T S - 
 
 
 The Church 
 
 and 
 
 International Peace 
 
 A Series of Papers by the Trustees of 
 THE CHURCH PEACE UNION 
 
 VII 
 
 Might or Meekness 
 
 by 
 
 Rev. William Pierson Merrill, D.D. 
 
 THE CHURCH PEACE UNION 
 70 Fifth Avenue 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
I The Church and International Peace 
 
 ] A uniform series of papers by the Trustees of The 
 Church Peace Union, treating the problems of war and 
 peace from the point of view of religion, and especially 
 emphasizing the message the Church should have for the 
 world in this time of war. 
 
 ALREADY PUBLISHED 
 
 1. The Cause of the War, by Rev. Charles E. Jefferson, D.D. 
 
 2. The Midnight Cry, by Rt. Rev. David H. Greer, D.D. 
 
 3. The Scourge of Militarism, by Rev. Peter Ainslie, D.D. 
 
 4. Europe’s War, America’s Warning, by Rev. Charles S. Mac- 
 
 farland, Ph.D. 
 
 5. The Way to Disarm, by Hamilton Holt, LL.D. 
 
 6. The Church’s Mission as to War and Peace, by Junius B. 
 
 Remensnyder, D.D., LL.D. 
 
 7. Might or Meekness, by Rev. William Pierson Merrill, D.D. 
 
 IN PREPARATION 
 
 1. After the War—What? by Rev. Francis E. Clark, D.D. 
 
 2. The Church and the Ideal, by Rt. Rev. William Lawrence, D.D. 
 
 3. The United Church and the Terms of Peace, by Rev. Frederick 
 
 ( Lynch, D.D. 
 
 4. Adequate Armaments, by Prof. William I. Hull 
 
Might or Meekness 
 
 By Rev. William Pierson Merrill, D.D. 
 
 “As for the mighty man, he had the earth.” > 
 
 Job 22:8. 
 
 “The meek shall inherit the earth.” 
 
 Psalm 37:11. 
 
 The history of mankind is the story of unceasing strife 
 between ideals. Down through the ages they come in pairs, 
 a positive and a negative, a true and a false, or a good and a 
 better, fighting their way along through the years, the sold 
 of mankind their prize. It is seldom that either side win 
 a decisive victory. After every defeat, the vanquished spring, 
 up and begins to fight again. After all there is much that fit; 
 the facts of life in the fundamental doctrine of Persia’ 
 theology,—that life is an eternal conflict between opposim 
 principles, between the darkness and the light. 
 
 One can readily trace through the books of the Bible 
 the course of many of these conflicts between ideals. But 
 few of them are more clear or central than is the opposition 
 between the two ideals of might and meekness. “As for tlie 
 mighty man, he had the earth.” “The meek shall inherit 
 the earth.” The results of the one policy and of the other' 
 are made clear in the words that follow these two texts. We 
 see the mighty man standing erect, towering triumphant. 
 While widows and fatherless mourn and suffer, he glories in 
 the terror created by his splendid strength. But the meek 
 “delights himself in the abundance of peace,” which blesses 
 him and the land which he has inherited. 
 
 The two ideals are two strongly contrasting answers, 
 to one of the great questions of every man. How can I 
 succeed? What is the real secret and way of victory? What 
 path leads most surely to the things worth while? It is the 
 
 3 
 
great practical question for every man, for every nation, 
 for the whole race. 
 
 Naturally the first answer to occur to a man, or to the 
 race, is “might.” You must make your way by force. If 
 you want the good things of life, you must be strong enough 
 to take them, and then strong enough to keep them. The 
 ultimate arbiter is force. You may not admire force very 
 much. You may think him a clumsy brute. But you must 
 call him in, and rely on him, or you will fail. It is the 
 mighty man who gets the earth. Life is a fierce struggle, with 
 scant place or pity for weaklings. Let the meek go to the 
 wall, while the strong wrestle and fight out in the open for 
 the mastery which comes ultimately only to the mighty. 
 
