ill!! 
 
 Itii 
 
F^n -s 1915 
 
 BR 121 .M25 1914 
 
 
 McConnell, Francis John, 
 
 
 1871-1953. 
 
 
 Personal Christianity, 
 
 
 inpttrnmpntc: 7^r\c\ pn<i<:; -in 
 
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Personal Christianity 
 
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A"^' 
 
 v^ ( FEB fi 
 
 The Cole Lectures for igi4 \ y, 
 
 deli'vered before Vanderbilt Uni'versity 
 
 Personal Christianity 
 
 Instruments and Ends in 
 the Kingdom of God 
 
 FRANCIS J. McCONNELL 
 
 One of the Bishops of the Methodist 
 Episcopal Church 
 
 New York Chicago Toronto 
 
 Fleming H. Revell Company 
 London and Edinburgh 
 
Copyright, igM, by 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
 New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
 Chicago: 125 North Wabash Ave. 
 Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W. 
 London: 21 Paternoster Square 
 Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street 
 
To 
 
 Dean Wilbur F. Ti/ktt 
 a Statesman of the Church 
 
THE COLE LECTURES 
 
 THE late Colonel E. W. Cole of Nashville, Ten- 
 nessee, donated to Vanderbilt University the sum 
 of five thousand dollars, afterwards increased by 
 Mrs. E. W. Cole to ten thousand, the design and con- 
 ditions of which gift are stated as follows : 
 
 " The object of this fund is to establish a foundation 
 for a perpetual Lectureship in connection with the Bib- 
 lical Department of the University, to be restricted in its 
 scope to a defense and advocacy of the Christian re- 
 ligion. The lectures shall be delivered at such inter- 
 vals, from time to time, as shall be deemed best by the 
 Board of Trust ; and the particular theme and lecturer 
 shall be determined by nomination of the Theological 
 Faculty and confirmation of the College of Bishops of 
 the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Said lecture 
 shall always be reduced to writing in full, and the man- 
 uscript of the same shall be the property of the Univer- 
 sity, to be published or disposed of by the Board of 
 Trust at its discretion, the net proceeds arising there- 
 from to be added to the foundation fund, or otherwise 
 used for the benefit of the Biblical Department." 
 
Prefatory Note 
 
 THE word " personal " as used in 
 these lectures does not mean '* in- 
 dividual." Two views of the hu- 
 man beings whom we actually know are 
 about equally mistaken. Extreme individ- 
 ualism spins theories about human life with 
 each life taken by itself in a separateness and 
 independence never realized or realizable on 
 earth. On the other hand the extreme doc- 
 trine of society as an organism is likewise 
 faulty. Society is not literally an organism. 
 The concrete fact is persons living in such 
 dependence upon one another that we can 
 call them members of one another more fit- 
 tingly than we can speak of them as mem- 
 bers of a social organism, — an organism, by 
 the way, which lacks so essential a feature 
 of organic life as a head. The social con- 
 sciousness is not a consciousness grasped by 
 one all-inclusive mind. The social conscious- 
 ness is personal consciousnesses knit together 
 in sympathetic community. It is the purpose 
 of these lectures to show that persons, existing 
 on earth in intimate interdependence, are 
 9 
 
lO PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 ends-in-themselves in the kingdom of God on 
 earth, and that all things else, — books, creeds, 
 rituals, organizations, — are instrumental, with 
 only such sacredness as can attach to instru- 
 ments. Persons alone are sacred in their 
 own inherent right. It might have been bet- 
 ter to use the word ** human " instead of 
 " personal," except that " personal " seems 
 more fundamental ; and it may appear early 
 in the course of the discussion that the value 
 set on the personal in human life comes 
 largely from conceiving in personal terms 
 the God who is set before us as the Father 
 in Heaven by the personal revelation in 
 Jesus. 
 
 F. J. MCCONNELL. 
 Denver, Colo. 
 
Contents 
 
 I. The Personal in Christianity . 1 3 
 
 II. The Instrumental in Christianity 55 
 
 III. The Christian Use of the Philo- 
 
 sophic Tools .... 97 
 
 IV. On Making Morality Human . 1 39 
 
 V. Ends and Means in Social En- 
 
 deavour 183 
 
 VI. Every Kindred and People and 
 
 Tongue 225 
 
 II 
 
LECTURE I 
 THE PERSONAL IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
LECTURE I 
 THE PERSONAL IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 IN a familiar Gospel passage Jesus is 
 represented as stooping and writing 
 upon the ground. Thoughtful Bible 
 readers stop for the moment as they come 
 to the passage. The direct question as to 
 what Jesus wrote has interest of course only 
 for the curious : the real reason why the 
 mind of the reader hesitates and ponders is 
 that this is the only passage which mentions 
 Jesus as in the act of writing. The scene 
 is suggestive, not merely because it reveals 
 Jesus' tact in a very delicate situation, but 
 because by its very solitariness it prompts us 
 to reflect upon the absence of the artificial in 
 all His work as a teacher. The impression 
 made by the New Testament portraiture is 
 of a teacher who relied not at all upon the 
 conventional scholastic methods, — the use of 
 books, the citation of authorities, the dicta- 
 tion of instructions to be written down for 
 study and preservation. In this absence of 
 the artificial the school of Christ was different 
 15 
 
l6 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 from schools with which we are familiar and 
 from schools with which Christ was familiar. 
 The method of Jesus seems to have been that 
 of direct contact of the teacher with his 
 pupils. We are not to miss the force of this 
 consideration by supposing that the method 
 of direct contact, with everything artificial 
 reduced to the very least possible, was the 
 inevitable procedure of a time which had 
 little opportunity for the use of books and 
 writings. As a matter of history the inves- 
 tigations of men like Sir William Ramsay 
 have shown that reliance upon writing in the 
 days of Jesus was much more common than 
 we have realized. The period during which 
 Christ lived was a period of very prolific 
 writing both in school and out. It will be re- 
 membered that Professor Ramsay finds letter 
 correspondence to have been then so easy 
 to all sorts of people that he is confident that 
 some parts of the Gospel must have been set 
 to parchment by the followers of Jesus within 
 a very few weeks after the crucifixion. The 
 existence of a rather elaborate mail system 
 seems to point to a very prevalent habit of 
 writing throughout the Roman Empire in 
 the time of Christ. 
 
 Jesus, we repeat, does not seem to have 
 relied upon the artificial helps of the schools 
 
THE PERSONAL IN CHRISTIANITY 1 7 
 
 of His time. Passing to matters of larger 
 consequence than the suggestive incident of 
 the writing on the ground we know that His 
 mind was evidendy steeped in Scriptural ex- 
 pression, but He does not seem to have 
 appealed to authority as did the scribes. He 
 does not even seem to have been concerned 
 about casting His thought into systematic 
 form. System of some sort He no doubt had, 
 but there is nothing to suggest the system of 
 the schools of His time or of later time. The 
 thought of Jesus unfolded largely as does the 
 thought of other leaders, pushed along by an 
 inner logic and by the pressure of outer 
 events. The thought of Jesus moreover was 
 of that compelling kind which produced 
 crises in the minds of those who heard Him 
 speak ; it seems possible to trace the order of 
 some of these crises in the narratives which 
 have come down to us, — but there is little to 
 suggest formal arrangement. If it be urged 
 that in the Gospels we are dealing not with 
 the form in which Jesus actually uttered His 
 truth, but with the reports which have come 
 from those who were His disciples, the ready 
 reply is that we must think it strange that 
 One who could so impress His hearers that 
 they caught the depth and might and beauty 
 of His thought was powerless to stamp their 
 
l8 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 minds with the system in which the thought 
 was cast, — if there had been a system. To 
 see what the rabbinic system could do with 
 Christian thought we have only to turn to 
 the words of Paul. Paul had seized the 
 essentials of Christianity, but at least at 
 times he ran these to forms which he had 
 inherited from the schools. And the en- 
 kindUng warmth and life of the Christian 
 spirit are not able to free the Pauline system 
 from the suggestion of artificiality which here 
 and there clings to it. When the modern 
 compiler of Biblical hand-books attempts to 
 arrange in schematic form the teaching of 
 Jesus, the oudines and the diagrams, help- 
 ful as they no doubt may be, contain but 
 meagerly the spirit and vividness of the 
 Gospel narrative itself. To put the case 
 rather extremely it would almost seem that 
 the teaching of Jesus was incidental to His 
 life with the disciples. Jesus lived with the 
 disciples, and as He lived with them spoke 
 to them of God and of men and of the duties 
 of life. The main fact in their thought, after 
 it was all over, seems not to have been the 
 teaching as teaching. They remembered, or 
 rather felt still the impact of a life which was 
 more than teaching. 
 
 Moreover Jesus does not seem to have 
 
THE PERSONAL IN CHRISTIANITY I9 
 
 Spoken voluminously. He does not seem 
 to have been in the customary sense of the 
 word a '' talker." A shrewd observer once 
 remarked that in a realm of perfect mutual 
 understanding, such as we may conceive 
 heaven to be, speech would be needless. 
 There might be silence in heaven for much 
 more than the space of half an hour, for each 
 mind would enter into such complete under- 
 standing of companion minds that an artifi- 
 cial instrument like speech would be superflu- 
 ous. There is enough in this fancy to remind 
 us that the less of living sympathy there is 
 between two minds the more there must be 
 of reliance upon a mechanism like language. 
 Some lives themselves mea7i truths which we 
 discern as soon as we come into touch with 
 the lives. Some faces mean and teach purity 
 the instant we look upon them. Words would 
 be superfluous and impertinent. The actual 
 utterances of Jesus as recorded do not of 
 themselves seem adequate in amount to the 
 impression which they produced upon the 
 minds of the early followers. Or rather there 
 is even to-day so much more in the words 
 than the words themselves, there is such 
 power of suggestiveness and such quickness 
 of life, that the words seem more than words. 
 They seem to carry with them a life which lifts 
 
20 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 them at once out of the realm of the artificial 
 and instrumental. Just from this quality in 
 the words we are prepared to believe the 
 accounts which have come down to us of 
 manifestations of a sheer personal force 
 which at the opening of the career of Jesus 
 caused a hostile crowd to make way before 
 Him that He might pass, and at the close 
 of His career caused some of His captors to 
 stumble backward to the ground. 
 
 The method of Jesus seems to have been 
 to gather around Him a few lives whom He 
 felt to be receptive and responsive. With 
 these men He lived. Though He occasion- 
 ally stepped outside to minister to larger 
 groups, He seems for the most part to have 
 given Himself to the smaller group and to 
 have started the new stream of life by living 
 constantly with a few men who did not 
 master His teaching in a formal fashion, but 
 who breathed the very spirit of His life. His 
 plan was not that of the preacher or the 
 lecturer. He moved through the ordinary 
 rounds with His disciples, and by His attitude 
 towards the ordinary lifted their thought to 
 the higher. If He gave any hints at all as 
 to how the lessons of the kingdom were to be 
 learned the instruction was that men were to 
 ** do " the words which they had heard, work- 
 
THE PERSONAL IN CHRISTIANITY 21 
 
 ing them into their inmost lives. Or they 
 were to take up the cross daily and by sym- 
 pathy with cross-bearers come into under- 
 standing of the cross of the Son of God. 
 More significant still is a sentence in the 
 Fourth Gospel to the effect that if men would 
 bear much fruit they would indeed become 
 His disciples. We are not troubling our- 
 selves here with the critical question as to 
 how far the Fourth Gospel actually records 
 the words of Jesus. The conception set forth 
 in this passage is essentially in harmony with 
 the total picture of Jesus which has come 
 down to us, — it forms a consistent part of 
 that picture. The meaning appears to be 
 that Jesus looked upon the Christian lessons 
 that men learn as coming out of such a life 
 process as the fruit-bearing of a tree. Let a 
 man bring forth the fruit of righteousness 
 and service and this experience itself will be 
 full of interpreting wisdom for him. In our 
 day we say that only the ideas which grow 
 are worth while. The ideas which are in any 
 sense artificially imparted from the outside 
 are not as significant as those which are 
 ripened from within by a life process as fruit 
 is ripened. The ideas which mean most to 
 us are the ideas we grow. 
 
 In fine the emphasis of the Master upon 
 
22 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 life terms which we find both in the Synoptics 
 and in the Fourth Gospel is an indication of 
 His complete freedom from the artificial. We 
 can make but little of His thought of religion 
 on the basis of the system of the scribes. 
 The outstanding facts in this present world 
 seemed to Jesus to be persons and their 
 needs. When He taught of the heavenly 
 world He spoke in personal terms. Or 
 rather He seemed to live with the fact of 
 personal contact with the Father in heaven 
 always before Him. It will not do to speak 
 of Jesus* use of the word " Father " as ap- 
 plied to God as if it were merely the best 
 word which He could find, and as if back of 
 and beyond this word He conceived of a form 
 of existence which cannot be expressed in hu- 
 man terms. The word ** Father " on the lips of 
 Jesus does not carry the suggestion that it is 
 merely a figure of speech. Criticism cannot 
 thwart this conclusion by maintaining that 
 we have only second hand reports of the 
 words of Jesus and not the words themselves. 
 We are not concerned with the critical 
 scruples, for we are not raising the question 
 as to ipsissimo verba of Jesus. We are con- 
 cerned with the impression which He left on 
 the minds of His followers. If He used the 
 word " Father " merely as the best word He 
 
THE PERSONAL IN CHRISTIANITY 23 
 
 could find, or just as an accommodation to 
 the simple intelligence of His followers, or as 
 a figure of speech to symbolize a reality out 
 beyond. He succeeded chiefly in getting Him- 
 self misunderstood. For He sunk that word 
 " Father " as applied to God so deeply into 
 the consciousness of His followers that it is 
 one of the unescapable words of the Gospel. 
 The Gospel makes the word exhaustive. It 
 is impossible for us to believe that the depth 
 of the impression made upon the minds of 
 the disciples by the word can be accounted 
 for by any merely verbal teaching on the part 
 of Jesus, or that Jesus Himself reached the 
 conception of God's fatherhood by formal 
 process. Something lay back there in the 
 realm of the personal experience of Jesus 
 which accounts for the meaning of the word 
 to Him, and for the force with which He 
 sunk the word into the life of the disciples. 
 " God the Father " was a conception which 
 He not only thought and spoke but which 
 He acted forth and which awoke definite re- 
 sponses in His feeling. ** God the Father " 
 was life experience with Jesus, and this ex- 
 perience became a telling force with the dis- 
 ciples. 
 
 The facts lying at the base of Christianity 
 are personal facts. Suppose we consider for 
 
24 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 a moment that problem of Christology which 
 has been the lure and the despair of Christian 
 thinking from the beginning. The moment 
 we use any term ending with " ology " w^e 
 are near the artificial. Now the purpose of 
 this series of lectures is to show that the arti- 
 ficial has its place and a great place, but at 
 present we insist that these formal terms 
 have very little in kind with the speech of 
 the Master or with the speech which He in- 
 spired men to utter. It is a clear gain all 
 around that we see so clearly to-day that all 
 discussion of the problem of the person of 
 Christ must take its start from \h^fact of the 
 person of Christ : and no fact seems to be 
 more stable in its foundation than that Jesus 
 thought of Himself as the Son of the Father. 
 Of course it is possible for the exegete to 
 empty everything distinctive from this word 
 " Son," and to make the title little more than 
 a conventional phrase, which Jesus used be- 
 cause He could not find a better. But here 
 again causes must be adequate to their ef- 
 fects. We can hardly see how a merely 
 conventional phrase could have meant so 
 much for the followers of Jesus both in earlier 
 and later times if it did not have back of it 
 something potently real. A suggestion more 
 in line with what we should expect among 
 
THE PERSONAL IN CHRISTIANITY 25 
 
 groups of followers as we know them would 
 be not that Jesus used the word ** Son " as a 
 conventional term but that He used the word 
 because any man would know something of 
 what it meant from living human experience. 
 But judging again from the depth to which 
 Jesus drove the word in Christian conscious- 
 ness we have to hold that back of the use of 
 the word was a fact of experience, or rather 
 more likely a state of experience which gave 
 the word vitality. We listen with all patience 
 and respect to those who tell us that when 
 Jesus spoke of Himself as the " Son of Man " 
 He had in mind merely an apocalyptic scrip- 
 ture and that when He called Himself the 
 " Son of God " He meant just a close feeling 
 of connection and dependence possible to any 
 other man, — but the effects seem greater 
 than such speech would produce. The truth 
 seems to be that Jesus' strength lay in a con- 
 sciousness of personal oneness with the Father 
 in heaven which is unique with all the unique- 
 ness of distinct personal experience and with 
 the enormous historical effects that flowed 
 from it, and that Jesus found His life mission 
 in a consciousness of oneness with men which 
 is also unique. We are not to conceive of 
 the person of Christ as a thread on which to 
 string abstract " divinity " and abstract " hu- 
 
26 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 manity." Many theories of the divinity of 
 Christ suffer grievously from impersonalism. 
 Jesus was a person with unique personal re- 
 lationship to God and man. About all that 
 we can say of that relationship in its inner 
 aspect is that the experience of Jesus was as 
 divine as possible without ceasing to be 
 human and as human as possible without 
 ceasing to be divine. 
 
 The point we insist upon is that all our 
 debates about the problem of Christ must 
 start from a living personal experience. A 
 touch of philosophy — noble philosophy too — 
 marks the opening of the Fourth Gospel but 
 the philosophic word ** logos " is not as near life 
 as the word "Son" of which that Gospel itself 
 makes so much. The consideration we would 
 repeatedly urge is that we must keep upper- 
 most in all the discussion of the Church re- 
 garding the two natures and the two wills 
 and the interpenetration of the divine and the 
 human a personal fact, not so much the per- 
 son of Christ as the person Christ. The ab- 
 stract terms have their value as instruments 
 to help us seize the meaning of the fact 
 but the fact is itself personal. All valuable 
 Christological discussion must be begun, 
 continued, and ended with Jesus the Person 
 in mind. 
 
THE PERSONAL IN CHRISTIANITY 27 
 
 Similarly with the cross of Christ. We 
 have so long debated theories of atonement 
 that we have occasionally come dangerously 
 near missing sight of the truth that the New 
 Testament accounts are personal. We may 
 use terms like substitutional, and govern- 
 mental, and moral influence wisely if we 
 keep in mind their instrumental nature. 
 But Gethsemane and Calvary were personal. 
 The impression made upon the followers of 
 Jesus by Gethsemane and Calvary was that 
 Jesus was passing through a supreme mo- 
 ment in His experience and that at that mo- 
 ment His thought moved in definitely per- 
 sonal channels. The mind of the Redeemer 
 did not seem to be among abstractions. 
 There is no suggestion that impersonal ne- 
 cessities of any sort were driving the Master 
 on, or that He was meeting His death for 
 the sake of general considerations. There is 
 no blind fate at work, — if the impression we 
 get from the Gospels can be trusted. The 
 Master is submissive to a personal will, — 
 that of the Father. If it be possible He 
 would have the cup pass from Him, but 
 there is no sort of hint of blind necessity at 
 work. The realm is that of personal rela- 
 tions. And part of the marvel of the Cross 
 to this day is that so many feel that the suf- 
 
28 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 fering of Jesus makes a personal appeal to 
 them as persons. Whatever the prime sig- 
 nificance of Calvary, it is not a struggle with 
 impersonal necessities or even with abstract 
 sin. It is, so far as Christ is concerned, an 
 inner personal experience so profound as to 
 reveal the heart of the Father Himself ; and 
 so far as men are concerned, it is a manifes- 
 tation of holy love so compelling as to touch 
 right-minded men with a sense of personal 
 appeal. And the love is not in the abstract. 
 It is not for humanity or for mankind but for 
 men. The personal aspect of the Cross is 
 the compelling aspect. 
 
 So with the other elements of the Christi- 
 anity of Christ, — if we can use such an ex- 
 pression, for even *' Christianity " is imper- 
 sonal enough to leave us a little detached 
 from the Christ. Take the resurrection ap- 
 pearances. It is no part of our present pur- 
 pose to attempt to explain the nature of these 
 appearances. All we wish to say is that they 
 are consistent with the rest of the Gospel nar- 
 rative in that they are definitely personal. If 
 their function were primarily evidential they 
 should have been more general, — and for 
 such purpose they ought co have been made 
 before some persons besides the disciples. 
 Perhaps they have more evidential value 
 
THE PERSONAL IN CHRISTIANITY 29 
 
 looked at as manifestations of a love for the 
 disciples which not even passage through 
 death could vanquish, but that is not evi- 
 dence as we ordinarily think of it in discuss- 
 ing the appearances. In any case the narra- 
 tive tells of an appearance to Peter evidently 
 with a revelation intended primarily for 
 Peter, — to Mary and the disciples with per- 
 sonal greeting. Here again we wave off the 
 impatient critic who would have us stop to 
 examine the evidence to determine whether 
 there were any such appearances or not. 
 With the matter-of-factness of the narrative 
 we are not now concerned. We are asking 
 simply the question as to how those who 
 stood closest to Christ thought of Him and 
 His work. If the appearance-narratives are 
 only attempts on the part of the disciples to 
 explain the effect of the life of the Lord on 
 themselves they nevertheless have their value 
 for our immediate point, as suggesting that 
 the thought of those closest to Christ went 
 instinctively and spontaneously to intimately 
 personal terms. 
 
 This brings us at last to the thought of the 
 Spirit of Christ as at work in the heart of 
 His followers. From the time of the ex- 
 perience in the upper room at Jerusalem till 
 to-day it has been maintained by the followers 
 
30 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 of Christ that the contact with God is a per- 
 sonal contact, that the chief effect of prayer is 
 its personal effect, that the result of accept- 
 ance of Christianity is to make persons in a 
 sense more personal than before, that the 
 chief duties of the Christian are to persons, 
 that the believers are a body not merely 
 figuratively but vitally, since they are bound 
 together by experiences which are pulsing 
 with an inner and personal energy. In 
 other words Christianity, while it depends, as 
 we shall see in subsequent lectures, upon the 
 instrumental for much of its power, is at its 
 centre a distinctly personal religion. It is 
 not even to be called Life unless the life is 
 the life of persons. 
 
 An experience like that of Pentecost is re- 
 markable among other reasons for the com- 
 pletely personal terms in which those present 
 conceived of the experience. The wor- 
 shippers in the upper room believed they 
 had come into actual touch with the living 
 Master. We are not now concerned with 
 the correctness of the interpretation of the 
 experience ; we simply point out the fact 
 that the early believers did believe in this 
 personal fashion. Their idea of the spiritual 
 presence of Christ was so definitely personal 
 as to make a beginning for that doctrine of 
 
THE PERSONAL IN CHRISTIANITY 3 1 
 
 the Trinity which has been such a sore puzzle 
 to the theologians ever since. The early 
 Christians were not theologians, — they stood 
 at the very fountainhead of direct experience 
 out of which the subsequent theorizing rose. 
 They interpreted their experiences in the 
 readiest, simplest terms which came to them. 
 Their explanations no doubt needed the 
 corrections of later thought, but the chief 
 element in their life was the experience 
 itself, an experience so quick and vivid that 
 they could think of it only in personal forms. 
 They would not call the Spirit "it." The 
 Spirit must be spoken of in personal terms. 
 The Jesus who had been their earthly Master 
 was the Christ of God still living and touch- 
 ing their lives with direct power. 
 
 Now what was the result of all this? 
 Much every way, but for our present purpose 
 it is necessary to lay stress on the personal 
 effects on the believers. A characteristic to 
 be noted in the history of Christianity is that 
 nothing in the experience of the early Chris- 
 tians tended to overslaugh their personal life 
 or independence. In later days oriental in- 
 fluences did seem to overcome such of the 
 believers as resorted to trances and ecstasies 
 but the clear insight of the Fathers always 
 marked these experiences as heresies. We 
 
32 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 sometimes speak of heresy as if it were 
 altogether an aberration of doctrine, but, 
 historically, many heresies have been ab- 
 normalities of experience. The Eastern con- 
 ceptions which would have the worshipper 
 reduce himself to such passivity that he 
 seemed swooning into nothingness have 
 never been Christian. In our day we hear 
 much about the power of the Hindu to give 
 himself up to days of absorbed meditation, 
 as if this were a power which the Christian 
 believer has not yet attained. Those who 
 have most acutely observed these Hindu 
 experiences, however, doubt whether they are 
 reflective or meditative at all. Conversation 
 with the Hindu devotee would indicate that 
 neither before nor after his experience does 
 the Hindu seem to have much intellectual 
 content on which to meditate. The experi- 
 ence is a sort of sinking into quiescence with 
 an approach just as near the obliteration of 
 the personality as may be. At times this 
 sort of dreaminess has tinged mysticism in 
 Christian circles, but it is not Christian. The 
 thought which precedes experience conditions 
 the experience just as the experience in turn 
 conditions the thought. The idea of the 
 Hindu concerning God is that of a vague 
 almost impersonal allness and the Hindu's 
 
THE PERSONAL IN CHRISTIANITY 33 
 
 experience moves correspondingly towards 
 attempt to drop off the personal. After 
 years of such experiences the Hindu is, at 
 least in any ordinary understanding of terms, 
 less of a man than before. The experience 
 of the early Christian believer moved in a 
 different direction. It started with the 
 thought of a Personal Being and searched 
 for living contact with that Person. 
 
 A devout theologian, attempting to explain 
 the facts of Christian experience, once sug- 
 gested that something of a clue might be 
 found to the explanation of the mystery in 
 the study of hypnotism. In the hypnotic 
 state one life, without ceasing to be itself, 
 comes so thoroughly under the influence of 
 another life as practically for the time being 
 to parallel that other life. So the Divine 
 Life works through a human life. But the 
 flaw in this argument is that in a true sense 
 the personal life of a man in the hypnotic 
 state is not his own. The power of self- 
 direction is gone, and while the psychological 
 mechanism seems to be running in full force 
 the element of substantial self-direction is re- 
 duced to a minimum. The man is not him- 
 self. He is the mechanism for another. If 
 we were to attempt to hold him responsible 
 for any deed done in the hypnotic state we 
 
34 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 would be at once met with the plea that a 
 man in the hypnotic state is not himself. 
 
 This brings us to the broad contrast be- 
 tween all such experiences and the experi- 
 ence of the early Christians, — and the later 
 ones too for that matter. The early Chris- 
 tians lived in a day when extraordinary ex- 
 periences were not extraordinary in the sense 
 of rare or uncommon. Enough of Eastern 
 influence was to be found in the lands in 
 which Christianity first wrought to make the 
 spectacle of persons in emotional abnormality 
 very frequent. The Christian experience was 
 one which made the most of the man, — not 
 the least of him. It left the man larger after 
 the crisis than before. It added to his power 
 of self-direction rather than subtracted from 
 it. The heart of the difference appears also 
 in the Christian practice of prayer. The 
 prayers of the followers of Jesus were 
 articulate expressions of need. Prayer was 
 not an aimless dreaming. The life was in- 
 deed to be filled with the spirit of prayer ; 
 and the disciples, according to Paul, were to 
 pray without ceasing, but the core of prayer 
 was articulate speech expressing a need. 
 The formulas of the scribes and the incanta- 
 tions of the Gentiles were alike odious, for 
 the reason that true prayer was supposed to 
 
THE PERSONAL IN CHRISTIANITY 35 
 
 be addressed to a living person. Assuming 
 the person to whom prayer was addressed to 
 be a person at all, mechanical formularies 
 and magic passwords would mean nothing. 
 But the attempt on the part of the Christian 
 to pray implied something on the part of the 
 petitioner. It implied quickened thought and 
 sincere feeling and purposeful willingness to 
 work in the spirit of the uttered prayer. All 
 this meant the aroused expansion of the 
 soul. 
 
 There is nothing, we repeat, in Christian 
 experience as put before us in the New 
 Testament to indicate that the personal life 
 of the believer is in any way repressed. On 
 the contrary the personal distinctions remain 
 marked. It requires only the most casual 
 reading of the New Testament to discern 
 this. It is as patent to the ordinary reader 
 of the Scriptures as to the careful, critical 
 student. All questions of exact authorship 
 apart, — it will be admitted that the Synoptic 
 Gospels and the Fourth Gospel were written 
 by Christian believers. We do not recall 
 that any one has been hardy enough to at- 
 tempt to establish the contrary. Yet the dif- 
 ference in content and style between the 
 Fourth Gospel and the others furnishes food 
 for debate to this hour. Even in the Synop- 
 
36 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 tics, while it is clear that all authors worked 
 on material more or less common, very im- 
 portant differences in point of view appear. 
 Then there is a broad difference between the 
 admittedly Pauline epistles and the other 
 parts of the New Testament. In the sphere 
 of more intimate personal views we have the 
 record of serious divergence of opinion be- 
 tween Paul and Peter. The astonishing 
 variety of the New Testament literature we 
 should not expect if Christianity were not in- 
 tensely personal in aim, working to preserve 
 what is separate and individual in the life of 
 each believer. Even in the day of that hard- 
 and-fast theory of Biblical inspiration which 
 made each writer virtually a mechanical 
 amanuensis of the Divine, all that the holders 
 of the theory meant was that each man wrote 
 down what came to him from the divine 
 spirit without attempt to add to or take from. 
 Few upholders of the most rigid type of that 
 doctrine would have been willing to declare 
 that the separate writers did not write each 
 after his own fashion. According to Paul 
 contact with the same Spirit through prayer 
 led to greatly diversified results. Each man 
 wrought according to his own nature and in 
 his own fashion. Some were evangelists and 
 some prophets and some organizers. But 
 
THE PERSONAL IN CHRISTIANITY 37 
 
 there is very little to show that Paul meant 
 that the man whose nature fitted him to be an 
 evangelist became a prophet, or that the 
 prophet left off prophecy for church manage- 
 ment. 
 
 What then do the Scripture writers mean 
 when they speak of conversion, and a change 
 of heart, or a change of nature ? What is a 
 man's nature ? It is certainly not some 
 mysterious stuff in him. It can only be the 
 law or the laws according to which he acts. 
 Or if law suggests a regularity which is lack- 
 ing in much life we say that a man's nature 
 is the way he acts or lives. The only agent 
 is the man himself living and acting in a cer- 
 tain fashion. To convert the man, or to 
 change his heart or his nature, is so to act 
 upon him that he freely lives in a differ- 
 ent way or according to a different law. 
 This is what the Master seems to have 
 meant when He said that men must turn if 
 they are to come into the kingdom of God. 
 Men are off the track and must get back 
 upon the track. Some must turn squarely 
 around, and others must make, maybe a less 
 radical change in direction, but a change 
 nevertheless. This problem of direction is 
 all-important. The lost life is the life going 
 in the wrong direction, or acting according 
 
38 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 to the wrong law, or in the wrong way. 
 That the change in becoming a Christian is 
 so great that the man acts and thinks and 
 feels differently from before is witnessed to 
 by innumerable experiences. In the face of 
 the testimony it would be impossible to deny 
 this, even if there were the slightest desire 
 to do so, but there is nothing in the New 
 Testament to indicate that even in the most 
 marked conversion we are not dealing with 
 the same man after the experience as before. 
 His very face may change, but it is the same 
 face. His mind thinks different thoughts but 
 it is the same mind, — thinking with the same 
 peculiarities of mental procedure. The heart 
 desires a new life, but the quality of feeling is 
 the same. The will does differently but 
 works after the same fashion. The clearest 
 exposition of conversion is from Jesus Him- 
 self and that is in distincdy vital terms. The 
 most spiritually minded of the Gospel writers 
 evidently caught the Master's thought that 
 the process of coming into the kingdom of 
 God is to be described as a birth, and a birth 
 is not a mechanical process. It is the intro- 
 duction of that which is already to a degree 
 alive to a larger world of life. So with the 
 soul. With the proper surrender of the will, 
 — and surrender here means the free assump- 
 
THE PERSONAL IN CHRISTIANITY 39 
 
 tion by the will of a law of higher life, — the 
 soul comes into a new world. But just as the 
 organic peculiarities which make the body 
 distinctive are present before its coming into 
 the world so the peculiarities which make the 
 soul distinctive before its coming into the 
 kingdom of God are present after entrance 
 into that kingdom. The most remarkable 
 instance of conversion recorded in the New 
 Testament is that of Saul of Tarsus. Here 
 if anywhere a personal life would seem to 
 have been overwhelmed in such complete- 
 ness as to make the man utterly different 
 from what he was before. But great as was 
 this Damascus road experience it seems to 
 have been definitely sanctioned and accepted 
 by the will of Saul himself, and then to have 
 turned the activities of the convert into dif- 
 ferent channels. Saul was still Saul. Fur- 
 thermore he could not if he had tried 
 have cleared himself of thinking of Chris- 
 tianity in terms of the system in which 
 he had been brought up. He was the most 
 advanced of the early apostles and flung him- 
 self farthest from the Judaism in which he had 
 been trained, but he made even his anti- 
 Judaistic arguments in Judaistic terms. 
 
 The hearer however would have a right to 
 feel that in this discussion of the personal in 
 
40 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Christianity we had left something unsaid if 
 we were to stop at this point. For after all 
 Christianity does believe in profound inner 
 change. The only consideration we are urg- 
 ing is that this change does not wreck per- 
 sonal distinctiveness but that it makes the 
 personal more significant. Jesus said that 
 He came that men might have life and that 
 they might have it more abundantly. He 
 said also that the tree is to be known by its 
 fruits. The implication is that once a man 
 has become a Christian he yields more fruit 
 and better. It is matter for congratulation 
 that we live in a day when Christianity is 
 being judged by the standard by which it 
 asks to be judged, and the standard in ac- 
 cord with which it claims to produce its re- 
 sults. The question asked to-day of all sorts 
 of teaching is as to the kind of man produced 
 by the teachings. By this test Christianity 
 seeks to be judged, and that for the reason 
 that it aims at making men in the divine sense 
 more and more human. Is a man larger or 
 smaller after his practice of Christianity ? 
 What is the effect of prayer on the man who 
 prays ? These are the questions by which 
 Christianity is willing to stand or fall. The 
 effect on the man most intimately practicing 
 the belief is the effect by which we judge the 
 
THE PERSONAL IN CHRISTIANITY 4I 
 
 belief. The Christian should be perfectly- 
 willing not only to meet the question as to 
 what there is in Christianity to harm any one, 
 but also the further question as to what there 
 is in the system to help any one. Christianity 
 must not harm men and it must help them. 
 The insistence first of all upon moral right- 
 ness and after that upon the development of 
 the life to the largest and finest possible, — this 
 is the essential mark of belief in Christ. The 
 presence of aberrations here and there does 
 not detract from the truth of this central 
 claim for Christianity. Some of the persons 
 who compose the Christian Church run off 
 into extremes but the claim of the Church is 
 that the contact with God in prayer makes 
 men stronger and better. The test of prayer 
 is the effect on the man who prays. The 
 summary logic of Christianity is that beliefs 
 which make men true and great must be 
 themselves essentially true and great. 
 
