
 been won or we had been utterly overthrown. I remem- 
 ber a conference which we had with one of our visitors 
 from Great Britain a short time ago, just after his 
 arrival here, when we were discussing this matter. He 
 was feeling exceedingly despondent. He did not be- 
 lieve that Germany ever would be defeated. He believed 
 
The Duty of Cooperation 87 
 
 that the war would end without any decisive triumph for 
 the principles for which we were contending. We said he 
 did not understand America. America might have a 
 reputation for mercurial and changeable spirit but it 
 was not so and once she had set her hand to a task like 
 this she would never take her hand off until the task w^as 
 done. And now the same principle holds in all spheres of 
 action. We have started on certain relationships in the 
 attempt to accomplish certain tasks. There is no withdraw- 
 ing from them. We have set out as a Christian Church in 
 a great war. There is no holding back and there is no 
 stopping until we get through, absolutely none. This move- 
 ment of closer codrdination and cooperation is never going 
 to stop. It is going to grow year by year with increasing 
 power. We may make mistakes. It is conceivable that 
 we should make such colossal mistakes as to destroy any 
 existing agencies of cooperation so that new agencies 
 would have to be set up in their stead, but as sure as there 
 will be a sunrise to-morrow another agency would be 
 set up in their stead, because we are moving in a great 
 progress from which w^e can never draw out or be drawn 
 back. The only question we face to-day is whether we 
 are going to be courageous enough, disinterested enough, 
 wise enough to discern our time and to pass into this 
 time with instrumentalities which we are called upon to 
 devise and control and direct that are adequate for the 
 tasks of this day. All of the great values that have come 
 out of the war with us call upon us for this thing — the 
 realization of how much more powerful great moral ideals 
 are than all things else, the discovery of how the sense 
 of something better ahead can command anything from 
 men, and, what is in one sense more wonderful even than 
 
88 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 all of these, and what the soldier feels to have been the 
 greatest thing that the war has brought to him, the sheer 
 glory of an unwithholding comradeship. In the camps, 
 in the trenches, wherever the soldiers wxre, this was 
 the splendid achievement of their great experience, 
 the communized consciousness of a brotherhood that 
 shares everything, that has pooled men's life blood, that 
 has made them one in one great sacrificial, national en- 
 deavor. Can we not match that and surpass it in the 
 body of Christ? Do not hours come when we know we 
 have matched it, when we feel the glow in our own hearts, 
 the longing to cross the chasms between man and man, 
 to produce at last here in the midst of our nation to-day 
 a fellowship so real, so commanding, that in the atmos- 
 phere of it we do not need to solve our problems, for we 
 shall find that they have disappeared? 
 
THE WAR AIMS AND FOREIGN MISSIONS 
 
 The war was so big and ft is still so near that it is not 
 possible yet to comprehend it. It has a thousand faces 
 which we shall be studying all the rest of our lives and 
 centuries will have to pass before men can see it in its 
 true perspective and proportion. But some things about 
 it are already sufficiently clear. And one of them is 
 that the war was the greatest proclamation of foreign 
 missions which we have ever heard. 
 
 It is interesting to mark the way in which, one after 
 another, the great ideas and principles of the missionary 
 enterprise were taken over and declared by the nation 
 as its moral aims in the war. If we will review 
 these aims we shall see how completely they have been 
 accepted from the foreign missionary undertaking. There 
 ought not to be any doubt or misgiving in our minds as 
 to what the aims were which, as we believed, justified 
 us in what we did, and which, if they were valid during 
 the war, as they were, are equally valid now ; for certainly 
 what we fought for in the war we have no right to re- 
 pudiate now in peace. 
 
 What was it for which we fought In the war? To 
 avoid reading back Into the struggle moral aims which 
 are an afterthought and which are imagined Into the 
 struggle for apologetic or homiletic purposes, let me re- 
 
 89 
 
90 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 call words written in the midst of the war times, when 
 we were striving to see clearly our present duty without 
 thought of any later moral inferences that might be drawn 
 from the statements of duty that then satisfied us. These 
 words were written with no reference to foreign missions 
 but with a view to defining for the Christian conscience 
 the purposes which warranted the war. This was the 
 statement : 
 
 There ought to be no doubt among Christian men as to what 
 we are fighting for in the war, — as to the great moral and 
 spiritual ends which justify it. 
 
 We are fighting to put an end, if we can, to war and to the 
 burden and terror of armaments. It cannot be too often said 
 that it is a war against war that we are waging. Both mili- 
 tarists and pacifists often deride this idea, the former because 
 they do not think that war can be or perhaps ought to be 
 destroyed, the latter because they do not believe that war can 
 ever be ended by war. But there are millions of men who 
 hate war and believe it must be ended and who are able 
 with conscience and determination to support this war because 
 it seems to them unavoidable and necessary as a struggle 
 directly aimed at war itself. They did not want war. The 
 precipitation of the war by Germany outraged all their deepest 
 convictions. And the principles and convictions and practices 
 as to the nature and method of war on the part of Germany 
 seem to these millions of men to be intolerable on our earth. 
 To give them unhindered room would make the world an 
 impossible home for free and friendly men. They must be 
 destroyed. War against them is war against war. It is war 
 for peace. 
 
 This purpose also nerves the men at the front on whom the 
 burden falls heaviest. They see the irrationality and wicked- 
 ness of war more clearly than any one else. What sustains 
 them is the thought that they are enduring it so that no one 
 else may have to endure it. The thing is so dreadful that it 
 is worth every sacrifice to slay it and to make sure that the 
 world will not have to go through it again. 
 