 It should not be cause for wonder that the Hebrew race 
 developed as its first ideal this of the mighty man. After 
 all these ages of advance, children still love to hear of feats 
 of strength, of wars and victories, and deeds of daring. It 
 is not strange if in the dim days of antiquity Hebrew mothers 
 found their children eager for tales of Samson, the man of 
 amazing might, and of David, the brilliant captain. So, when, 
 urged on by a mysterious silent power in the soul, Hebrew 
 thinkers began to formulate an ideal, a human yet divine 
 figure who should, in the future, bring the golden age, the 
 sum of all blessings, to Israel and the world, it was natural 
 that that figure first appeared “glorious in strength,” “travel¬ 
 ling in the greatness of his might,” clad in radiant armor, 
 holding for a sceptre a rod of iron with which to dash the 
 nations in pieces, a warrior filling the valleys with the dead 
 bodies of his foes, making Israel irresistible in might, and 
 causing all other nations to bow before the chosen race, glad 
 to be the servants of the nation whose Lord was the Mighty 
 One of Jacob. 
 
 It is a little difficult for those who have, irom earliest 
 childhood, read the Bible in the light of the beauty of Jesus, 
 who, caught by the glory of goodness in His face, have easily 
 transferred all ancient scriptural ideals to the spiritual 
 King and His spiritual Kingdom, it is difficult for us, I 
 
 4 
 
say, to appreciate how much there is in the Old Testa¬ 
 ment of the “religion of valor,” the glorification of might, 
 the deification of power. We read the words, “Who 
 is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from 
 Bozrah,” and we think of the Lamb slain for sinners. His 
 garments dyed with his own blood. We have a right so to 
 use the words, we are reading the deeper mind of the Spirit; 
 but we forget that the men who first read the words, before 
 the Christ-light had come into the world, saw in them the 
 picture of a hero, coming back in triumph from a bloody 
 victory over Edom, the ancient foe of Judah. It is the blood 
 of Israel’s enemies that stains his garments. “I trod them 
 in my anger, and trampled them in my wrath,” he cries. 
 “And their lifeblood is sprinkled upon my garments. Eor the 
 day of vengeance was in my heart, and my wrath upheld me. 
 And I trod down the peoples in mine anger, and I poured 
 out their lifeblood upon the earth.” 
 
 The shadow of the mighty man looms large and dark 
 across the Old Testament. True, he is always much more 
 than mighty. He is the champion of the weak, he is the 
 upholder of righteousness; his vengeance falls on the oppres¬ 
 sor and the tyrant; he is a noble figure, the incarnation of 
 the might and of the wrath of God. But he is the mighty man„ 
 whose appeal is to force as ultimate arbiter. That is the 
 Messiah, the King, the hero, for whom the ancient people 
 of God eagerly looked. 
 
 But the wonder of the Old Testament is the appear¬ 
 ance there of another ideal, that of the meek. It is not 
 found so early, save in faint suggestion. Moses, mighty 
 master that he was, was greatest, the Hebrews said, in his 
 self-mastery; his noblest praise was as the meekest of men. 
 Yet this ideal of the meek as the greatest, the most heroic, 
 the most desirable of men, did not take definite shape, or 
 grow to where it might seriously dispute with the ideal of 
 the mighty the right to the chief place, until late in Hebrew 
 history. It was when the people of God had been crushedi 
 broken, dragged away from their homeland, their dreams of 
 
 5 
 
empire and wealth and national glory dissipated, that a voice 
 began to make itself heard, as it proclaimed the new ideal, 
 that of the Servant of the Lord. In those wonderful chapters 
 found in the latter part of the book of Isaiah there is set 
 before us what we may venture to call the greatest idea that 
 ever came into the mind of man, the thought that the truly 
 great man is not the mighty but the meek, that the real hero 
 is not the King but the Servant, that the noblest work is not 
 to set foot upon men’s prostrate bodies, but to put your strong 
 arms under their weakness and lift them up, that the highest 
 ideal is not mightiness, but meekness. 
 