 And now it may be supposed that this 
 lecture is teaching that Jesus wrought for ex- 
 treme individualism. We do not intend to 
 leave any such impression. The teaching of 
 Jesus stands between that radical doctrine 
 of the individual which can see nothing but 
 separate individuals and that radical doctrine 
 of society which would overlook and ignore 
 
42 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the individuals. The teaching of Jesus would 
 take account both of the separateness of the 
 individual and of the partly organic nature of 
 society. In this lecture we are trying to keep 
 close to the prime facts with which society 
 has to do. When we use the word personal 
 we do not mean personal as over against so- 
 cial, for we mean that the social is personal. 
 The actual situation in human life is not indi- 
 viduals existing separately but individuals 
 existing together. The idea that Christianity 
 would do anything to put individuals off in a 
 vacuum is utterly mistaken. No rational 
 being ever lived an altogether separate Hfe. 
 Individuals are made for one another, and 
 while the consciousness of the individual is 
 very distinct and separate, while there is in a 
 sense a wall built around the individual, the 
 further fact is that the individuals are so fitted 
 together that in the full measure they cannot 
 live apart. The social activities are merely 
 personal activities in which two or more, in- 
 stead of one, take part. 
 
 Jesus saw individuals just as they are. 
 While an individual is from one angle an 
 entity and a unity, from another angle he is 
 only a fraction. Taken by himself he is only 
 the centre on which numberless hooks hang, — 
 hooks which reach out to hold fast other indi- 
 
THE PERSONAL IN CHRISTIANITY 43 
 
 viduals. Theoretically speaking, the existence 
 of the individual self, — the personal centre, — 
 is about the most important fact we have. 
 Practically, the individual self amounts to 
 very little if we have not other selves with 
 whom the individual can come into touch. 
 The fact of the personal centre answers some 
 questions which the abstract thinkers have 
 been debating from the days of the Greeks. 
 Here we have the substance which both 
 changes and abides, and thus answers the 
 puzzle as to how in one being there can 
 be fixity and change. Practically, the per- 
 sonal centre is a centre of just nothing at all 
 if there is no possibility of reaching out to 
 others. It is in contact with those others 
 that the self comes to itself. So for example 
 Jesus took the family for granted as a spir- 
 itual fact. When He spoke of marriage as 
 an institution He was thinking only of the 
 man-made laws with which men express 
 certain ideas concerning the married state. 
 When He said that in heaven there is neither 
 marrying nor giving in marriage we would 
 have to make Him mean something contrary 
 to His whole system if we made Him mean 
 that the spiritual relationships which grow up 
 in the family are not essential and permanent. 
 It must not be forgotten that in the present 
 
44 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 lecture we are trying to keep close to the 
 spiritual and personal bases of the Christian 
 life. The artificial and instrumental elements 
 we shall appraise later. We cannot call any- 
 thing instrumental in our present use of the 
 word which goes so deeply towards the very 
 centre of the personal life as does the rela- 
 tionship in the family. The child could not 
 come to full personal existence if the older 
 person did not stand to him in the place of a 
 parent. It is said that in India for the pur- 
 poses of experiment a number of newly-born 
 children were once put together and kept to- 
 gether under the charge of nurses through 
 years of childhood, — the nurses under pain of 
 death not being allowed to utter a spoken 
 word. The children came to nothing. It is 
 hardly to be supposed that they were natu- 
 rally idiots, but after a few years their condi- 
 tion was practically that of idiocy. Now this 
 does not point merely to the importance of 
 language as an instrumental institution. It 
 points to the dwarfing of the soul when it 
 cannot hook itself to some life other than 
 itself. The parents and the children need 
 the merging of souls for the sake of recipro- 
 cal personal development. So with the hus- 
 bands and wives and the brothers and sisters. 
 Jesus saw this so closely that He utilized these 
 
THE PERSONAL IN CHRISTIANITY 45 
 
 inner spiritual relationships, not the artificial 
 and institutional phases of the family life, to 
 set forth man's relation to God. The man 
 does not come to full spiritual stature without 
 the communion with the Father above and 
 best reaches this communion in discharge of 
 duties to the persons in the world. 
 
 It is from this point of view that we must 
 approach the study of the Church. With 
 the instrumental aspect of the Church we 
 shall deal in the next lecture. Here we point 
 out that the life of Jesus and the experiences 
 which came to His followers in the early 
 days were calculated to deepen the founda- 
 tion on which the institutional side of the 
 Church was built up, — the dependence of 
 men upon one another in spiritual relation- 
 ships. Paul stood closest to the Master's 
 thought when he spoke of the Church as the 
 body of Christ. It is hard to think that he 
 intended by the phrase just to capture the 
 attention of his readers by a happy figure of 
 speech. Granting the validity of that con- 
 ception of the divine nearness which is so 
 much a part of our thinking to-day, Paul's 
 speech suggests the closeness of the spirit of 
 Christ to a body of believers in sympathy 
 with the divine purpose, — a closeness as 
 immediate as the closeness of a man to the 
 
46 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 responsive nerves and muscles of his own 
 body. But there is another aspect, — that 
 which Paul so strongly emphasized, the 
 significance of the activity of each part of 
 the body for every other part. We cannot 
 indeed speak of a society as an organism 
 with the same exactness with which we speak 
 of a human body as an organism, but the 
 expression is at least on the path to the 
 truth. The simplest psychological experi- 
 ment shows that as minds work together in 
 a common purpose the powers of each are 
 increased in defiance of the ordinary laws of 
 arithmetic. One hundred plus one hundred 
 no longer make two hundred, but the addi- 
 tion makes five hundred or a thousand. 
 There is a social reenforcement which defies 
 the familiar methods of estimate. And there 
 is more, — there is often the loosing of a 
 force in the individual which the individual 
 himself did not suspect that he had. We 
 observe this on the bad side when we see a 
 mob spirit so strong that men who would not 
 as individuals have thought of evil deeds, 
 under the influence of the mob spirit run 
 headlong to courses which in quieter mo- 
 ments they condemn. They wonder after- 
 wards if they could have been themselves in 
 the mob. In a sense they were not them- 
 
THE PERSONAL IN CHRISTIANITY 47 
 
 selves, — a different phase of the activity of 
 the self was started into action by the pres- 
 ence of the crowd. Now these laws which 
 work so clearly in crises of evil point to 
 possibilities for crises of good. We do not 
 surrender anything of what we said about 
 Christianity as not overwhelming the indi- 
 vidual when we do say that in righteous 
 community-action there are possibilities of 
 which the individual might not ever be 
 conscious if left to himself. The memory of 
 moments of exalted uplift which have oc- 
 curred as a righteous enthusiasm has taken 
 hold of men in masses remains in the indi- 
 vidual mind to help that mind towards 
 larger personal strength, just as truly as the 
 memory of deeds done under the influence 
 of evil social forces tends to degrade and 
 dwarf the mind as it looks back upon them. 
 The early Christians seem to have partaken 
 of this spirit of community. The fact that 
 they had all things in common does not have 
 as much economic significance for our times 
 as some radical reformers would have us 
 believe, but it certainly has profound spiritual 
 significance. It is the translation into 
 material terms of a feeling of community so 
 close that at least for a time material com- 
 munism was possible. 
 
48 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 This then is what we mean by the personal 
 in Christianity, — not the individual alone but 
 persons set in relations to one another, which 
 relations are as much a fact as is the separate 
 existence of the individuals. We do not 
 subscribe to a doctrine of individualism 
 which would attempt to pull the individual 
 out of his living relations and look at him 
 apart. This is not possible, — any more than 
 it would be possible to cut off a living arm 
 and expect to study it as still living. Nor 
 do we subscribe to a doctrine of society as 
 a thing-in-itself which would blur over the 
 individuals. We look upon persons as 
 realizing themselves in a Christian com- 
 munity. This is the fundamental. In a 
 sense even these persons are instrumental to 
 one another, but that is a forcing of the word 
 out of the meaning which we now have in 
 mind. The persons could more properly be 
 called parts of one another, or organs of one 
 another. The great aim of Christianity is to 
 minister to the needs of these persons thus 
 set together. Through all the ages the be- 
 lievers have taught that those who live in 
 this substantial community of like spiritual 
 aims are the Church of Christ, — part of it 
 visible and part invisible. Through the 
 spiritual union the society life becomes richer 
 
THE PERSONAL IN CHRISTIANITY 49 
 
 and through the enrichment of the commu- 
 nity fuller life comes to the individuals of the 
 community. 
 
 It is the aim of the Church to bring all 
 men into this substantial fellowship, not 
 merely into the instrumental organizations 
 which we call the separate churches. This 
 fellowship is the kingdom of God on earth 
 which all right-minded men are supposed to 
 try to advance. Now it is the purpose of 
 this series of lectures to try to show that this 
 personal community is entided to use what- 
 ever instruments can be employed to further 
 its fundamental human purpose. That pur- 
 pose of bringing life to persons being kept in 
 mind, the Christian community has a right to 
 deal with the merely instrumental in any such 
 fashion as will increase the life. The great 
 heresy then becomes the heresy of treating 
 lives as if they were in the mechanical sense 
 instruments and of treating instruments as if 
 they were ends in themselves. The human 
 outcome must be kept uppermost. 
 
 We know that human societies are allowed 
 to take considerable liberties if they do so in 
 the name of human welfare. If the aim is 
 simply to build up a state as a state some 
 actions are forthwith condemned which are 
 entirely legitimate when undertaken in the 
 
50 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 name of the largest human Hfe. To take an 
 extreme example, a state may no longer 
 legitimately go to war if its aim is merely to 
 extend its own boundaries as a state. We 
 recognize that wars are no longer morally 
 justifiable if undertaken just for national ag- 
 grandizement without reference to human 
 rights. But he would be hardy extremist 
 who would deny the right of nations of the 
 earth, preferably acting together, to move in 
 upon a nation which in its internecine strug- 
 gles had lost all sense of the value of human 
 life. In a sense the kingdom of God on earth 
 has the right to hold to some beliefs and to cast 
 others aside and to make practical adjust- 
 ments and readjustments if it does so in the 
 name and for the sake of the largest and best 
 religious life. 
 
 Coming back to the expression of Paul, the 
 body of Christ, — we may say that the body 
 has a right to use some instruments which 
 are clearly mechanical. It has a right to 
 fashion for itself weapons of offense and 
 defense, to make building tools, or to make a 
 house, so to speak, in which it may live. It 
 has the right to change these instruments to 
 make them better ; or, if they have served 
 their purpose, to cast them aside for some- 
 thing better. Instruments are to be judged 
 
THE PERSONAL IN CHRISTIANITY 5 1 
 
 only by what they can do, — but they must 
 not be taken as ends in themselves. In some 
 cases we can see this clearly. There is no 
 more sin in changing an item of church or- 
 ganization, for example, for something better 
 than in throwing aside a poorly tempered 
 knife for one better tempered. Thus stated 
 the principle seems obvious enough, but it 
 may lead us rather far. But it cannot lead us 
 away from the truth. Truth after all is life at 
 its fullest and best. We use whatever instru- 
 ments serve the purpose of such life. 
 
 But the word instrument is too mechanical 
 to express some elements which after all are 
 instrumental, though in a finer sense. Food 
 for example is instrumental, and men live 
 upon intellectual and spiritual foods as well 
 as upon bread. Man does not live by bread 
 alone. But the spiritual foods are to be 
 judged by the kind of spiritual vitality they 
 furnish. Any man must have a care in rec- 
 ommending that masses of men change 
 their food, but after all no suggestion is too 
 radical if it provides for larger and fuller 
 satisfaction of the life needs. When a phys- 
 iologist who advocated the change for the 
 oriental world from a rice to a wheat diet was 
 met by the rejoinder that it is wild to sug- 
 gest a change in a food on which a race has 
 
52 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 lived for ages, his retort was that it is not 
 wild if that diet is the reason why the race 
 has amounted to so little. Apart from the 
 dietetic merits of the case the physiologist 
 had the correct principle. The needs of the 
 race have the right of way. 
 
 There are some other elements which are 
 like the atmosphere in which the body moves. 
 These elements seem to be fine in them- 
 selves and to stand in their own right. In 
 reality they have a right to existence only so 
 long as they minister to a need. Works of 
 art seem to stand in their own right. But 
 they have no right except as they satisfy 
 some artistic instinct. We have seen stand- 
 ards of art change. The art ministers to a 
 finer need than a merely utilitarian tool to be 
 sure, but it ministers nevertheless and stands 
 or falls by its ministry. 
 
 We repeat that it is the purpose of these 
 lectures to insist upon this distinction between 
 the persons, who are ends in themselves, and 
 the instruments which minister to the per- 
 sons. We object to treating the personal as 
 instrumental, or the instrumental as if it had 
 personal rights. We do not pretend to say 
 just what use in a particular case the Chris- 
 tian community is to make of a given instru- 
 ment but we do insist that the highest and 
 
THE PERSONAL IN CHRISTIANITY 53 
 
 best life of persons is to be the aim of all 
 handling of instruments. The insistence 
 upon this fullness of personal life will help us 
 find our way about in some fields not tech- 
 nically religious but which can be utilized for 
 a religious purpose. Much of our confusion 
 comes from our taking ecclesiastical factors 
 and philosophic and moral and social doc- 
 trines as if they were ends in themselves. 
 The Christian persons are the ends in them- 
 selves. The sacredness inheres in them. The 
 Christians are so to use everything instru- 
 mental as to make the personal more sacred. 
 
LECTURE II 
 
 THE INSTRUMENTAL 
 IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
LECTURE II 
 
 THE INSTRUMENTAL IN 
 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 WE have laid stress on the personal 
 as the object in Christianity's en- 
 deavour. What our religion aims 
 at is the unfolding and enrichment of the life 
 of human beings. The needs of persons are 
 uppermost in value and have the right of 
 way. All else is instrumental. This does 
 not in the least minimize the importance of 
 the instrumental : indeed it makes the instru- 
 mental indispensable as furnishing the means 
 by which persons attain to larger life. But 
 discrimination between the personal and the 
 instrumental gives us a guide and a standard. 
 If our intent is to treat certain devices of the 
 Christian system as ends in themselves our 
 attitude and conduct will be different from 
 what it will be if these factors have instru- 
 mental place. Some instrumental elements 
 are indeed means of grace. But the means 
 of grace are not the ends of grace. An end 
 57 
 
58 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 of grace cannot be an instrument but must 
 be a person. 
 
 Foremost among these means of grace we 
 place the Christian Scriptures. We all admit 
 theoretically to-day that our Scriptures belong 
 in the instrumental relationship, but very 
 often we treat the Book as an end in itself. 
 Now of course there has been sensibleness 
 and wisdom in some defense of the Scrip- 
 tures which has pronounced them ends in 
 themselves. In times past this position helped 
 in the preservation of the Scriptures. If some 
 believers had not looked upon the Book as 
 possessing a peculiar sacredness in itself it 
 might never have travelled down to us. But 
 even such valiant defenders if closely cross- 
 examined would have placed the sacredness 
 of the Book in what it can do for men. 
 Strictly speaking the Book is instrumental. 
 If a community's last available food supply 
 in time of famine could be preserved only by 
 some one's giving his life, many men would 
 offer to die. But this would not be because 
 the heroes would think of the food. They 
 would think of the lives that the food would 
 be instrumental in saving. 
 
 At the outset we protest again that we do 
 not mean by instrumental anything me- 
 chanical. The Book is indeed a sword of 
 
THE INSTRUMENTAL IN CHRISTIANITY 59 
 
 offense and defense, but it is instrumental 
 also in those finer shades of meaning at 
 which we hinted in the last chapter. It is 
 the food upon which men sustain themselves 
 in the search for God. It is the clear atmos- 
 phere which men breathe as they strive after 
 the kingdom of righteousness. It abounds 
 with ideas which seem to stand in their own 
 right as good and true and beautiful but 
 which after all have their deepest claim in 
 that they minister to human wants. Take 
 for example that idea of God with which we 
 find ourselves as the result of Biblical study. 
 This, we say, is fine in itself. Apart from 
 any utilitarian query as to the effect on us 
 of accepting this idea the idea stands by 
 itself as a final conception, — one which we 
 contemplate for itself, as we would contem- 
 plate a masterpiece in painting or in 
 sculpture. But even such masterpieces are 
 instrumental as we use the term. They 
 minister to a human demand even if the 
 demand is satisfied not so much by practical 
 utilization as by adoring contemplation. We 
 must keep steadily before us that we are 
 viewing the life of man in its highest ranges 
 and are asking what will best suit the highest 
 needs. The purpose of the readers of the 
 Scriptures has been from the beginning 
 
6o PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 loftily practical, — they have used the Book 
 as a means of grace. This being true it 
 seems a legitimate inquiry on the part of 
 Christians as to how to make the Scriptures 
 more completely and specifically means of 
 grace. We are not doing honour to a sacred 
 idol before which we must bow down, but 
 rather awarding proper place to a weapon, a 
 food, an atmosphere. On the plea for in- 
 crease of usefulness we may so deal with 
 weapons and foods and atmospheres as to 
 make the most out of them. It is not unfair 
 to affirm that down to the present not enough 
 has been made of the Scriptures. They 
 have not been used with the wisest economy. 
 If we regard them as a field we must admit 
 that they have not been intensively cultivated. 
 For proof of this we have only to inquire as 
 to how many devout Bible followers habitu- 
 ally read widely throughout the Book. Al- 
 most every mature Bible reader to-day has 
 been brought up on the doctrine of the 
 sacredness of the entire Book, but not all 
 readers carry that doctrine into practice. 
 The reading actually moves through some 
 of the loftier eloquence of the prophets, 
 tarries delightedly around the favourite 
 psalms, pores long over the Gospels, and 
 catches the glow of some of the epistles. 
 
THE INSTRUMENTAL IN CHRISTIANITY 6l 
 
 But long stretches of Scripture territory have 
 been neglected. There are abandoned farms 
 in the Scripture. It ought to be worth while 
 to see if some use cannot be found for these 
 Scriptural acres. If we believe that the Book 
 as a whole contains a revelation from God 
 why confine ourselves to a few passages, im- 
 portant as these may be ? If the Scripture 
 is indeed the daily bread upon which the 
 believer lives why forget that the preparation 
 of bread so as to win from it the most nutri- 
 ment is one of the chief functions of the 
 housewife ? The Bible was made for man 
 and not man for the Bible. The Bible then 
 should be so used as to make it mean the 
 most for man. 
 
 It is a mistake to suppose that modern 
 Biblical study has on the whole or in the 
 main pared down the useful portions of the 
 Scriptures or thrown away parts of the 
 Scriptures. A few years ago it was a favour- 
 ite procedure with some opponents of the 
 more recent methods of approaching the 
 Bible to refer to modern students as the 
 mutilators of the Scriptures. But this misses 
 the point. Dismissing the extremists here 
 and there whose assumptions and conclu- 
 sions are clearly fanciful or forced, the intent 
 of present-day study is to get the most out of 
 
62 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the Scriptures. We do not get the most 
 from the Scriptures by using them without 
 discrimination, any more than we get the 
 most from any other instrument by treating 
 it thus. Employing the old figure of the 
 kernel and the husk, — economy in the han- 
 dling of grain does not show itself in a willing- 
 ness to eat husk and all. There is a more 
 excellent way. To begin with we must re- 
 member in our radical impatience with husks 
 that there could not have been grain if there 
 had not been husks, and next that even after 
 the grain is threshed from the husk there is a 
 market value for husks in the economy of 
 the prudent farmer. We can use the Scrip- 
 tures wisely only by estimating the present 
 usefulness of their contents in the light of the 
 demands of the highest Christian life of our 
 time. To do this we must find what a par- 
 ticular Biblical passage meant for the people 
 to whom it was written, and then discover 
 what message it has for to-day. The pres- 
 ent-day Biblical schools are not throwing 
 away anything. They are distinguishing be- 
 tween orders of utility. Some parts of the 
 Scripture contain the very sum of practical 
 wisdom for our guidance to-day. They set 
 before us the principles which must be prac- 
 ticed into life if we would know that doctrine 
 
THE INSTRUMENTAL IN CHRISTIANITY 63 
 
 of Jesus which is centrally Christian. There 
 are other parts, which so far as daily guid- 
 ance is concerned, may have little bearing on 
 the immediate duties before us. But these 
 parts are mightily instructive for the under- 
 standing of the ways of God with men. 
 More than all this there is a fresh air of life 
 itself blowing across even what we might 
 think of as the desert passages of the Bible. 
 The discerning student sees that various pas- 
 sages of the Scripture do not cease to have 
 all use when they lose an immediate matter-of- 
 fact use. The value for reflection and for 
 contemplation still abides. 
 
 Modern understanding, then, finds more 
 value in the Scriptures to-day than before, — 
 only the worth of some parts is of a different 
 order than formerly. Jesus Himself told us 
 that He would set aside some requirements 
 of the Mosaic law. But is the Mosaic law 
 then of no value ? It is of eternal value as 
 showing how God dealt with men. We often 
 declare that the Old Testament Scriptures 
 were written in a time so different from ours 
 that they have but little concern for us. We 
 holders of this view might get some light 
 from the fact that many Old Testament 
 specialists to-day are among the most devout 
 of men, and that these scholars urge the study 
 
64 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 of the Old Testament for devotional purposes. 
 The divine method is apparent enough in the 
 Old Testament. As to the local and tempo- 
 rary and even heathen coverings which form 
 the husk in which much Scriptural truth is 
 clothed, is it important to know which is 
 kernel and which is husk so that we may 
 throw the husk away ? Not at all. Rather 
 so that we may use both kernel and husk 
 aright. 
 
 We emphasize and reemphasize the dif- 
 ference in orders of usefulness. There is the 
 usefulness for which the man seeks who 
 wishes immediate light or consolation. This 
 man may not get much from the Old Testa- 
 ment historical narratives or even from some 
 of the epistles. But another man is not thus 
 under the pressure of crisis. He has oppor- 
 tunity to brood over the Book. He is con- 
 cerned not merely with immediate guidance 
 but also with the larger and longer views of 
 God's dealings with men. He searches the 
 pages of all commentators. He asks as to 
 the times when such and such a conception 
 emerged, who was the prophet to whom it 
 was first revealed, what was the motive 
 which brought it forth, what in the concep- 
 tion is common to the conceptions of the 
 peoples round about the chosen people. 
 
THE INSTRUMENTAL IN CHRISTIANITY 65 
 
 This student may reach conclusions which 
 to his ecclesiastical neighbours seem very 
 astounding but which nevertheless vitally 
 minister to his religious cravings. For this 
 man too is on the search for God, and one 
 road to God is by study of God's methods. 
 If a man's ways are significant as revealing 
 the nature of the man, why should God's 
 ways be any less significant as revealing the 
 nature of God ? A single passage may not 
 itself be illuminating as to the nature of God, 
 but the entire history of the passage, as the 
 modern student sees it, may be more illu- 
 minating than any direct statement of divine 
 purpose could be. And this is the more im- 
 portant because there comes with such study 
 not only intellectual enlightenment but that 
 development of the religious instinct which 
 marks the devout Christian student. Find- 
 ing God has one meaning to a man dis- 
 tressed by sin or burdened by sorrow, but a 
 different and possibly a higher significance 
 to the man who is seeking knowledge of 
 God for the sake of understanding Him in 
 the subtler, finer manifestations and for the 
 sake of bringing those revelations to men. 
 A sneer used to go the rounds to the effect 
 that the scholarly Biblical student is likely to 
 be a woodenly intellectual creature with no 
 
66 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 conspicuous development of religious intui- 
 tion. The observation of the present speaker 
 does not profess to be extensive, but those 
 who know best the foremost Scripture stu- 
 dents of our time report that the impression 
 left from contact with such men has been not 
 more of intellectual than of spiritual acumen. 
 From acquaintance with such men there may 
 easily come a confidence in the efBcacy of 
 close study of even the supposedly driest 
 parts of the Old Testament as a means of 
 grace. If the Bible is the sword of the 
 Spirit we should know how to take hold 
 of it : much depends on handhng a sword 
 aright. If the Bible is food the more we 
 know about it the better. If it is atmos- 
 phere the more pressing the duty of learning 
 to breathe deeply. 
 
 The current investigations of the Scripture 
 result in giving the Scripture larger utility. 
 Even in the parts where we follow the motto 
 of knowledge for its own sake we are seeking 
 for that high utility which ministers to and 
 satisfies the mind in the search for God. So 
 that the Church has a right to look upon the 
 Bible from the point of view of each succeed- 
 ing day, for the sake of the welfare of the 
 persons of each succeeding day. It was not 
 a sin to translate the Scriptures into common 
 
THE INSTRUMENTAL IN CHRISTIANITY 67 
 
 tongues. It was not a sin to allow the print- 
 ing press to aid in the spread of the Gospel. 
 It is not a sin to take the intellectual instru- 
 ments of our time and with them to make the 
 Bible count for more. There can be little 
 doubt that the scientifically forged tools for 
 Biblical study will prove in the end to be 
 among the most powerful propagating 
 agencies in the spread of Scriptural knowl- 
 edge. Some parts of the Book are read in- 
 telligently to-day that were hardly read at all 
 twenty-five years ago. Some classes of per- 
 sons to-day devotedly study the Scriptures 
 who could hardly have been brought to look 
 at them on the assumptions of twenty-five 
 years ago. The wider the use of the Scrip- 
 tures the more useful they are, of course. 
 Nothing will be thrown out of the Scriptures 
 by modern study. The emphasis will be 
 changed. If we have in the Bible the 
 best spiritual instrument the obligation is 
 upon us to learn how best to use the instru- 
 ment. 
 
 This was the plan of Jesus. He dared set 
 .side some of the teaching of the Scripture 
 iDecause it could not be brought into living 
 contact with the moral situation in which He 
 found Himself. But He set aside only in 
 that He changed the emphasis. He did not 
 
68 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 cast anything out of the Book. All through 
 the Scriptures He saw the turning of 
 prophecy towards Himself. He recognized 
 the moral and spiritual purpose in the parts 
 which He placed in a different order of im- 
 portance. Just so a physician to-day might 
 look through the sanitary requirements of the 
 Mosaic law and pronounce them insufficient. 
 He might say that our modern knowledge of 
 disease has outdated these requirements. 
 But he might rejoice to claim the Hebrew 
 leaders as worthy of all imitation in their in- 
 tention to make it a religious duty to care 
 for the welfare of men by the prevention of 
 disease. The nations round about the He- 
 brews did not care so much for the welfare 
 of men. The trend of the Hebrew religion 
 in the direction of correct principles of phys- 
 ical living is immensely significant. So 
 also a social student might to-day read the 
 land laws of the ancient Hebrews. He 
 might find that we cannot carry out just such 
 land laws to-day, but he would be sure to 
 declare that these advance in the direction of 
 economic justice, and that they are in prin- 
 ciple of far loftier conception than are many 
 laws in so-called civilized nations to-day. 
 The attempts to guard against the waste of 
 the land, and the attempts also to prevent 
 
THE INSTRUMENTAL IN CHRISTIANITY 69 
 
 extreme monopoly of land in private hands 
 were very noteworthy. In these as in so 
 many other instances the movement of the 
 Scripture is interesting because of its direc- 
 tion. Ideal humanity was the goal of the 
 lawmakers and the prophets. It should be 
 the goal in our modern reading of the su- 
 preme instrument of the Church. We are 
 entitled to use the Scriptures so as to make 
 them mean the most to us. If we distort 
 them they will not in the end mean most to 
 us. If we do not take account of the historic 
 truth about them they cannot mean the most 
 to us. If we allow ourselves to follow after 
 extreme radical or conservative views which 
 get away from actual basis in history they 
 cannot mean the most to us. We are to 
 seek to know all we can about them and to 
 apply their revelation in the wisest manner, 
 — seeking always for the best good of the 
 persons for whose benefit the Scriptures are 
 before us. 
 
 If we could all come to this position it 
 would hasten the passing of that conflict 
 which happily is dying out, — the conflict be- 
 tween radicals and conservatives over the 
 Scriptures. The difficulty here as with so 
 many wrangles of the sort is in the failure to 
 clear up the assumptions. One help in clear- 
 
yo PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 ing up would be to ask what is the direction 
 of the Scriptural movement. What are the 
 ends in the kingdom of God? These are 
 the members of the kingdom. The further 
 question then becomes as to how we can 
 best serve the persons in the kingdom. We 
 take literally the doctrine that the Bible is a 
 means of grace. It will be best defended 
 and preserved by devoting it to the most and 
 the best use. With this simple understand- 
 ing we are better able to say how to make 
 the best use of it. Some of the greatest dis- 
 coveries in the world have come as men have 
 discovered that the things around us are in- 
 tended for use. There was a time when men 
 fancied that mighty streams of water were 
 such sacred parts of God's universe that any 
 attempt to harness them could only be 
 blasphemy. Then there came men who saw 
 that the highest reverence towards God's 
 streams was to utilize them, — mills and cities 
 were the result. So wath the Scriptures. 
 They are not sacred objects in themselves. 
 They prove their divineness only as they are 
 used to the utmost. The great betrayal of 
 trust would be, — in a day which is making 
 the most of every other manner of instru- 
 ment, — not to make the most of the Scrip- 
 tural instrument. We cannot bend this 
 
THE INSTRUMENTAL IN CHRISTIANITY 7 1 
 
 sword enough to break it. Sharpening its 
 edge does not grind it away. 
 
 The recollection that these modern Biblical 
 methods are wholly instrumental may help 
 the preacher in the work of preaching. The 
 sermon is an utterance of results, not an ex- 
 planation of the details of the instruments by 
 which the results are obtained. There is 
 place for the discussion of the instruments, 
 but not in the pulpit. The spectacle of in- 
 struments is apt to be disquieting in any case 
 but results speak for themselves. The worst 
 sort of talking shop is talking of instruments. 
 The surgeon anaesthetizes his patient before 
 he lets him see the instrument with which the 
 operation is performed. After it is all over 
 the instrument can be exhibited and ex- 
 plained. The modern Biblical instruments 
 are enormously beneficial to the believer but 
 it is not the part of homiletic wisdom to make 
 too free an exhibition of them until the be- 
 liever is familiar with the results which they 
 produce. 
 
 When we come to creed and dogma we 
 find that these too are instruments of the 
 kingdom of God. But some one will say 
 that these are truth, and that they stand in 
 their own right. What is truth ? Truth in 
 ^he Christian sense is not mere intellectual 
 
72 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 formula. It is the truth of life. It is life. 
 When Jesus spoke of Himself as the Truth 
 we are not to think that He had in mind the 
 primarily intellectual. But of course the ob- 
 jector means that the statements of the creed 
 are true as statements. Even if they are 
 they have as their justification the feeding 
 and strengthening of the mind of the be- 
 liever and are to be judged by their suc- 
 cess in doing so. In religion we are not 
 always in the realm of objective proof. The 
 only way we can judge of the validity of be- 
 lief is by noting what happens to the man 
 who beHeves. 
 
 The instrumental character of the creeds is 
 very apparent as we look at the causes of 
 their origin. Even if they are final state- 
 ments incapable of improvement they were 
 framed for a purpose. The Church was in 
 danger of splitting into fragments because of 
 lack of authoritative pronouncement on this 
 or that, or there was required a compact 
 shaping of the truth for fighting purposes, or 
 for purposes of exposition. Or, we may be- 
 lieve, the Christian community had attained 
 through historic processes to a fresh insight 
 which must be set forth systematically to 
 mark an advance. 
 
 We can sometimes discern a tendency 
 
THE INSTRUMENTAL IN CHRISTIANITY 73 
 
 most clearly when it is working on a min- 
 imum of material. Suppose we look at one 
 or two dogmas where the tendency is very 
 clear from the fact that there is little to work 
 upon. For example consider the Roman 
 Catholic doctrine of the immaculate concep- 
 tion. To provide for the sinlessness of Jesus 
 the Roman Church teaches a sinlessness of 
 Mary so complete that any ancestral tendency 
 towards evil was cut off from Mary. What 
 is the explanation of this doubtful dogma? 
 Just the necessity of providing for the sin- 
 lessness of Jesus. The doctrine is entitled to 
 larger respect for its recognition of a diffi- 
 culty and for its courage in facing it than for 
 any positive contribution towards the solu- 
 tion. Or take the doctrine of purgatory. 
 Very worthy motives are back of the doc- 
 trine. One motive is to deal with the prob- 
 lem of the spiritual condition of souls at the 
 best manifestly unfit without further prepara- 
 tion for a perfect environment. Another mo- 
 tive is to keep close the connection between 
 the ones who have passed on and those who 
 remain here. Of course in a field devoid of 
 data the bare tendencies back of the doctrine 
 are about all that is apparent, but the motives 
 are entitled to respect. 
 
 But other creed-making tendencies have 
 
74 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 more to work upon. Take the historic data 
 as to Christ's manifestation of Himself to His 
 disciples in the resurrection appearances. 
 The items of the record are scanty, to be 
 sure, but they are flooded with the light 
 which comes out of our familiarity with the 
 Christ-character and out of nineteen centu- 
 ries of the history of the Church. If the 
 items were not recorded of Christ they might 
 possibly be dismissed as of no great conse- 
 quence, but when they are recorded as of the 
 career of Christ the aspect changes. For the 
 problem of Christian thinking is at least 
 measurably to express the fullness of life in 
 Christ. We are perfectly willing to admit 
 that it is from the point of view of those con- 
 vinced of the eternal life in Christ that we 
 read the story of the resurrection appear- 
 ances. The Church's appreciation of Christ, 
 dealing with the recorded data, results in the 
 dogma that Christ passed through death and 
 revealed Himself to His disciples in such fash- 
 ion as to convince them that He liveth for- 
 evermore. In a word the pressure of the life 
 of Christ is the driving force in creed-making. 
 In this or that detail the items of creed as to 
 Christ may need improvement, but the creeds 
 are not as likely to err from overstatement as 
 from understatement. We have not a Christ 
 
THE INSTRUMENTAL IN CHRISTIANITY 75 
 
 who shrinks within the creedal phrases which 
 we make for Him, but one who outgrows the 
 phrases. The life of the Person is the end 
 which we are trying to set forth. All our 
 instruments are inadequate, — inadequate not 
 so much through maladjustment as through 
 lack of size. The great fact is Christ Him- 
 self. He has been the dynamic shaping the 
 creeds. The separate items of the creeds 
 have been so many attempts by successive 
 ages to put into formal terms a measure of 
 the impact of Christ. The creeds are both 
 results of the Personal Force which stands at 
 the centre of the Christian system, and also 
 instruments to help us to know Christ. The 
 Life does not shrink, we repeat, but grows in 
 size when set in the larger frame of the ad- 
 vancing statements of the ages. This or 
 that creed could be spoken of as an attempt 
 to construct a lens with which to read the 
 Christ-thought the better, if it were not 
 that the figure is so inadequate. The mean- 
 ing of Christ is so vast that it is always out- 
 standing, — needing no lens for its discern- 
 ment. The creeds have been attempts of the 
 Church to utter for herself in compendious 
 phrases the imprint which Christ has left on 
 a particular time. They were partly instru- 
 ments of self-expression, — the Church feeling 
 
76 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 that she must burst forth into exclamation 
 and declaration. After that they possessed 
 expository and argumentative value. 
 