 We are fighting against aggressive autocracy. Not yet against 
 
The War Aims and Foreign Missions 91 
 
 autocracy itself. We disbelieve in it and we fear it, but if any 
 nation wants it for itself and can have it without letting it 
 imperil all other nations thus far we have said that we have 
 no right to interfere. It is not our business. Each people has 
 the right of self-government. But we cannot sit quiet and let 
 autocracy, unwilling to stay at home, go abroad to rule the 
 world. It is the strong nation invading other nations, attack- 
 ing the rights of humanity, perpetrating wrong and injustice, 
 that must be resisted and bound to keep the peace, just as the 
 strong man breaking the laws of society and perpetrating wrong 
 and injustice in the state must be bound to desist from wrong. 
 
 We are fighting against the claim of nations to be above the 
 moral law. A state cannot endure if one class of its citizens 
 is allowed to excuse itself from the moral obligations which 
 bind all others. And the world cannot endure if any nation is 
 allowed to set itself above the principles of truth and justice 
 and righteousness which have their ground in the character of 
 God and which are the foundation of individual life and must 
 be the foundation of international life and of international 
 relationship. It is moral anarchy for any nation to set itself 
 and its interests above the laws of God, which are laws of 
 universal right and justice. 
 
 We are fighting against the idea of power as its own law, 
 against the ancient claim of might to be its own right. This 
 idea, if yielded to, puts an end to civilization. If we merely 
 match might with might and try to disprove the claims of 
 might by superior might we support the very law we attack. 
 But if we use might for right and hold it subject to right, and 
 repudiate utterly the principle that it is or can be anything 
 apart from right, we may safely and we must unyieldingly 
 oppose what strength we have or can get from God against 
 the falsehood of power as its own warrant for aught that it 
 can do. The very essence of evil is in this falsehood and 
 must be destroyed. 
 
 And we are not only fighting against great falsehoods and 
 wrong, we are fighting for a new world order of concord and 
 peace and justice. Just as in each nation the elements which 
 had to be combined were compelled to give up their separate 
 claim to the end that a righteous and stable political order could 
 
92 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 be established, so now we realize that the world must in some 
 simple and practical way be reorganized to provide some in- 
 strumentality of international justice which will settle difficulties 
 by peaceful, judicial processes, as men settle their difficulties 
 among themselves without murder or any violence. To carry 
 mankind forward by such a big advance is worth any sacrifice 
 necessary to win it. 
 
 All of these things ought to have been won without war. 
 They have not been. Against our wills the great war which 
 involves these issues came out and laid hold upon us and, 
 whether we would or no, we had to take up our part. And 
 now that duty cannot be played with. Asking God for His 
 forgiveness for all that has been wrong in ourselves, humbly 
 trusting His grace and seeking His strength, we are to take 
 up our task in the spirit of those who know only one fidelity, 
 the fidelity that knows no yielding until its task is done. 
 Without hate or pride or wrong-doing, without using against 
 evil the evil we deplore, without malice toward any one and 
 with charity toward all men, including our foes, with patience 
 and tenacity and deathless devotion, we are to do the work that 
 has come to us until it is done and done to last. 
 
 It is the business of the Church to keep clear and unconfused 
 these moral ends which alone justify the war, to warn men 
 against hate and evil will, to strengthen in men's hearts the 
 sense of deathless devotion to duty, to encourage faith in the 
 possibility of establishing on the earth a righteous order worth 
 living and dying for, to show men that they must and can 
 behave now as citizens in a manner worthy of the Gospel 
 of Christ, to maintain in the soul of the nation an unswerving 
 loyalty to righteousness and a fearless love of all humanity, 
 to make the nation humble and penitent before God, and to 
 summon it to such obedience to God's holy law that it can 
 confidently offer itself to Him for the accomplishment of His 
 purposes of justice and truth. 
 
 Here were five clear moral aims: to put an end to 
 war, and the fear of war and the burden of arma- 
 ments, to assure human freedom, to assert and establish the 
 
The War Aims and Foreign Missions 93 
 
 principle of international righteousness, to use strength 
 for human service, to prepare the way for an order of 
 truth and justice and brotherhood. As the war went 
 on these aims grew clearer and firmer. ( i ) '' This is 
 a war to end war " became a universal watchword. 
 The military spirit which kindled and flamed in human 
 hearts blazed most fiercely against militarism, and re- 
 pudiated with deepening horror and loathing the whole 
 philosophy of war, its colossal inefficiency and its exorbi- 
 tant waste. (2) The indignation against the autocratic 
 governments which were responsible for the war, although 
 at first this indignation proclaimed no doom upon autoc- 
 racy as a political theory, came gradually to realize that 
 autocracy can not confine itself to any bounds and is not 
 able to be harmless. The spread of the spirit of liberty 
 of itself overthrew one by one all the autocracies that 
 entered the war. (3) The nation saw with increasing 
 clearness that wrong is wrong no matter who perpe- 
 trates it, whether a nation or a man, and likewise that 
 the duty of service and protection is a national as well 
 as a personal duty. (4) The war became a great enter- 
 prise of human service. Nations fed one another and 
 stood ready to die for one another and for the safety 
 of mankind. (5) And above all as time went on men 
 realized that they were in this struggle for the sake 
 of what lies ahead of us, for the hope of a new human 
 order — an order of righteousness and of justice and of 
 brotherhood. If it were not for that hope ahead, all 
 the arguments that spring from what lies behind would 
 not have been enough to sustain men. Once men had 
 got into their minds that the same thing was going to 
 be afterward that was before, the war would have been 
 
94 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 over that day or the next. Men were not going into the 
 war and dying for the sake of punishing somebody for 
 what lay behind alone, or for the sake of executing venge- 
 ance for great wrongs. You cannot sustain sacrifices like 
 these or memories. They must be sustained on great 
 expectations. Even our Lord, Himself, was upheld by 
 what lay before Him, " Who for the joy that was set 
 before him endured the cross, despising shame, and hath 
 sat down at the right hand of the throne of God." 
 