 Just as we needed to remind ourselves that the Hebrew 
 ideal of might was not mere ruthlessness, but was ennobled 
 by righteous aims, and high resolves; so we need to remem¬ 
 ber that meekness is not weakness; that the hero of the latter 
 Isaiah is not a silly, helpless sheep; though he is led as a 
 lamb to the slaughter, he goes thus quietly because of strength 
 and self-control, not through weakness and fear. He is as 
 nighty as the King of the earlier dreams; yes, mightier, for 
 le is strong enough to make his majesty more glorious 
 through humility and sacrifice. 
 
 This “Servant of the Lord,” who appears as the ideal 
 of the later Hebrew literature, is a servant, but he is not 
 servile. He does not bow before men; he makes men bow 
 before the majesty of goodness. An unfortunate atmosphere 
 has gathered about that word “meek,” which makes it far 
 from attractive to a strong man. But there seems to be no 
 other word; we must use it, however, with the perpetual re¬ 
 minder that meekness and masterfulness are not inconsistent; 
 that only a strong man can be truly meek, and only a meek 
 man dare put forth his strength; that the meekness to which 
 we are called in the Bible is not a weakness, but a passion. 
 Only a great-hearted man can afford to be meek. And for 
 such a man meekness is the sure way to mastery. The truly 
 meek man is the man who forgets himself in a passion of 
 surrender to a great ideal. 
 
 So appeared in the sacred books of the Hebrews (and 
 
 6 
 
of the Christian world), these two strangely contrasting ideals 
 of the mighty and the meek, the King and the Servant; the 
 two ways of vrinning, through power and through sacrifice; 
 the two crowns, of splendor and of humility. Each was in thd 
 Word of God. The upholder of the one as of the other 
 could appeal to the Bible to support his view And men 
 have always appealed to the Bible in justification of their 
 advocacy of the one view as of the other. The glamour of 
 royalty, of the warrior, of strength that will have its way, has 
 never faded; the old ideal of the mighty man as the Messiah 
 of God has always had its believers. 
 
 How the two ideals have struggled in the life of the 
 church! Men have said. If the church of Ghrist is to have 
 real power over men, it must be placed above kings and 
 emperors and nations by possessing might superior to theirs. 
 Conscientious men they were and are, many of them, these 
 who would make the church great through making it mighty. 
 They find in the Bible promises and prophecies and dreams 
 which seem to justify the belief that the way to success for 
 God’s church lies through gaining and asserting might and 
 mastery. 
 
 If the church can thus readily be led into the worship of 
 might, into estimating as her true resources wealth and power 
 and fame, can we wonder that that ideal of the mighty man 
 still controls so largely the political and commercial life of the 
 race? Can we wonder if in their hearts many believe that 
 the way to success is through the assertion of might? Is it not 
 possible for one to justify such a conviction by pointing to 
 the Bible and saying, “Here is that very ideal. Granted that 
 the ideal of meekness is here, so is the ideal of might. The 
 Bible is back of me when I say that the way to inherit the 
 earth, the way to be safe and prosperous, the way to win for 
 mankind a better future, is the way of might, righteous, 
 honorable, yet, in the last analysis, victorious because possess¬ 
 ing adequate force.” 
 
 But those who thus defend the religion of might on the 
 ground that it is sanctioned in the Word of God, overlook one 
 
 7 
 
significant and decisive fact, the fact of supreme meaning for 
 all Christians. It is the fact that Jesus chose, definitely, 
 decisively, the one ideal, and rejected, definitely, decisively, 
 the other. And wherever Jesus has chosen, the Christian has 
 no choice. 
 