 What we said in discussing the Scriptures 
 we say again in speaking of creed. The 
 question as to the usefulness of a creed is 
 not always easily answered. The immediate 
 and original demand for this or that formula 
 may have passed away. But because I do 
 not believe a particular article, say of Cal- 
 vinism, I have no call to sneer at the lack of 
 usefulness of Calvinism. I may thus show 
 myself a spiritual kinsman of the tourist who 
 could see no usefulness in the Parthenon. 
 The practical utility is not all. Some sys- 
 tems of theology are of perennial intellectual 
 worth as religious creations, deserving look- 
 ing at for the stimulus and thrill which they 
 impart to the mind. The systems are at 
 least wonderfully made. They gratify in- 
 tense intellectual cravings on the part of 
 thinkers, — inadequate as they may be as 
 permanent formulations. And acquaintance 
 with them helps us bring ourselves into a 
 spiritual unity with the mighty men of faith, 
 gone on before, who have left not too numer- 
 ous a race of spiritual descendants. The 
 purpose of the more important creeds, no 
 matter when uttered, was that of Christian 
 
THE INSTRUMENTAL IN CHRISTIANITY 77 
 
 thinking to-day, — to exalt Ciirist with the 
 very highest intellectual tribute. So far as 
 these greater creeds are concerned more than 
 one devout life which has not accepted this 
 or that formal statement has found brooding 
 over the creeds nevertheless a source of spir- 
 itual quickening. Such creedal utterances 
 are not dead to one capable of discerning 
 their aim. As ends in themselves to be cher- 
 ished above all else their value would be less 
 than as instruments and centres of inspira- 
 tion tending to quicken the life of the faith- 
 ful. 
 
 And this brings us to our attitude towards 
 the religious declarations of our own later 
 time. Here once more we ask that the di- 
 rection towards which a doctrine points be 
 kept in mind. A statement serves a two- 
 fold purpose : it utters as far as possible the 
 thought of the speaker, and it addresses it- 
 self to the intelligence of others. The life 
 needs of both speaker and of him spoken to 
 are the imperative facts. The person speak- 
 ing and the person addressed are the ends 
 in themselves. The self-expression of the 
 persons speaking and the enlightenment and 
 quickening of those addressed, — these are 
 the chief considerations. Not forgetting that 
 intellects have legitimate appetites and that 
 
78 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Statements of doctrine must give heed to 
 scientific and logical and rational grounds, 
 we must insist that all doctrines are instru- 
 ments and succeed or fail by the extent to 
 which they fulfill their purpose in use. What 
 manner of appeal do they utter to the whole 
 man? How thoroughly do they serve the 
 largest and best life ? Will a man by accept- 
 ing them become more or less ? Will he be- 
 come better or worse, — for a man cannot 
 sincerely marry his mind to a doctrine with- 
 out becoming better or worse. Dealing ad- 
 mittedly with a realm where strict objective 
 knowledge is out of the question the creed 
 can only be looked upon as an instrument 
 for the furtherance of right religious life, and 
 the only test is the quality and volume of 
 life which follows acceptance of the creed. 
 Of course the effects of some beliefs can be 
 foreseen by any man of common sense. The 
 straight flying in the face of fact or logic will 
 bring a fall sooner or later ; but in the inter- 
 pretation of scientific fact and logical con- 
 clusions the best creed is the one which as 
 an instrument furthers the best kind of life. 
 By the rights of humanity we are entided to 
 deal just as freely with the creedal statements 
 which we all have to make, — and each of us 
 has in one way or another to fashion some 
 
THE INSTRUMENTAL IN CHRISTIANITY J^ 
 
 sort of creed for himself, — as the calls of the 
 largest life seem to make necessary. 
 
 An interesting study in practical creed 
 making can be pursued by observing a proc- 
 ess going on before our very eyes in the 
 unfolding of socialism. You will understand 
 that I am not taking sides one way or an- 
 other as to the worth of socialism. I use 
 this illustration simply because I can speak 
 of socialism without taking sides. Here is a 
 body of doctrines held by more persons in 
 Christendom to-day than any other set of 
 doctrines whatsoever. And the doctrines are 
 in amazingly large part held not by absorp- 
 tion or inheritance but as the result of at least 
 an attempt at deliberate reflection. Whether 
 they think rightly or not there are probably 
 more persons thinking in the ranks of the 
 socialists than in any other group on earth. 
 Now socialism in the main seeks to accom- 
 plish its results by persuasion. I am speak- 
 ing of the socialist who thoroughly under- 
 stands his own system. Such a socialist 
 realizes that the only path by which socialism 
 can draw near is the voluntary adoption of 
 the principles of socialism by a good deal 
 more than a majority of the voters of any 
 nation. Socialism cannot succeed, and its 
 leaders know it cannot succeed, with too 
 
8o PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 large a minority of irreconcilables. While 
 the socialist would admit that the resort to 
 force here and there might apparently hasten 
 the day of the formal coming of socialism he 
 knows that the real arrival can only take 
 place as the people are persuaded of the doc- 
 trine and intentionally adopt that doctrine. 
 
 Now the socialistic doctrines have as their 
 goal the production of tangible results. This 
 does not mean that they are contrived solely 
 for campaign efBcacy : the works of Marx 
 strive at giving a historically just account of 
 industrial evolution from the beginnings of 
 industry which the few only can take time to 
 read. But the intent is primarily to persuade. 
 It is interesting then to note how the ortho- 
 dox tenets of socialism change as the years 
 go by. They change because they will not 
 continue to work in their first form. So we 
 have modifications of the doctrine of eco- 
 nomic determinism and of class struggle. 
 Many of the Marxian teachers insist in all 
 sincerity that they are not making doctrinal 
 changes but they are doing so nevertheless ; — 
 there is nothing commoner in the history of 
 thought than a man's making modifications 
 in a system to which he adheres while pro- 
 fessing that he is merely clarifying his mas- 
 ter's utterance. The socialist is — by consent 
 
THE INSTRUMENTAL IN CHRISTIANITY 8l 
 
 which reaches even to his enemies — strug- 
 gUng for the betterment of human life ; and 
 he is employing his conceptions as tools with 
 which to do this. He is trying to help men. 
 He fashions and refashions his instruments 
 as he moves along. A very able and persua- 
 sive exponent of socialism is J. Ramsay 
 MacDonald, Chairman of the British Labour 
 Party. Ramsay has remarked significantly 
 that Marxism had to begin with sharp and 
 extreme phrasings but that in the wielding of 
 the instrument the sharpness of the edge was 
 inevitably worn off. If similarly the edge of 
 a Christian creed wears ofif we are at liberty 
 to believe that perhaps the instrument is 
 better for not being too sharp, or we may 
 sharpen the instrument if it will do better 
 work for men when sharpened. So far as 
 minor beliefs are concerned we may cease to 
 use them altogether. Even the most ortho- 
 dox learn how to put some details of creed 
 out of ordinary reach. They may still have 
 them in the locker, — but in the remote corner. 
 If this is true of creed it is also true of 
 ritual. Ritual meets some requirements of 
 the religious nature on the aesthetic side : 
 and here we seem to be in a realm where 
 things as well as persons have value on their 
 own account. The a3sthetic seems peculiarly 
 
82 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 to Stand as an end-in-itself. But here again 
 the reference must be to Hving needs of living 
 men. The Church has a right to appro- 
 priate and baptize anything which appeals to 
 fine taste and true feeling. She will do this 
 whenever she feels that by so doing she can 
 minister to human need, just as she did when 
 she took over from what we would technically 
 pronounce heathenism a whole body of beau- 
 tiful Christmas symbols and consecrated them 
 to the delight of her children. When ritual is 
 inadequate it will be transformed or supple- 
 mented. Phillips Brooks has told a pathetic- 
 ally amusing story of the helplessness of a 
 body of high churchmen who met to find 
 consolation in prayer after the Chicago fire. 
 There were many beautiful prayers in the 
 regular collection but none seemed just 
 suited to the particular type of affliction then 
 upon the nation, and the worthy brethren 
 were sadly at a loss ! In such plight any 
 body of normal human beings will find room 
 for expression of religious yearning in what- 
 ever form seems best suited to the purpose 
 whether the Church sanctions extemporaneous 
 prayer or not. 
 
 Finally we look at the Church itself in its 
 instrumental aspect. It will be recalled that 
 in the previous lecture we drew a distinction 
 
THE INSTRUMENTAL IN CHRISTIANITY 83 
 
 between the more personal and the more 
 artificial aspects of the Church. The Church 
 is the actual persons bound together to do 
 the will of God. This personal community 
 reaches under and through the separate arti- 
 ficial alignments and includes many who are 
 not technically united with any organization. 
 About the relations of the various systems to 
 one another we shall speak in a moment. 
 Here we call attention to the spiritual peril of 
 identifying the actual personal human fact 
 with any artificial fact like this or that partic- 
 ular type of organization. 
 
 The Church as a body of persons actually 
 knit together in sympathy is an end in itself. 
 No organizational constitution of laws and 
 rules, however, can have anything but an in- 
 strumental sacredness. We may do well to 
 encourage devotion to an organization as an 
 organization but in such case the emphasis 
 must be upon the evident fitness of the or- 
 ganization to accomplish results which can 
 be stated in human terms. The Church as 
 a creature of laws and rules is not an end in 
 itself. 
 
 Of course it is understood that distinctly 
 denominational considerations are out of 
 place in a lectureship like this, but those 
 who are Methodists may recall that the 
 
84 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 strictly instrumental nature of church or- 
 ganization is Methodist doctrine. John 
 Wesley never formally broke from the 
 Church of England, but John Wesley so 
 modified the doctrines about the Church 
 itself in the view of the thinking world that 
 in spite of all its professions hardly any 
 church can ever again claim to be an end in 
 and unto itself with the old force. Wesley's 
 genius, as we all know, was preeminently 
 for management. He was not of the sort 
 to be over-impressed with the claims of a 
 church laying stress on some peculiar sanctity 
 in itself. Though naturally conservative he 
 allowed himself to be borne along by the 
 success of this venture and that until he was 
 willing to undertake almost any plan which 
 seemed likely to benefit men. In sentiment 
 he very probably at the outset revolted from 
 any step so radical as preaching in the open 
 air, but he put aside whatever scruples he 
 may have had as soon as he saw how im- 
 mense a hearing he obtained from worship 
 in the fields. Dr. T. C. Hall of Union The- 
 ological Seminary has shown how thorough 
 a modification the work begun by Wesley 
 wrought in the churchly conception as to 
 the bishopric. In Methodism the bishopric 
 is not a separate order. It is purely an 
 
THE INSTRUMENTAL IN CHRISTIANITY 85 
 
 administrative office. Worthy souls here 
 and there have at times fancied that the 
 episcopacy could be made more holy and 
 commanding by being constituted a so- 
 called higher order, but the instinct and 
 good sense of Methodism have always been 
 sound at this point. Our only question as 
 to the episcopacy is as to its success as an 
 instrument. The only expedient by which 
 it can be made sacred is by success in sacred 
 work. The only authority to which it is en- 
 titled is that of a sincere purpose striving to 
 do the best possible under a given set of 
 circumstances. The bishopric is an instru- 
 ment and has no right to be looked upon as 
 an end in itself. It exists for the service of the 
 people of the kingdom and for no other pur- 
 pose whatsoever. The welfare of the per- 
 sons of the kingdom has the right of way 
 over all offices whatsoever. We instance 
 the episcopacy as an outstanding illustration 
 of the power of a democratic church to take 
 an office regarded in the past, — and even in 
 the present in some quarters — as something 
 holy on its own account, and to strip it of 
 every right to exist except in a purely instru- 
 mental capacity. The only problem before 
 General Conferences in discussion of church 
 offices, — episcopacy included, — is simply as 
 
86 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 to how best to get the work administered. 
 The question as to whether this or that style 
 of instrument is most hke the instruments of 
 the fathers is out of place. We ask merely 
 as to what will most surely help on the king- 
 dom here and now. 
 
 What is the Church on earth for? We 
 mean of course in its institutional features. 
 First, for the enlistment and the training of 
 disciples. The immediate duty is to rouse 
 men to an awareness of the divine and to 
 get them started in the righteous course. It 
 is the business of the Church to test every 
 means which may open the eyes of men to 
 the necessity of their becoming disciples. It 
 is possible for the individual soul to get along 
 without the organizational church just as it 
 is possible for one to walk from San Fran- 
 cisco to New York, or to become educated 
 without going to school, but we nevertheless 
 preach the necessity of railroads and public 
 schools. If the evangelical methods of an- 
 other generation will not now succeed some- 
 thing else must be resorted to. There is 
 nothing sacred in mechanisms after they have 
 ceased to accomplish the desired result. To 
 go through the old motions without result is 
 not especially intelligent. Anything which 
 will win men must be sacred as an instrument 
 
THE INSTRUMENTAL IN CHRISTIANITY 87 
 
 in the eyes of the Church. Only, in all this 
 we must remember that there are some 
 showy maneuvers, notably those of the 
 present-day sensationalist, which even as 
 maneuvers may in the ultimate outcome cost 
 more than they are worth. The look ahead 
 to the long run has to play a part in our 
 evangelism. 
 
 Once enlisted in the ranks, the disciples of 
 Jesus were taught that there are various steps 
 in training, — to some of which we have 
 already alluded. There is the learning by 
 the educated ear, or the skilled faculty. He 
 that hath ears to hear, let him hear. It is the 
 task of the Church to discipline the faculties 
 of the disciples. Then there is learning by 
 doing. He that doeth the words is like the 
 man that laid the foundations against the 
 day of storm. This method is somewhat like 
 that of the modern laboratory. The knowl- 
 edge of the divine doctrine comes from the 
 doing of the Divine Will. Again there is 
 learning through cross-bearing, the develop- 
 ment of sympathy with the world's cross- 
 bearers as we do the desperately hard un- 
 selfish tasks which involve for us undeserved 
 suffering. This is an advance beyond the 
 knowledge won through the normal life of 
 righteousness : as being more intimate and 
 
88 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 human. Finally there is the knowledge 
 attained by bearing fruit. Here the Master 
 comes to His favourite theme of the life as a 
 growth. In bearing fruit, in growing con- 
 victions, in developing thoughts and feelings 
 and deeds which run their course through 
 the life as naturally as ripening fruit, — in this 
 fruit-bearing especially the disciple comes to 
 know his Lord. And all these various proc- 
 esses of learning the Church is to encourage. 
 She is systematically, and in our day scien- 
 tifically, to train the faculties of the disciples. 
 She is to insist upon the incessant practice of 
 righteousness. She is to lead in cross-bear- 
 ing. She is to create and keep potent the 
 vital conditions in which wisdom and senti- 
 ment and power can arrive at harvest fruitage 
 in the life of the believers. 
 
 There is another function besides disciple- 
 ship, — that of apostleship. The Church is to 
 send forth her adherents to capture this world 
 for the kingdom. She is to hold fast to 
 the doctrine of self-sacrifice especially as 
 applied to herself. How can an organization 
 fashioned to teach that the only salvation for 
 the individual believer is in a willingness to 
 lose his own life get very far if it develops a 
 narrow organizational pride which stands 
 stiffly on keeping the organization intact 
 
THE INSTRUMENTAL IN CHRISTIANITY 89 
 
 when the task to be performed demands 
 institutional change ? Esprit de corps is well 
 and good but it ought to depend on the liv- 
 ing contact of the believer with his fellows 
 and not on the mechanism of an organization. 
 What will best accomplish the work of individ- 
 ual and social salvation ? This is the question 
 before the Church as an organization. What 
 will put the largest human meaning into 
 salvation and make salvation attractive ? 
 
 But what about all these various denomi- 
 nations which we see around us ? Can all 
 these be alike true ? All these are alike, we 
 trust, working to benefit human beings : — 
 that is their only right to existence. A good 
 rule for them all would be to master the doc- 
 trine that on their more technical side they 
 are purely instrumental. As instruments 
 they may have immense value. The doc- 
 trines of different churches are not so many 
 conflicting absolute truths. They are differ- 
 ent paths of approach to truth. They are 
 instruments which make towards the truth 
 which we mean when we speak of the Chris- 
 tian life. A good m.an is a good man 
 wherever we find him. He may have been 
 nourished on doctrine which is very distaste- 
 ful to the rest of us, but if the doctrine has 
 made him good we have no right to object 
 
90 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 overmuch to his spiritual food, though we 
 may recommend our food to him. He may- 
 have wrought valiantly for the Lord with a 
 weapon which we think crude and bungling, 
 but he has wrought successfully. He has a 
 right to choose his own weapon. If we think 
 our weapon is better than his let us show its 
 superiority in action. We should dismiss as 
 not over-intelligent objections like that of the 
 Hindu who asked the Christian missionary 
 which of the scores of varieties of Christian 
 truth taught in India he should accept. 
 There are not scores of varieties of Christian 
 truth being taught in India or anywhere else. 
 The only final truth taught is the truth of the 
 worth of a good life. Varieties of instru- 
 ments may be used in the presentation of 
 that truth. The separate denominational ap- 
 proach is just an approach. A Christian 
 man is a Christian man and not primarily a 
 Methodist or a Presbyterian. He may have 
 attained to Christian manhood along the 
 highway of Methodism or of Presbyterianism. 
 Human nature being what it is we find little 
 profit in discussing the advantage of church 
 unity in the form of just one denomination. 
 All men should be animated by the one spirit 
 of Christ but the peculiarities of human be- 
 ings are such that it is hardly possible to 
 
THE INSTRUMENTAL IN CHRISTIANITY QI 
 
 persuade all sorts of men to wield one make 
 of spiritual instrument or to depend upon one 
 type of spiritual food. The desirability of 
 straight-out oneness of organizational form is 
 very doubtful. Variety and diversity urge 
 legitimate claims. Even in the union of 
 commercial bodies into one organization it 
 has often been found best to allow the sep- 
 arate constituents to keep by one plan or an- 
 other enough of their separateness to pre- 
 serve whatever has been most worth while 
 in that separateness. Speaking of army di- 
 visions Napoleon used to say : ** Separate for 
 the march." There was a clear economy in 
 having the troops march even to the common 
 objective point in different masses. They 
 were thus more easily maneuvered, more 
 easily fed, more easily sustained in the fight- 
 ing spirit. So with the church life. Realiz- 
 ing that organizational activities are alto- 
 gether instrumental we ask what the churches 
 can best do separately. They can best move 
 separately through the activities of church 
 support and religious instruction and training. 
 But Napoleon also told his marshals to 
 unite for the battle. There is need to-day 
 for a closer coming together for battle. 
 There must be some common plan of cam- 
 paign, especially in the social warfare in 
 
92 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 which the Church ought to be a determining 
 factor! Federation seems to be the watch- 
 word of the hour, — all sorts of bodies federate 
 and that with signal practical success. If 
 there are some duties which the organiza- 
 tional instruments can best perform sepa- 
 rately, it is equally true that there are many 
 other tasks which they can best undertake 
 together. In campaigns for civic righteous- 
 ness, in some phases of the attack on hea- 
 thenism, the work can best be done by the 
 churches acting together. Both at home 
 and abroad much can be expected from wise 
 division of church territory and by mutual 
 respect of that division. Much can be ac- 
 complished by joint activity in educational 
 enterprises, — especially in mission fields. 
 Most of the objection to agreement of this 
 kind is purely verbal. Colleges under the 
 control of a particular church feel perfectly 
 free both to accept students from any and all 
 denominations and to select faculty members 
 wherever they can find the men best fitted to 
 do the work. And there is nothing more 
 effective in bringing men to a right under- 
 standing of the difference between the su- 
 preme object of Christian endeavour and the 
 instruments by which that object is achieved 
 than just the getting together which is so 
 
THE INSTRUMENTAL IN CHRISTIANITY 93 
 
 much a feature of the reHgious life of our 
 time. If a man thinks that his particular 
 church has a monopoly on ultimate truth in 
 itself and some day discovers that it has not 
 such a monopoly he may experience a slack- 
 ening of loyalty to his denomination if he 
 does not discover at the same time the 
 instrumental function of the organization. 
 Once let him catch the force of that distinc- 
 tion, however, and he is likely to become 
 more of an institutionalist than before. He is 
 anxious to make his instrument the best in- 
 strument. Church rivalry can be a bitter 
 and deadly thing if we believe that churches 
 other than our own are not in possession of 
 truth and are misleading immortal souls. It 
 can be a very helpful thing if it leads to bet- 
 ter and better puttings of the truth, better 
 stimuli of religious sentiment, better forging 
 of religious tools. 
 
 But this word instrumental seems so 
 mechanical ! It seems to spill out so much 
 that is sacred I We repeat again and again 
 that we are not confining ourselves to the 
 mechanical in the use of the word instru- 
 mental. In our sense of the term even a 
 subtle sentiment may be an instrument. 
 Sentiment may nourish the spirit of proper 
 pride : it may be a very powerful stimulus 
 
94 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 to righteous effort. We are all aware that 
 some classic passages of literature take on 
 increased effectiveness in our memories from 
 tender personal associations with which we 
 have connected them, or from an appropriate- 
 ness to our personal lot which lends the words 
 a force which the author himself never could 
 have foreseen. So with the doctrines and 
 the practices of a church. The memories 
 of childhood, the stir of old-time friendships, 
 the echo of spiritual victories won in partic- 
 ular denominational relationships, — all these 
 help in our grasp on a belief or on a practice. 
 We give place and honour to all this. But 
 after all this too is valuable just for the 
 human effect which it produces. Moreover 
 considerations of this kind should be urged 
 with good sense and complete sincerity. 
 The sentimental consideration should not 
 be allowed to outweigh all others unless it 
 really weighs more. A church member who 
 opposes the tearing down of an antiquated 
 and unsafe house of worship and the erection 
 of a better because of the spiritual blessings 
 he has received in the old building is hardly 
 to be commended. This principle can be 
 given quite a wide application. 
 
 If we look at some phases of the life of 
 Jesus we can best understand them as at- 
 
THE INSTRUMENTAL IN CHRISTIANITY 95 
 
 tempts to keep the distinction between the 
 personal and the instrumental in His attitude 
 towards the Church. We have seen in the 
 first lecture that Jesus in His own work kept 
 the instrumental aspects at a minimum and 
 always in the secondary place. He had to 
 do this to get Himself understood at all. 
 Jesus treated the Church of His time with 
 profound respect, but He maintained His right 
 to criticize it in accordance with the demands 
 of personal life. The Sabbath was made for 
 man and not man for the Sabbath. The 
 scribes were entitled to the respect due those 
 who sat in the seat of Moses, but they needed 
 to know that they did not act according to 
 the spirit of Moses. The laws had their 
 place. Even tithing should not be omitted 
 but the emphasis should be put upon the 
 more profoundly human concerns of judg- 
 ment and mercy and truth. At an early 
 crisis in the life of Jesus it seems to have 
 been the chanting of the priests and the 
 flaming of the altar fires which awoke Him 
 to at least a deeper realization of His relation 
 to the Father, but He called the Temple just 
 the Father's house. Towards all these instru- 
 ments, — the Temple and the synagogues, the 
 readings of the law and the calls to prayer, 
 Jesus acted with the sole purpose to make 
 
96 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 them mean most for men. If He could have 
 had His way He would not have brought 
 the Church to destruction, — He would have 
 shaped it anew and filled it with a new pas- 
 sion for men. 
 
 We have thus far confined ourselves to the 
 circle of the churchly problems. The spirit 
 of Jesus would prompt His followers to move 
 forth and make the most of the earth and all 
 that is therein for the good of men. The 
 meek are to inherit the earth and the saints 
 are to judge the world. We are to seek the 
 kingdom of God and His righteousness, and 
 in the spirit of righteousness we are to insist 
 upon the largest human use of all things 
 capable of good use. The fields of material 
 achievement, of scientific and philosophical 
 and moral investigation, of social and na- 
 tional and international endeavour, are to be 
 made the most of for humanity by the per- 
 sons who are filled with the spirit of Him 
 who came to bring Hfe to men and to bring 
 life more abundantly. But even such spirit- 
 filled workers can be most successful in do- 
 ing this by always keeping in sight the dis- 
 tinction between the things which are ends- 
 in-themselves and the things which are means 
 to those ends. 
 
LECTURE III 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN USE OF 
 THE PHILOSOPHIC TOOLS 
 
LECTURE III 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN USE OF THE 
 PHILOSOPHIC TOOLS 
 
 THE first problem before Christianity 
 as it marches out to world conquest 
 is to determine upon the proper at- 
 titude towards the world-views which at one 
 period and another have commanded the 
 assent of their times. These world-views are 
 in part results and outcomes of manifold 
 forces at work at a particular era but they 
 are also instruments of vision and investiga- 
 tion and adjustment of conduct with which 
 men seek to dominate the world. Whether 
 a maturely reasoned view prevails at any 
 one era or not there are at least half-views 
 and assumptions and presuppositions present 
 at all times which influence the attitude of 
 men towards the problems of life and destiny. 
 Since no age is without some such intellectual 
 construction by which the attitudes towards 
 the tasks of moral and social and racial life 
 are determined it is well to examine some of 
 99 
 
lOO PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the greater of these intellectual lenses, and to 
 ask how best to master them. 
 
 There is nothing sacred about a world- 
 view except the use to which it may be put. 
 The more important conceptions which arise 
 from time to time all claim to be final, and 
 each may seem so when it first appears, but 
 after a while signs of change become mani- 
 fest. Take the theory of evolution which has 
 made so deep an impression on the last half 
 century. Probably no theory has ever laid 
 more insistent claim to be final truth than has 
 the doctrine of evolution, and this in spite of 
 the fact that the last word of evolution ap- 
 pears to be continuous movement and rest- 
 less change. But wisdom has come to the 
 evolutionists with the passage of years and 
 their view is now a zvorkiiig hypothesis, of 
 prodigious value because of the prolific re- 
 sults of evolutionary investigation. The in- 
 telligent evolutionist nowadays does not 
 pronounce evolutionary doctrine as in itself 
 sacred. There was for a season a tendency 
 towards a hard-and-fast orthodoxy among 
 the followers of Darwin, but the evolutionist 
 to-day feels free to make any modification 
 which he sees fit in this once so-sacred 
 theory. In the realm of theory nothing has 
 final sacredness. Even if we should hit upon 
 
CHRISTIAN USE OF PHILOSOPHIC TOOLS lOI 
 
 a putting of the truth which could not in any 
 detail be improved, even that would have 
 only instrumental sanctity. The thinkers 
 whose minds the formula might satisfy would 
 be the only ends in themselves. 
 
 Assured then of liberty to deal with the 
 theories of the universe as the demands of 
 our total life may prompt us, we point out 
 the path to mastery of world-views over 
 which the Church may one day move. First, 
 the Church cannot neglect the duty of search- 
 ing criticism of world-views in their more 
 technical phases. The opponents of Chris- 
 tian teaching have found some paths of at- 
 tack yielded too easily by Christian scholars. 
 These scholars have too often allowed them- 
 selves to be thrown on the defensive. An 
 anti-religious theory would arise making 
 vigorous assaults on the Church, and the 
 Church would give itself too much to the 
 campaign of defense. More justifiable tac- 
 tics would have been more aggressive. In 
 actual warfare a downright fighting spirit is 
 the effective defense. The Church has often 
 been scared into ridiculous panic by the raids 
 of theories which could not themselves, if 
 challenged, have given good foundation in 
 reason for their own existence. The war 
 should sometimes be carried into Africa. 
 
I02 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 The Church is here, and the presumption is 
 that she has a right to be here. Before any- 
 opposing system is accepted in her place 
 that system should be challenged throughout. 
 When the gust of atheistic materialism which 
 broke over Christendom in the later seventies 
 had died down somewhat and the Christian 
 teachers had begun in turn to put questions 
 to the materialists, there arose an outcry 
 from the materialistic camp as if this were 
 presumptuous. But this turning of the ta- 
 bles is the correct strategy. Most systems 
 hostile to Christianity stand on shaky foun- 
 dations, and the Church needs to train men 
 who even on the technical side are able to 
 point out the shakiness and to do some shak- 
 ing. For example take the broad issue be- 
 tween theism and atheism. The atheist has 
 often shouted triumph because he has to his 
 own satisfaction established the proposition 
 that theism cannot account for the universe. 
 But if theism cannot account for the universe, 
 can atheism do any better ? This alternative 
 has too often escaped the attention of theists 
 and atheists alike. Atheism as a positive 
 and not a negative construction is somewhat 
 unstable. So with mind as over against 
 matter as an explanation of all things. It is 
 a favourite plan of attack on Christianity 
 
CHRISTIAN USE OF PHILOSOPHIC TOOLS 103 
 
 boldly to declare the inadequacy of mind as 
 an explanation of the universe. But if mind 
 cannot explain, how about non-mind, or 
 matter ? All of this seems obvious but it is 
 sadly overlooked. We have many defenders 
 of the faith ; there is room also for assailants 
 of the unfaith. 
 
 Secondly, — the Church should not miss the 
 apologetic force of Christian character itselL 
 For, after all, the triumphs of the most highly 
 trained scientific and logical reasoners are 
 not of supreme moment. These victories 
 are seldom over the direct opponent. They 
 accomplish something in interesting and en- 
 couraging the bystanders, especially if the 
 bystanders are already inclined to believe. 
 But while most bystanders are fond of a log- 
 ical battle now and then, they soon weary of 
 such conflict. World-views are not alto- 
 gether established by the arguments put 
 forth for them, nor are they overthrown by 
 the assaults made upon them. Not many 
 persons reason much, even though they may 
 think they do. So that a second way of 
 meeting world-views which threaten the 
 Christian system is actually to produce situa- 
 tions which no sensible observer can over- 
 look, — to create a quality and volume of 
 Christian life which cannot be put to one 
 
I04 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 side, but which will persistently come back 
 the instant it is pronounced banished, and to 
 which the world- view must ultimately adjust 
 itself. 
 
 A third method is more effective still, — the 
 utilization of whatever is good in the various 
 views. Regarding these systems as tools at 
 the best, or the worst, the Church seeks to 
 redeem the instruments by making the 
 worthiest use of '^em for the interests of 
 human life. The Church shows her largest 
 vitalities not when she breaks to pieces her 
 captured booty or casts it into the fire, but 
 when she makes it Christian, or when she 
 remoulds the" instruments once turned against 
 herself for the sake of exalting the truth which 
 these instruments were forged to overthrow. 
 We hurriedly pass in review these different 
 methods as applied to some world-views ; for 
 these methods, (i) of critical understanding 
 of world-views, (2) of life-protest by volume 
 and quality of character against what is 
 inadequate or unworthy in them, (3) of utiliza- 
 tion of what is good in them, are the gist of 
 what we mean by the Christian use of 
 intellectual constructions. 
 
 The Christian religion has relied much on 
 the world-view of common sense. Here are 
 persons and here are things, — with scant 
 
CHRISTIAN USE OF PHILOSOPHIC TOOLS 105 
 
 question as to what is back either of the per- 
 sons or the things. Things are made of stuff 
 undoubtedly here. Now the sensible plan in 
 leading the common-sense individual as we 
 meet him in the Church is not to travel too 
 far into the domain of formal reasoning. It 
 seems that almost anybody ought to be strong 
 enough to listen to an argument which 
 strips " things " of their fancied all-sufficiency, 
 but the things seem so undeniably here that 
 they constitute a tough problem. The im- 
 mediate task is so to preach and so to foster 
 the living activities of the Church as to pre- 
 vent the things from getting the upper hand. 
 Why do many disciples make failure of life ? 
 They are not argued out of the Christian 
 belief, but things get into the saddle and then 
 of course ride mankind. The preaching of 
 Jesus was for the most part aimed just at 
 building the spirit into strength that would 
 refuse to be saddled. 
 
 Men who have wrought overmuch with 
 things may slip off into materialism, and they 
 may do so sincerely. The material world is 
 such a factor with us that the theory that 
 matter is all seems at moments overwhelm- 
 ing. We congratulate ourselves that the 
 battle with materialism is pretty well over, 
 but we would better not be too sure. Just at 
 
Io6 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 present indeed there is less outspoken 
 materialism than for a long time. The 
 arguments for the omnipotence of matter 
 have become tiresome. The contemporary 
 materialist bores us. Our state of boredom 
 should not conceal from us, however, the 
 possibility that the materialistic argument 
 may almost any day receive a fresh state- 
 ment which will again make it attractive and 
 seductive. Such a statement seems about 
 due. Almost any one reading closely the 
 arguments of the materialists wonders why 
 they have not stated their case more strongly 
 than they have. Quite likely the future will 
 see more forceful phrasings of materialism 
 than any that have ever yet appeared. And 
 when they come what is the soundest attack 
 for the Church ? 
 
 One attack will be of course the insistence 
 upon the inadequacy of materialism. It is not 
 necessary to try to anticipate the reasonings 
 here. Quite likely they will be in substance 
 just an emphasis on the impotence of materi- 
 alism to explain the facts of life as we see 
 them, especially the facts of mind and knowl- 
 edge. But the decisive advance is from 
 another quarter. That is simply calling 
 attention to the inescapableness of spiritual 
 facts. If there is in existence a quality and 
 
CHRISTIAN USE OF PHILOSOPHIC TOOLS 107 
 
 volume of Christian life, showing forth char- 
 acter in its highest growths, that quaUty and 
 that volume are the effective protest against 
 materialism. If there are multitudes of 
 persons obviously above yielding to the 
 earthward pull of matter that superiority 
 must be heeded. For a theory which pro- 
 fesses to be a world-view must at least 
 attempt systematic completeness. Just as 
 the sinner is a stubborn fact for the theist so 
 the saint is even a more stubborn fact for the 
 materialist. There is less hope of explaining 
 the saint in materialistic terms than there is of 
 explaining the sinner on a theistic basis. As 
 to the sinner in a theistic world we can say 
 that a man of his own free choice may refuse 
 to sanction the plans of the universe ; as to the 
 saint in a materialistic world we can only say 
 that matter has for the moment reached such 
 a steadiness of equilibrium that the effect 
 is a singularly well-ordered character. The 
 miracle of particles of matter balanced in this 
 equilibrium for ten, twenty or fifty years has 
 just to be taken as a miracle. But the miracle 
 is quite a miracle, especially when the 
 particles of matter may for the most part 
 report themselves in pain and uproar. The 
 greater the number of saints, the greater the 
 difficulty for the materialist. 
 
Io8 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 A group of persons living superior to the 
 downward pull of matter is a protest against 
 materialism. We do not wish to speak 
 harshly of the materialist, but it is a com- 
 monplace that materialism of behaviour 
 makes for materialism of thought. This is 
 true even though many materialists are as 
 self-denying as ascetics and as self-sacrific- 
 ing as martyrs. We do not say that ma- 
 terialism in conduct is the only force which 
 makes for materialism in theory, but it is an 
 effective force. Anything then which offsets 
 subordination to the earthiness of matter 
 makes for the reign of the spirit. The 
 Church is to face the conditions out of which 
 materialism arises. Extremes of prosperity 
 and of adversity alike may conduce to ma- 
 terialism, — prosperity because the rich see so 
 much of matter that they come to believe in 
 the omnipotence of matter, and adversity be- 
 cause the poor see so little of matter that 
 they are constantly craving more. Espe- 
 cially in handling social questions is it in- 
 cumbent on the Church to keep before her 
 eyes the danger of these extremes which 
 breed doubt. To quote the familiar figure 
 the swamps out of which the doubts arise to 
 poison men must be drained. 
 