 I have named just as briefly as I could what seem to 
 me to be five of the great moral justifications for the 
 war, justifications that made legitimate the sacrifices that 
 were poured out, and that laid the obligation of the 
 struggle to the last effort upon every life in our land. 
 But, when we have said this, have we said anything more 
 than just to put into political terms, in connection with 
 the great struggle, the aims and ideals and purposes for 
 which many men have been living all their lives, which 
 have actuated the missionary enterprise, and which under- 
 lie it to-day? What does that enterprise exist for? 
 What has it been seeking to do, and in reality doing all 
 the years since it began? 
 
 It has been in the world as an instrumentality of peace 
 and international good will. Wherever it has gone, it 
 has erased racial prejudice and bitterness, the great root 
 of international conflict and struggle. It has helped men 
 to understand one another. It has rubbed off the fric- 
 tions. '' Christianity continues to spread among the 
 Karens," said the Administration Report for British 
 Burmah for 1 880-1881, "to the great advantage of the 
 Commonwealth, and the Christian Karen communities 
 are distinctly more industrious, better educated and more 
 
The War Aims and Foreign Missions 95 
 
 law-abiding than the Burman and Karen villages around 
 them. The Karen race and |:he British government owe 
 a great debt to the American missionaries who have, 
 under Providence, wrought this change among the Karens 
 of Burmah." At the outset of missionary w^ork in India, 
 Schwartz had illustrated this power of missions, com- 
 manding the confidence of the people, and securing peace 
 and order where the East India Company and the native 
 rulers themselves were helpless. *' Send me none of your 
 agents," Hyder Ali said to the Company in some of their 
 negotiations. *' Send me the Christian missionary, 
 Schwartz, and I will receive him." " To be welcomed in 
 the land of cannibals," said a Dutch traveler in Sumatra, 
 Lunbing Hirum, " by children singing hymns, this indeed 
 shows the peace-creating power of the gospel." *' The 
 benefits " (of the missionary work in New Guinea), said 
 Hugh Milman, a magistrate, ** are immense; inter-tribal 
 fights formerly so common, being entirely at an end, 
 and trading and communication, one tribe with another, 
 now being carried on without fear." 
 
 Missionaries have been a conciliatory influence again 
 and again, and have allayed hostility which diplomats 
 and traders have aroused. They did this in Japan. The 
 Jijt Shimpo, one of the leading newspapers in Japan, 
 spoke of this in advocating the sending of Buddhist mis- 
 sionaries to Korea. '' Japanese visiting Korea will be 
 chiefly bent upon the pursuit of gain and will not be 
 disposed to pay much attention to the sentiments and 
 customs of the Koreans or to allow their spirit to be 
 controlled by any consideration of the country or the 
 people. That was the case with foreigners in the early 
 days of Japan's intercourse with them, and there can be 
 
g6 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 no doubt that many serious troubles would have occurred 
 had not the Christian missionary acted as a counter- 
 balancing influence. The Christian missionary not only 
 showed to the Japanese the altruistic side of the Occi- 
 dental character, but also by his teaching and his preach- 
 ing imparted a new and attractive aspect to intercourse 
 which would otherwise have seemed masterful and re- 
 pellent. The Japanese cannot thank the Christian mis- 
 sionary too much for the admirable leaven that he intro- 
 duced into their relations with foreigners, nor can they 
 do better than follow the example that he has set, in 
 their own intercourse with the Koreans." 
 
 And missionaries in the same conciliatory spirit have 
 been the main factors in opening some sealed lands to 
 international intercourse. The United States Govern- 
 ment's treaty with Siam was negotiated in 1856, and 
 Dr. Wood of the Embassy wrote that *' the unselfish 
 kindness of the American missionaries, their patience, 
 sincerity and faithfulness, have won the confidence and 
 esteem of the natives, and in some degree transferred 
 those sentiments to the nation represented by the mission- 
 ary and prepared the way for the free and national inter- 
 course now commencing. It was very evident that much 
 of the apprehension they felt in taking upon themselves 
 the responsibilities of a treaty with us would be dimin- 
 ished if they could have the Rev. Mr. Mattoon as the 
 first United States Consul to set the treaty in motion." 
 In 1 87 1, the Regent of Siam frankly told Mr. Seward, 
 the United States Consul-General at Shanghai, " Siam 
 has not been disciplined by English and French guns as 
 China has, but the country has been opened by mission- 
 aries." 
 
The War Aims and Foreign Missions 97 
 
 Of the work of the Scotch Presbyterians in Nyassa land, 
 Joseph Thomson, the traveler, bore testimony after his 
 visit in 1879. "Where international effort has failed," 
 he said, " an unassuming Mission, supported only by a 
 small section of the British people, has been quietly and 
 unostentatiously, but most successfully realizing in its 
 own district the entire program of the Brussels Confer- 
 ence. I refer to the Livingstonia Mission of the Free 
 Church of Scotland. This Mission has proved itself, in 
 every sense of the word, a civilizing center. By it slav- 
 ery has been stopped, desolating wars put an end to, and 
 peace and security given to a wide area of the country." 
 For a hundred years the missionary enterprise has been 
 doing this over the entire world, getting men acquainted 
 with one another, showing the unselfishness that lies 
 behind much that seems to be and often is so purely 
 selfish. It has always been and is to-day an enterprise of 
 tranquillity and of peace. 
 