 The presence of good men in the world 
 
CHRISTIAN USE OF PHILOSOPHIC TOOLS 109 
 
 living in protest against the lures of ma- 
 terialism is then a block in the path of ma- 
 terialistic theory. But it is not by protest 
 alone that victory is to be won. Protests 
 may thwart but they do not vanquish. More- 
 over the mental faculties which are in chronic 
 protest may not remain healthy or normal. 
 For example the spectacle of men withdraw- 
 ing from a community which has gone mad 
 in the pursuit of riches to shut themselves up 
 in monasteries would be a bracing protest 
 against the sordidness of that crazy world, 
 but it would not be altogether effective after 
 all. The world would go howling in derision 
 past the doors of the monasteries. There is 
 a more excellent way, even though a more 
 difficult way. It is often easier to be extreme 
 than to be moderate. It is easier to be a 
 materialist giving one's self up to earthly 
 pursuits, or to be an ascetic cutting one's self 
 off from physical pleasures than it is to walk 
 in the midst of the material world and use 
 that world for a righteous purpose. The 
 highest Christian answer to both theoretical 
 and practical materialism is the control of 
 matter in the name of spirit. 
 
 Matter is one of the apparently fixed ele- 
 ments of our present existence, even though 
 its function is instrumental. We must adjust 
 
no PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 ourselves to matter, and the only legitimate 
 adjustment is that of high-minded control. 
 The sin of materialism is in erecting a purely 
 instrumental creation into an end in itself. 
 The Christian followers of that Lord who 
 while He had no earthly possessions of His 
 own nevertheless moved untainted by covet- 
 ousness among the possessions of others and 
 told how to use houses and lands, and of 
 that apostle who declared that the whole 
 creation, travailing in pain, awaits the reve- 
 lation at the hands of the sons of God, are to 
 seize the earth to make it bloom like the 
 garden of the Lord. Spiritual health is so 
 closely linked with earthly conditions in our 
 present sphere that it is hard to see how the 
 world could have so long undervalued the 
 significance of the material for the spiritual. 
 The materialist is using in a wrong spirit an 
 instrument that does not properly belong to 
 him. The instruments belong in the hands 
 of those who can do better with them. In a 
 word an objection to materialism is that it 
 does not get enough from matter. Matter 
 itself is degraded in the outworking of ma- 
 terialism ; — it is much more fortunate under 
 the sway of the spiritualists. In the attempt 
 at control of matter some indeed will come 
 to grief, for they will fall under the spell of 
 
CHRISTIAN USE OF PHILOSOPHIC TOOLS III 
 
 wealth or earthly power. Demas left the 
 Apostle, having loved this present world. 
 But a body of men controlling material goods 
 as tools for the sake of the spiritual welfare 
 of men constitute an argument which the 
 avowed materialist will find it hard to dis- 
 lodge. 
 
 At this juncture some one will object that 
 all the above is obviously unfair. The ob- 
 jector will protest that some materialism 
 does admittedly result from giving the ma- 
 terial things the wrong stress, but that much 
 other materialism comes from pure specu- 
 lation and splendid search for truth, that 
 many materialists are such sincerely, that 
 they have made costly personal sacrifices 
 for the sake of their belief. All such put- 
 tings of the argument as ours are not fair to 
 those noble explorers, we are told. In re- 
 joinder we repeat our disavowal of any in- 
 tent to represent materialists as personally 
 evil-minded. All that we maintain is that 
 the system works down and not up. We 
 cannot always tell what a system is by not- 
 ing its effects on the lives of those who first 
 formulate it. The character of such persons 
 is very likely ''set" long before they come 
 to the formulation of their theories. They 
 may not be thrown far ofi[ the track by their 
 
112 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 own formulations. But when the theory has 
 been taught to others whose minds are still 
 plastic, the inherent logic of a false system 
 may be expected to reveal itself. Here 
 again there may be restraints which make 
 the adherents of the creed better than the 
 creed, but the ultimate trend will be in a 
 false direction. And even if there is not 
 such an outcome, the spectacle of Christian 
 people employing for the further victories of 
 Christianity the very tools which the materi- 
 alist has wielded against the Christian system 
 is illuminating. 
 
 Take the honour given to law in material- 
 ism. How trenchantly ** the reign of law " 
 was urged against Christian belief in the old 
 days of some thirty years ago I How mighty 
 the " reign of law " seems to some opponents 
 of the Christian system to-day ! And yet 
 how completely this very conception has 
 been incorporated into more recent Chris- 
 tian thinking ! When once the Christian 
 reasoner saw that law never could have 
 more than an instrumental function all his 
 fear vanished. While there are still some 
 who imagine that there is an inherent incom- 
 patibility between the scientific idea of law 
 and the idea of the presence of God in the 
 world the general understanding is fast 
 
CHRISTIAN USE OF PHILOSOPHIC TOOLS II3 
 
 coming to be that God works through law. 
 The reign of law can mean nothing but the 
 reign of whoever is back of the law. Of 
 course the materialist will correct us by say- 
 ing " whatever is back of the law." But 
 when we see discovery of and subjection to 
 scientific law used mightily for the advance- 
 ment of the spiritual faith we may be justi- 
 fied in demanding more conclusive reasons 
 for belief in materialism than any which have 
 yet been offered us. One inescapable diffi- 
 culty in materialism is just this, — that while 
 law may be omnipotent it was mind that dis- 
 covered the omnipotence, and mind in the 
 act of discovery goes back to its old position 
 of supremacy over the law. But the materi- 
 alist says this is too fine and far fetched. 
 We insist then that the materialist must con- 
 sider the significance of the fact that the 
 laws of nature are used to-day as never be- 
 fore for setting the conceptions of Christi- 
 anity on high. We are willing that the 
 Scriptures be studied in accordance with 
 scientific principles, — every reputable theo- 
 logical school to-day insists upon such 
 study ; we insist upon the investigation of 
 the phenomena of Christian experience by 
 the experts in psychology ; we declare our 
 purpose that the teachings of the historians 
 
114 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 shall be applied to the study of the career 
 of the Church. And all we ask in return is 
 that the scientific student be willing on his 
 part to face facts when he meets them. If 
 there is found an eEhcacy in prayer, if the 
 power which was lodged in the Hebrew re- 
 ligion cannot be explained by the external 
 historic causes at work, if there is manifestly 
 more in the inner vitality of the conceptions 
 of the Church than can be accounted for by 
 the economic or social spirit of a particular 
 period, if the beliefs of the Church are seen 
 to be not merely effects but also causes, if 
 above all there is in the life of the Christ a 
 fountain of spiritual efficiency which ex- 
 hausts the customary historical tabulations 
 and classifications, — if all or any of these 
 results appear all that we ask is that in the 
 spirit of scientific inquirers we be allowed to 
 take scientific account of the findings. It is 
 more scientific to admit that some things 
 cannot be explained on the basis of scientific 
 principles as we now have them than to 
 maintain that everything must be classifi- 
 able within our present scientific set of 
 pigeonholes. In any event we shall use 
 what science we have with a spiritual mo- 
 tive. It is very well to declare that the 
 scientist seeks knowledge as an end in 
 
CHRISTIAN USE OF PHILOSOPHIC TOOLS II5 
 
 itself without any reference to the purpose 
 to which his discoveries are to be put and 
 that scientific knowledge is an end in itself, 
 but all this can mean is that there are higher 
 and lower uses for science. When we speak 
 of knowledge as an end in itself what we are 
 likely to mean is that the contemplation of 
 this knowledge renders delight to a fine type 
 of highly cultivated mind, rather than sup- 
 plies hints to some mechanical inventor. 
 But if the knowledge is thus finely inspira- 
 tional it is still instrumental, — instrumental 
 for quickening a mind without regard to the 
 commoner use to which the mind may direct 
 the knowledge. All our previous discussion 
 has been vain if we have not made it clear 
 that we believe in knowledge of this high 
 degree, and in the contemplation of such 
 knowledge as likely to stimulate the Chris- 
 tian community as readily as it will stir the 
 intellects of any who deny Christianity. 
 There is no reason why a man should be a 
 materialist to get the thrill which comes with 
 the revelations of astronomy. There is no 
 reason either why he should be a calculator 
 for a nautical almanac. He may be a be- 
 liever in Christianity, finding in the latest 
 researches into the starry marches across the 
 skies commentary upon the psalmist's word 
 
Il6 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 that night unto night showeth knowledge. 
 He may affirm with another behever that he 
 is thinking God's thoughts after Him. But 
 whether to matter-of-fact or to rare specu- 
 lative desires the knowledge ministers. 
 With this belief in the instrumental function 
 of knowledge the Christian is in position to 
 make the utmost of the idea of law. There 
 are diversities of instruments. There are 
 hammers and hand-saws, but there are also 
 organs and pictures. Nothing in our con- 
 ception of the Christian attitude towards the 
 instrumental warrants the contention that we 
 must use instruments for any purpose lower 
 than that for which they are intended. The 
 Christian life is the life of the whole man, 
 and the Christian seeks for instruments 
 which will minister to the whole man. The 
 attitude of the Christian community then 
 towards the doctrine of materialism will be 
 first to ask what in materialistic theory 
 should be cut away and then to proceed to 
 cut. After that the query will be as to what 
 can be offset by Christian character. Most 
 important of all will be the question as to 
 what can be used for human welfare. Some 
 parts can be used for the material relief of 
 men ; some for the intellectual satisfactions 
 without any reference to so-called utilitarian 
 
CHRISTIAN USE OF PHILOSOPHIC TOOLS II7 
 
 needs ; some for the gratification of aesthetic 
 and spiritual demands of highest rank. The 
 utiHzation of whatever is worth while in ma- 
 terialism is Christianity's answer to and con- 
 quest of materialism. The process of con- 
 quest has gone far enough in our own day 
 to constitute a very unusual triumph. Be- 
 cause the conquest has moved on under our 
 eyes we may have missed something of its 
 meaning. For one marvel that investigation 
 begun by materialism has forced Christian- 
 ity to surrender, Christianity has won back 
 from materialism a thousand marvels. 
 
 And so with idealism, which stands over 
 against materialism in protest against ma- 
 terialism. Idealism can be just as irreligious 
 as materialism ; and so far as concerns out- 
 come in the life the extreme materialist and 
 the extreme idealist may join hands. The 
 idealist may put on a loftier air than the 
 materialist because he claims a nobler line of 
 intellectual ancestry, but that may be about 
 the only difference. The critical objections 
 to the idealism which ranks thought above 
 thinkers are well enough known to the pro- 
 fessional teachers, but most others find both 
 the doctrines and the criticisms so dry that 
 they pay little attention to them. This is no 
 reflection on the patient metaphysicians. 
 
Il8 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 They have to travel through the dry places. 
 But the effective protection against extreme 
 idealism is the protest of living consciousness 
 against the extremes of idealism and after 
 that the seizure of rational idealism for the 
 purposes of Christianity. One danger of 
 idealism is a logic-chopping which reduces 
 the whole realm of life to barrenness ; but if 
 there are persons who refuse to be made 
 barren they are in so far an answer to radical 
 idealistic theory. The proof that the ideal- 
 istic theory is inadequate in its extreme form 
 is the manifestation that there is more in life 
 than mere ideas, and that vital movement is 
 more than strictly logical movement. This 
 does not imply a resort to the illogical, but 
 it does imply emphasis on the indispensable 
 emotional and aesthetic and volitional na- 
 tures. Another danger in idealism is the 
 tendency to pantheism and monism. Men 
 are but phases of the All. The decisive 
 counteraction here is personal protest against 
 being anaesthetized into any idealistic All. 
 If life meant no more to us than to the Hindu 
 we might welcome some Buddha who could 
 administer spiritual chloroform, but we have 
 been insisting from the beginning that Chris- 
 tianity makes the most of the individual per- 
 sons. Christianity develops beings who re- 
 
CHRISTIAN USE OF PHILOSOPHIC TOOLS II9 
 
 fused to be absorbed. Surrender to the 
 "divine thought" does not mean soul-ob- 
 literation. The more deeply Christian a man 
 becomes, the more deeply individual he be- 
 comes. The development of a community 
 of individual Christians is an antidote to the 
 idealism which is tainted with pantheism. 
 Of course the strict idealist will respond that 
 his system soars above all such trifling argu- 
 ments, — which may be true, — but before 
 pantheistic idealism can be convincing it 
 must step down from absolutism and es- 
 tablish some connection with workaday 
 notions which may indeed be relative, but 
 which are nevertheless real enough to those 
 of us who are tangled in the present web of 
 relationships. Incidentally the high absolu- 
 tists might be aided by a sense of humour. 
 
 A further guard against that pantheism to 
 which extreme idealism tends is the cultiva- 
 tion of an intense moral sense. If there is 
 no separateness in the individual man and if 
 his will cannot be called into account in any 
 degree for the presence of moral evil in the 
 world, then this moral evil must be pro- 
 nounced a necessary constitutent of the mon- 
 istic All. We unload our sins upon the All 
 and make him, or it, responsible. Now 
 Christian reflection gets on very well with 
 
I20 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the presence of physical evil in the universe, 
 — and that not by ignoring such physical 
 evil but by frankly recognizing it and by 
 struggling to reduce it and by waiting for 
 the light of a further explanation which we 
 may not now be quaUfied to receive. But 
 with moral evil the difficulty is more serious. 
 If we are to have a God at all we might just 
 as well have a God worth while, and a per- 
 sonal or impersonal God of whose character 
 our sins are an expression would hardly be 
 morally worth the intellectual labour to find 
 Him. We say " intellectual labour," for that 
 is about the only path to the deity possible 
 to the strictly intellectualistic explorer. A 
 furious opposition to moral evil in the heart 
 of vast masses of people would at once sug- 
 gest the impossibility of carrying this battle 
 up into the Godhead of the pantheistic 
 scheme. Chronic belHgerency and self-con- 
 tradiction in the inner phases of the deity 
 would not be much of a fulfillment of that 
 craving for unity which has given absolute 
 systems so much of their power. 
 
 In a word this whole absolutist construction 
 is the outcome and expression of a demand 
 for unity on the part of the human mind. 
 The absolutist has made his absolutism ap- 
 pear as if it stood ofl by itself in its own 
 
CHRISTIAN USE OF PHILOSOPHIC TOOLS 121 
 
 right, but whatever value there may be in 
 absolutism results from its ministry to men's 
 needs. Absolutism is related to our needs 
 partly as their expression and partly as their 
 supposed fulfillment. The entire system is a 
 commentary on confounding ends and instru- 
 ments. Thought in the impersonal sense is 
 an instrument. In any other sense thought 
 is a thinker thinking. But this purely instru- 
 mental creation, thought, gets around in front 
 of the thinker and becomes the finality in 
 itself. Impersonal thought has to be brought 
 back to the instrumental place. It has to be 
 led to its place and must be commanded to 
 sit there. Hardly any arrogance in the his- 
 tory of intellect has approached that of the 
 absolutists, and hardly any arrogance has 
 been less justified. The arrogance has sought 
 to obliterate persons in the name of the prod- 
 uct and output of personal life. Yet these 
 persons have considerable powers of protest, 
 — enough at least to establish for them the 
 claim to belligerent rights. 
 
 But the idealistic program has merits and 
 can be mastered for the Christian community. 
 On the intellectualistic side it wins room for 
 about the only respectable theistic argument 
 we have, — the argument that things cannot 
 exist apart from the divine thought, though 
 
122 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the realists — old and new — are right in in- 
 sisting that there is in things an element not 
 created by human thought. If we keep im- 
 personal thought in the strictly instrumental 
 place there is value in the teachings of 
 idealism. In the system there is indeed that 
 chronic tendency to confuse thought and 
 thinker but this is readily detected, and once 
 on our guard against it we need have no 
 fear. The best way to conquer idealism is 
 to use it. For example take the claim that 
 nothing can exist apart from thought. 
 Thought relations are woven through every- 
 thing. This truth is sometimes so empha- 
 sized as to leave the impression that there is 
 nothing in the universe except ideas, and all 
 the warmth of feeling and doing are left out. 
 But making allowance for this one-sidedness 
 it is part of the duty of the Christian com- 
 munity to weave thought-relationships per- 
 sistently into the fabric of daily life. We 
 teach that Christian love is central in the 
 realm of personal existence, but too often we 
 make no attempt to rationalize Christian 
 love, or even to make it sensible. Of course 
 we know that in many a crisis we get light 
 just by taking sides, and by forcing a con- 
 clusion by a decision of will. It is, however, 
 a duty to try to bring all activities into ac- 
 
CHRISTIAN USE OF PHILOSOPHIC TOOLS 1 23 
 
 cord with reason. Accord with reason may 
 occasionally demand that we act without a 
 reason which we can articulate, but Christian 
 sentiment and Christian activity need more 
 and more to be lifted from the lower plane of 
 impulse and to be informed with idea. Chris- 
 tians are to vindicate their claim to divine 
 sonship in the realm of severe creative think- 
 ing, in which realm their duty must be to 
 make all their activities conform to reason. 
 Society is harassed to-day by the preaching 
 that men ought to act according to their in- 
 stincts even if these instincts be chiefly ani- 
 mal. Christianity should develop a vigorous 
 logic with which to insist that life is not hu- 
 man until the activities move in the direction 
 of intelligence. We would not harden the 
 Christian life down to rigid logic of a me- 
 chanical stiffness, but we hold that if the 
 Christian life is not in the stern sense rational 
 it is not entitled to be called human. This 
 power of intellectual system building is one 
 of the distinctively human abilities. And if 
 the system does not run off into such ab- 
 surdity as that of putting the creation ahead 
 of the creator the idealism which takes for its 
 motto that nothing should be attempted apart 
 from rational principle is wholesome. Is 
 Christian love to be just a smiling and 
 
124 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 amiable well-wishing and good humour ? Or 
 is it to be the love which seeks light of fact 
 and reason everywhere as to what is best for 
 men, and acts in harmony with that light ? 
 Abounding in faults as is the teaching of the 
 idealists, impossible as it is to " deduce " to 
 the extent which they claim, the idealists 
 may well be imitated by the Christian com- 
 munity in their firm insistence upon the 
 rights of thought. The human mind in its 
 daily relationships is not likely to think too 
 much. The average believer is not prone to 
 become enough sickled o'er with the pale 
 cast of thought to be in peril when he listens 
 to idealistic speculators. And moreover the 
 tendency to materialism in one shape or an- 
 other is so inevitable at all times that most 
 of us are helped by an idealistic bath quite 
 frequently. The pressure of the world of 
 things is so unrelenting that the perusal of 
 the most extreme idealism sometimes serves 
 well as a counter pressure. And so long as 
 we keep our eyes open and do not bewilder 
 ourselves into fancying that we are face to 
 face with absolute finality we shall do well to 
 resort to the idealistic philosophers now and 
 then as veritable means of grace. 
 
 Some storm-battered intellects, having 
 made the rounds from common sense to 
 
CHRISTIAN USE OF PHILOSOPHIC TOOLS 125 
 
 materialism and then by reaction to idealism, 
 find themselves at the end in agnosticism. 
 Others arrive at agnosticism by a different 
 route. Agnosticism is with some just intel- 
 lectual weakness or weariness. The mind is 
 tired out so that it cannot believe. In con- 
 fronting such agnosticism the Christian 
 leader will attempt to tone up the whole life. 
 A distinguished scientist used to say that he 
 always felt a tendency to agnosticism when 
 the currents of his life began to run low, 
 and that he would find his way out by read- 
 ing the greater poets, or by listening to the 
 hymns of the faith, or by reaching out for 
 closer fellowship with dear friends. Some 
 agnosticism is the outcome of spiritual starva- 
 tion, though we use the terms without re- 
 flection upon the character of the agnostics 
 themselves. They may not be to blame for 
 the dwarfing experiences through which they 
 have passed. But in helping such impover- 
 ished souls the soundness of life in the 
 Church itself should be an aid. The whole 
 life of the Church ought to be so quick and 
 stirring as to arouse life in others. The posi- 
 tive note should be ever ringing. The stu- 
 dents of Christian thought in recent years 
 have done much for us in demonstrating 
 that the experiences on which Christian opin- 
 
126 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 ion depends rise and fall with the rise and 
 fall of the vitality of the inner man ; hence 
 the more reason why everything about a 
 Church should suggest vigour. This can only 
 mean in the last analysis, of course, the vigour 
 of the persons who compose the Church. 
 
 Much fluent criticism of the Church falls 
 to the ground as soon as we realize the effect- 
 iveness of the Church in thus creating the 
 conditions out of which belief arises. A 
 writer in a very reputable magazine devoted 
 quite a stretch of space recently to the con- 
 tention that the Church must stand or fall 
 with the answer to an inquiry put to this 
 particular correspondent by a newspaper re- 
 porter who pulled forth his note-book to take 
 down the answer, — the question being : 
 *' What is the Church doing that I can report 
 to my paper ? " Every few days somebody 
 raises the same sort of interrogation. In our 
 hesitation before the question we may yield 
 ourselves to a momentary feeling of distress 
 because we forget the different meanings of 
 ** doing." The word may mean just those 
 actual achievements of aggressive campaign- 
 ing which a newspaper would be likely to 
 *' play up " with catchy head-lines in a daily 
 issue. The most important events cannot 
 thus be played up. That from one hundred 
 
CHRISTIAN USE OF PHILOSOPHIC TOOLS 12/ 
 
 to a thousand people assembled yesterday at 
 a service which in song and prayer and ser- 
 mon was forceful with unanalyzable power in 
 creating the conditions out of which belief 
 grows is not news in the technical sense. 
 The present speaker happens to be ac- 
 quainted with the work of a metropolitan 
 preacher whose sermons seldom abound with 
 direct demolitions of unbeliefs or even with 
 exhortations to detailed duties. The minister 
 is a man of abounding spiritual, intellectual, 
 and physical vitality. Those who hear him 
 for thirty minutes on Sunday are caught in 
 the momentum of that vitality, — or rather 
 they are for the moment drenched with the 
 life of a man who can fill other people with 
 his own vitality. This sort of service does 
 not make newspaper copy except occasion- 
 ally, but the good work goes on not occasion- 
 ally but continually. Ask a man why he 
 goes to such a church and he may reply 
 vaguely that the service makes him feel 
 better, — at which the scoffer may smile, but 
 out of that "feeling better" comes a firmer 
 belief and a completer freedom from doubt. 
 
 The best reply to the doubter is the pres- 
 ence not so much of beliefs as of believing 
 persons. Agnosticism should be met by 
 Christian daring. The venturesomeness of 
 
128 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 faith, especially when it leads to expanding 
 and improving life, is the reply to the doubts 
 of the times. The theoretical objections to 
 the possibility of walking are solved by walk- 
 ing. The objections to belief are solved by 
 believing. The believers who attain to life 
 by their belief are the actual facts that make 
 doubts difficult. If Christianity ever loses 
 this quality of magnificent daring it will cease 
 to be the Christianity of Christ. The belief 
 in God, the belief in men, the belief in the 
 possibility of filling the whole world of men 
 with the spirit of Jesus, — these are the bold 
 ventures which show forth the daring of 
 Christianity. Hope grows by its own exer- 
 cise. The persons actually at work at the 
 relief of world-wide heathenism or at the 
 redemption of cities and nations from civic 
 evils, do not seem easily discouraged. If 
 now such persons were clearly becoming 
 more and more erratic, if they were all 
 cranks and visionaries, we might say that 
 their faith draws them out of touch with the 
 realities which centre around sanity. That 
 word '' sanity " is badly overworked, but we 
 probably mean by it a living union with the 
 forces which are normal and healthy and 
 human. The mass of missionaries and social 
 workers, those facing the most discouraging 
 
CHRISTIAN USE OF PHILOSOPHIC TOOLS 1 29 
 
 tasks, seem to be highly sane. Common 
 sense might seem to impel them to quit their 
 tasks and go home, but the most sensible 
 seem to stay longest on the tasks, and the 
 ones who give up in despair are those likely 
 to develop aberrations and eccentricities. 
 The queer missionaries are those who have 
 abandoned the field. Most of them are back 
 at home. The aberrant social reformers are 
 not the heroes of the battle-line struggling 
 with vice and squalor. 
 
 But let us hasten to remind ourselves that 
 there is a place in the Christian community 
 for a spirit of agnosticism which is at bottom 
 faith, — the faith of willingness to leave some 
 problems unsolved, with confidence that the 
 results can be left in the hands of the Father 
 in heaven. If we get at the cause of agnos- 
 ticism in some persons we may find it to be 
 the reaction from too extensive claims to 
 knowledge either on their own part or on the 
 part of some believers with whom they have 
 been associated. Take one theme very im- 
 portant to us all, — the belief in immortality. 
 Many Christian believers in immortality do 
 not say much about their belief, and that for 
 the reason that they do not wish to seem to 
 assume more knowledge than they possess. 
 They feel convinced of their essential im- 
 
I30 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 mortality as sons of the Father, but just how- 
 to construe the conditions of eternal life they 
 make no claim to know. They say frankly 
 that they do not know. There is no data 
 upon which to frame even an opinion. All 
 that we have is so clearly pictorial or else so 
 utterly drawn from a world-view which has 
 passed away, like that of Dante's or Milton's 
 splendid imaginings, that we say that we 
 have no knowledge whatever in the exact 
 sense. Now this is a sincere and reverent 
 and Christian agnosticism. It is the agnos- 
 ticism of faith and not of doubt, for the 
 believer is entirely willing to leave the out- 
 come in divine hands. He does not profess 
 knowledge which he does not have. And so 
 with scientific or formal proof of even the 
 fundamentals of the Christian religion. We 
 have no proof of the existence of God w^hich 
 will make any one believe whether or no, 
 without a venture of faith. Kant once said 
 that the wisdom of the Almighty had been 
 shown us quite as much in what had been 
 withheld from us as in what had been 
 revealed. We shall get on best by conceding 
 the limitations of our mental instruments. 
 Some who think of themselves as agnostic 
 are not really so. The Christian minister, in 
 dealing with doubters, should proceed very 
 
CHRISTIAN USE OF PHILOSOPHIC TOOLS 131 
 
 carefully. It may be that the man who is 
 outside the organizational fellowship because 
 he doubts is a more intelligent, or more 
 reverent, or more believing disciple than 
 some who are within. Some within may not 
 question because they may not be over- 
 supplied with the instruments for questioning. 
 There is a sphere in Christian experience 
 for legitimate suspension of judgment. The 
 simple recognition of this will keep some 
 from leaving the Church because of supposed 
 agnosticism, and will certainly aid in correct- 
 ing the misapprehensions of those who resent 
 this or that claim of the believers to knowl- 
 edge to which no one may be able to show 
 tide. 
 
 There is an intellectual current to-day 
 towards a theory which may well seem at 
 first glance to be just what Christianity needs 
 for its final apologetics, — the theory of per- 
 sonalism. There is indeed in this doctrine 
 much which is in common with Christian 
 thinking. We can employ this present day 
 conception with much effect for expositional 
 and explanatory purposes. But current per- 
 sonalism stands sadly in want of correction 
 by Christian doctrine. It is not as yet a 
 system. Some of its most able expositors 
 teach that individuals exist from all eternity ; 
 
132 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 some set individuals out in such independ- 
 ence from a Creative Person as virtually to 
 deprive God of power of creation and leave 
 Him just the Bigger Person among us smaller 
 folk ; some push the doors open for a riot of 
 individualism, — and all leave their exposition 
 at rather loose ends. The existence of the 
 Christian brotherhood should point to the 
 possibility of a community of interest and 
 endeavour which will curb the lawlessness of 
 the riot of individuals. Personalism is usually 
 professed by those who have wearily tramped 
 through materialism and idealism and have 
 come back to themselves and others like 
 themselves as the facts of the universe. So 
 far so good, — but the differences between 
 persons and the need of the improvement of 
 persons are often overlooked. Christianity 
 has an opportunity with this latest phase of 
 opinion in insisting that the people of the 
 world are the ends with whom we have to do 
 and in making the most of the world for the 
 persons in the world. 
 
 Somewhat similar criticism must be passed 
 upon pragmatism. Pragmatism is more a 
 protest than a system, and in the main it is a 
 healthy protest. But the moment a man sits 
 down to frame a system as a system he is 
 dangerously near having to admit that there 
 
CHRISTIAN USE OF PHILOSOPHIC TOOLS 133 
 
 is something in the world beside immediately 
 practical interests or else he would not be 
 sitting down to study. Of course the prag- 
 matist will reply that he is trying to make 
 his thought so clear that any one can see that 
 the final test of truth is in its practical result. 
 But we could get along with much less expo- 
 sition of pragmatism to-day if its aim were as 
 matter-of-fact as it professes to be. The truth 
 is that the pragmatist to-day is busy at the 
 same ideal that has drawn on all the other 
 fashioners of systems, — he is trying to satisfy 
 the purely intellectual cravings by self-con- 
 sistent formulations as truly as is the believer 
 in absolutism. Tell a pragmatist that his 
 system is not logical and he gets excited. 
 But if the aim is merely pragmatic there is 
 no reason why the pragmatist should be 
 particularly logical. Daily life can get along 
 without much logic, if the strictly practical 
 result is all. Of course if the presence of 
 contradictions annoys us, that is a different 
 afiair, — and possibly a purely intellectual 
 afTair. We must then be strictly logical as 
 we prove that logic does not matter, or 
 logically industrious to prove that we have a 
 right to be logically lazy. 
 
 The difiFerence between pragmatism and 
 the Christian doctrine of knowing by doing is 
 
134 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 in the order of results sought for. The Chris- 
 tian demand is for the very highest order of 
 results. The consequences by which truth 
 is indictated in the Christian view are the 
 consequences in the range of the highest 
 and best. The whole man in the loftiest 
 activities must be ministered to, but in 
 pragmatism which does not care much for 
 anything except pragmatism itself, the move- 
 ment is apt to slip towards the lower con- 
 sequences. Pragmatism must lock the brakes 
 to keep from sliding down hill. What is 
 agreeable to life depends upon whose life is 
 under consideration. Without some high 
 ideal pragmatism as a test of truth amounts 
 to little. Savages or barbarians or Chris- 
 tians might alike use the scheme with differ- 
 ing results depending upon the differing 
 driving ideals. Of course it will be under- 
 stood that we are not professing to criticize 
 pragmatism from the more technical point of 
 view. We take it simply as a means for the 
 discovery of truth. If now we make the 
 truth mean the highest life for the believer 
 we can use the pragmatic principle. The 
 truths of Christianity lie peculiarly in the field 
 of moral test ; with other sorts of tests we 
 have not now especially to do. But there is 
 no path to the discovery of specifically Chris- 
 
CHRISTIAN USE OF PHILOSOPHIC TOOLS 135 
 
 tian truth but by moral venture. The result- 
 ing consequences, in the inner as well as the 
 outer life of the whole man are the charac- 
 teristically Christian witness. 
 
 We have passed in review these schemes 
 of speculation more for illustration than for 
 any other reason. There are other spectacles 
 for looking at the universe besides the ones 
 we have mentioned. But enough has been 
 said to show the function of Christianity in 
 dealing with world-views. We aim to create 
 a set of spiritual facts which any open-eyed 
 observer must take into account. If a world- 
 view itself is important it must not miss so 
 important a fact as the Christian system. 
 And the facts of the Christian system must be 
 kept dynamic and personal. The conflict is 
 not so much between conflicting world-views 
 in themselves as between different manners 
 of life. Again, the difference between the 
 life nourished by one sort of belief as over 
 against another may not be altogether due 
 to the difference in the quality of the contents 
 of the differing views. All that may be re- 
 quired to make a hitherto unchristian system 
 essentially Christian may be just a better 
 emphasis. The scientific instructor who 
 teaches the farmers how to work their fields 
 more profitably does not necessarily advise 
 
136 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 them to throw away the tools which they have 
 always used and which their fathers used 
 before them. It may be that the slightest 
 change in adjusting the handles to the plow 
 will cause all the difference between a tool 
 that works beneficially and one that works 
 harmfully. Or, in another sphere, a lens 
 which now does nothing but distort may with 
 the least turn of a screw give an exact image. 
 Or a food that now almost poisons may lack 
 just a little of one ingredient or have too 
 much of another. Or the atmosphere may 
 be that of too low an ah'-jde, or it may 
 sweep across a disease-laden swamp. So in 
 the utilization of the world-views. The 
 Christian attitude is not critical until reason 
 for criticism appears. When such reason 
 appears it is fortunate if we are able to lay 
 the finger precisely upon the objectionable 
 spot. To do this is the function of the trained 
 thinker. But with the objectionable feature 
 away, and the whole righdy focused, and the 
 good rightly appropriated the kingdom 
 comes to its own. World-views may de- 
 termine the believer's atdtude towards even 
 the details of daily conduct. How important 
 then that these instruments should be seized 
 and redeemed. Swamps can be redeemed 
 by draining and wild lands by cutting of^' the 
 
CHRISTIAN USE OF PHILOSOPHIC TOOLS 137 
 
 ranker growths. After this they may become 
 the most productive soils. So with some 
 ways of looking at the universe. 
 
 An old time writer once found reason to 
 marvel at the universe because it was estab- 
 lished upon the floods and founded upon the 
 seas. The world to him was a wonder of 
 balance, — the dry land resting steadily upon 
 a surface of water. The psalmist's concep- 
 tion of the world has passed away, but not 
 his reason for marvelling at the universe. 
 Only, our thought is not of a standstill stead- 
 iness but a steadiness of direction in the 
 midst of a sea of changes. The system of 
 Christian beliefs is like a ship which holds to 
 her course and gets ahead in spite of some 
 rolling. The balance of the ship is shown 
 not in never yielding to the waves, but in 
 never capsizing, in an inevitable swing back 
 when she has rolled far to one side. There 
 are discomforts in such travel, but we ad- 
 vance best by letting the ship roll. Better 
 rise and fall with some ocean swells than to 
 try to cut through them. Both the pitch 
 and the roll may help us forward. That ship 
 is the best instrument which best gets us 
 ahead. 
 
LECTURE IV 
 ON MAKING MORALITY HUMAN 
 
LECTURE IV 
 ON MAKING MORALITY HUMAN 
 
 A 
 
 FURTHER field to be occupied by 
 the Christian Church is that of moral- 
 ity. This seems like a wofully com- 
 monplace statement on its face but what we 
 mean is that the field of moral theory and 
 practice is not to be permitted to stand apart 
 from the Christian religion as an independ- 
 ent realm. Of course we expect the Chris- 
 tian believer to be moral as a matter of 
 course, but we feel also that the Christian 
 capture of the kingdoms of this world cannot 
 be complete until this world's morality is 
 made Christian in root and branch. 
 