 It has been an agency of righteousness. As the years 
 have gone by, it alone has represented in many non- 
 Christian lands the inner moral character of the Western 
 world. By our political agencies and activities we have 
 forced great wrongs upon the non-Christian peoples — 
 commercial exploitation, the liquor traffic, and the slave 
 trade upon Africa and the South Sea Islands, the opium 
 traffic upon China. Against these things the one element 
 of the West that has made protest has been the mission- 
 ary enterprise. Year after year in those lands it has 
 joined with what wholesome moral sentiment existed 
 among the people in a death struggle against the great 
 iniquities that Western civilization had spread over the 
 world. It has been an instrumentality of international 
 righteousness. 
 
98 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 It has been and Is a great instrumentality of human 
 service. It has scattered tens of thousands of men and 
 women over many lands, teaching school in city and 
 country, in town and village. It has built its hospitals by 
 the thousand. It has sent its medical missionaries to 
 deal every year with millions of sick and diseased peoples 
 in Asia and Africa. It has been the one great, con- 
 tinuing, unselfish agency of unquestioning, loving, human 
 service throughout the world, dealing not with emergency 
 needs of famine and flood and pestilence alone, but, year 
 in and year out, serving all human need and seeking to 
 introduce into human society the creative and healing 
 influences of Christ. " It is they " (the missionaries) , says 
 Sir H. H. Johnston, of British Central Africa, " who 
 in many cases have first taught the natives carpentry, 
 joinery, masonry, tailoring, cobbling, engineering, book- 
 keeping, printing, and European cookery ; to say nothing of 
 reading, writing, arithmetic, and a smattering of general 
 knowledge. Almost invariably, it has been to mission- 
 aries that the natives of Interior Africa have owed their 
 first acquaintance with a printing press, the turning-lathe, 
 the mangle, the flat-iron, the sawmill, and the brick 
 mold. Industrial teaching is coming more and more in 
 favor, and its immediate results in British Central Africa 
 have been most encouraging. Instead of importing 
 painters, carpenters, store clerks, cooks, telegraphists, gar- 
 deners, natural history collectors from England or India, 
 we are gradually becoming able to obtain them amongst 
 the natives of the country, who are trained in the mission- 
 aries' schools, and who having been given simple, whole- 
 some local education, have not had their heads turned, 
 and are not above their station In life." 
 
The War Aims and Foreign Missions 99 
 
 Let any one who doubts the constructive influence 
 of missions in molding the social life, in affecting insti- 
 tutions, in establishing just trade, in creating and foster- 
 ing industries, in making friendly producers and con- 
 sumers, in purifying morality and elevating mankind, 
 turn to the second volume of Dr. Dennis's " Christian 
 Missions and Social Progress," and read there of the 
 achievements of mission work in these spheres, and he 
 will gain a new conception of the power and value of 
 foreign missions. As Dr. Dennis shows, they have pro- 
 moted temperance, opposed the liquor and opium traffics 
 which are fatal to wise commerce, checked gambling, 
 established higher standards of personal purity, culti- 
 vated industry and frugality, elevated woman, restrained 
 anti-social customs such as polygamy, concubinage, adul- 
 tery and child-marriage and infanticide, fostered the sup- 
 pression of the slave trade and slave traffic, abolished 
 cannibalism and human sacrifice and cruelty, organized 
 famine relief, improved husbandry and agriculture, intro- 
 duced Western medicines and medical science, founded 
 leper asylums and colonies, promoted cleanliness and sani- 
 tation, and checked war. '' Whatever you may be told to 
 the contrary," said Sir Bartle Frere, formerly Governor of 
 Bombay, " the teaching of Christianity among i6o,ocx>,ooo 
 of civilized, industrious Hindus and Mohammedans in 
 India is effecting changes, moral, social and political, 
 which for extent and rapidity of effect are far more 
 extraordinary than anything that you or your fathers 
 have witnessed in modern Europe." " When the history 
 of the great African States of the future comes to be 
 written," says Sir H. H. Johnston, bearing witness out 
 of ample personal knowledge and experience, " the ar- 
 
100 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 rival of the first missionary will with many of these new 
 nations be the first historical event in their annals." 
 
 Foreign missions have been a great agency of human 
 unity and concord. They, at least, have believed and 
 acted upon the belief that all men belong to one family. 
 They have laughed at racial discords and prejudices. 
 They have made themselves unpopular with many repre- 
 sentatives of the Western nations who have gone into 
 the non-Christian world, because they have not been 
 willing to foster racial distrust, because they have insisted 
 on bridging the divisions which separated men of different 
 bloods and different nationalities. We are talking now 
 about building the new world after the war. But it 
 would be hopeless if we had not already begun it. We 
 are talking about some form of international organiza- 
 tion. It may need to be very simple, with few and 
 primitive functions, but it must come. And it can come 
 only as first, we sustain in men's hearts a faith in its 
 possibility; as second, we devise the instrumentalities 
 necessary to it and make them effective; as third, we 
 build up a spirit that will support it. Across the world 
 for a hundred years the missionary enterprise has been 
 the proclamation that this day must come, and that some 
 such international body of relationships as this, based on 
 right principles, must be set up among the nations of the 
 world. 
 
 It would not be hard to go on analyzing further what 
 the missionary enterprise has been doing. It has been 
 doing peacefully, constructively, unselfishly, quietly for 
 a hundred years exactly the things that now, in a great 
 outburst of titanic and necessarily destructive struggle, 
 we were compelled to do by war. I say it again, that 
 
The War Aims and Foreign Missions loi 
 
 one of the most significant things of the day is to see how 
 the great ideals and purposes of the missionary enterprise, 
 that have been the commonplaces of some men's lives, 
 have been gathered up as a great moral discovery and 
 made the legitimate moral aims of the nation in the great 
 conflict in which we have been engaged. 
 
 And now that the war is done the question looks at 
 us squarely. Do we mean all that we said and fought 
 for? If we were right then are we not bound to go 
 straight on now and do by life in peace what we were 
 ready to do by death in war? The need for achieving the 
 things we fought for is here to-day all over the world. 
 The missionary enterprise is the honest effort to achieve 
 them. 
 
 And we need the missionary enterprise now, strong, 
 living, aggressive; first of all because we require, more 
 than we have ever required them in the past, every pos- 
 sible agency of international good will and interpreta- 
 tion. Why did that happen In Russia that did hap- 
 pen, prolonging for many months the great struggle? 
 We know why it happened — m part at least because 
 of a lack of adequate interpretation of our own true 
 ideals and national character. Men who had lived here 
 in our own land, had gone back to Russia by the 
 hundred, to misrepresent America. They said we were 
 a capitalistic oligarchy, not a democracy, that privilege 
 and not justice ruled our life. I suppose Trotzky had 
 never been in a company of two hundred real Ameri- 
 cans. He returned to Russia, not knowing the least 
 thing of the real spirit of the American nation and our 
 true political ideals, and the real heart of the American 
 people; and the same ignorance which he carried back 
 
102 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 with him is in no small measure spread far and wide over 
 the world to-day. There could have been nothing more 
 unwise than the proposition that we should recall in the 
 war from Africa and India, Japan and China the men 
 who are correctly interpreting to the non-Christian world 
 the unselfish Christian ideals of our Western nations. 
 In the early years of the war our Government sent to 
 the consuls in China especially word that Americans 
 ought not to come home; that if ever they were needed 
 there, they were needed to-day that they might correctly 
 represent what the moral purposes of America are, and 
 that by their good will and friendliness, they might be 
 true ambassadors of our spirit. We need not less to-day, 
 but more than ever, the shuttles of sympathy and service 
 that fly to and fro across the chasms of race. The mis- 
 understandings of the world are a tragic thing. We 
 little realize how deep and terrible they are ; the innumer- 
 able millions of men on the other side of the world whose 
 minds are unknown to us and to whom what we are 
 thinking is unknown, in whose thought there has never 
 entered the conviction of our unselfish interest in the 
 whole human family, and of our desire not to injure but to 
 benefit both ourselves and with us all mankind. As 
 never before in the history of the world, we require 
 every possible agency of interpretation, of international 
 fellowship and brotherhood to be thrown across the 
 chasms that separate the races and nations of men. 
 
 President Wilson understood this. At the height of 
 the war he wrote to a medical missionary who had asked 
 his advice as to returning to China or entering the war: 
 " I feel that I am by no means qualified to answer the 
 question you put in your letter of March 9th, but it is 
 
The War Aims and Foreign Missions 103 
 
 clear to me on general principles that we must not rob 
 eJEfort everywhere else in order to concentrate it in France, 
 unless it is absolutely necessary to do so. It does not 
 appear necessary at this juncture, and my judgment, 
 diffidently expressed, would be that your duty still lay in 
 China." 
 
 And he had earlier written to some missionary workers 
 in the South an equally strong statement: 
 
 " I entirely agree with you in regard to the missionary work. 
 I think it would be a real misfortune, a misfortune of lasting 
 consequence, if the missionary program for the world should 
 be interrupted. There are many calls for money, of course, 
 and I can quite understand that it may become more difficult 
 than ever to obtain money for missionary enterprises, but that 
 the work undertaken should be continued and continued . . . 
 at its full force, seems to me of capital necessity, and I for 
 one hope that there may be no slackening or recession of any 
 sort. 
 
 " I wish that I had time to write you as fully as this great 
 subject demands, but I have put my whole thought into these 
 few sentences and I hope you will feel at liberty to use this 
 expression of opinion in any way that you think best." 
 
 We are needing to prepare for the great undertakings 
 of peace that are now upon us. It may or may not be 
 a true principle that in times of peace we should prepare 
 for war; but there cannot be any doubt about its being 
 a true principle, that in times both of war and of peace 
 we should prepare for peace. In time of peace war may 
 or may not come, but in time of war peace must and 
 will come. And now that peace has come, whatever 
 may be the decision regarding the continuance of arma- 
 ments, there can be no doubt that our immediate duty 
 is to confront the tasks of peace. Unless those tasks 
 
104 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 are met, any preparations for the future will rest on 
 hollow foundations. Other agencies of sinister purpose 
 were preparing diligently throughout the whole period 
 of the war for this present time. And they are not 
 relaxing their purposes to-day. Against these and all evil 
 forces every energy of righteousness must be aroused both 
 in America and throughout the world. Every unselfish 
 purpose, the full measure of moral consecration, the uplift 
 and inspiration of every great ideal and of unlimited tasks 
 must be taken advantage of now if the soul of the nation 
 is to be equal to its responsibility. We need every ounce 
 of moral and spiritual resolution for the nation's sake. 
 Whatever we subtract from the spiritual outgoing of 
 the Christian Church we subtract from the vitality of 
 the nation in its present struggle. 
 
 Necessary as the great negative energies of destruction 
 are, they can never achieve the things that have to be 
 done in the world. This business of war has been an 
 unavoidable business, but its result is to work structural 
 changes. We cannot say that it cannot work any organic 
 change, but if it does it is by reason of the thought which 
 it embodies. Such work has to be done by great prin- 
 ciples, by living ideals, by the Spirit of God. Mere 
 mechanisms, the thunder of guns, the massing of bodies 
 of men never can do it. They can build walls against 
 the onset of wrong; they cannot replace it. We have 
 to let loose the creative and constructive spiritual powers 
 if that is to be done, and there is no creative and con- 
 structive spiritual power the equal of that which Christ 
 released. 
 