 The kingdom of moral theory and practice, 
 operating entirely on its own principles and 
 without reference to religion, is a dreary ter- 
 ritory. It has from the beginning lacked 
 freshness and verdure. Reading a course in 
 formal ethics is like travelling across a desert 
 with the difference ,that we are not likely to 
 happen upon an oasis anywhere except per- 
 141 
 
142 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 haps that of the charm of an occasional 
 author who is not quite dried up. Moreover 
 the man who starts out to be professedly and 
 outspokenly a " moral man," apart from any 
 bracing or reenforcement by religion, too 
 often tends towards woodenness without 
 much magnetism. The unreligious moral 
 man never can understand why he is often 
 dealt with slightingly by the professedly re- 
 ligious people. They sometimes speak of 
 him indeed too harshly, as if he were a sinner 
 above all others, whereas he may not be a 
 sinner at all. But he is dreary, especially 
 when he falls to discoursing on morality. 
 He insists that he has no underlying assump- 
 tions of a religious cast ; he believes in right 
 for right's own sake and hates a lie just be- 
 cause it is a lie. This sounds well enough 
 when we first hear it, but it speedily becomes 
 tiresome. 
 
 The reason for the weariness is not far to 
 seek. The academic moralists have esteemed 
 their systems as self-sufficient and their for- 
 mulas as ends in themselves. They have 
 put the cart before the horse, — a performance 
 which is sometimes interesting but which 
 usually prevents rapid travelling. The 
 phrases which the moral theorist manipulates 
 mean little apart from the vigour imparted to 
 
ON MAKING MORALITY HUMAN I43 
 
 them from full-lived human beings. The 
 professional moralist does not immerse him- 
 self in the currents rushing through the ac- 
 tual world often enough to keep his theories 
 from evaporation. Impersonalism clings to 
 moral discussion like a pest. The progress 
 of moral reflection has threshed out some 
 good terms which have proved indispen- 
 sable, but the tendency is to allow these to 
 become sufficient in themselves and to stiffen 
 into the impersonal. 
 
 Consider the more important terms. Moral 
 theory necessarily has much to say about the 
 ''chief good." Here the tendency is espe- 
 cially likely to set towards impersonalism. 
 One thinker declares that the chief good is 
 virtue for its own sake. But what is virtue 
 in the abstract? We would say more if we 
 said that the virtuous person is an end in 
 himself, or the chief good. Moreover a vir- 
 tue which might not result in making life 
 happier would not be worth while. A mor- 
 alist who realizes this declares that the chief 
 good is the sum of human happiness and 
 that it is the object of the moral man to in- 
 crease this sum. This looks promising till 
 we try to get to close quarters with it. Sir 
 Frederick Treves once estimated in terms of 
 hours the sum of pain banished in a given 
 
144 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 time by the London hospitals. He calculated 
 from the amount of anaesthetics and sedatives 
 consumed, and announced the hours of relief 
 from pain that the specified quantities of 
 these drugs would render. This is possible 
 of course with an approximate accuracy, but 
 nothing so exact would be attainable if we 
 tried to get at a sum of happiness. For then 
 all the qualities of persons have to be taken 
 into measurement. Of course there are dif- 
 ferences in pain, but there is more nearly a 
 common element in pain than there is in hap- 
 piness. Neuralgia is very much itself where- 
 ever found, but a happiness varies. The ex- 
 hortation to add to the sum of human happi- 
 ness ordinarily forgets that there is not 
 pleasure or happiness in the world but 
 pleased and happy persons. As soon as this 
 is recognized of course the inclination is to 
 the idea that the chief good is the good man, 
 but here too we have to be on our guard lest 
 we manufacture an abstract man amazingly 
 unlike any one in the houses or on the 
 streets, — a much less agreeable creature than 
 was even the economic man who stalked 
 with such stiff steps through the pages of the 
 older writers on the political sciences. We 
 cannot make anything out of the conception 
 of the chief good until we come to the good 
 
ON MAKING MORALITY HUMAN 145 
 
 man but we must bring the good man close 
 enough to actual life to keep him human. 
 
 Another term of the moralist is our old 
 college-days' friend, — the categorical impera- 
 tive. It would be difficult to push anything 
 along in ethics or anywhere else without 
 some kind of imperative, but impersonal im- 
 peratives soon lose their *' drive." The term 
 has to be reenforced by personal life. As 
 soon as the categorical imperative becomes 
 not some supreme command outside of us 
 standing in its own authority but just a de- 
 mand of whole life growing in the direction 
 of what seems to be highest and best we be- 
 gin to obey gladly, but not before. The real 
 imperative is that of an appetite or a crav- 
 ing. We have heard of the saint who be- 
 came perplexed over the idea of God and 
 finally gave up the idea, being convinced that 
 there is nothing higher in the universe than 
 the abstract principle of right. Of a wor- 
 shipful and reverent temperament he con- 
 tinued his prayers but directed them not 
 towards God but towards the abstract prin- 
 ciple of right Soon this saint found his way 
 back to reliance on a personal God. Inci- 
 dents like this here and there recorded in 
 biographies of worthy spiritual leaders are 
 often misunderstood. It is easy to conceive 
 
146 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 of such an incident as a tribute to a moral 
 conception in itself. As a matter of fact the 
 story proves nothing so clearly as the mo- 
 mentum of a good life which, though dis- 
 tressed by momentary doubt, swung on 
 through a prayer addressed to an empty and 
 dead abstraction back to a normal religious 
 health. 
 
 Then there is the term ** intuitionalism." 
 But whose intuitions are meant ? The in- 
 tuitions of the man long practiced in moral 
 uprightness may be reasonably sure, but 
 what about the intuitions of a less mature 
 man or of a weak man, or of one whose life 
 has been marred by immorality ? Of course 
 we can say that even these persons should 
 live up to their moral intuitions, but suppose 
 they are in the majority and try to impose 
 their faulty intuitions on the rest of us ? 
 Even in their own case how far can we con- 
 tinue to allow them to do themselves moral 
 harm by following the intuitions of their un- 
 tutored or unhealthy consciences ? Utilita- 
 rianism comes in to help us out with a behest 
 that we regard the consequences, but whose 
 utilities after all are most to be regarded ? 
 If we take account of inner consequences, — 
 the consequences which accrue inwardly as 
 well as outwardly to the man striving to live 
 
ON MAKING MORALITY HUMAN 147 
 
 aright, intuitionalism and utilitarianism would 
 be about equivalent to each other. But 
 neither of them is of surpassing value until 
 we ask as to whose intuition and whose 
 utility. So with common-sense morals. 
 What does this give us until we know whose 
 common sense we are to follow ? We run 
 through these terms of moral discussion 
 which, we repeat, are indispensable, — to 
 show that they are not worth much until liv- 
 ing persons give them living content. In 
 plodding through the discussions of the mor- 
 alists we are in a plight somewhat similar to 
 that in which we find ourselves in reading 
 the debates of the scholastics. The sub- 
 stance of the debates of the scholastics is not 
 precious. There is too much beating of old 
 straw. But the scholastics did build fairly 
 some good threshing machines. That is to 
 say, they developed some very serviceable 
 instrumental terms ; their terminology has 
 value to-day. So with moral theory. The 
 terms are good, — but they must not be taken 
 as important in themselves. They are in- 
 struments to be handled by moral beings 
 who are the ends in themselves. 
 
 It is not the purpose of this lecture, how- 
 ever, to discuss moral theory. The intent is 
 simpler. We wish to show how the moral 
 
148 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 life can be made much more attractive and 
 moral theory much more vital by keeping to 
 the front the human interests and meanings. 
 And we begin by remarking that it is the 
 duty of the Christian community to force 
 uppermost the demands of the usual and ordi- 
 nary rounds of life as of chief importance for 
 the development of moral character. Moral- 
 ity must be kept near the earth. We know 
 what harm has been wrought in religious ex- 
 perience by allowing persons, especially 
 young persons, to acquire the notion that 
 religious experience consists in unusual 
 states of feeling. We err when we pick 
 out the instant of rapt insight and the mo- 
 ment of exalted uplift and make these the 
 heart of religion. These may indeed be the 
 heart of religious experience, but only if they 
 have come out of experience of another order, 
 — the experience of daily practice of right- 
 eousness. So with the moral duties. These 
 are not to be found largely in the realm of 
 the unusual. The duties in time of ship- 
 wreck or of war or of martyrdom have little 
 to do with the problems which we meet day 
 after day. About as speedy a route as any 
 out of the living contact with the world in 
 which we live is to make such imagined situ- 
 ations the topic of much moral discourse. 
 
ON MAKING MORALITY HUMAN I49 
 
 The reply that in such unusual settings the 
 jewel of the moral principle is displayed most 
 advantageously is of slight worth. Much 
 more light on the extraordinary situation is 
 likely to come at the proper time to him w^ho 
 has been faithful in the daily moral practice. 
 The Christian community must not get away 
 from the insight of its Founder. The daily 
 tasks are the important tasks ; these have 
 the right of way as lying closer to actual 
 human life. The moral duty is to freshen 
 these daily relationships by stimulating them 
 with noble purpose. What is the profit of 
 wrangles over that threadbare inanity as to 
 whether a He is ever justifiable as compared 
 with incessant practice of integrity in the 
 customary duties ? The only extraordinary 
 we need trouble ourselves with is not some- 
 thing standing apart from the ordinary, but 
 something lifted above the ordinary by the 
 operation of the same laws as those which 
 control the ordinary. If the extraordinary is 
 not this it is just a freak set of happenings 
 without bearing on the moral career. Chris- 
 tianity is to make morality more personal, 
 closer to human existence, nearer the earth 
 on which most of us walk. We might well 
 take for our motto in this field the sanctifica- 
 tion of the ordinary. We may learn some- 
 
I50 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 thing here from that method of modern in- 
 struction of children in the schools which be- 
 gins with the facts nearest home. In geog- 
 raphy, for example, the child is taught why 
 the street in front of the door is located where 
 it is. What principles are set forth by the 
 slope of the land towards the stream just out 
 of the village ? The principles which deter- 
 mine the value of real estate even on the 
 small scale are substantially those which 
 guide nations in their scrambles for new 
 territories. The law of good will comes as 
 near standing in its own right as any law in 
 the moral kingdom ; but the training of 
 youth is not best secured by teaching the 
 law of good will towards abstract or sup- 
 positious beings. Sound instruction begins 
 with the obligations towards the neighbours 
 or the playfellows. We must deliver our- 
 selves from bondage to the abstract and 
 unusual. The concrete and the usual com- 
 prise the sphere for moral training, and this 
 emphasis on the usual is peculiar to Chris- 
 tianity. 
 
 A further way to prevent morality from be- 
 coming unhuman is to keep one's eyes ofi 
 one's self. A man does not realize ideal 
 character by seeking directly after character. 
 We have said so much about the need of de- 
 
ON MAKING MORALITY HUMAN 151 
 
 veloping ideal life that some may think that 
 we advise a man to set himself before himself 
 as the true aim. We intend nothing of the 
 kind. There is an indirectness about suc- 
 cessful moral conquest, — that is to say, about 
 that of the man who here and now attracts 
 us as the kind of person we should like to be. 
 Woodrow Wilson once remarked profoundly 
 that character is a by-product. He meant 
 that men do not attain character by march- 
 ing out deliberately to attain character. The 
 successful method is to lose one's self in a 
 task ; and the character grows as an inevita- 
 ble accompaniment. If we should ask a 
 man why he gives himself to this or that 
 activity and should get the answer : " To 
 develop my character," we would put the 
 man down as a prig. The outright cultiva- 
 tion of character may be more desirable from 
 the point of view of systematic moral theory, 
 but it is not the path by which virtue arrives. 
 He who would save his life must lose it. 
 Here we reach one of those odd moral para- 
 doxes which so abound in actual experience. 
 We have been preaching that the good man 
 is an end in himself, but the moment a man 
 begins to set himself up as the end he begins 
 to dwarf himself. We shall have more to 
 say about the social sphere of righteous en- 
 
152 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 deavour later, but here we point out the 
 futility of moral theory which preaches to a 
 man to develop his character ! Even in the 
 preaching of the Gospel it is possible to 
 make a hearer think too much about his own 
 spiritual state. The unfailing sign of the 
 presence of the Spirit of God in human life 
 is absorption in the worthy task. When the 
 mind begins to turn inward upon itself the 
 symptoms of aberration may appear. Intro- 
 spective morality is not quite human. It 
 would seem part of the plan of the universe 
 that a person is to contemplate himself just 
 as little as possible. Even a mirror helps but 
 slightly, for a man seldom catches himself as 
 he is, and the clearest reflective surface does 
 not give back all the truth. Moreover there 
 seems something providential in the fact that 
 a man after gazing into the mirror goeth 
 away and straightway forgetteth what manner 
 of man he is. Soiled faces and tumbled hair 
 call for mirrors but there is small place in a 
 healthy moral life for introspection. The 
 less of it the better. The simplest observa- 
 tion reveals that a man is seldom himself 
 while thinking of himself. The singer can- 
 not sing, the player cannot play, wdth the 
 hateful question as to whether he is doing 
 well or ill ever before him. Nor can a man 
 
ON MAKING MORALITY HUMAN 153 
 
 do well towards developing the life which is 
 the goal of Christian morals with the ques- 
 tion as to how he is doing always uppermost. 
 " Forget it " is often sound advice to a man 
 of good intentions worried about his search 
 for character. 
 
 The Christian teacher can render further 
 service by showing that in actual experience 
 many questions can be argued forever and 
 that if we would keep the moral field fresh 
 we must not debate everything to dust. 
 There is an inherent indeterminateness about 
 many moral problems. We get on only by 
 moving the previous question and by taking 
 a vote. We have to assume the responsi- 
 bility for action and then act. We may not 
 be able to tell what lies before us but we 
 go ahead nevertheless. The frontiersman's 
 motto that when in doubt we are to go ahead 
 is bad advice if we have not sought out the 
 course as far as we can. If we go ahead be- 
 fore we have done any scouting the advice 
 is bad, but there is in some cases no better 
 advice for the moral life, if the preliminary 
 exploration has not brought back any definite 
 report. In living moral experiences we have 
 to break many paths. This is to be done 
 with a consciousness of responsibility but it 
 is to be done. There is no more unhealthy 
 
154 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 moral state than that of constant debate. It 
 will not do to argue some questions. Even 
 to raise them is to open the door of the pit. 
 And just to raise some other questions is to 
 lose a sacred opportunity for beneficial ac- 
 tion. We cannot have everything explained 
 to us beforehand. Thus it happens that 
 some great leaders, when after their success 
 they are complimented on their reach of 
 vision as if they had seen the end from the 
 beginning, avow that they did not at all see 
 the end from the beginning. They took the 
 next step with the light they had and they 
 came out aright. Or if they failed they had 
 the satisfaction of knowing they were doing 
 their best and then tried as quickly as pos- 
 sible to get back to the right path. The 
 statesmen would be a hypocrite if he should 
 pretend always or often to have foreseen just 
 what the unfolding years actually have re- 
 vealed, — for it is a peculiarity of human ex- 
 perience that we can see just a short distance 
 before us. In some situations the past sheds 
 but feeble light. We cannot tell what to do, 
 but we do nevertheless. This enables a 
 species of moral reasoner to rail at the mass 
 of human conduct as immoral, or unmoral. 
 It may be so, but this is the only way we 
 advance. We feel it incumbent on us to get 
 
ON MAKING MORALITY HUMAN 1 55 
 
 ahead, — to get ahead, that is, towards the 
 ideal human state which should mark those 
 who are developing into the likeness of the 
 divine. The explanation of the success of 
 men who have gone ahead without formal 
 reason for their advance is this, — that out of 
 the doing of the right the whole life itself has 
 begotten an intuitive sense of moral direc- 
 tion. Just as the woodsman develops a feel- 
 ing of direction in the dense forest when he 
 cannot see the sun, and just as many men 
 have a sense of time which enables them to 
 tell within a few minutes the hour of day 
 without looking at a timepiece, so the doers 
 of righteousness acquire a discernment that 
 the true course is to one hand or the other 
 without being able to tell just why they think 
 so. They might debate forever without be- 
 ing able to say more than this. Now if this 
 is intuitionalism it is the intuitionalism of the 
 persons who have had the most practice in 
 the development of the right sort of intuition. 
 If we are to keep the realm of morality hu- 
 man we must see that realm as it is. There 
 is no justification for laying claim to fore- 
 sight here which we do not have elsewhere. 
 We do not shut our eyes and go ahead, — we 
 open them and go ahead, — but that does not 
 mean that we always see very far. To any 
 
156 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 one fully alive, however, this is part of the 
 charm of the moral career, — this appeal to 
 moral venturesomeness, not indeed the ap- 
 peal to see how close to evil we can steer but 
 the appeal to discover how far we can get 
 towards the result which seems to us most 
 worth while. The sphere of moral advance 
 has the same charm and lure that other 
 spheres of advance have when they are en- 
 tered by those who carry not a set of formal 
 principles good for all time but who carry a 
 consciousness of the needs of persons to be 
 satisfied by moral progress. In some courses 
 we have attained to certainty. In other 
 realms we are just beginning to be moral. 
 The average man would be astounded and 
 perhaps scared if he could now behold the 
 morality of the future. We are beginning 
 to catch foregleams of the future, especially 
 in the realm of social activities, which are 
 disquieting to some persons, but which sum- 
 mon others with a thrill as of the discovery 
 of new continents. Genuinely human mo- 
 rality is always in the making. Conduct 
 which was once regarded as innocent enough 
 may be seen after a while as evil. The in- 
 sight of the seer becomes through the expan- 
 sion of intelligence the common property of 
 the masses, — and wide-spread moral advance 
 
ON MAKING MORALITY HUMAN 1 57 
 
 results. It would be better if we would all 
 keep this developmental, evolutionary aspect 
 of morality in mind, — especially if we discern 
 in ourselves the tendencies to loftiness of 
 spirit as we give ourselves to abstract moral 
 contemplations. Men whom we sometimes 
 pronounce immoral may not be consciously 
 so at all. They may be excellent as far as 
 they go, but they may not go far. We are 
 under obligations to help all such see the 
 light, but not as if we had completely at- 
 tained or were already perfect. From the 
 point of view of the conduct which may 
 mark the life of the years just ahead of us, 
 we may to-day be sorry spectacles. And 
 this same reflection ought to give us a his- 
 toric moral sense in contemplating genera- 
 tions earlier than ours. A brilliant social 
 student recently wrote a book showing that 
 the framers of the constitution of the United 
 States were interested in the capitalist class 
 and that the constitution is in the light of its 
 origin a capitalistic document. The main 
 point is of economic and political value and 
 the author himself would have been the first 
 to admit the social wisdom of the founders 
 of the constitution in their time. But some 
 of the reviewers of the book speak as if we 
 now had clear proof that the fathers of the 
 
158 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 nation were the chief plunderers of their day 
 and generation. As a matter of fact what is 
 high social righteousness in one generation 
 may be of doubtful propriety two generations 
 later and clearly wrong two generations later 
 still. 
 
 A still further freshening of the moral field 
 is through taking the whole man into our 
 plans. We have to live with men as they 
 are and they are much more than appears in 
 any single putting-forth of their activity. 
 For example we hear to-day that if we can 
 only get people to know the consequences of 
 evil we shall turn them from evil. Nothing 
 could be more mistaken. The assumption 
 that the increase of knowledge will of itself 
 increase moral power is far from the track. 
 It is just a fractional truth, — or a truth based 
 on a fraction. A man is appetite as well as 
 knowledge and his knowledge has to be 
 very compelling indeed to keep him on the 
 right path, if his knowledge alone is to be 
 depended upon. Perhaps this overempha- 
 sis on knowledge comes just out of the peda- 
 gogical necessities of the situation, — it being 
 necessary to make some minds think of a 
 truth as the only truth if they are to think of 
 it as true at all. But if we conceive of a man 
 as a creature to be reached solely by inform- 
 
ON MAKING MORALITY HUMAN 1 59 
 
 ing his intellect we make grievous mistake. 
 The knowledge of the dire consequences of 
 an evil does not necessarily make the evil 
 itself any less seductive. We have an in- 
 stance of this inadequacy in the present-day 
 emphasis on instruction in sex hygiene as a 
 preventive of sexual immorality. No doubt 
 much sexual sin does come out of ignorance, 
 but there is wide-spread temptation in this 
 quarter which cannot be met by increase of 
 knowledge. The men who know most of the 
 consequences of sex transgressions are not 
 always those who avoid the transgressions 
 most determinedly. Such men, caught for 
 example in the clutches of disease, are often 
 the very first to find their way back to vice 
 as soon as the disease is alleviated. The 
 training of the whole life, including the will, 
 is more significant than the training of the 
 fraction of a man. Fractional moral training 
 is not over successful in any event and soon 
 leads to weariness and disgust. 
 
 Of equal inadequacy is the assumption 
 that this or that man can be trained apart 
 from his fellows. We are reserving the 
 larger social questions for a later lecture, but 
 we must here comment on the futility and 
 barrenness of trying to upbuild lives in an 
 unreal and strained isolation from other lives. 
 
l6o PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 We have said that when we attempt this we 
 bend the mind inward upon itself — compel- 
 Hng the will ultimately to spring back in re- 
 bellion. The law of good will is empty for 
 us except in fellowship with companions and 
 fellows. The path of the cross is still the 
 path of life. Better for me to suffer with 
 comrades than to enjoy myself alone. We 
 advance not by minding each the affairs of 
 himself but by minding the afTairs of one an- 
 other. And we help one another by making 
 a social climate in which some temptations 
 die out. Take the basic virtue of truth-tell- 
 ing, which seems to be a peculiarly individ- 
 ual virtue. There must be some one to 
 whom the truth is to be told, and truth-tell- 
 ing rests on the assumption that the mem- 
 bers of society are in the main in an attitude 
 of good will towards one another and that 
 men are entitled to the truth from one an- 
 other. Suppose, however, that this funda- 
 mental assumption is mistaken, that the 
 social condition is war on every man's part 
 against his fellow, that every man is trying 
 to cheat every other man. In such social 
 atmosphere the moral notions become dread- 
 fully perverted. The highest praise for the 
 youth of fifteen is that he lies like a man of 
 fifty. No one feels that he can afford to tell 
 
ON MAKING MORALITY HUMAN l6l 
 
 the truth. So with chastity. If the social 
 atmosphere breeds impurity the most vir- 
 tuous in intention have to fight the down- 
 ward pull. Society must furnish the condi- 
 tions of morality. At least the general moral 
 sentiment must be such that men can afford 
 to be honest and virtuous. 
 
 And yet in this emphasis on the social we 
 have always to remember that each man is 
 a problem in himself. Each bears within 
 himself at all times the mark of his own sep- 
 arateness, and that separateness must not be 
 smothered under a blanket of too general 
 moral law. Making men moral comes after 
 while to be an intensely personal affair best 
 left in the hands of those who know their 
 acquaintances best. It is for parents and 
 teachers and pastors and friends rather than 
 for professed and professional moralists. 
 
 The intention of all that we have thus far 
 said has been to show that morality must be 
 freshened by being made personal. We can- 
 not take any system as an end in itself and 
 expect to become righteous by exalting that 
 system. What we must exalt is the persons 
 who desire to become better persons. From 
 what we have said it is easy to see that the 
 trouble with much morality is that it lacks 
 not ideas but power ; there is too often a 
 
l62 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 failure in dynamic. The function of the 
 Christian religion is to supply the moral ma- 
 chinery with energy. The power can come 
 only from the Christian persons, and the 
 Christian persons can help mightily by 
 preaching to the world the secret of Chris- 
 tian forcefulness. 
 
 We have said that energy does not spring 
 primarily from knowledge. But when knowl- 
 edge becomes operative and incarnate in 
 men the knowledge takes on at least a degree 
 of force. Take the force of some of the 
 Christian ideas as an inspiration for the moral 
 advance. We have seen that the end of 
 moral endeavour is human life in all its 
 higher possibilities. But what is a man? 
 How can a moral thinker say that it makes 
 no difference for morality how we answer ? 
 It may make no difference for morality con- 
 sidered as a set of abstractions, but it ought 
 to make vast difference for morality con- 
 sidered as an affair of lives. We speak of 
 moral development, but has moral develop- 
 ment to do with the limited space of the 
 earthly years, or has it an eternal race to 
 run ? A lie is a lie, and all good men should 
 hate a lie, but not all men are good. The 
 core of the difficulty is to help men to be 
 good enough to hate a lie. We have not 
 
ON MAKING MORALITY HUMAN 163 
 
 much of an inducement to tell the truth if we 
 are to believe that the universe is itself a lie. 
 If we exist in a world which arouses our 
 fondest hopes only forever to blight them, if 
 it ties us to dear friends only to mock us at 
 the last with the revelation that we shall see 
 them no more, if it ultimately reduces every- 
 thing" which we regard as ideal to the dust, 
 the universe itself is rather a huge liar. The 
 idea of putting myself out to avoid telling a 
 lie in such a universe may approach the 
 ludicrous. Of course we know that this 
 manner of remark stirs a certain type of 
 moralist to fury, for according to him we 
 ought to love morality for its own sake. 
 We can admit this duty and yet maintain 
 that the progress of persuading a majority of 
 the people of the world to protest against a 
 lying universe by themselves telling the truth 
 and by standing for the truth is not hopeful 
 on the basis of disregard of what the relation 
 of the universe may be towards upright con- 
 duct. For when all is said the potent ques- 
 tion with the average man concerning the 
 moral struggle is : '* What's the use ? " 
 
 The Christian meets the question : *' What's 
 the use ? " by the doctrine that a moral God 
 controls a universe which is but the expres- 
 sion of the divine purpose. The believer 
 
l64 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 does not offer this as a proposition which can 
 be proved. He does not affirm that we can 
 go out and gather scientific data which will 
 demonstrate the morality of the universe, but 
 he does spread this belief over his head as a 
 part of his intellectual sky. He avows that 
 he finds light in that sky. Now the shining 
 of light is not always capable of proof. It is 
 not capable of proof to one who is blind or to 
 one who will not throw open his windows or 
 step out into the sunshine, or to one who will 
 not open his eyes. But light is the prerequi- 
 site of almost everything else. When the 
 Master told His disciples that they were to be 
 the light of the world He seems to have had 
 in mind their relation to the moral conduct 
 of those who were to follow their leadership. 
 They were to put a light in men's sky. 
 When the blind lead the blind both fall into 
 the ditch, — and that in spite of the earnest 
 intentions of the blind leaders to keep out of 
 the ditch, and in spite of the most intense 
 desire of the blind followers to be kept out 
 of the ditch. The light makes possible the 
 moral life. The precepts of the moral law 
 are fine instruments, but they have only a 
 limited application if there is not light enough 
 in the sky for us to use them. The Christian 
 doctrine of God brings light. The universe 
 
ON MAKING MORALITY HUMAN 165 
 
 may not be all that men have claimed for it 
 in relation to human needs. We may pos- 
 sibly some day find, for example, that the 
 world has other purposes than merely those 
 which have to do with human inteUigences, 
 but anyhow the world is usable by us and we 
 can feel at home here. The revelation of the 
 Christian religion shows us that the world 
 belongs to our Father and that the earthly 
 part of the world is one of the many man- 
 sions of the Father's house. God is a moral 
 being, and our moral insights are but gleams 
 of the light and hfe which are in Him. 
 
 President Eliot of Harvard once said that 
 the first step in the moral development of 
 children in a well-ordered home is to get the 
 children to respect the father of the family. 
 Respect should always underlie love. The 
 Christian doctrine of God creates respect for 
 God. This world is not altogether a nursery. 
 It is a place where many of the children of 
 God are beyond the nursery stage, and de- 
 mand justice and righteousness in God's 
 nature, as well as love. The revelation in 
 Jesus is a pledge that the moral obligations 
 which are binding on us are binding also on 
 God. God is under the heaviest of bonds, 
 — which He has had no desire to escape. 
 There is suggestiveness in the remark of an 
 
l66 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 old saint who once declared that the revela- 
 tion of the divine purpose in Christ is neces- 
 sary to satisfy God's own self-respect. The 
 remark may be a trifle overbold, but few 
 reverent remarks of this sort are likely to be 
 overbold. As soon as there are prophets or 
 seers who can glimpse anything of the moral 
 purpose of God it would seem that God is 
 under obligation to let them know His pur- 
 pose. If there were no other persons beside 
 God Himself that would create one sort of 
 moral problem. God would then be under 
 obligation only to those moral laws which 
 express His own inner nature, in other words, 
 only to Himself. But the moment other be- 
 ings of moral intelligence are brought into 
 existence the Creator is under obligation to 
 come into moral communion with them. He 
 cannot stand aloof and refuse to do this and 
 maintain His own self-respect. Why did the 
 saint say this ? Because he knew that a man 
 could not give himself to such a refusal and 
 maintain his self-respect, and self-respect 
 must mean more to God than to man. The 
 Christian revelation is of a God whom we 
 can respect and trust. There is no hard-and- 
 fast proof of the existence of this God, and 
 this is what the moralist may have in mind 
 when he says that strict morality cannot go 
 
ON MAKING MORALITY HUMAN 167 
 
 outside the realm of the actually known. He 
 declares that strict uprightness cannot delude 
 itself or bolster itself up with beliefs just be- 
 cause their consequences happen to be bene- 
 ficial. 
 
 Abstract righteousness is never more dis- 
 tressingly unhuman than when it climbs into 
 this lofty attitude ; and from an unhuman 
 position it often leaps over to an inhuman 
 one. *' We must be absolutely honest," de- 
 clares the abstract moralist. And indeed we 
 must. But we must not fancy ourselves 
 honest when we spill all the human values 
 out of life. There was once a very small boy 
 who when asked the time of day never felt 
 that he could reply that it was ten minutes 
 past twelve, or any other exact minute, be- 
 cause the hands were moving, and that 
 therefore he could not honestly say that they 
 were at any one place. The boy would reply 
 that the hands were passing from such figures 
 to such other figures. Though this boy ac- 
 tually lived on earth he was hardly human. 
 A normal human being is satisfied if he is 
 understood in his intended meaning, for 
 language is an instrument and as such has 
 communication of thought for its purpose. 
 The abstract moralist who believes in mo- 
 rality on its own account and declares against 
 
l68 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the dishonesty of holding fast to beliefs in 
 God which we cannot prove will never do 
 much for the cause of any type of morality. 
 If we made claims for Christian belief differ- 
 ent from those we do make the case might 
 be different. The present lecturer cannot be 
 persuaded that the Christian is not honest 
 when he makes the frankest distinction be- 
 tween what is known as objective fact and 
 what is assumed on faith. In the Christian 
 doctrine of God we are admittedly in the 
 realm of belief. We avow as heartily as did 
 Kant that there is no formal reasoning which 
 will give the God of Christianity as the con- 
 clusion, to be known as we know that the 
 square of the hypothenuse of a right-angled 
 triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of 
 the other two sides. We would remind the 
 abstract and highly honest moralist that all 
 the truths which can be known in this strictly 
 logical procedure are about as momentous as 
 this mathematical proposition. We refuse to 
 be put at a disadvantage by this objection 
 that our religious knowledge is not strict 
 knowledge in a w^orld where we cannot get 
 anywhere without assumptions. After having 
 made our assumptions we affirm that the idea 
 of God thus assumed does satisfy our total 
 life better than anything else we have ever 
 
ON MAKING MORALITY HUMAN 169 
 
 found, — it satisfies intellectual and emotional 
 and volitional demands. We ought to be 
 competent witnesses as to whether our de- 
 mands are satisfied or not. So where does 
 the dishonesty come in, except that we use 
 the word '' knowledge " when the moralist 
 thinks we ought not ? We use ** knowledge " 
 in the sense of faith experience ; and in ordi- 
 nary human speech such use is permissible 
 if anything is. We are pointing out the only 
 normal dynamic. We say that the light on 
 morality comes from belief in God, — not 
 scientifically demonstrable or logically de- 
 ducible knowledge of God ; and we point to 
 the Christian community of persons as them- 
 selves proof of the justice of our belief. If 
 we find that believing men become better 
 men, better fathers and brothers and sons 
 and husbands, better citizens, better members 
 of the commonwealth, we declare that this is 
 precisely the result at which we are aiming, 
 and we hold fast the beliefs as aids to this 
 Tightness of conduct. We would not go so 
 far as to attempt to explain the results of be- 
 lief in detail on this or that individual, but we 
 do maintain that on the whole and in the 
 main this is the result which follows sincere 
 entrance into the body of Christian believers. 
 As instruments Christian beliefs are superior 
 
lyo PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 to the formal precepts of abstract morality. 
 If there is any risk in accepting the funda- 
 mental beliefs of Christianity we are willing 
 to run the risk. 
 
 Much follows as implication from the Chris- 
 tian doctrine of God. The universe must be 
 under a law substantially moral. Moreover 
 if men are sons of God the confidence in 
 immortality becomes at once potent in Chris- 
 tian circles. And now again the formal 
 moralist breaks out upon us because we 
 bring in immortality to bedim the pure moral 
 motives of men. The moralist will have it 
 that men cannot be moral when they are 
 looking for pay for their virtue. In quoting 
 thus from abstract moralists we are not quot- 
 ing from straw men to whom we are attribut- 
 ing ready-made objections which we proceed 
 to knock over. Men, — and famous men too, 
 — have actually urged and are urging this 
 type of objection. It is an interesting com- 
 mentary on the moral state of some of these 
 moralists that they can refer to life in terms 
 of pay or reward when they find the desire 
 for immortality so especially selfish. If the 
 main current of life here is selfish there could 
 be legitimate objection against continuing 
 the opportunity for selfishness, but even the 
 most detached of closet reasoners must surely 
 
ON MAKING MORALITY HUMAN 171 
 
 have seen the unselfishness of much life ; 
 they must have seen men delighting to serve 
 and asking for a chance to serve forever. In 
 what sense it is selfish to long for a chance to 
 work for the highest and best forever does 
 not appear. By the way, if the honest ab- 
 stract moralist wants to be absolutely honest 
 let him cease claiming impersonal immortality 
 as immortality. The abstract moralist avows 
 that he believes in immortality, but not 
 personal immortality. The influence or the 
 value of our lives is immortal. But im- 
 personal immortality is not what ordinary 
 speech means by immortality. 
 
 The desire for immortality is the desire to 
 claim the whole universe as the moral sphere, 
 to insist that God has righteous purposes for 
 men which stretch beyond this present life, to 
 offset the ironies and mockeries of earthly 
 existence not so much by punishing some 
 people and rewarding others in a spectacular 
 readjustment as by vindicating and satisfying 
 the instinct of the normal conscience for 
 justice. The hard lot of this or that man 
 may not count much with the sufferer him- 
 self. He may have made a stoic adjustment 
 to it so that the hardship has ceased to 
 trouble him, but the moral bystanders are 
 not satisfied that any life should be unjustly 
 
172 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 treated forever. And these bystanders have 
 some rights. We desire to live in a world 
 where righteous law rules throughout. We 
 are like the spectators of a play or the readers 
 of a novel. We wish the plot to " end right." 
 We are not happy with a poor ending. The 
 characters portrayed are not the only ones 
 concerned. We onlookers are concerned. 
 Our sense of fitness demands some con- 
 sideration ; and so we wish the universe to 
 end right. We can work better with the 
 expectation of the right ending. If some one 
 convinces us that there is no immortality for 
 men we shall give up the belief, but until 
 thus convinced we shall hold fast to the 
 belief. The belief morally agrees with us. 
 