 And in Christ alone to-day is the power of saving men 
 and of redeeming society. To give Him to the world 
 
The War Aims and Foreign Missions 105 
 
 is to do the work the world needs more than it needs 
 anything else. No man can do better with his life to-day 
 or accomplish more for the world than by going out to 
 acquaint men with Christ and to lead all nations to 
 obey and follow Christ as Saviour and Lord. 
 
 The Christian churches throughout the war manifested 
 the spirit which must now have yet freer and richer play. 
 Both in Canada and in Great Britain the foreign mis- 
 sionary societies year after year during the war closed 
 their books not only without a deficit but in many cases 
 with a surplus and with larger receipts than had ever 
 come to them before. Our American foreign mission 
 boards had the same experience. The year of the war was 
 with many of them the year of the most generous sup- 
 port of their work that they had ever known. 
 
 Indeed, the work of foreign missions has never been 
 stopped by war. The great Foreign Missionary So- 
 cieties of Great Britain were launched in the midst of 
 European wars, and if the earlier missionaries from the 
 Continent had waited for times of world peace before 
 setting out on their undertakings, they might never 
 have gone. The first foreign missionaries from the United 
 States, sent out by the American Board, sailed during 
 the year of 1812. If the Church could ever be justified 
 in waiving her missionary duty in times of national diffi- 
 culty it would have been during the Civil War. The 
 Southern Presbyterian Church projected its foreign mis- 
 sionary work then. To quote Dr. Houston's words, in 
 a noble address delivered in Philadelphia in May, 1888, 
 ** When in that day she found herself girt about as with 
 a wall of fire, when no missionary had it in his power 
 to go forth from her bosom to the regions beyond, the 
 
io6 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 first General Assembly put on record the solemn declara- 
 tion that, as this Church now unfurled her banner to 
 the world, she desired distinctly and deliberately to in- 
 scribe on it, * in immediate connection with the Headship 
 of her Lord, His last command, " Go ye into all the 
 world and preach the Gospel to every creature," regard- 
 ing this as the great end of her organization, and obedience 
 to it as the indispensable condition of her Lord's promised 
 presence.' " And the moment the way was opened she 
 sent forth her sons and her daughters. 
 
 The experience of the missionary board of one of the 
 churches in the Northern States during the Civil War 
 is illustrative, I believe, of almost all. In the spring 
 of 1862 the Northern Presbyterian Board reported that 
 instead of ending the year with a heavy debt, as was 
 seriously feared, it had been able to " support the Missions 
 in nearly all cases in their usual vigor, to send out new 
 laborers, to occupy new ground in some instances, and 
 to close the year in a satisfactory manner." The Board 
 expressed the hope '' that a not less vigorous support of 
 this work will be afforded in the coming year, and the 
 trying discipline of Divine Providence and especially the 
 influences of the Holy Spirit may lead our churches to 
 reach still higher standards of giving." The Board ap- 
 pealed accordingly for an increase of 25 per cent, in the 
 gifts of the churches, in order that the work of the Mis- 
 sions might not be reduced nor new missionaries kept 
 at home. The General Assembly welcomed these views 
 and rejoiced in the fact that the largest number of mis- 
 sionary candidates ever reported was waiting to be sent 
 forth. The following year the Board reported that none 
 of the new missionary candidates had been kept at home 
 
The War Aims and Foreign Missions 107 
 
 except for health or similar reasons. When the Board 
 appealed to young men and women not to allow the im- 
 pression that the funds of the Board would not permit 
 them to be sent out to be made a rule of duty or to 
 hinder them from offering themselves to the missionary 
 service, the General Assembly endorsed this view, and 
 in the Spring of 1864 declared: "New Missions are 
 needed. Shall they be established? Is it inquired, Where 
 are the means? We answer. They are in the hands of 
 the Christians, who are God's stewards. Let a proper 
 demand be made. Let this Assembly call on the churches, 
 and that call will be answered. The response will come 
 to us in the spirit of that consecration in which all God's 
 people have laid themselves and their all upon His altar. 
 In the opinion of the General Assembly, the Presbyte- 
 rian Church under its care should, during the ensuing 
 year, increase the amount of funds put under the com- 
 mand of the Board of Foreign Missions, for the spread 
 of the Gospel among the heathen, to not less than three 
 hundred thousand dollars." As the war drew to a close 
 the Board reported that never in its history had there 
 been times when the financial prospects appeared so 
 dark. The rates of exchange cut the value of the Ameri- 
 can bills in half. But the light broke through the dark- 
 ness, and the Board reported in 1865, *' It has not been 
 necessary ,to break up any of the Missions, to recall any 
 of the missionaries nor to keep at home for pecuniary 
 reasons any of the brethren who desired to be sent forth 
 on this service." 
 
 The Christian conscience of the nation during the days 
 of the Civil War saw in the generous outpouring of 
 life at the call of the nation not a reason for exemption, 
 
io8 The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 but a ground of appeal in the matter of missionary service. 
 The Presbyterian General Assembly of 1865 resolved 
 " That the work of Foreign Missions calls for expansion. 
 The prayers and wants of our brethren in the field, the 
 field itself white to the harvest, the loss occasioned by 
 age, infirmity and death among the laborers, all appeal 
 for an increase of men and means; while the voice of 
 God's providence, in His favor to this work, clearly says 
 to His Church ' Go forward.' The promptness, energy 
 and abundance with which our young men have come 
 forward during the past year to engage in our armies 
 for the defense of our nation . . . should encourage 
 Christians to pray for that increased devotion of our 
 sons to the service of Christ, which is demanded to 
 provide ministers and missionaries to go into the fields 
 which are now open to hear the Gospel." 
 