 A foremost abstract moralist once burst out 
 with contemptuous impatience on John Henry 
 Newman on account of Newman's ability to 
 persuade himself of the truth of religious 
 beliefs because of their beneficial results. 
 Newman's capacity for belief seemed to out- 
 rage this strict moralist, but the comment of 
 the critic would seem to show scant insight 
 into the process by which men attain to 
 spiritual certainty. Moralists of a type seem 
 to cling fast to their creeds because of the 
 very disagreeableness of the beliefs, or un- 
 beliefs. We find a saint now and then who 
 
ON MAKING MORALITY HUMAN 1 73 
 
 seems to imagine that the more disagreeable 
 a call to duty the more surely it must be 
 from God. So with some teachers of 
 morality. The less of human value there 
 seems to be in their systems the more the 
 adherents seem to prize them. It is at least 
 as rational to accept beliefs because they 
 make us contented as to accept them because 
 they make us miserable. The abstract 
 moralist is of all men most impotent when 
 asked to suggest a dynamic for the enforce- 
 ment of actual morality. When the dis- 
 tinguished moralist to whom we have referred 
 as criticizing Newman himself became 
 alarmed at the spread of lawlessness in this 
 country he made the suggestion that singing 
 be more widely taught in the public schools, 
 since singing has obviously a soothing and 
 tranquillizing effect ! 
 
 We come back to our avowal that in mak- 
 ing morality vigorous we must put a sky 
 over human life in the form of teaching 
 about God and man. If men are sons of 
 God the whole problem of duty towards our 
 fellows pushes into new force at once. Since 
 we are under obligations to be kind even to 
 the beasts of the field no doubt we ought to 
 be kind to men even if their career is to be 
 as short as that of the beasts ; but human 
 
174 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 kindness is one duty if it is just an attempt 
 to meet the commoner needs of men, and 
 quite another if it is an effort to call forth 
 the transcendent dignity attaching to men as 
 at least possible sons of God. The con- 
 demnations of Jesus were for the inhuman 
 who were inhuman just in overlooking op- 
 portunities to be human. Dives may have 
 been a pretty good sort of fellow. He may 
 have been an agreeable companion and a 
 hospitable entertainer, but he overlooked 
 responsibility to Lazarus. Dives in the sec- 
 ond part of the Master's picture is about the 
 same man as in the first. Very anxious 
 that his brothers should not come into the 
 place of torment, and very willing that Laz- 
 arus should be treated just as a convenience 
 to carry water to him and to go and warn 
 the brothers of their danger ! The persons 
 condemned in the Master's picture of judg- 
 ment were not those we usually pronounce 
 bad. No violent offenders are in the list, 
 but those who have not treated men as men 
 come under condemnation. What is God ? 
 The answer carries with it the answer to, 
 what is man ? — and what is human life ? 
 With some light on these questions we take 
 a long stride towards a dynamic for mo- 
 rality. 
 
ON MAKING MORALITY HUMAN 1 75 
 
 But we remind ourselves that we ourselves 
 have been teaching that light is not enough. 
 Light is the indispensable prerequisite, but 
 men can stand in the full light and not move 
 towards the moral life. We must have an 
 appeal which stirs the heart. Emotion which 
 is sheer effervescence is nothing ; but emo- 
 tion which bursts out of ideas and impels to 
 action is everything. Feeling which comes 
 with the full light and which acts in the light 
 is full of might. 
 
 The revelation in the cross of Christ has 
 always appealed to the heart of man. An 
 experience most apt to arouse us to repent- 
 ant gratitude is to become aware of some 
 one's patience towards us in spite of our own 
 waywardness and wickedness. In one de- 
 gree or another the cross makes us realize 
 our cost to God and our debt to Him. The 
 love of God for us is laid bare. The Son of 
 God will meet the death of the cross to 
 show us how far He will go in holy love for 
 us. We must never cease to remember that 
 all theories of the atonement are so many 
 attempts on the part of successive genera- 
 tions to say that God has done whatever 
 must be done to win us. God has done all 
 that He can do. Whatever our theory, or 
 whether we have any theory or not, this is 
 
176 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the aspect of the cross on which we agree, — 
 that we have here the revelation of God's 
 willingness to do all He can for us. Then 
 our moral desire is aroused to do all we can 
 for the sake of Christ. " For the sake of 
 Christ " is on some lips a cant phrase but it 
 has in it the secret of Christian effectiveness. 
 We take upon ourselves His cross because 
 it is His cross. The dynamic is especially 
 powerful when we are face to face with the 
 obligation to help some men as they actually 
 are, for men are not always attractive in 
 themselves, even though we are labouring for 
 them because of what they are and may be- 
 come. Suppose we take unqualifiedly the 
 dictum that we are to sacrifice ourselves for 
 men just because of what men are in them- 
 selves. Looked at apart from the Christian 
 revelation men are not always winsome in 
 themselves. We say of them that they have 
 their future in the life which Christ can im- 
 part to them. For the sake of Christ, and 
 of the vision of men which He gives us, we 
 move forward undismayed by men as we 
 here and now find them. The practice of 
 self-sacrificing morality becomes rather cheer- 
 less if it does not base itself on the view 
 which Christ took of men and on the cross 
 which He was willing to carry for their sake. 
 
ON MAKING MORALITY HUMAN 1 77 
 
 But there is more still in the Christian 
 dynamic, considered merely as centre and 
 source of power. There is that belief in the 
 Spirit of God as the Helper that sustains the 
 members of the Christian community as they 
 in their turn strive to help men. The Spirit 
 is indeed the Helper. Men need to be reas- 
 sured that their blunders are not fatal ; that 
 if they fall, they- can get up and stumble on ; 
 that in time of stress they can feel their 
 powers reenforced from within. Here we 
 are in the realm of a fact as scientific as any 
 which the laboratory affords. The members 
 of the kingdom of God may be mistaken as 
 to the assumptions on which they pray, but 
 they can hardly be mistaken as to whether 
 they get help from prayer or not. The most 
 saintly among them say that they would soon 
 be lost in the moral struggle if it were not 
 for the reenforcement in prayer. 
 
 The fact that many well-meaning persons 
 think they get on smoothly enough without 
 prayer is not a suf^cient rejoinder to the 
 Christian's claim that he is helped in prayer. 
 Many persons get on after a fashion without 
 living up to hygienic or sanitary laws, be- 
 cause they do not know what life would be 
 if they lived more in accordance with those 
 laws. Many ignorant persons say that they 
 
1 78 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 get on well enough without books, — simply 
 because they do not know what is inside of 
 books. The higher the life rises the greater 
 the need of prayer to maintain that balance 
 and poise which mark lofty saintliness. 
 Some Bible readers cannot understand the 
 temptations of Jesus, for example, simply be- 
 cause those temptations move in so rare an 
 altitude. The temptation to surrender to a 
 gross bodily appetite is intelligible enough 
 to all, but not so the temptation to seek a 
 short cut to win the mind of the nation. To 
 steady Himself in the heights where He lived 
 Jesus avowed His dependence upon prayer. 
 Moreover the worker for the relief of men 
 needs reenforcement against the moral wear 
 and tear that come in the process of the 
 moral work itself. It is possible for a man 
 to be morally worn out in the very perform- 
 ance of Christian duty. There is a tendency 
 to fall away from the ideal, to yield to the 
 spirit of compromise, to become lost in the 
 details and to forget the personal and spir- 
 itual aim of the work. And there are subtle 
 considerations entering into the achievement 
 of the highest morality which escape the eye- 
 sight of the coarser-grained. There is an 
 element of timeliness in Christian effort which 
 requires a keen moral discernment. Some 
 
ON. MAKING MORALITY HUMAN 1 79 
 
 duties are duties just for a fleeting instant. 
 The word is to be spoken or the deed done 
 just now, if it is to have moral value. Or 
 the problem of the wise placing of the life 
 activity is before one who wishes to make 
 the life count for the most. Or there is the 
 problem of the true Christian manner. Some 
 deeds must be done in just the right manner 
 to have value. Jesus said : " Take heed how 
 ye hear." '* After this manner^ pray ye." 
 These are the fine considerations on which 
 light breaks only for him whose intuitions 
 are continually subject to the inflow of the 
 life from belief in a personal Father in 
 heaven. 
 
 And how much greater the need in the 
 lives of those who have been bound with 
 sin ? What can abstract moral principles do 
 with the man who has been literally reared 
 in sin, — in that he has been surrounded by 
 evil conditions from birth ? For such a man 
 especially, *' ethical culture " without refer- 
 ence to change in the inner purpose by spir- 
 itual purification and reenforcement is lam- 
 entably inadequate. With those whose 
 moral experience is conventional routine 
 there may be no deep feeling of contrite 
 need. Some persons are held to a measure 
 of moral life by the conventional morality 
 
l8o PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 around them. They act about as their 
 neighbours do, — and that satisfies all their 
 demands. But ** ethical culture " goes to 
 pieces in any heartrending spiritual crisis. 
 Suppose the Salvation Army should throw 
 aside the Gospel for the abstract precepts of 
 moral culture. It is the aim of the Salvation 
 Army to make men better morally, — espe- 
 cially in the commoner moralities. The Sal- 
 vation Army could well afford to let its ap- 
 peal for approval of the community rest on 
 what it has done for the actual improvement 
 of particular persons, but imagine the Salva- 
 tion Army soldier talking to the dazed wretch 
 in the gutter about moral precepts alone. 
 There is needed the inrush of a new life. 
 
 Once more the moralist breaks out that 
 such doctrine interferes with a man's moral 
 freedom, that such sentimental religion creates 
 a fierce psychological and emotional storm 
 which sweeps everything before it but which 
 cannot be fundamentally moral. We may 
 be permitted to dismiss this objection in 
 view of the fact that the reformed man him- 
 self interprets the experience in personal 
 terms. The new life which has rushed in 
 upon him he believes to be the love of a 
 Person who cares for him ; and his obliga- 
 tion towards that Person is a personal debt. 
 
ON MAKING MORALITY HUMAN l8l 
 
 The Christian Church must freshen the 
 moral field. That field, at least in its theory, 
 is Hke a tract of earth which has the proper 
 soil constituents but which lacks just one 
 requisite, — water. The rains must fall, or the 
 rivers must be carried to the dry acres. 
 Christianity does not add greatly to the list 
 of moral precepts. The ethics of Christian- 
 ity are not so very different from the ethics 
 of some other systems, but Christianity can 
 irrigate the ethical soil. She does so in the 
 personal methods which we have been at- 
 tempting to describe. And Christianity 
 must succeed at this. Failure here is fatal. 
 We know how deadly becomes the criticism 
 directed towards a church organization when 
 it appears that the organization itself is get- 
 ting away from the path of rectitude through 
 concessions to the spirit of the world. The 
 invisible body of true believers may always 
 be moral but the organization of this or that 
 sect may be tainted. Having care for her 
 own life it is the duty of the Church to bring 
 moral life to the world, to teach that all 
 phases of experience must be made subordi- 
 nate to the law of good will, to proclaim a 
 moral love which is for the last man. More 
 and more acts are to be brought within the 
 scope of moral duty. More and more per- 
 
l82 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 sons are to be reached with good will. More 
 and more even the instincts and desires are 
 to be trained towards the highest expressions 
 as second nature, and so far as possible as 
 first nature. But always, always, always the 
 Church is to remember that morality is to be 
 stated in human terms. Out of human lives 
 are to flow the streams of living waters 
 which are to irrigate the precepts and the 
 laws and the systems in which men record 
 their moral insights. And the systems are 
 never to be made ends in themselves. If 
 they are outgrown by the uprush of the life 
 of righteous persons they are to be amended 
 or supplanted. In every case and at all 
 times they are to be looked upon just as the 
 instruments by which the growing life of the 
 persons of the Christian community is helped 
 towards completer humanity. The persons 
 are to move freely among the systems and 
 quicken them into fruitfulness and fragrance 
 by the freshness of life itself. 
 
LECTURE V 
 
 ENDS AND MEANS IN 
 SOCIAL ENDEAVOUR 
 
LECTURE V 
 
 ENDS AND MEANS IN SOCIAL 
 ENDEAVOUR 
 
 WE have been careful not to speak 
 of society as if it were literally an 
 organism, but we must reckon 
 with the truth in the figurative characteri- 
 zation of society as an organism. The 
 actual fact is persons existing together, — 
 and we doubt as to whether persons could 
 be persons and exist apart from one another. 
 We are not instruments of one another : we 
 have studiously avoided speaking of persons 
 as if they were instruments. We are more 
 nearly parts of one another, though without 
 merging into one greater self with conscious- 
 ness of its own. This mutual interdepend- 
 ence is as much a fact as is the separateness 
 of the individual. We say that around each 
 self stretches the " unplumbed, salt, estrang- 
 ing sea," and we all know how justly the poet 
 sings. We think of ourselves as islands cut 
 ofE from one another by deep abysses, or as 
 185 
 
1 86 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 spheres thrown together touching one an- 
 other only at points. But we must not so 
 exaggerate this isolation as to forget that 
 the sea however deep and salt is navigable, 
 and that at the points where the spheres do 
 touch there can be much interchange. The 
 hermit withdraws from society to live alone, 
 but he carries on his meditations in language 
 taught him by society, — language which is 
 a purely social creation and instrument. 
 The cynic rails at society, — with society, 
 through its faults, more before his gaze than 
 anything else. Men never have lived apart 
 as solitary individuals ; and it is increasingly 
 certain that they never will. We are mem- 
 bers one of another. It has always been so, 
 and it will always be so. 
 
 Now out of these social cohesions come 
 diversified instrumental creations. We have 
 seen that the basal fact in the family is the 
 cohering group itself, — father, — mother, — 
 child. Dealing wath this group we have 
 agreements governing marriage and child-life 
 which express formally the ideals as to the 
 family. These are instruments for the control 
 of the family relation. There are other 
 social facts, such as coalitions into religious 
 and political and industrial and state and 
 national units. The fundamental in every 
 
ENDS AND MEANS 187 
 
 coalition is the individuals with their mutual 
 affinities. We are not just now to discuss 
 the foundations of political science but we find 
 around us commonwealths and nations whose 
 laws govern these widest provinces of social 
 activity themselves and in greater or less 
 degree control all other groups within their 
 borders. Just what is the constructive factor 
 in nationality we do not pretend even to 
 guess. Of course the bottom truth is the 
 united group of individuals but how much is 
 natural and normal in a given nationality 
 and how much artificial and accidental ? 
 Enough now to recognize the fact of com- 
 monwealths and to proceed to discuss the 
 relation of Christianity to the wider social 
 activities. We are thinking of nations some- 
 what like our own, where there has been at 
 least measurable progress towards democracy, 
 where the ultimate authority is through one 
 organ of expression or another the authority 
 of the people themselves. Democracy can 
 work even through monarchical framework, 
 — as in England. Taking national groups, 
 or groups which we call the states of a 
 federation, we try to hint what Christianity 
 should attempt in the shaping of the forces 
 which make for general social advance in 
 such groups. Especially are we inquiring as 
 
l88 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 to the possibilities of suggestion along the 
 path most explored to-day, the path of society 
 towards larger industrial control. We need 
 not remark that our discussions are simply 
 for purposes of illustration by one who can- 
 not lay claim to special and technical infor- 
 mation, but who draws upon knowledge 
 common to all to set forth general principles. 
 Industry seems especially apt for illustration 
 because industrial problems are just now so 
 much before the states and nations and 
 because the earning of livelihood is so 
 inherently important as demanding the 
 largest division of the time and effort of the 
 average man. 
 
 In spite of all this, however, we may en- 
 counter the impatient glances of many who 
 declare that the religious teachers should 
 keep out of this province, that the pure gospel 
 is a gospel for the individual, and that the 
 only plan for social regeneration is to labour 
 for the regeneration of individuals. To all of 
 which we subscribe, — but we see no prohibi- 
 tion here for those who declare the duties of 
 Christianity in the social activities. The laws 
 of society are the instruments through which 
 society works. Though all depends on the 
 man behind the instrument, that man cannot 
 do much with the instrument unless he knows 
 
ENDS AND MEANS I89 
 
 something about it and the purpose of its 
 creation. Good intentions are not enough ; 
 study of the social tools is indispensable. 
 Instruments aside, however, for the present, — 
 our modern understanding is that an agent 
 is wherever he ac^s. The theologian tells us 
 that the omnipresence of God means that God 
 is acting upon all parts of the universe, and 
 is where He acts. However it may be with 
 God we can see that a man is where he acts, 
 and that he is responsible for his activities at 
 their farther ends. I shoot an arrow in the 
 air and it falls to earth I know not where, but 
 if it strikes any one in its fall the consequences 
 may be prosaically unromantic for me, for I 
 am responsible. I, so far as concerns moral 
 merit and demerit, am where my activity 
 reaches. I may sit in the pew and pray for 
 the conquest of all parts of my nature by the 
 spirit of the Lord, and I do well ; but I must 
 not forget that the large part of the answer 
 can only be the Christianization of my acts 
 towards those whom I meet in my daily 
 occupation. If the earning of my living 
 consumes the major part of my time six days 
 in the week the chances are that the chief 
 opportunity for my personal sanctification 
 will lie in those six days. We seek of course 
 the transformation of the world by a trans- 
 
I90 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 formation of the individuals in the world but 
 we are not so foolish as to imagine that these 
 transformations can be wrought by spiritual 
 exercises which touch only a fraction and that 
 a small fraction of the doings of the individual. 
 There is something worth thinking about in 
 the homely axiom that when you get a man's 
 money you come near getting the man, and 
 the observation may not be at all cynical. 
 The most of the ordinary man's mental effort 
 is in the making of the money ; the most 
 significant stress of his moral endeavour is 
 there. If we are to neglect this sphere of the 
 individual's activities it would hardly seem 
 serious to pay attention to anything else. 
 We repeat our bit of metaphysics that a man 
 is where he acts and we avow our belief that 
 Christianity must touch all his acts. 
 
 And now another objector reminds us that 
 we cannot reform men from the outside. He 
 would have us treat this problem thoroughly 
 by digging deep down within men's souls. 
 We protest that we are doing our utmost to 
 press this entire debate into the inner realm. 
 But when our friend tells us that we cannot 
 change men by changes outside of them, we 
 beg leave to amend. All depends on what is 
 outside of them. The material environment 
 may be the chief outside factor, in which the 
 
ENDS AND MEANS I9I 
 
 chances for inner change of the man living 
 under the domination of the environment 
 may be good or may not be. We remark in 
 passing that some men do not have very 
 great chance to be good in the material cir- 
 cumstances in which they are placed and that 
 if they could have change of circumstances 
 their moral prospects would mightily im- 
 prove. This aside, however. What is most 
 potent outside of the man whom we wish to 
 transform may be another man or other men. 
 It may be that his employer is the irresistible 
 feature of his environment and that his em- 
 ployer is unjust. It may be that those with 
 whom he daily associates are the forces out- 
 side of him that keep him down. It may be 
 too that some of these outside persons are 
 within hearing of the gospel of industrial 
 Christianity and by change of inner spirit 
 these environmental persons may take the 
 first step towards inwardly transforming the 
 man whose activities they so influence. So 
 we shall try to hold fast to the personal and 
 inner aim. 
 
 Now as to the laws of a social group. 
 Men living together in groups have to make 
 instruments which we call laws. These laws 
 are unmistakably the artificial creations 
 through which the group works. The laws 
 
192 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 have tool sacredness, — that is to say, they 
 are valuable for what they can do and are to 
 be regarded by men as sacred. But they are 
 never to be hoisted to a pedestal to be wor- 
 shipped as if they were ends in themselves. 
 And their importance, vast as it is, is not to 
 be overestimated. All this seems so obvious 
 as to require apology for uttering it, until we 
 begin to cast about to discover what is the 
 actual situation. Then we find two ex- 
 tremes, — an extreme of lawlessness on the 
 one hand and of idolatry of law on the 
 other. At one extreme are men in rebellion 
 against all law. At the other are those who 
 speak of law as if it were above all things 
 else holy. 
 
 The Christian view lies between these ex- 
 tremes. Laws are instruments and not ends 
 in themselves. The only ends in themselves 
 in a society of persons are the persons. 
 Christianity stands against that lawlessness 
 which is riot, and does so on the broad 
 ground that the persons of society never can 
 prosper until order reigns. For the same 
 reason Christianity stands against mistakenly 
 sanctifying the law ; — for persons are sure to 
 suffer as soon as the laws are lifted up as 
 more sacred than men. There is altogether 
 too much reason to suppose that in democra- 
 
ENDS AND MEANS 193 
 
 cies like ours the law is exalted harmfully by 
 some who may profit by such exaltation. It 
 is possible for financial or political interests 
 to get control of laws for their own purposes, 
 and to fortify themselves behind the ramparts 
 of the sacredness of the law. In such event 
 it is to be remembered that the law is a tool 
 and that much depends upon who wields it. 
 It is to be judged by what it does, not by 
 what its framers thought it would do, not by 
 what it once did, not by what it might con- 
 ceivably do under some other circumstances. 
 The entire system of laws, or the entire box 
 of tools, is far from perfect and has no right 
 to honour as more sacred than other instru- 
 ments of social expression. There is no 
 place in the Christian program for disorder- 
 liness but there is every place for the control 
 of the law itself. Society has to protect it- 
 self many times by throwing a veil of sacred- 
 ness over laws, by claiming for them a holy 
 sanction and surrounding them with awe-in- 
 spiring sentiment. But their sacredness is 
 the sacredness of what they do. No differ- 
 ence how extensive the claims for sacredness, 
 — it is hard to treat as sacred an instrument 
 which accomplishes a wrong result where we 
 looked for a right one, or for an instrument 
 which is hopelessly awkward and bungling. 
 
194 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 However, injury by such a law is not to in- 
 cite us to riot. It is simply to incite us to 
 better laws. The cure for a poor law is a 
 better law. 
 
 What now shall be the position of the 
 Christian community towards the laws of the 
 community ? The ideal of the Church is to 
 transform society not by instructing society 
 in detail as to what laws to enact but by fill- 
 ing society with a just appreciation of the 
 goal of all social endeavour. Law is but a 
 social agreement to act in a specified fashion. 
 We have found out how to get together in 
 social activities, and either through repre- 
 sentatives or through more direct agencies 
 we agree to act according to particular rules, 
 with the understanding that the recalcitrants 
 who will not thus act must be compelled to 
 act with us, at least to the extent of not vio- 
 lating the rule. Towards every law there 
 are probably three different grades of re- 
 lation in a community. There are those who 
 are morally ahead of the law. They do not 
 need the law, any more than multitudes of 
 persons to-day need the enactments against 
 murder and theft. If such persons were to 
 fashion laws at all they would legislate in a 
 lofty realm which might not even be in- 
 telhgible to their neighbours. Next there 
 
ENDS AND MEANS 195 
 
 are the main masses for whom the law is a 
 serviceable guide, and a wholesome agree- 
 ment. After that are those who find the law 
 above them, but who from compulsion or 
 choice nevertheless obey the law. It is well 
 for the Christian reformer to remember all 
 this. Doing so he will consider laws as the 
 expression of how far we can go or what sort 
 of tool we can manufacture at a given date, 
 and not as a final utterance sacred in itself. 
 The trouble with too many reformers in their 
 speeches about imperfect laws is that they 
 cannot modulate their tones. They must 
 either keep still or scream, and nothing ex- 
 cept an alarm is ever intelligendy uttered in 
 a scream. So the reformers scream out 
 against inadequate laws as if we who ob- 
 serve such laws look upon them as ultimate 
 ends in themselves. We simply regard 
 them as the instruments which we must use 
 until we can create something better. Only, 
 —we are trying to proceed in decency and 
 in order. While the Church cannot regulate 
 the details of legislation it is her duty to 
 preach more and more the instrumentality of 
 these social contrivances and the sacredness 
 of the human life to which they minister, and 
 to live out into life a spirit which will sooner 
 or later find its way into the code. Some 
 
196 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 ideas are actual instruments which society 
 uses for offense and defense. Some ideas 
 are the wholesome food upon which the 
 social body thrives. Some others are the 
 impalpable air which society breathes. It is 
 the business of the Church to work at the 
 social problems from the top down, or from 
 the bottom up, helping shape the tools aright, 
 preaching the worthiest ideas, and above all 
 living into the social atmosphere the spirit of 
 good will. 
 
 Here it may be well to speak of a charge 
 sometimes brought unjustly against the 
 members of the Christian communion in 
 their relation to admittedly imperfect social 
 systems. The critic declares that the Church 
 denounces evils in the present political or in- 
 dustrial or social system and then accepts 
 the advantage of these evil conditions her- 
 self, — that if the Church is sincere she should 
 stand unsmirched from all such profit. There 
 is occasionally some validity in this criticism. 
 To take the most extreme case imaginable, — 
 suppose a Church should profit by the rents 
 of disorderly houses at the very moment she 
 was preaching the gospel of social purity. 
 The contradiction would be too glaring even 
 for invective. But some evils are affairs of 
 the whole of society and nothing can be 
 
ENDS AND MEANS I97 
 
 done until practically all act together. It is 
 scarcely fair in such case to rail at the mem- 
 ber of the Christian communion for not do- 
 ing as an individual alone what can only be 
 done by a large majority of the people act- 
 ing in concert. For illustration let us take a 
 political doctrine which at present is not live 
 enough to divide us into hostile camps, — a 
 suggestion from the free silver agitation of 
 some twenty years ago. Here is a member 
 of the Christian community sincerely believ- 
 ing that the gold standard is wrong, — mis- 
 taken not merely as to expediency but 
 morally wrong. He sees in it a device for 
 robbing the debtors to enrich the creditors. 
 Now what shall this Christian do ? Shall he 
 individually refuse to respect the ratio be- 
 tween gold and silver established by the 
 market at a particular date ? Shall he de- 
 clare that as long as his money holds out he 
 will receive silver in exchange for gold at 
 the ratio of sixteen to one instead of, say, 
 fifty to one? This might be high morality 
 from this point of view but it would be folly. 
 He might better recognize that a ratio in 
 currency is something about which a whole 
 people have to act together. He would bet- 
 ter put up with the system for the time being 
 and spend what money he has publishing 
 
198 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 his theory to others whom he may influence 
 towards the desired reform. So with even 
 larger issues. Each of us discerns faults in 
 the social order, but we cannot directly 
 remedy them alone. All we can do is to 
 proclaim our gospel and wait for the ripen- 
 ing of the understanding of the people. 
 
 But we must come to the illustrations of 
 the working out of the difference between 
 persons and instruments in the industrial 
 sphere. It will be understood of course that 
 we are simply laying down general prin- 
 ciples, with no attempt whatever to take 
 sides on current debates. We begin with 
 that social instrument which we know as 
 private property. The ideas of private prop- 
 erty have been hammered out through count- 
 less centuries. The result has been that many 
 have come to regard private property as more 
 sacred than life itself. We often hear it said 
 that property rights are more widely re- 
 garded than human rights. Now we have 
 no cure-all for social ills ; but we must, if we 
 are to control the social movement, keep 
 human rights inscribed on our banners. In 
 spite of all misunderstandings to the con- 
 trary there are no widely-accepted social 
 programs to-day which would do away al- 
 together with private ownership of property, 
 
ENDS AND MEANS I99 
 
 though some would most radically limit the 
 extent of such ownership. There is small 
 danger that the institution of private prop- 
 erty will be overthrown. But there is ever- 
 lasting need of emphasis on the instrumental 
 nature of private ownership. Wealth is a 
 tool, and nothing more. As an instrument 
 it is of value. It often is a determining 
 factor in deciding whether a man shall have 
 a chance to make himself moral and spiritual. 
 The crushing materialism of masses of men 
 is the materialism of no materials. They 
 have not enough matter to give themselves 
 anything more than material existence. They 
 have so little of the things of this world that 
 the struggle for things and the craving for 
 things consume altogether too much of their 
 strength, — consume all of their strength. If 
 it is materialism for the rich man to be pon- 
 dering so much on his houses and lands that 
 he has not time for the intellectual or moral, 
 it is materialism for the poor man to be com- 
 pelled to think so much of his lack of houses 
 and lands and even of food or clothing that 
 he has no energy for the intellectual and 
 moral. The cure for this materialism of 
 poverty is more matter. Wealth as an in- 
 strument is prodigiously efftcacious. The 
 Christian community must keep this doctrine 
 
200 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 constantly before the people. Beratings of 
 wealth will not avail. The value as instru- 
 ment must be recognized, but the value must 
 stop with the instrumental. The community 
 has just as much right to undertake modifica- 
 tion in the institution of private property as 
 it has to undertake modifications in any other 
 social instrument whatsoever. The only sa- 
 credness of property rights is the measure of 
 sacredness which may attach to the use of the 
 rights. There is small danger of confisca- 
 tion, but there is likelihood of change, in the 
 rule governing private property whenever 
 the institution works towards social harm. 
 
 Take the private ownership of land. What 
 is the basis of this ownership ? Simply the 
 good of the most men, — good of course in 
 the highest sense. If the community should 
 arise and forcibly dispossess the holders of 
 the land the confiscation would not be good 
 for anybody concerned. Centuries would be 
 required to allay the bitterness thus engen- 
 dered. But some changes for the better might 
 be adopted without confiscation. The com- 
 munity might be expected to adjust relations 
 so that society as a whole would have more 
 enjoyment from the land. Land is an instru- 
 ment, and social welfare depends on the right 
 use of the instrument. It is to the interest of 
 
ENDS AND MEANS 201 
 
 society as a whole to say how land shall be 
 used or perhaps, rather, not be used. The 
 secret of the strength of the modern move- 
 ment towards conservation of natural re- 
 sources lies in this, — that the treatment of 
 land is the affair of all of society. Of course 
 the owner of the land may say that the land 
 is his, — but that is not the final pronounce- 
 ment. It may not remain his if he does not 
 use it aright. Riding some time ago through 
 a section of the country far distant from here, 
 the present speaker came upon a district 
 where mining enterprises were being carried 
 on by turning over the top of the earth to a 
 great depth. What had once been a fair 
 valley was fast being transformed into heaps 
 of gravel. The gold was washed from the 
 gravel and the gravel thrown over the land. 
 Now it is obvious that when land is once 
 treated after this fashion there is no further 
 service to which it can be put. It has not 
 even landscape attractions. In this particular 
 corner of the earth's surface the harm done 
 may not be considerable as compared with 
 the value of the gold secured. It may be of 
 more consequence to society to have in cir- 
 culation the gold washed from that under- 
 surface gravel than to have the top preserved. 
 But we could not consent to such mining 
 
202 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 over large ranges of the earth's surface, no 
 matter what the supposed rights of private 
 owners might be. We must think of the 
 good of the community. So with the use of 
 rents. When an owner owns land and then 
 moves from the land, subsisting entirely upon 
 the rents from the land without any labour of 
 his own, we can justify the conduct only by 
 showing that this rent instrument is never- 
 theless a good instrument. If the persons 
 benefited by the rents are in some way render- 
 ing service to the community, if they take 
 their unusual opportunities seriously and 
 utilize their income to make themselves 
 socially worth while, the rent instrument will 
 be tolerated. But such a system is always 
 on trial, and unearned incomes have been 
 back of just about as many revolutions as 
 any other single cause in history. The 
 seizure of vast estates in the French revolution 
 was not confiscation in the ordinary sense. 
 The receivers of the rents were not showing 
 themselves socially productive, and they 
 were dispossessed. Society has at crises 
 fallen back upon its right to dispossess land- 
 lords, just as landlords have fallen back upon 
 a right to dispossess tenants. This is not 
 an alarmist cry. There is no danger in this 
 country of a wholesale casting out of land- 
 
ENDS AND MEANS 203 
 
 owners, but there is need of the landowner's 
 recognizing his enormous obligation to be 
 serviceable to society. 
 
 When we come to the ownership of the 
 huge tools of capital the same standard must 
 be kept uppermost. What is the best for 
 men as a whole ? Society has made possible 
 these tools, notably the transportation 
 systems, which could not exist if it were not 
 for the masses of persons living in com- 
 munities. The community is largely the 
 creator of capitalistic values. Now the 
 question as to who shall own these tools 
 depends altogether upon who can use them 
 best. We can discuss this with all calmness 
 just now because nobody is in immediate 
 danger of robbery. If the community ever 
 takes over the tools of capitalism it will 
 probably take them over on fair terms. 
 Communities in our day have not shown 
 much disposition to be unfair in these respects. 
 When we say " own " we ought perhaps to 
 say control, but the control of some of these 
 instruments is in such few hands that the con- 
 trol amounts to ownership. Will the con- 
 cern be more productive under one type of 
 ownership than under another? Will the 
 rights of all parties be subserved as carefully 
 under one system as another ? Will the 
 
204 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 realization of *' the long run " have as much 
 scope under one system as another? Will 
 the human interests be as safe under one 
 system as another ? Under what plans do 
 the instruments stand the best chance of get- 
 ting into the worthiest hands ? Society in- 
 sists upon its right to lay down the rules 
 under which instruments which may be 
 dangerously handled shall be placed in 
 human hands. For example, we will not al- 
 low men to carry dangerous weapons in 
 crowded centres. We will not allow igno- 
 rant men to transport dynamite. We insist 
 that only trained operators shall drive loco- 
 motives and automobiles and trolley cars. 
 And we always declare that we have a right 
 to disarm a desperado. Now some of the 
 capitalistic tools, by which we mean what we 
 call capital itself, are capable of being as 
 dangerously used as any material instru- 
 ments. It is society's concern as to who 
 fingers the triggers of these instruments. 
 Society has a right to withdraw the control 
 of these tools from those who will not use the 
 tools aright. If an industry is making im- 
 possible the conditions of normal human life 
 society does not have to halt because of the 
 outcry from stockholders whose profits may 
 be cut by change in the direction of that in- 
 
ENDS AND MEANS 205 
 
 dustry. If an industry itself, like the liquor 
 or the opium traffic, is debauching a com- 
 munity the community has a right to do 
 with the industry as it sees fit, and that in the 
 name of the human interests involved. The 
 objects of social endeavour are the people of 
 the community. If we say that we must 
 tread very softly towards capital lest we re- 
 move the incentive to production on a large 
 scale we reply that we must be very careful 
 lest we give incentive to waste on a large 
 scale. If it be urged that we cannot procure 
 the genius which can control the capitalistic 
 tools without holding out prospect of sur- 
 passing rewards we reply that this is one of 
 those cant sophisms which appear reason- 
 able till we look at them closely. One type 
 of genius which makes modern large scale 
 industry possible is the inventive genius. In 
 actual history has the inventor usually or often 
 received the major part of the reward for his 
 invention ? Does not the inventor work as 
 much from scientific motives as from finan- 
 cial ? The other effective factor on the 
 capitalistic side is the organizing intelligence. 
 We freely admit the supreme industrial value 
 of this intelligence and we concede that the 
 organizer's ability is always in peril of being 
 underestimated by the critics of the existing 
 
206 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 system, but is organizational ability always 
 at the call of money alone ? We would not 
 glorify war, but we all agree that the success- 
 ful general in modern warfare must be an or- 
 ganizing genius. The conduct of any one of 
 the larger campaigns in our Civil War, or in 
 the Russo-Japanese war, or even on the 
 British side in the Boer war called for 
 enormous organizing ability. But the pros- 
 pect of the old-time money prizes for the vic- 
 tory was nil. If society could arrive at such 
 spirit that the successful manager of an in- 
 dustrial enterprise for the welfare of the com- 
 munity would be honoured as military heroes 
 have been honoured we would have solved 
 the problem of securing men for large or- 
 ganizational campaigns without paying them 
 extravagant prizes. 
 
 But how about the side of labour and its 
 instruments ? Since capital possesses the 
 material tools of large scale industry the only 
 tools left to labour are organizational. The 
 labour organizations in any Christian teach- 
 ing as to modern society have to come under 
 the same moral laws as all other organiza- 
 tions. We may well thank God that, barring 
 exceptions which only prove the rule, labour 
 leaders take the ground that labour organi- 
 zational tools must be manipulated with a 
 
ENDS AND MEANS 207 
 
 human purpose. The intellig-ent labour or- 
 ganization member will no more treat his 
 organization as an end in itself than the 
 church member will treat his organization as 
 an end in itself. The organization is an in- 
 strument for the welfare of persons and as 
 long as it advances in that direction we may 
 well rejoice in its spread of power. Only, the 
 power under intelligent and conscientious 
 leaders will not be brute power. It would be 
 a sad plight if after we had found our way 
 along thus far in the path of peace, and if 
 after labour organizations have themselves 
 done so much to rid the world of the curse of 
 international w^ar, we should have these na- 
 tion-wide organizations tolerating even a 
 secret reliance upon physical force. Of 
 course capitalism has had its brutalities and 
 the general public, in its difference to the 
 wrongs of labourers, has had its brutalities 
 also, but that is all the more reason why we 
 should all work together for the elimination 
 of reliance upon force. The most enlight- 
 ened teaching to-day is as to the futility of 
 force for the achievement of social objects. 
 The labour organization that takes the sword 
 will likely perish by the sword, and that not 
 by the sword in the hands of outside enemies, 
 but by the weapon in the hands of those in- 
 
208 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 side who will resort to force to impose their 
 will quickly on their fellows. 
 
 But all this has been for the sake of illus- 
 tration. We pass to suggest some implica- 
 tions of our principles which ought to mark 
 the Christian preaching as society marches 
 towards increasing control. It may be well 
 for the Church often to recall to herself the 
 wide extent of that advance. The movement 
 is the most notable trend in the world to-day. 
 Whether the growing scarcity of free lands 
 has thrown the peoples back upon themselves 
 in denser and denser congestion, or whether 
 the increase of means of intercommunication 
 makes knowledge so common that men 
 everywhere catch inspirations which arise 
 anywhere, the truth is that all over the world 
 social groups are grasping more and more 
 control for themselves. With men thrown 
 thus closer together the teachings of Chris- 
 tianity must meet severer and severer strains. 
 We have been looking chiefly at our own 
 country, but we must say that in view of this 
 world-wide hastening towards increasing 
 power for society it is the responsibility of 
 the Christian to stand for that gospel which 
 here and everywhere will righteously guide 
 the advance in all its phases. With this 
 portentous centring on closer unity there is 
 
ENDS AND MEANS 209 
 
 likelihood that the social mechanism will be- 
 come jammed unless there is wisdom and 
 unselfishness in relieving some of the pres- 
 sures created by the newer forces. In a sit- 
 uation so complex it would be folly to ven- 
 ture far into detail, but some suggestions 
 seem altogether Christian. How to apply 
 them must be left to the economic and legis- 
 lative expert. But they must be applied. 
 
 First and foremost, industrial and political 
 and social contrivances must stop short of the 
 point where workers are in danger of becom- 
 ing tools or of being treated as tools. A 
 labourer who is living a merely tool existence 
 is just as much unhuman as a man who is 
 living a merely animal existence. One criti- 
 cism upon capitalism is that under the system 
 which cuts the ownership of the tool from the 
 man who actually handles the tool,— the me- 
 chanical tool to-day is the whole factory, — 
 the labourer himself comes dangerously near 
 being reduced to the rank of a tool. The 
 labourer cannot go out and build himself a 
 factory. The economic freedom of the 
 labourer about which we hear so much often 
 comes just to that— the Hberty to go out and 
 build another factory ! Even if he could 
 build the factory he would find difficulty in 
 getting a business start. We may say that 
 
2IO PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the labourer is free to move from one factory 
 to another, but not after the factories have 
 become Hnked closely together in manage- 
 ment. We may say that he is at liberty to 
 seek another line of employment, but that is 
 cruel nonsense if the man is past the age 
 when he can learn another trade, or if he has 
 already spent much time in becoming expert 
 in a chosen occupation. Any system which 
 makes it possible for one man virtually to 
 own another man is wicked. Any system 
 which makes men just cogs in a wheel is 
 wrong. We have come far towards victory 
 in the battle against animalism in men, — 
 at least we have so far won that we all unite 
 in the condemnation of the forces which make 
 for animalism. But it is not so with the bat- 
 tle against making men tools. Faithfulness 
 to a daily task is admirable, but when that 
 faithfulness ends in making the worker just a 
 part of the machinery it is time for a break 
 somewhere. If the task itself is not one 
 which lends itself to that diversified play of 
 faculties which keeps the mind interested, 
 there must be provision for the leisure in 
 which the more human powers can get their 
 exercise. That was really a righteous pro- 
 test which the newspapers reported as occur- 
 ring on the ships of a certain navy some 
 
ENDS AND MEANS 211 
 
 months ago. The protest may be just news- 
 paper gossip but it illustrates our point. The 
 story is that a number of men had enlisted in 
 a navy on the promise that they would have 
 opportunity to see something of the world. 
 That may have been a poor expedient for 
 enlisting sailors, but such seems to have been 
 the method. After the sailors had enlisted 
 the vessels were stationed at a dreary port on 
 a sub-tropical island. The recruits protested 
 that this was not in accordance with the 
 terms of the enlistment. The coast of the 
 sub-tropical island is something of the world, 
 — but not enough of the world. The story 
 continues that the protest was heeded. 
 Whether all this happened or not, the story 
 suggests one fault with much more of the 
 modern system than the navies. Battle-ship 
 existence apart, — men in general are not 
 given enough outlook on the world. They 
 sink into a machine routine which is less re- 
 volting but not much more ideal than an 
 animal existence. The social activities of all 
 groups from the national down to the indus- 
 trial should stop short of anything which 
 would harden men into machines or tools. 
 
 Furthermore, the social agencies should be 
 prevented from any levelling process which 
 would leave men so much alike as to destroy 
 
212 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 what is distinctively individual in them. For 
 one type of individualism it will be readily 
 seen that we have little patience. Men can- 
 not come to any individuality alone. And 
 they cannot come to any high distinction 
 without some social adjustment which puts 
 them where they can best work. The con- 
 demnation of both extremes of the modern 
 industrial organization is that they both alike 
 level men to sameness. Poverty may be so 
 crushing that the poor man cannot rise to 
 what would be distinction in character, or he 
 is submerged, — and when men are submerged 
 they all look alike. We sometimes say that 
 at time of shipwreck it is a tribute to the per- 
 ception of human values that all men look 
 alike to the rescuers. Women and children 
 first, to be sure, but after that the men with- 
 out any thought of difference in rank or birth 
 or endowment. This is noble in the applica- 
 tion for which it is intended, but how horrible 
 that we can say of society that it too is so 
 filled with disaster that the sinking people all 
 look alike to us ! We sing the advantages 
 of poverty but we have in mind something 
 like the Cotter's Saturday Night or those sur- 
 roundings in which Americans like Abraham 
 Lincoln were reared. The hardship of such 
 early circumstances as those of Lincoln was 
 
ENDS AND MEANS 213 
 
 indeed appalling, but hardship is not desti- 
 tution. Lincoln was not poor after the pov- 
 erty of the man who has no hope for the 
 future and whose plight is absolutely dehu- 
 manizing. The levelling rollers should be 
 lifted of^ the poor man. The question of 
 getting just enough to eat is not before us ; 
 we are speaking of the freedom to live out 
 the life which is distinctive. The charge that 
 the Christianization of the social system 
 would have a flattening effect is ridiculous in 
 view of the deadliness of the poverty of the 
 present world as a leveller. And then at the 
 other extreme of the scale is a similar danger 
 to which the over-rich man is exposed. It 
 may provoke a smile to say that society 
 should do something for the protection of the 
 rich man against the levelling influences of 
 too much wealth, but such is the duty never- 
 theless. We are speaking more particularly 
 of those of inherited wealth. The man who 
 has heaped up the money ordinarily knows 
 how to avoid the roller processes. But when 
 we have before us the class reared in extrav- 
 agance, the responsibility of society for the 
 levelling crush of wealth appears. In the 
 parable of the rich man and Lazarus Jesus 
 used the expression " A certain rich man." 
 The expression may be entirely accidental, 
 
214 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 but the suggestion seems to be that it was 
 Lazarus who, in spite of his condition, had 
 distinction enough to be called by a name 
 and the rich man was just an undistinguish- 
 able rich man like the other rich men. Deaf 
 to all call to stimulating endeavour such a 
 Dives-soul sinks below the truly individual 
 and exists on the plane of commonness. 
 This rich man may be a fairly good citizen, 
 but he does not always manifest the talent or 
 even the genius he might have shown if he 
 had not been smothered or rolled flat by 
 wealth. This is not invective ; it surely is 
 not a proposal for a raid ; it is a bare state- 
 ment of what seems to be a fault in society 
 as it exists under present distributions. 
 
 Continuing in this same direction the Chris- 
 tian spirit would sanction all those arrange- 
 ments by which men are brought to do some 
 things together so that they can be left to 
 do other things separately. By constituting 
 some duties everybody's business we provide 
 more leisure for the individual to attend to 
 his own business. Some obligations can best 
 be discharged by the whole community to- 
 gether, or by those who act as agents for the 
 community taken as a unit. As illustration 
 think how much time is saved for the indi- 
 vidual in a city by the common water supply. 
 
ENDS AND MEANS 215 
 
 Suppose each inhabitant of a community had 
 to look after his own water supply. The well 
 or the private pipe would be a perpetual 
 annoyance. To say nothing of its getting 
 out of order there would be continually the 
 imminent threat of disease. That old oaken 
 bucket was dangerous enough even when no 
 other family lived within a mile, for it may 
 have been too near the contamination from 
 the house of the owner himself. But the old 
 oaken bucket was safe enough for all pur- 
 poses if the water looked reasonably clear. 
 Such a test would not hold to-day. Only 
 the expert can detect the typhoid germ. 
 Now so simple a contrivance as the common 
 water supply does away with an immense 
 amount of worry and leaves the mind free to 
 follow its bent. We say ''follow its bent" 
 advisedly, for that is how minds find them- 
 selves. They must have leisure for wander- 
 ing around the favourite subjects if they are 
 ever to reach any considerable intellectual or 
 artistic or even ethical attainment. Without 
 regard to the exact theoretical formulation of 
 our hopes we may well trust that by some 
 scheme or other the tasks which can best be 
 performed for communities as units w^ill one 
 by one be given over to those who will look 
 after them for communities as units, so that 
 
2l6 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 more and more the individual will be left 
 free to become distinctive if not distinguished. 
 If we could look forward a distance of one 
 hundred years from now we would probably 
 behold an astonishing number of tasks given 
 over to community control which we now 
 think never could be so delegated. The 
 criticism which is to be passed upon the 
 individualistic system in its extreme develop- 
 ment is that it is not individualistic enough : 
 the individuals do not get the best chance. 
 The most forceful individuals may get to the 
 fore, but we have long since given up that 
 doctrine of the survival of the fittest which 
 makes the fittest to survive necessarily the 
 most deserving of survival. 
 
 Putting this in still another phrase we 
 may say that we should seek for the uni- 
 formities in experience which will make for 
 varieties. To escape the odium of too fre- 
 quent reference to industrial situations we 
 employ an illustration drawn from church 
 enterprise. In many sections of this coun- 
 try churches are needlessly duplicating one 
 another's activities. In frontier districts 
 there may be two or three churches where 
 there should be but one. It would be a gain 
 all around if the denominations could come 
 to enough agreement as to tests of member- 
 
ENDS AND MEANS 21 7 
 
 ship and order of worship and formulation of 
 belief and local administration to make a 
 church of any denomination welcome to vir- 
 tually all the religious people of a community. 
 The need of duplication would then pass. 
 The energy saved could be better economized, 
 with the result that each denomination would 
 have more likelihood of fulfilling whatever 
 might be its distinctive mission, and once 
 the organizations were seen to be instru- 
 ments rivalry would be more friendly. It 
 would lack the deadly seriousness which 
 comes when a tool is regarded as an end- 
 in-itself. So as to social cooperation. We 
 might find more of common ground which, 
 while it would make conduct and duties 
 more uniform, would leave individuals free 
 for the development of the true human dis- 
 tinctiveness. We might limit individual ini- 
 tiative at some outlets for the sake of giving 
 the individual greater initiative through other 
 channels. 
 
 The individual needs more privacy than 
 he gets to-day. It is a grim and tragic joke 
 to hear men dismiss modern plans for larger 
 social cooperation on the ground that we 
 must not intrude upon the privacy of individ- 
 uals. As if the modern scramble for profits 
 in tenement houses, for example, made for 
 
2l8 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the privacy of the occupants ! We do need 
 privacy for individuals. All modern social 
 reformers see the futility of the communistic 
 programs which involve living together. 
 Such schemes go to pieces because people 
 see too much of one another. Even foreign 
 missionaries living in compounds have to ex- 
 ercise care lest they become " too thick " with 
 one another. Present-day social plans aim 
 at providing more privacy for the individual 
 by taking off his single mind burdens which 
 can better be borne collectively, thus leaving 
 him free to live the strictly private part of 
 his life in his own way. Larger mutual re- 
 spect would result. Competition would be- 
 come more and more friendly rivalry instead 
 of a war to the death. 
 
 To say it all over again, — we might lay 
 down a doctrine of equality for the sake of 
 the resulting inequality. If we could more 
 nearly equalize some burdens we would have 
 more leisure for the free play of individuality. 
 We plead for diversity. We must have 
 diversity if we are to have any degree of 
 richness and fullness of individual life. In- 
 equality is just as characteristic of life as is 
 equality, — only the inequality must not be 
 such as to suggest a lurking injustice some- 
 where. We need a world of incommensur- 
 
ENDS AND MEANS 219 
 
 able personal inequalities. If we can have 
 men so distinct that we cannot well compare 
 them with one another much bitterness of 
 envy will disappear. A man ought to have 
 scope to develop the good traits of which he 
 may have a personal monopoly. For sake 
 of illustration again we make a harmless 
 reference which all can accept. Suppose we 
 had under any social system approximate 
 equality of taxation. This does not mean a 
 system by which all should pay a like sum 
 into a treasury as a man pays a poll tax, but 
 a system by which each man would pay 
 what he ought to pay, — no more and no less. 
 What an advance upon present situations 
 that would be, — for nobody could well claim 
 that any present system is equitable, — even 
 if no men were tax-dodgers. Even under so 
 commonplace a burden as the payment of 
 taxes, if men were more nearly equal as 
 serving under a more equitable system, the 
 economy of human energy which now goes 
 to nervous friction and irritation would be 
 immeasurable. 
 
 And to say it once more, — men might well 
 subject themselves in an improved order of 
 society to greater subordination among the 
 lower goods for the sake of greater freedom 
 among the higher goods. We might agree 
 
220 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 to a surrender of some lower liberties in a 
 common bond of search for some higher 
 liberties. We might enter into some ar- 
 rangements which would take the load of 
 financial stress off over-weighted shoulders 
 and more equitably distribute the strain. 
 The race took a long step forward when the 
 progress of invention lifted the physical 
 weights off the shoulders of men and placed 
 them on muscles of iron and steel. Another 
 improvement may be to lighten the stress for 
 daily bread so as to secure more freedom in 
 the search for spiritual bread. It all comes 
 down to this, — the Christian is in society for 
 the purpose of giving the members of society 
 a better chance. His work is not merely 
 remedial. The work of Jesus was not merely 
 to open the blind eyes but to give the eyes 
 something worth seeing after they were 
 opened. He unlocked prison doors not 
 merely to let out the men inside, but to 
 show them what to do after they got out. 
 He healed the lame not merely to help them 
 walk erect but to help them to travel in the 
 right direction. We will not believe that 
 this world cannot be made a better instru- 
 ment for the development of righteousness. 
 We hear it said that the world as we have it 
 is a good world for the purpose for which it 
 
ENDS AND MEANS 221 
 
 is intended. Far be it from us to venture 
 any criticism on the universe, but there are 
 some details in our latitude which need 
 correction. Men need to give heed to the 
 significance of the material for the spiritual. 
 Society should seek to make the earth more 
 of an aid to the life of righteousness. We 
 should at least try to make the world such 
 that men can afford to be honest here. We 
 cannot believe that we are always to look 
 upon this present world as a vale of tears. 
 Tragedy there will no doubt always be, but 
 all the more reason for seeking to mitigate 
 the tragedy. It is conceivable that under a 
 thoroughly Christian society even the tragedy 
 of death would be reduced to less painful 
 woe than at present. The fear of death 
 might be done away in a community which 
 had practiced righteousness into the warp 
 and woof of all conduct. The horror of 
 sudden death by accident or even by disease 
 might be made less frequent through proper 
 regard for human life. The fear of poverty 
 through the loss of the bread-winner might 
 be greatly reduced. There would remain of 
 course the dire agony of separation from 
 loved ones, but that might be lessened in a 
 fully human community quick and warm 
 with genuine sympathy. If over all of this 
 
222 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 there could stretch a sky radiant with the 
 hopefuhiess which comes from reahzing God 
 in experience there would hardly be an in- 
 strument comparable to this earth for the 
 development of righteousness. The very 
 possibility of dreaming of such outcome is a 
 signal and summons for the attempt to realize 
 the dream. 
 
 But we come back to our main thesis. 
 Before the earth is much improved the peo- 
 ple in it must learn what is supremely worth 
 while. If they can learn the uses of instru- 
 ments and can give themselves to the right 
 use of instruments the future is bright. It is 
 not safe to have stupendous instruments de- 
 livered into the keeping of men before the 
 men know how to use them. We have only 
 to look to a condition like that in semi-bar- 
 barous countries to see the trouble which re- 
 sults when high-powered instruments are put 
 in the hands of people who rush readily to 
 internecine wars with no conviction of respon- 
 sibility. The only saving fact in such a crisis 
 is that the people cannot shoot straight 
 enough to hit the objects at which they aim, 
 — though the destruction is terrific when non- 
 combatants are exposed. The peoples of the 
 earth seem to be sweeping determinedly on 
 towards larger and larger social powers. It 
 
ENDS AND MEANS 223 
 
 is the function of the Christian portion of the 
 community to seek to dike and levee this 
 movement into the right channels. It will 
 be observed that we have made little of 
 definite suggestion as to any particular prob- 
 lems now before the peoples. All we have 
 tried to show is that some simplification re- 
 sults when we discern the true aim of our ef- 
 fort, — the highest life of man, — normal life in 
 the enjoyment of all legitimate functions. 
 The enjoyment of this life as part of the 
 divine plan, — this is the goal. The social 
 instruments, the laws, the institutions, can 
 help mightily in assisting us towards this 
 fundamental goal. Dynamite is deadly. If 
 men use dynamite to destroy one another it 
 is a curse, but dynamite turned against a 
 nature which must be transformed is a bless- 
 ing. It can blow to pieces rocks which 
 would turn the point of the strongest pick- 
 axe. It lifts the loads in an instant that 
 hundreds of men could not budge in weeks. 
 All depends on who uses the instrument 
 and what he uses it for. Law. is mighty, if it 
 is the expression of the good life, but suppose 
 law, instead of aiming at good will for men, 
 aims at vengeance and hate. Then the 
 dynamic force tears down and does not build 
 again. We end as we began. Society can 
 
224 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 modify, or set aside, or create outright social 
 instruments for the accompHshment of its 
 purposes. But instruments are instruments 
 and must be used by persons for the sake of 
 persons. 
 
LECTURE VI 
 
 EVERY KINDRED AND 
 PEOPLE AND TONGUE 
 
LECTURE VI 
 
 EVERY KINDRED AND PEOPLE AND 
 TONGUE 
 
 WE have reserved to the last the 
 study of the program of the Chris- 
 tian community in world-wide mis- 
 sionary conquest. Before looking up at the 
 ideal which the missionary has to keep al- 
 ways in sight we glance at some underlying 
 conditions which limit the Christian in his 
 direct appeals to the peoples whom he seeks 
 to win. The intercourse of the missionary 
 with what we call heathenism is but one of 
 the contacts of Christendom with heathenism. 
 The most fundamental barrier to missionary 
 enterprise is the difficulty of bringing these 
 different contacts into some agreement with 
 one another. In our own land the contradic- 
 tion between the Christian ideal and the un- 
 christianized aspects of society is wide enough, 
 but we have some appreciation of the diffi- 
 culty and struggle on towards harmony. In 
 other lands such mental adjustment is often 
 nearly impossible. The native sees the gap- 
 227 
 
228 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 ing abyss between the missionary's preach- 
 ing and the wickedness of the missionary's 
 own countrymen and may have no particular 
 interest in seeking an adjustment. George 
 Francis Train used to say that he objected to 
 sending to China missionaries with whom to 
 convert the Chinaman and ammunition with 
 which to kill the Chinaman on one and the 
 same vessel because such mixed cargo was 
 apt to be confusing to the Chinese mind. At 
 the centre of the foreign missionary problem 
 is a home missionary problem. We hear 
 much about the cultivation of the home base 
 in missionary campaigning, and the reference 
 is to the cultivation of a home basis of sup- 
 plies of money and men. We need also the 
 fuller Christianization of the home base. If 
 we cannot bring our industrial and political 
 and social organizations to Christian stand- 
 ards and redeem them from paganism the 
 direct appeal of the missionary is made more 
 than doubly difficult because these difTerent 
 institutions send out their representatives into 
 other lands to make a deadly competition 
 with missionary forces. 
 
 The contacts of the Christian nations and 
 of the non-Christian nations are chiefly those 
 of the tourist, of the trader, of the diplomatist, 
 and of the missionary. Each of the first 
 
EVERY KINDRED, PEOPLE AND TONGUE 229 
 
 three named is himself a missionary of one 
 sort or another. The conduct of each is 
 preaching in one direction or another even 
 though the preaching is unconscious. Take 
 the tourist. We do not often give weight to 
 the influence of the tourist in international in- 
 tercourse, but such influence is quite potent. 
 When the tourist returns home from a non- 
 Christian land and begins to berate the mis- 
 sionary to that land we discount the tourist 
 very heavily. We know well enough that 
 the tourist has not taken pains to learn what 
 he is talking about. But the tourist himself 
 while abroad makes impressions on the for- 
 eigner which the foreigner does not know 
 how to discount. Very frequently the tourist 
 is travelling solely for holiday sightseeing. It 
 is to be doubted if any man who visits foreign 
 peoples chiefly for recreation can make much 
 of those peoples. Of course the observa- 
 tions of the serious student are not just 
 now under review. But the "globe-trotter" 
 tourist sees all inhabitants in an alien coun- 
 try as about alike, and towards them all he 
 is apt to assume an air of aloofness. This is 
 almost inevitable unless the traveller be a 
 man of marked attainment of character. Even 
 when travelling in European countries the 
 American may plume himself on the fancied 
 
230 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 superiority of American customs and Ameri- 
 can institutions, and is now slow to express 
 his gratification. Patriotism may account 
 for some of this pride. Add to this that the 
 " globe-trotters " of the holiday tourist class 
 are apt to be persons of wealth, often newly- 
 acquired, and that they are reenforced in their 
 assumption of national and racial superiority 
 by the possession of money, and we have the 
 explosives at hand for some unhappy dis- 
 charges. If this is true in European lands 
 how much more is it true in what we call 
 heathendom? Years ago, reputable writers 
 have told us, the foreign sojourner in Japan 
 occasionally thought it fine sport to strike 
 with his stick the coolie pulling a jinrickisha. 
 This may not have happened often, but it 
 happened often enough, though it is only fair 
 to say that such insults have not occurred 
 since Japan's last war. While the stick-using 
 may now have ceased the spirit thus revealed 
 has not altogether passed. We would not 
 have it understood that this is the customary 
 state of mind among tourists, for it is not ; 
 but there is enough of such feeling to attract 
 notice among the natives of the non-Christian 
 countries. Moreover the tourists who sim- 
 ply travel through a country attending to 
 their own business and treating the natives 
 
EVERY KINDRED, PEOPLE AND TONGUE 231 
 
 with civility do not command the attention 
 that the other tourists attract. All peoples 
 resent the assumption of aloofness by visitors 
 from outside. Quite likely Charles Dickens 
 in his ** Notes on America " did not overstate 
 the crudeness of our country when he visited 
 it, but what he said rankles in the breasts of 
 some Americans to this day. Likewise lofti- 
 ness of manner in the unofficial and uninten- 
 tional and unconscious representatives of 
 Christendom who visit non-Christian peoples 
 is unspeakably galling to those peoples. 
 
 Now what is the trouble ? Just this, — that 
 the tourist is not of a class who take the doc- 
 trine of human brotherhood with any serious- 
 ness. It is an enigma as to how many 
 Christian populations do take that doctrine 
 seriously, however, so we may say that the 
 trouble with the tourist is that he is not will- 
 ing to think of the peoples whom he visits as 
 belonging to the order of human beings to 
 which he himself belongs. He often looks 
 upon them as a spectacle or show in which 
 he is to find entertainment. The tourist is 
 the outcome and the expression of widely 
 prevalent social notions of our time. He is a 
 social product, just as the others of us are 
 social products, and he represents a type 
 of thought, or of lack of thought, and a 
 
232 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 type of attitude. Until Christianity has so 
 thoroughly permeated the social ideals of 
 our own lands that much larger masses 
 of men have become, not necessarily avow- 
 edly Christian, but substantially Christian 
 in their bearing towards human beings 
 wherever found, the teaching of the mission- 
 ary will have to encounter grave obstacles. 
 But is it not possible for the Christian ideal 
 to make so complete a conquest among us ? 
 We think it is. We have so attained to ideas 
 of elementary decency in Christian lands that 
 there are some misdeeds which any man, 
 whether a professing Christian or not, will 
 condemn. There are acts and attitudes w^e 
 will not tolerate because we have learned, or 
 at least absorbed, a regard for essential hu- 
 manity in ourselves, if not in other people. 
 For example the dweller in Christendom wdll 
 not peaceably tolerate physical filth. He 
 will keep his body and his house measurably 
 clean whether any one is to see him or not. 
 Likewise there are moral abominations with 
 which the normal man reared in civilized 
 lands will not compromise, no matter what 
 may be his moral shortcomings in other 
 respects. We do not ahvays stop to think of 
 the conquests of Christianity registered in 
 these facts. Virtually every man in every 
 
EVERY KINDRED, PEOPLE AND TONGUE 233 
 
 Christian land has been forced to the adop- 
 tion of some ideals, limited though they may 
 be, by the progress of Christian sentiment. 
 There were once vices whose very names 
 have long since faded out, and this because 
 of the progressive realization of the human 
 ideal. Now we expect Christian conceptions 
 of man so to gain ground that whether this 
 or that single person becomes a disciple of 
 Christ or not, no person will take some atti- 
 tudes towards heathen peoples that are as- 
 sumed to-day. To allude again to the inci- 
 dent of the stick-using on the Japanese. 
 Apart from the fear of consequences, such 
 outrageous behaviour would hardly be possi- 
 ble anywhere among tourists to-day. We 
 expect cruelty and boorishness to die out. 
 But the task of assisting their death is a home 
 task ; the home base needs to be so pervaded 
 with human sympathy that wherever we go 
 we shall look upon men as men, no matter 
 what may be the accidents of race or poverty 
 or ignorance or moral inadequacy. 
 
 The second class of obstacles in the path 
 of the Christian conquest of the world is that 
 represented by the trader. It has always 
 been true that the trader has bothered him- 
 self very little about what he has sold to 
 foreign natives. To the trader the natives 
 
234 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 are not so much human beings as buyers of 
 wares. The trader has been guided mainly 
 by what he has found the natives likely to 
 buy. The "five hundred barrels of rum" 
 which the New England sea-captains used to 
 carry as cargo to the West Coast of Africa 
 were shipped because there was a demand 
 for them. The effect of the rum on the native 
 did not disturb the captain any more than it 
 has disturbed his successors at the business 
 since. Moreover cheating a native was 
 partly a pleasure and partly a duty. In trad- 
 ing with the American Indians a Dutchman's 
 hand in the scale of which the other pan was 
 loaded with furs never weighed more than 
 one pound and his foot never weighed more 
 than two pounds. Whatever the means the 
 aim was the same, — to exploit the native for 
 the utmost possible. 
 
 All this was bad enough when the repre- 
 sentatives of the so-called Christian nations 
 were Yankee sea-captains, or their like, each 
 doing business somewhat on his own account. 
 Then an occasional stirring of conscience in 
 the Yankee might arise and relieve the native. 
 But the outcome has been, at least until quite 
 recently, made worse by the growth and 
 aggressiveness of corporate finance. It will 
 be understood that the present speaker has 
 
EVERY KINDRED, PEOPLE AND TONGUE 235 
 
 no intention of indulging in wholesale con- 
 demnation of wealth, but we all know that 
 even here at home corporations thrive best 
 morally when they enjoy the full light of 
 publicity. Unrestricted competition and 
 unregulated monopoly are paganism as 
 rank as the rawest heathenism. There 
 are inherent and inevitable tendencies to 
 evil in the very situation which make ex- 
 ceedingly difficult the control of the large- 
 scale instruments of wealth working in a 
 foreign land away from the home ofBce. 
 First of all the distant representative is not 
 judged by his treatment of employees as is 
 the official at home. At home the feelings of 
 the people with whom the corporation does 
 business have to be reckoned with. The 
 customers must be pleased and the labourers 
 also, and general public sentiment must not 
 be disregarded. The directors of the corpora- 
 tion look more exclusively at profit or loss 
 when scrutinizing the returns from foreign, 
 non-Christian lands. The excuse that profits 
 have fallen because regard had to be taken 
 of the sentiment in the foreign community 
 as to how the labourers there were treated 
 does not weigh as it would at home. More- 
 over all businesses are under the pressure for 
 expansion. If they cannot expand at home 
 
236 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 because of the exactions of public sentiment 
 and the requirements of legislatures and the 
 severity of public officials they nevertheless 
 seek to show a gain in the total volume of 
 business done by pushing foreign expansion. 
 Added to this is the temptation of business 
 agents living in lands far from home and 
 often far from high-minded society to sink to 
 the level of vicious surroundings. The total 
 tendency is down-hill. 
 
 Now the picture must not be painted darker 
 than it is. The corporation is in the foreign 
 country for business purposes, — to get as 
 much out of the natural resources as possible 
 and to profit as much from the native labour 
 as possible. But even so the natives are 
 often better treated by foreign employers 
 than by employers of their own race. In 
 Mexico for example the poor peons who can 
 do nothing but the commonest labour would 
 often sooner hire out to Americans than to 
 persons of their own race, — and this not only 
 because the American pays better wages but 
 because he is apt to treat his labourers more 
 humanely. Apart from exceptional atrocities 
 like those of the rubber and ivory trades the 
 native labourers employed by foreign business 
 leaders in non-Christian lands are not likely 
 to be abused. The speaker knows of at least 
 
EVERY KINDRED, PEOPLE AND TONGUE 237 
 
 one instance where the English manager of a 
 cotton mill in Bombay was followed to his 
 steamer as he left for home by a group of 
 native employees in genuine grief at the 
 departure of one who had in all his relations 
 to them treated them kindly. But conceding 
 all this and much more the situation makes 
 for the obliteration of the distinction which 
 have so emphasized in these lectures, the 
 distinction between men and tools. No 
 matter how indispensable an instrument 
 wealth may be it is not important enough to 
 justify the disregard of human interests. 
 
 It does not help us much to say that all 
 this exploitation of the resources of heathen 
 lands is accomplished by the consent of the 
 rulers of the lands themselves. We are think- 
 ing of the welfare of the vast numbers whom 
 the rulers may not represent at all. Take 
 the granting of concessions to foreign capital 
 by governments in financial distress. A na- 
 tion gets into trouble and borrows money. 
 Then in return for money aid huge conces- 
 sions of resources are granted by those who 
 have the legal authority to do so. The in- 
 terests of the people of the land itself are 
 often the last to be heeded. In a state which 
 has passed through such concessions to sub- 
 jection to foreigners so complete that there 
 
238 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 may be scant standing room left for the na- 
 tives the people may rise in revolution ; then 
 there is cry for military intervention in be- 
 half of the endangered foreign interests. Or 
 foreign collectors are placed in charge of the 
 custom houses until finances can be adjusted. 
 The effect on the temper of the native peoples 
 in such crises is not hard to imagine. 
 
 What is the remedy ? There is but one 
 answer and one solution, — the completer 
 humanization and moralization and spiri- 
 tualization of all our so-called civilized busi- 
 ness procedure. We are not urging this or 
 that or the other industrial platform. We 
 are pleading for the approach to the problems 
 which wealth creates from the point of view 
 of the human interests involved. We beg for 
 a public sentiment which shall so widen the 
 meaning of the term '* human beings " as to 
 include the peoples of whom we are ac- 
 customed to speak as heathen. We protest 
 against the oversight of the truth that wealth 
 is a mere instrument. Now instruments may 
 cost too much in the fashioning, or they may 
 not be rightly used after they are fashioned. 
 An old legend tells us that an oriental ruler 
 once conceived the fancy that his sword 
 blades could be brought to just the right 
 temper by being thrust hot through the 
 
EVERY KINDRED, PEOPLE AND TONGUE 239 
 
 thigh of a slave. Suppose such a proposal 
 should be advanced by some despot and we 
 should protest to him that such tempering 
 makes the sword blade too costly. Suppose 
 he should reply that we were mistaken, that 
 the slave cost so much and the blade was 
 worth so much more. If we had the power 
 to proceed to extremities with such a despot 
 we would not longer debate, for we would 
 say that the despot's reply argued an utter 
 density of ignorance as to human values. 
 Business enterprises may develop into keen 
 instruments but they may cost too much in 
 terms of humanity. The public sentiment 
 which will see this and will hold the instru- 
 ments to the instrumental position will help 
 tremendously in the Christianization of the 
 world. 
 
 Then there is the diplomat representing as 
 he does the sentiment of his people on the 
 national and governmental side. The Chris- 
 tian nations in recent years have much to 
 their credit in their diplomacy with the so- 
 called less favoured nations. England, bar- 
 ring some terrible blunders in other days, 
 has been on the whole humane in her policies 
 towards the people whom she rules, — so that 
 so sharp and cynical a critic as William 
 Graham Sumner once declared that it would 
 
240 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 be well if England could be put in possession 
 of all the remaining unappropriated territories 
 of the globe. It would be unjust to say that 
 England does not chiefly consider the welfare 
 of her subject peoples both in India and 
 Egypt. This is all the more noteworthy from 
 the pressure of the world-wide financial in- 
 terests to make themselves the uppermost 
 considerations in international policy. 
 