 The Church to-day cannot be justified in sinking to a 
 lower measure of courage and devotion than marked our 
 fathers in the days following the Civil War. The nation 
 is vastly richer now than then, and abundantly able to 
 meet every obligation, first among them its obligations 
 to God and the Gospel. There are men enough and 
 to spare for all the work that needs to be done — fore- 
 most the great constructive work of spreading Christ's 
 message of peace and good will among the nations, and 
 planting everywhere the principles of the Gospel. The 
 increase of suffering on account of war does not diminish 
 the chronic suffering of Asia and Africa. The hungry 
 of these lands are not less hungry because there is want 
 in Europe as well. Preachers of the Gospel, medical 
 missionaries, teachers and friends of mankind who will 
 
Ihe War Aims and Foreign Missions 109 
 
 serve the needy in the spirit of Christ are more needed 
 throughout the non-Christian world to-day than they 
 were before the war. And while all other duties must 
 be done, these primary and continuing duties must not 
 be left undone. The nation will be stronger for its 
 task at home if it is faithful to its ministries of peace 
 to all the world. 
 
 And now will the men and women who have lives to 
 give act upon a pinched and withholding principle? Can 
 we believe that the men who were willing to give their 
 lives for the nation and the cause in the war will not 
 be willing to give them for Christ and the world and 
 this work now that the war is done? It is inconceivable 
 that it should be so. The men who unselfishly gave 
 themselves to the cause to which God called the nation 
 and who in that cause counted everything loss — who 
 deemed life itself merely the reasonable offering which 
 it was their duty and joy to make — will not now, surely, 
 when the war is done, be content to turn aside to selfish 
 and easy lives. Surely they will want to carry forward 
 in the days of peace the same ideals for which they con- 
 tended in the time of war — the ideals of human brother- 
 hood, of international justice and service, of peace and 
 good will. 
 
 And now is the time when men should face this issue 
 of the principles by which they are going to live in peace 
 times. Now is the time when thousands of men who 
 have learned the unworthiness of selfish lives should 
 resolve to give themselves to the Christian ministr)^ to 
 missionary and social service, and to careers of philan- 
 thropic and political and religious consecration. Millions 
 
no The New Opportunity of the Church 
 
 of young Americans went on a foreign mission to northern 
 France. Thousands of these men should go forth, now 
 that the war Is over, on the foreign mission of peace to 
 Asia and Africa and Latin America. There are men who 
 win read this to whom the missionary Idea had never oc- 
 curred before and there are others who have thought of It 
 again and again, but who have evaded the missionary obli- 
 gation. They say they never had " a missionary call." 
 They do not plead that excuse when the nation asks 
 them for their lives. Why should they need a different 
 kind or degree or measure of call from Christ than they 
 have had from the nation? There are men who, with- 
 out a quiver, went across the sea and took whatever came, 
 but who have been avoiding the missionary obligation, 
 which does not ask them for any more. Why for the 
 one and not for the other? " We thus judge " — we read 
 the words of Paul, ** We thus judge that One died for 
 all, therefore all died; and He died for all, that they 
 that live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto 
 Him who for their sakes died and rose again." 
 
 For four years the world has poured out life and wealth 
 without limit. It was a struggle which ought never to 
 have been. But once precipitated there was but one 
 thing to do and that was for an outraged world to go 
 through with It at whatever cost and to spare nothing 
 until the calamity was removed and the liberties of 
 the world were secured. And now the struggle is past. 
 Shall the sacrifices made for war be discontinued or 
 shall we be ready to do for peace and for the coming 
 of the Kingdom of righteousness all that we did for 
 war and for the prevention of what we believed to be 
 
The War Aims and Foreign Missions 1 1 1 
 
 the threatened destruction of the freedom of mankind? 
 Were not those sacrifices rational only as we now com- 
 plete and perfect them in their perpetual consecration 
 to the establishment of the reign of Christ in human life ? 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
T 
 
 HE following pages contain advertisements of books 
 by the same author or on kindred subjects 
 
Christian Internationalism 
 
 By WILLIAM PIERSON MERRILL 
 
 Cloth, 12°, $1.50 
 
 " An army pushing its victorious advance finds one stubborn 
 stronghold which resists ; and it reaHzes that it must capture 
 that one center of resistance or its advance is imperilled. So 
 Christianity, advancing to the control of the world's life, halts 
 before this great citadel of International Relationships where 
 pagan forces are still strongly intrenched; and it realizes that 
 the whole program and hope of Christian Redemption are held 
 back, thwarted, imperilled, until that fortress is reduced." 
 
 Christian Internationalism lays siege to this fortress and 
 marshals in force manifold considerations, political, social 
 and religious, in support of the case for an immediate end 
 of the old arbitrary conduct of nations toward each other 
 and a beginning of a new era of peaceful, ordered freedom. 
 
 CHAPTER HEADINGS 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. The Function of Christianity in the World. 
 
 II. The Old Testament and Internationalism. 
 
 III. The New Testament and Internationalism. 
 
 IV. Christianity and Internationalism. 
 V. Democracy and Internationalism. 
 
 I. America and Internationalism. 
 
 II. Constructive Proposals for an International Order. 
 
 VIII. Problems Confronting Internationalism. 
 
 IX. Christian Principles Underlying Internationalism. 
 
 X. The War and Internationalism. 
 
 XI. The Church and Internationalism. 
 
 XII. Conclusions. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 
 
The Coming of the Lord 
 
 Will it be Premillennial? 
 