 In spite of the noble aim of much inter- 
 national bearing, however, and in spite of the 
 success of many ministers and ambassadors 
 in resisting the tendency towards an aristo- 
 cratic caste system which infests so many 
 diplomatic circles, it is hard for diplomacy 
 to rise much higher than its source, and that 
 source is the people of the Christian nations 
 themselves. Public opinion is the determin- 
 ing power. And that public opinion will not 
 always be content to allow its wiser leaders 
 to be the mouthpieces. So that whenever a 
 California land law is up harm is wrought 
 not so much by the terms of the law itself as 
 by the inability of many debaters to see that 
 the Japanese are human beings. If such 
 problems could always be discussed as the 
 careful diplomatist would discuss them, — 
 with due regard to the human decencies, to 
 say nothing of the human courtesies, — they 
 
EVERY KINDRED, PEOPLE AND TONGUE 24I 
 
 could be more often adjusted without arous- 
 ing ill-feeling. But these international epi- 
 sodes unravel overnight what the representa- 
 tive of the Church has been weaving through 
 the day. Granted that any country has the 
 right to exclude from its borders those who 
 will become a public charge, those who may 
 lower the standard of living in the country, 
 and those who may prove to be an alien 
 body in a democracy, still there are choices of 
 methods and manners in the exercise of these 
 undoubted rights. 
 
 The position of the diplomat is a delicate 
 one. He is of all men most likely to be mis- 
 understood. But he is just a spokesman, 
 and skillfully as he may conduct himself, all 
 depends on the public sentiment back of him. 
 The sentiment needs being made Christian 
 — which can only be accomplished by mak- 
 ing the public Christian. We must work 
 towards the time when the strong nations 
 will honestly protect the weaker nations. 
 The strong peoples cannot rule the weaker 
 even for the good of the weaker by mere 
 strength alone ; neither can they leave them 
 entirely to themselves. If the public senti- 
 ment of the civilized lands could arrive at 
 such a stage of evident unselfishness that 
 the weaker nations would be willing to listen 
 
242 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 to the counsel of the stronger, something 
 very much worth while could be accom- 
 plished, especially if the advice took the form 
 of helping the weaker peoples on towards 
 self-government. 
 
 And just here it may be in order to say a 
 word about making a fetich of words in our 
 struggle to help nations. The charmed word 
 in our day is " democracy." In so far as 
 democracy is a people governing themselves 
 and aiming to reach human ideals it is an 
 end-in-itself. Democracy in that meaning is 
 the people themselves in the process of 
 governing themselves for themselves in the 
 highest sense. The cry for democracy for a 
 weaker people may be for the ideal of a self- 
 governing community or it may be for per- 
 mission to allow the people to follow out 
 their own devices. The devices have only 
 such sacredness as attaches to them from their 
 success in helping on the people. Now the 
 interests of democracy may be aided by a 
 nation which steps in, say to a country in 
 which inhuman institutions prevail, and puts 
 an end to those institutions, the proviso al- 
 ways being that such action is backed up by 
 a public sentiment of the interfering nation 
 which never loses sight of the main issue. 
 For example England stamped out of India 
 
EVERY KINDRED, PEOPLE AND TONGUE 243 
 
 the most complete institution of thuggery 
 which the imagination could have conceived. 
 In doing so she interfered with a native in- 
 stitution, — breaking up a monstrous invention 
 of the peoples of India, but her interference 
 was in accord with the dictates of humanity, 
 and of course was a necessary step towards 
 whatever measure of genuine self-govern- 
 ment India is ever to have. When a nation 
 in its weakness reaches the beginnings of 
 degeneracy so that even order is impossible, 
 the coming in of an outside nation is necessary 
 for the humanity of the people themselves, 
 — and for their progress towards democracy. 
 It is not interference with the progress of 
 a people towards democracy to prevent them 
 from doing what may make democracy im- 
 possible. 
 
 Freedom is another word which may trip 
 our feet as we fight to liberate men. We say 
 that the weaker peoples are to be left alone 
 to fight out and achieve their own salvation. 
 It will always ward off confusion when we are 
 confronted by such unreal simplifications if 
 we ask as to actual, concrete social facts. 
 The present speaker has no theory as to the 
 proper method of detailed procedure, — say 
 for the United States in relation to the 
 weaker states of Latin-America. But what 
 
244 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 do theorists mean when they declare that 
 these peoples should be left absolutely alone 
 to work out their own salvation as free 
 beings? Does this mean that the public 
 sentiment of nations like ours is not to count 
 even in an advisory capacity ? One Latin- 
 American dictator succeeds another dictator. 
 The success of the dictator, for the moment 
 on top, may be due to no moral or intellec- 
 tual or even human strength. His success 
 may represent just the physical efficacy of 
 brute might. The people are not free under 
 him, or under the successor who is bloody 
 enough to put him out of the way. The 
 people have no chance under such dictators 
 to attain freedom. The facilities for educa- 
 tion are not sufficient, and the opportunities 
 for experiment in self-government are noth- 
 ing at all. Under such sway the people really 
 sink farther and farther below real freedom. 
 In the name of theoretical freedom they are 
 allowed to fall away from actual freedom and 
 to miss all chance for actual freedom. 
 
 It behooves us always to guard ourselves 
 against what the old philosopher called '' the 
 fatal imposture and deceit of words." Words 
 are instruments and nothing more. It is pos- 
 sible to erect an instrument into an end-in-it- 
 self and forthwith to forget the vital content 
 
EVERY KINDRED, PEOPLE AND TONGUE 245 
 
 in the mere repetition of the word. In a sub- 
 stantive sense there is no such thing as free- 
 dom. The only reaUty is men living freely. 
 In pondering over all such questions the 
 public mind must not be deceived. It must 
 keep in view the interests of the men and the 
 methods of helping them to act more and 
 more freely. Even this word " humanity " of 
 which we have been making so much, and of 
 which nations sometimes insincerely make so 
 much when they are seeking for reasons for 
 entering aggressively the territories of weaker 
 peoples, is an instrument like the others. 
 The facts are people, — men, women and 
 children, and the methods of helping them 
 most effectively. Words erected into holy 
 idols will not prove much more effective than 
 idols usually prove. 
 
 And now some man will wail forth that if 
 missionary progress cannot come to the full 
 tide until the Christian nations develop this 
 unselfish interest in men we might just as 
 well give up the battle. But why despair, 
 even if the ideal is high ? In spite of all that 
 the cynics say about the selfishness of nations 
 there are citizens who vote on international 
 issues unselfishly and if some vote thus others 
 may. Many of us have voted on platforms 
 having to do with the Philippines, for ex- 
 
246 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 ample. Now political and financial leaders 
 may have taken advantage of us in using 
 selfishly our unselfish feeling, but we have 
 voted unselfishly. We know that much, — 
 and we have enough humility not to imagine 
 that we monopolize political righteousness. 
 If we think and vote thus others can, — and 
 do. The main sentiment of the United 
 States to-day towards the Philippines and 
 towards Cuba is unselfish. Many who have 
 projects of an industrial or political character 
 to promote might conceivably thwart this 
 unselfish feeling, especially since we do not 
 claim that the sentiment is effectively organ- 
 ized. But we can increase and enforce this 
 unselfishness. We ask just for the extension 
 of the regard for the truest human interests 
 of all human beings into political theory and 
 action. Our governmental policies play far 
 more part in shaping the opinion of the 
 peoples to whom we go with the Gospel than 
 we can estimate. If we can work the national 
 unselfishness out into expression our problem 
 is well on towards solution. Or rather if we 
 could cultivate a positive interest in the wel- 
 fare of peoples beyond our lands we could 
 move much more swiftly to success. Of 
 course we are not to forget the enormous 
 material and labour resources to be developed 
 
EVERY KINDRED, PEOPLE AND TONGUE 247 
 
 in China, for example, and we ought to 
 further the Christianization of such lands for 
 the sake of the utilization of this material 
 and personal power, but the primary motive 
 is not the material or the labour reservoir of 
 power. The first motive is the people. 
 
 But it is high time we arrived at the mission- 
 ary himself. It would not have been alto- 
 gether worth while, however, to discuss the 
 missionary and his duties without heeding 
 the backlying conditions which have to be 
 taken into the reckoning in the impact of 
 Christian nations upon the less favoured 
 nations. As we said at the outset, the hand 
 of the missionary is but one of many laid by 
 the Christian nation upon the heathen nation. 
 The note sounded by the missionary in the 
 ears of the heathen people is but one note, — 
 and it may be drowned out by the other 
 notes, or it and they may be most wofully 
 out of accord. 
 
 So far as the all-essential is concerned the 
 missionary must come to his task interested 
 primarily in his people because they are 
 human beings. He is there for the sake of 
 the men, women and children themselves. 
 They are folks like himself, in spite of all the 
 differences. Even what seem to him their 
 gross immoralities are in them more nearly 
 
248 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 unmoralities. The missionary may reply to 
 us that he supposed he was going to the 
 field primarily for the sake of Christ, but 
 what does he mean by this phrase if not that 
 he is going to help those for whom Christ 
 died? Jesus wrought upon men to help 
 them, and He poured fierce condemnation 
 upon all professedly religious folk who had 
 not the willingness thus to serve. If Jesus 
 were to reappear on earth to-day and set 
 Himself to labour among non-Christians it 
 would be for the sake of the people. The 
 whole earthly aim of Christianity is to serve 
 those now on earth. 
 
 To be sure there is force in the missionary's 
 question. He may infer that we advise that 
 he should forget the more spiritual aspects of 
 missionary effort in the passion for the im- 
 mediate relief of lives in terrible distress. 
 We hasten then to say that the duty is at all 
 times spiritual. The missionary is to strike 
 at once to the spiritual centres, arousing the 
 conviction for sin, pointing the path to for- 
 giveness, preaching the good news of the 
 good God. Only, this evangel is to be 
 thoroughgoing. From the moment when 
 the missionary gets enough people converted 
 to create anything like a social spirit he is 
 under obligation to teach the converts to 
 
EVERY KINDRED, PEOPLE AND TONGUE 249 
 
 carry the newly-found God into their social 
 relationships. Just as in the home land we 
 are to urge progressive salvation which will 
 include all a man's relationships to his neigh- 
 bours so in the mission field must we preach 
 the same salvation. The fundamental motive 
 is to get the individual into prayer and com- 
 munion with the God of Jesus. After that 
 we must push the divine conquest into those 
 realms of the believer's life which touch other 
 lives for the sake of making him and his 
 fellows more human here and now. As has 
 been so often said, it is not so much the duty 
 of keeping the non-Christian nations out of 
 hell hereafter which confronts us, as the duty 
 of getting them out of hell here and now. 
 
 Everything comes back to the idea of God 
 as revealed in Jesus. That idea carries with 
 it positive and specific ideas of what man is 
 and of the possibility of man's becoming 
 more like God. Allowing all we please for 
 the play of economic forces in the life of alien 
 peoples, we have to admit that our very 
 ability to detect the evil tendency of eco- 
 nomic forces lays upon us the responsibility 
 for the correction of those tendencies. The 
 strategic attack is that of the missionary. If 
 the missionary went into a non-Christian field 
 and began to work entirely from without, on 
 
250 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the assumption, let us say, that healthier 
 physical bodies would be enough of an ob- 
 ject for him to achieve, we could at once 
 concede the justice of the charge of super- 
 ficiality. But when the missionary plants 
 the idea of God in the inner life of his fol- 
 lowers and works outward from thence, we 
 have to praise him for proceeding upon work- 
 manlike principles. Jesus did not indeed at- 
 tack by name the outstanding economic and 
 political wrongs of His day, but He did begin 
 within men and set ideas to seething which 
 had an inevitable expansive and even ex- 
 plosive tendency. It is impossible to accom- 
 plish everything in a few months, but Jesus 
 so placed His truth in the hearts of men 
 that He knew the development must surely 
 encircle the outward institutions. The proc- 
 ess of growth involves expansions. As well 
 might a vineyard dresser protest that the 
 vine is doing a merely superficial work when 
 it is reaching out for more room to accom- 
 modate its increasing length and diameter 
 as for a critic of Christian methods to say 
 that the methods are artificial and superficial 
 when they reach outward from the inner 
 germ. What the vine is doing is building 
 larger channels for the sap ; and more sap 
 means more fruit. 
 
EVERY KINDRED, PEOPLE AND TONGUE 25 1 
 
 The present speaker heard at widely dif- 
 ferent periods two great men make two great 
 utterances which by right belong together. 
 I once heard Dr. William F. Warren, the 
 greatest student of the faiths outside of Chris- 
 tianity that I have ever known, say that the 
 majority of the inhabitants of the earth, when 
 they attempt to conceive of God conceive of 
 Him as best symbolized by some unhuman 
 form, — multitudes of persons finding no bet- 
 ter symbol for Him than a serpent or dragon. 
 I once heard Bishop James M. Thoburn, the 
 greatest missionary I have ever known, say 
 that the majority of the inhabitants of the 
 earth lie down to rest every night without 
 having known through the day the satisfac- 
 tion of enough to eat. The two statements, 
 though uttered by different men, fitly belong 
 together, for each has significance for the 
 other. If we could get men to a nobler idea 
 of God a nobler idea of humanity would 
 follow ; and if a nobler idea of humanity 
 followed, a better state of human existence 
 would appear, — while conversely a better 
 state of human existence would lead to a 
 healthier conception of God. The mission- 
 ary has to utilize both spiritual and physical 
 influences, but his primary function is to 
 point men straight to God. Doing that will 
 
252 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 ultimately transform even the outward envi- 
 ronment and this in turn will react for good 
 on the religious view of those won for 
 Christianity. 
 
 Professor Borden P. Bowne used to say 
 that Asia past and present is the sufficient 
 condemnation of the Asiatic religions. A 
 genuine philosopher saw the intimate bond 
 between the view of God which the Asiatic 
 peoples have held and the outcome in Asiatic 
 life. There may have been a stage in the 
 history of religions when the worship of even 
 the fructifying and reproductive principles of 
 nature led only to innocent results, but the 
 final outcome of such worship is sure to be 
 abomination like the rankness of some cults 
 in India to-day. Religions are to be judged 
 not only by their intellectual formulation but 
 by their total appeal to the impulses of men 
 as men actually are. It is a peculiarity of 
 any religion that it cannot remain static. It 
 moves up or down, and the Asiatic heathen- 
 isms have not moved up. " Raw " heathen- 
 ism grows rawer. Nothing demonstrates 
 more conclusively the power of the religion 
 of the ancient Hebrews than the vigour with 
 which it clung to its upward course in spite 
 of the contaminating influences from the 
 nations round about. When the ancient 
 
EVERY KINDRED, PEOPLE AND TONGUE 253 
 
 prophets denounced the worship of heathen 
 gods in terms which suggested abominable 
 and unnatural immoralities they were not 
 indulging in figures of rhetoric. Idolatry- 
 slides downward into baseness. Nothing can 
 be swifter than the rush down-hill when im- 
 morality is labelled with the name of religion. 
 Or think of a creed which is loftier and 
 purer than any species of nature worship, — 
 the creed of ancestor worship. Here would 
 appear to be a religion laying stress on the 
 recognition of value in human life. The an- 
 cestors are worthy of supreme honour. But 
 the essential deification of actual men has led 
 away from the ennoblement of humanity. It 
 may seem odd to hear Mormonism spoken of 
 as heathenism, but there was once in Mor- 
 monism, though there may not be now, a 
 trace of heathenism in the form of ancestor 
 worship. A man was to be honoured in pro- 
 portion to the number of his descendants. 
 Polygamy would be the natural outcome of 
 such belief. Professor Ross has calculated 
 that through the demand for sons to honour 
 the ancestors China brings forth five genera- 
 tions in a period which normally ought to 
 produce only four. Through the intense 
 stimulus of any belief which thus forces too 
 many beings into existence the value of the 
 
254 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 single life falls. Life literally becomes cheap. 
 Then we have the wretched adjustment of 
 the human vitality to a standard of living 
 hardly human at all. There are degrees of 
 adversity which furnish the stimulus to char- 
 acter-building, but such wretchedness as re- 
 sults from overcrowding like that of China 
 and India is so far below what we in Western 
 lands think of as adversity and poverty as to 
 make the terms inapplicable. We have in- 
 deed in China and India a manifestation of 
 what the human race can achieve against 
 desperate odds, but that is not the revelation 
 of which we are desirous. We desire the un- 
 folding of men's possibilities under favoura- 
 ble circumstances. We are looking not for 
 the environment in which the physically 
 toughest alone can survive, but for the en- 
 vironment which gives impulse to the human 
 energies towards something beyond hardiness. 
 It is sometimes said to the credit of the China- 
 man that he is able to live on next to noth- 
 ing, and that he is immune to typhoid fever ! 
 But better not be immune to typhoid fever if 
 the immunity carries with it an immunity of 
 mind and feeling towards the filth which pro- 
 duces typhoid fever. There are much more 
 glorious victories possible for the Chinaman 
 than to become immune to typhoid. The 
 
EVERY KINDRED, PEOPLE AND TONGUE 255 
 
 human victory for the milHons of China is not 
 Hkely to come until the birth-rate in China 
 falls. The birth-rate will fall when polygamy 
 and concubinage and general laxity of sexual 
 relationships cease. These will decline when 
 ancestor worship passes. Ancestor worship 
 will pass as the worship of the true God 
 comes. With the worship of the true God 
 will arrive a new estimate of the value of a 
 man, — and the new estimate of the worth of 
 a man will work back in turn through more 
 and more beneficial channels to enlarge the 
 idea of God. 
 
 Even the more abstract notion of fatalism 
 which haunts many theologies has direct hu- 
 man consequences. The drowsy passivity of 
 the Indian ryot in the presence of plague, the 
 crazy rush of the Mohammedan warrior upon 
 the machine guns of his enemy, the utter 
 callousness of the Mexican peon to the threat 
 of death by bandits and revolutionists, — all 
 these reveal the dehumanizing deadliness of 
 a belief which makes men merely the play- 
 things of fate. The fatalistic creeds all end 
 in attaching less and less value to human life. 
 The idea of God revealed by Jesus cannot be 
 taken seriously without enhancing the value 
 of men, and that increased worth of men and 
 the happy consequences which flow forth from 
 
256 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 thence are potent signs of the presence of 
 God in the world. While we have condemned 
 the plan of going forth into non-Christian 
 lands with schemes merely for the physical 
 development of the lands, it nevertheless must 
 be said, after we have focused our view into 
 correct perspective, that the very lands of the 
 world, — the soil, the mines, the water-powers, 
 — will never have their chance until the Chris- 
 tian idea seizes the peoples. To turn West- 
 ern science in full blast upon the material 
 resources of the Orient now, with the Western 
 lands themselves not fully Christianized, and 
 with Christianity barely started in the Eastern 
 lands, might lead to industrial calamity. But 
 with the whole world Christianized into some 
 notion of stewardship as applied to material 
 goods there is no reason why through the 
 long future lands now burdened to exhaustion 
 may not revive into garden beauty. And 
 there is every reason why these resources 
 should ultimately work for the deepening and 
 enrichment of human experience. 
 
 We have said that we go forth into 
 heathen lands because the less fortunate peo- 
 ples need us. We also need them. Life is 
 such that it does not in human beings run an 
 even stream. It calls for seasonal refresh- 
 ment and revival. We crave the inspiration 
 
EVERY KINDRED, PEOPLE AND TONGUE 257 
 
 of the tingle of world-wide victory. Just as in 
 the career of our own country the entire na- 
 tion was quickened by the consciousness of 
 an ever-expanding frontier where pioneer 
 spirits were pushing on ahead of the nation, 
 so we are stirred by the stories of the con- 
 quests of the Cross out upon the frontier. 
 But more important than the need of the 
 heathen for us and the need of ourselves for 
 the conquests of heathenism is the demand 
 of the whole Christian community, present 
 and future, for whatever any portion of the 
 community can contribute to the joy of the 
 whole. The Church of Christ yearns for the 
 heathen peoples because of the fine possibil- 
 ities of the heathen as human beings. With 
 the growth of a genuine Christian conscious- 
 ness the reflective students discern more and 
 more worth in men everywhere, taken just as 
 human beings. Christianity would be poor 
 without the diversity of view and manner 
 which abound as persons of widely separated 
 place of abode and habit of life merge into 
 more intimate understanding of one another 
 as members of one Christian body. The 
 speaker once heard two professors from a 
 distinguished university discussing the policy 
 of having preachers of different denomina- 
 tions appear before college students. When 
 
258 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 one expressed the opinion that the sounding 
 of diverse notes as to religious conviction be- 
 fore college students would tend to confuse 
 them, the other replied that one need of stu- 
 dents everywhere is to realize the luxuriant 
 variety and diversity of religious approach to 
 central themes. The religious convictions 
 are as diversified as the peoples themselves. 
 When we glance at masses of heathen persons 
 they all look alike to us, and different from 
 persons of our own race. There is room in 
 Christianity for whatever is racial in the habits 
 of mind of the different peoples. There seem 
 to be in particular races distinctive qualities, 
 — as the artistic tendencies in the Japanese. 
 We are not attempting any pronouncements 
 in racial psychology, — for all that we mean 
 is, for example, that whether innately or by 
 acquired habit the Japanese have Japanese 
 artistic abilities. When we broaden our idea 
 of Christianity enough to make it include as 
 essential everything which makes life rich 
 and sweet we shall rejoice in the conversion 
 of alien peoples because of their racial qual- 
 ities. What can these be but gifts of God ? 
 Is not any taste for beauty an echo or a gleam 
 from the Source of all Beauty ? Is not any 
 trait of intellectual acuteness a revelation 
 from the Divine intellect ? Is not any grace 
 
EVERY KINDRED, PEOPLE AND TONGUE 259 
 
 of personal excellence a revelation of some 
 glory of the Supreme Person? After our 
 glance at the Oriental crowds steadies to a 
 gaze the sameness dissolves and the differ- 
 ences in individual character begin to stand 
 out. And the Christian community needs all 
 these separate persons with all their peculiar- 
 ities of character. Needs them why and 
 how ? Needs them because they are persons. 
 Needs them just as persons need one another. 
 Needs them in the finest and purest spiritual 
 communion. 
 
 Does Christianity lack anything which can 
 be supplied from the outside systems as such ? 
 Here we fall back upon our conception of in- 
 struments. The systems are nothing in them- 
 selves and have no rights of their own. The 
 only question then is as to how much of these 
 systems can be utilized for Christianity in an 
 instrumental capacity. We profess ourselves 
 unable to see much that is precious for pres- 
 ent-day use in the heathen doctrines or codes. 
 They do not furnish healthy inspiration, or 
 supply wholesome spiritual food, or put into 
 the hands of men effective spiritual weapons 
 of offense or defense, or tools for construction 
 in the religious life of our time. A fair judg- 
 ment would probably be that the systems 
 have had their chance. They have done all 
 
26o PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the good of which they are capable. Some 
 are indeed better than others, but all are in- 
 adequate in to-day's crisis. What we really 
 desire of the so-called heathen are the persons 
 themselves and their aptitudes. Their relig- 
 ious views are not suited to the days just 
 ahead of us. Many heathen religions are in- 
 deed wonderful inventions. They are like 
 the American Indian's birch-bark canoe — one 
 of the most marvellous contrivances ever de- 
 vised by the wit of man, but valuable chiefly 
 for museum purposes to-day. So of the re- 
 ligion of the American Indian, and of other 
 non-Christian races. 
 
 We must not be understood in this as in- 
 dicating a willingness to throw away any- 
 thing of the slightest value. The concep- 
 tions of the outside religions when looked at 
 on the whole and in the main are apt to be 
 disquieting. We can pick out gems of moral 
 precept and of spiritual insight here and 
 there, but to do so we have to rummage 
 through heaps of rubbish, — to use no stronger 
 term. If there are items of these systems 
 worth the expense of hunting them out by all 
 means let them be appropriated. Gold is 
 gold, but after we have paid for the mine and 
 the digging and the cyanide process there 
 may not be any gold left. It is more likely 
 
EVERY KINDRED, PEOPLE AND TONGUE 261 
 
 that the appropriation will be that of the 
 spiritual capabilities of the people themselves 
 which are powerful engines but which have 
 never been steered to the true course. If the 
 Hindu has developed great faculty for medi- 
 tative brooding the faculty can be used 
 wonderfully for Christian thinking, — and the 
 Hindu will have something worth brooding 
 over. It may be that the progress of the 
 years will show that there are segments of 
 Christian truth which are more adapted to 
 some races than are others, and it may be 
 that the final interpretation of these segments 
 cannot come until the outside peoples take 
 hold of the aspects of Christian truth for 
 which they are racially fitted. This is more 
 likely than that Christianity will discover 
 much in heathen theologies of which to 
 make outright seizure. There are indeed 
 among the outside peoples customs which 
 are quaint and beautiful, manners which are 
 graceful and inimitable, courtesies which are 
 charming and fascinating. It would be sad 
 indeed if the world-wide spread of Chris- 
 tianity should mar any of this. But the 
 virtue of these peoples is not chiefly in the 
 content of their religious beliefs. 
 
 It ought to be apparent that we do not 
 imply that the missionary should attempt to 
 
262 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 introduce Western methods and habits of life, 
 — say to Eastern peoples. He is to introduce 
 the life of God into the Eastern hearts and 
 then allow that divine life to assume whatever 
 form seems most appropriate. If the mis- 
 sionary relies on the method of himself liv- 
 ing an approximately ideal human life he will 
 accomplish much more than by merely formal 
 preaching. The objection that missionaries 
 bring discredit on their cause by living in 
 better circumstances than do the people to 
 whom they minister misses an essential point 
 most wofully. To begin with, the mission- 
 ary cannot live as do the people around him, 
 and in the next place he ought not to if he 
 could. It is part of his business to give his 
 people an object lesson in what the normal 
 human life means. The very thoroughness 
 with which he cleans his premises is a lesson. 
 And out beyond that are the obvious examples 
 in the love of husband and wife for each 
 other, the conscientious training of children, 
 the kindliness towards the neighbour, the 
 honesty of daily marketing, which ought to 
 be invaluable. But it is not the duty of the 
 missionary to try to divert Chinese or Indian 
 Christianity into any other than Chinese or 
 Indian channels. It may not be desirable for 
 the Chinaman to wear European clothes, or 
 
EVERY KINDRED, PEOPLE AND TONGUE 263 
 
 to eat European dishes, or to speak European 
 language, or to be anything but a Chinaman 
 or to act like any one except a Chinaman no 
 matter how sincere a Christian he may be. 
 
 And now, as we draw towards the close, 
 we avow our belief that the progress of Chris- 
 tianity in foreign fields is a benefit for the 
 instruments of the Church, considered as 
 instruments. The missionary has to hold 
 his emphasis to the right place, — the change 
 of the life of the convert. He is not apt 
 to be led into over-stress upon this or that 
 minor detail when the acceptance of faith 
 can mean only the transformation of life. 
 In our land a man may be performing sub- 
 stantially Christian duties without the Chris- 
 tian consciousness. He ought to dedicate 
 his powers openly to the Christian God, but 
 the outward conduct may then go forward 
 as before. It may not be necessary for him 
 to abandon any habit whatsoever. But in a 
 foreign land the transformation has often to 
 be complete. Habits and even associations 
 have to be broken. A batde is to be fought. 
 The wise missionary, to get at the heart of a 
 situation like this with the great essentials, 
 must keep the stress on the features of the 
 faith that really count. He will not make 
 much of denominational definitions. He will 
 
264 PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 not rely overmuch upon church machinery. 
 In the severer trials that come upon him he 
 will lean most upon the Master's example of 
 immediate contact of life with life. He wins 
 by being first a Christian man and after that 
 and incidentally a minister and a teacher. 
 
 We have all heard the story of the found- 
 ing of a very important Christian school 
 in Korea. The workers preached for years 
 without success in winning converts. They 
 could not get close enough to the people. 
 One year the cholera struck Seoul, carrying 
 off the people by hundreds. The dead were 
 so numerous that burial of all seemed out of 
 the question, — some were cast on the gar- 
 bage heaps outside the city. A missionary 
 walking beyond the walls came upon the 
 body of a child, — a little girl — on a heap of 
 refuse. The girl had been cast out for dead 
 but proved to be alive. There was no place 
 to take her but to the missionary's home, 
 and there she recovered. With that girl as 
 a pupil the missionary made a start towards 
 a school, for he saw here a way into the life 
 of the people. From such a beginning in 
 closer daily contact came the after success. 
 The impulse was Christian, the method was 
 Christian, the outcome has been Christian. 
 Here was evidently a providential opening 
 
EVERY KINDRED, PEOPLE AND TONGUE 265 
 
 of the door to more intimate life centres of 
 the people. The Church has in most places 
 come upon happier times than those in older 
 Korea, but in the abundance of the new 
 opportunity she ought not to forget the em- 
 phasis on personal values and personal meth- 
 ods which is the centre of any evangelism 
 worthy the name of Christian. 
 
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 PROFESSOR JAMES R. HOJVERTON 
 
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 i2mo, cloth, net 75c. 
 
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SOCIOLOGY AND PRACTICAL RELIGION 
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PRACTICAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
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 Twice-Born Men 
 
 A Clinic in Regeneration, 
 
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 A footnote in narrative to Prof. Wm. James* "Tlie 
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 Prof. William James, of Harvard: "Mr. Begbie's book is 
 a wonderful set of stories splendidly worked up. It certainly 
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 references and I wish the book a great success." 
 
 Prof. George A. Coe, of Union Theological Seminary: "I 
 like the book greatly. It gives concrete data and that is 
 what both the psychologist and religionist needs. As I read, 
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 SIR JOSEPH COMPTON-RICKETT 
 
 Origins and Faith 
 
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 by this eminent statesman and layman on the fundamentals 
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 Christianity, by one who is well known now as the author of 
 the erstwhile anonymous books "The Christ Ihat is to Be" 
 and "Pro Christo et Ecclesia." 
 
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STUDIES IN CKRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 
 
 JAMES A. ANDERSON 
 
 Religious Unrest and Its Remedy 
 
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 "In this remarkable book — for such it is — the author gives 
 all critics full credit for honest deductions and honest 
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 culties found in Biblical interpretation. 1 he writer has con- 
 densed volumes into his comparison of Christianity with other 
 religions. Must be satisfactory to any honest inquirer after 
 the truth of Christianity." — Pittsburgh Christian Advocate, 
 
 REV. W. K. FLEMING, M.A., B.D. Library oj 
 _ _ . . . >^t • • • Historical 
 
 Mysticism m Christianity Theology 
 
 8vo, cloth, net $1.50. 
 
 "Successive schools of thought and the teachings of indi- 
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 upon the subject by writers of recognized authority, are 
 combined in a scholarly yet simple narration of the deeper 
 spiritual life." — Christian Advocate. 
 
 T. T. MARTIN 
 
 Redemption and the New Birth 
 
 l2n]o, cloth, net $1.00. 
 
 "A rare contribution. Ihe author occupies a peculiar 
 place in the evangelistic world. There is none other like 
 him. No other man is bringing such messages to this age. 
 That this is true, his book will give ample evidence. It de- 
 serves wide reading and will must certainly be read with 
 profit and delight both by the preachers and laymen." — 
 Baptist and Reflector. 
 
 PATTERSON DUBOIS 
 
 The Practice of Salvation 
 
 Trailing a Word to a World Ideal. i2mo, net $1.00. 
 
 Mr. Uu Bois, who is so well known to Bible teachers and 
 students as the author of "The Point of Contact in Teach- 
 ing," and "The Natural Way in Moral Training," in this, 
 his latest volume, interprets salvation in the terms of the 
 new psychology. The very unconventional and untraditional 
 character of the work will commend it to Christian workers 
 who will find rare spiritual stimulus and inspiration in its 
 pages. 
 
 ELWIN L HOUSE, P.P. 
 
 The Psychology of Orthodoxy 
 
 8vo, cloth, net $1.50. 
 
 The author points out clearly and helpfully the relation 
 between or the comparative value of what may be called the 
 Psychological Cults and the Orthodox Christian position. 
 Some of the themes interpreted are "The Principles of Men- 
 tal Healing," "The Principles of Spiritual Healing," "The 
 Available God," "The God of Possession," "The Conscious 
 Mind," "Ihe Sub-Conscious Mind," "The Power of Sugges- 
 tion," "The Psychology of Prayer." "The Builders of Health." 
 "Spiritual Healing," "The Relation of the Oiurch to New 
 Thought and Christian Science." 
 
STUDIES IN CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 
 
 MORA CE EMO R Y WA R NER, P.P. /'^''f/'ff ''/? ^ 
 a J. R. Mott, D. D. 
 
 The Psychology of the Chri^ian Life 
 
 Cvo, cloth, net $1.50. - 
 
 "Dr. Warner has written something new and thought- 
 provoking. The method is, in general, that of the empirical 
 school so valiantly championed by the late Prof. William 
 James. Yet cur author explores a narrower field, confining 
 himself rigidly to Christian experience." — Book Neivs. 
 
 i). A. MURRAY, P.P. 
 
 Christian Faith and the New Psychology 
 
 8vo, cloth, net $1.50. 
 
 "Dr. Murray may be classed among the mediators be- 
 tween modern thought and evangelical theology. Evolution 
 and the New Psychology are to hira not sources of difficulty 
 as a Christian thinker, but aids to faith. It is one of the 
 most original and stimulating books in the field of Christian 
 apologetics." — Tlie Continent. 
 
 THEOLOGICAL 
 
 WILLIAM ALEXANPER GRIST 
 
 The Hi^oric Chri^inthe Faith of To-day 
 
 8vo, cloth, net $2.50. 
 
 "It would be difficult to exaggerate the value and sig- 
 nificance of this new study of the historic _ Christ ; or the 
 singular lucidity, beauty and simplicity of its style. That 
 it should be the work of a writer hitherto comparatively 
 unknown makes it the more surprising. It is not a life of 
 Christ, in the ordinary sense of the term; but it is a rever- 
 ent study and vivid presentation of the commanding figure 
 in human history, in the light of all that modern scholarship 
 has disclosed." — Living Age. 
 
 GEORGE COULSON WORKMAN, Ph.D. {Leipsic) 
 
 At-Onement ; or Reconciliation with God 
 
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 Dr. Workman, Late Professor of Old Testament Exegesis 
 ana Literature in Weslyan 'iheological College, Montreal, 
 and author of "The Old Testament Vindicated," lucidly 
 presents this vital subject under the following heads: Atone- 
 ment in Itself, in God, in Christ, in Man. in Sncrifice, in 
 Death, in Suff^cring, in Service, and in Theory. Chancellor 
 Burwash, of Victoria University, says: "This work of 
 great importance,^ should do excellent service at the present 
 time. It gives Scriptural emphasis to the love of God as 
 the source of man's redemption." 
 
Princeton Theological Seminary Libraries 
 
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