 By JAMES H. SNOWDEN, D.D., LL.D. 
 
 Professor of Systematic Theology in the Western Theological 
 Seminary, Pittsburgh, Pa. 
 
 Cloth 12°, $1.75 
 
 The question of the second or final coming of Christ has been an 
 important and at times an intensely interesting and stirring one from 
 the days of Christ and his apostles to the present hour. The great War 
 has again kindled it into intensity, and numerous " prophetic confer- 
 encea " are being held and many books on it are appearing. 
 
 Dr. Snowden's book is probably the first comprehensive and systematic 
 and scholarly treatment of the question which has been produced since 
 Dr. David Brown's well-known " Second Advent " appeared seventy 
 years ago, a work that has ever since been an authority on the post- 
 millenanan side but is now in some respects out of date. The present 
 work is based on a broad study of the literature of the subject, the 
 list of " Works Consulted " prefixed to it comprising about one hundred 
 and twenty authors. The literature on both sides of the question has 
 been read and the treatment of it in this book is characterized through- 
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 and state the truth. All difficulties are frankly faced, and the discus- 
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 millenarians can read this book without feeling that they have been 
 misrepresented and without irritation. Whatever one's point of view 
 on the question, he will find this work informing and inspiring. It is 
 not a technical and dry book, but a live and interesting one, and even 
 a sense of humor is not lacking in its pages. Its concluding chapter 
 on " Is the World Growing Better? " is a notable piece of writing and 
 is probably the best available statement and proof of an optimistic view 
 of tha world. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 
 
The Course of Christian History 
 
 By W. J. McGLOTHLIN, Ph.D., D.D. 
 
 Professor of Church History in the Southern Baptist 
 Theological Seminary. 
 
 Cloth, $2.00 
 
 This volume has been written with a full and accurate knowledge of 
 the subject gained from study in European Universities and teaching 
 in one of the leading theological institutions of this country. 
 
 While it is thoroughly scientific in spirit and is abreast of the latest 
 developments, the author has at the same time preserved that lucidity 
 and simplicity of statement and style which make the book interesting 
 and readable for the general student. 
 
 ** The study of the course that has been taken by the Church in its 
 extended life is most interesting and fascinating, when guided by one 
 who is able to speak as a real master. . . . The growth and develop- 
 ment of the church from its early days, on through the middle centuries 
 and into modern times, is portrayed in a skillful and authoritative way, 
 and much light is shed on the great controversies and councils, in the 
 development of doctrines, the spread of heresies and the expansion of 
 the life and work of the church." — Herald and Presbyter. 
 
 " The" volume is different from the general run of church histories. 
 ... It is readable, interesting and informing. The book is intended 
 primarily for college students and is well adapted to this use. . . . The 
 book is also well adapted to the use of Bible classes, mission study 
 classes, etc.. and could be used by them to great profit. . . . Dr. Mc- 
 Glothlin has done a splendid piece of work in this volume and made 
 a real contribution to the literature on the history of Christianity. We 
 wish for this book a wide reading." — Review and Expositor. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 
 
RELIGIOUS HAND BOOKS 
 
 (New and Not Reprints) 
 
 Each Sixty Cents 
 THE NEW OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH 
 
 Preparing By ROBERT E. SPEER 
 
 This volume very suitably follows Dr. Speer's The Chris- 
 tian Man, the Church, and the War, dealing as it does with 
 the present responsibility of the Church. 
 THE CHURCH FACING THE FUTURE 
 
 By WILLIAM ADAMS BROWN 
 
 Dr. Brown discusses four big questions: First, Where the 
 War Found the Church; second, What the Church did for 
 the War; third, What the War did for the Church; and 
 fourth. Where the War Leaves the Church! 
 DEMOCRATIC CHRISTIANITY; SOME PROBLEMS 
 
 OF THE CHURCH IN THE DAYS JUST AHEAD 
 
 By FRANCIS J. McCONNELL 
 
 " We have in mind the tasks of to-day as they confront the 
 Christian Church," writes Bishop McConnell. 
 GOD'S RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE WAR 
 
 By EDWARD S. DROWN 
 
 Dr. Drown discusses this very interesting question in terse 
 and vigorous prose. 
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY CRUSADE 
 
 By LYMAN ABBOTT 
 
 Written by one who has an exultant faith that never in the 
 history of the past has there been so splendid a demonstra- 
 tion of the extent and power of the Christ spirit as to-day. 
 THE WAY TO LIFE By HENRY CHURCHILL KING 
 
 A discussion of the Sermon on the Mount, similar to that 
 in Dr. King's former book The Ethics of Jesus. Besides re- 
 writing them, he has added material on the war and the 
 teachings of Jesus. 
 THE CHRISTIAN MAN, THE CHURCH AND THE 
 
 WAR By ROBERT E. SPEER 
 
 Dr. Speer here discusses the essentials of a problem which 
 has exercised Christian men since the beginning of the war. 
 He deals with it sanely and in a manner that will be consid- 
 ered distinctly helpful. 
 NEW HORIZON OF STATE AND CHURCH 
 
 By W. H. P. FAUNCE 
 
 " Broad, profound scholarship, close relationship with pro- 
 gressive sentiment all over the land, and unusual powers of 
 keen analysis and graphic statement are forceful elements in 
 The Ne7v Horicon of ^ti'e and Church." — Philadelphia 
 North American. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 
 
on Theological Semmary-Spe. 
 
 Princeton Theologi 
 
 1 1012 01092 7400 
 
 Date Due 
 
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