 Can anyone who knows even slightly the life and spirit 
 of Jesus of Nazareth doubt that He chose the ideal of meek¬ 
 ness, not that of might? He grew up in the presence of the 
 two great ideals of the Old Testament. He knew His Bible. 
 There in the first part of Isaiah, as in many other places, stood 
 out before Him in brave and noble form, the ideal of the 
 mighty warrior, the hero who should establish peace and 
 justice by force—the king on his war horse. Ble read of 
 David, and of the Maccabees, of the glorious days of pros¬ 
 perity when these mighty men were in power. He climbed 
 the hills back of Nazareth, and looked out over the plain of 
 Megiddo, wjiere Barak fought with Sisera, where again and 
 again the armies of the Lord had clashed with the hosts of 
 the heathen. Down below flowed the brook Kishon, where 
 Elijah, in grim determination to uphold the right, had slain 
 the four hundred prophets of Baal. As He looked. He saw 
 cohorts of Roman soldiers marching across the plain. He 
 knew well how the men of His nation hated the presence and 
 power of those representatives of the tyranny of Rome, how, 
 in the synagogues and in their private conversations, the men 
 of Israel read with fierce conviction the words in which the 
 Old Testament predicted the coming of a Messiah who should 
 set Israel free from its enemies, and fight out the battle of the 
 Lord. There is no question that the ideal of the mighty man, 
 the Messiah who should be a great king, was very forcibly 
 presented to the mind of the young Jesus, and kept before 
 Him in a thousand ways. Had not His mother, in her early 
 joy that she was to give birth to the Messiah, recalled the 
 promises of One who should “show strength with his arm?” 
 Had not the old priest, in his hymn of praise, given thanks 
 for the coming of One whose mission it should be to bring 
 “salvation from our enemies, and from the hand of all that 
 
 8 
 
hate us?” On every hand Jesus, saw evidence that this ideal, 
 this hope, of the mighty man filled the expectations of the 
 people. 
 
 But there was a Spirit in our Lord which came not from 
 His environment, but directly from God. And reading His 
 Bible for himself—as there is plain evidence that He did— 
 he found there another ideal. Few were thinking or speaking 
 of it in that day. It lay forgotten in the literature of the exile. 
 To us Christians there is no part of the Old Testament which 
 is so definitely Messianic as the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. 
 It is hard for us to realize that men could ever have failed 
 to see that it looked forward to the Ideal Man, the Messiah, 
 the Chosen of the Lord. But no one before Christ came 
 thought of that figure of the suffering and meek Servant of 
 the Lord as a picture of the Messiah. Jewish rabbis debated 
 who this Servant might be. Some saw in him simply a 
 picture of Israel, despised among the nations, yet bearing the 
 secret of the world’s salvation in his faith. Others thought 
 that the Servant might be a helper and companion of Messiah 
 when He should come. 
 
 But Jesus, the lad in Nazareth, knowing Himself to be 
 the chosen of the Lord, the conviction growing quietly stronger 
 in His heart, looked at the two contrasting ideals of might 
 and meekness and said, “This, not that, is the nobler. This, 
 not that, is what God wants me to fulfill.” And He made the 
 choice, irrevocable, uncompromising, to be followed without 
 a shadow of wavering. The Messiah must be the Servant, 
 not the King; Fie must win His way, and establish God’s reign, 
 not by might, nor by power, but by the spirit of meekness 
 and of sacrifice. 
 
 Here again let us say to our souls, forcibly and insistently, 
 that the “meekness” and “lowliness” of Jesus was as far as 
 possible from weakness or meanness of spirit. There was 
 leadership in Jesus, finer and stronger mastery of men than 
 Napoleon ever exerted. Meekness is spiritual might. Christ 
 did push his teaching to extremes at times, telling us never 
 to resist evil, and that to the one who smites on the one cheek 
 
 9 
 
we should turn the other also. But we must remember that 
 Christ is always giving us ideals, not rules; and that when¬ 
 ever we stiffen any one of His ideals into a rigid rule, we 
 freeze the life out of it. His ideals are for the long future 
 also, and, while holding them firmly, we must move toward 
 them as we can. There is abundant evidence that He calls 
 His followers to show a temper heroic, stern, indomitable. It 
 is not that He has no use for steel, it is that He has better 
 use for it than as a servant of self-interest and personal or 
 racial passion. There was nothing soft in Christ’s meekness, 
 no reluctance to stand unflinchingly for righteousness. He 
 never allowed anyone or anything to hinder or thwart His 
 heroic determination to do the will of God, though all the 
 world stood in the way. His voice is like the sound of a 
 trumpet far oftener than “like bells at evening pealing.” He 
 calls us, as Peter says, “by His glory and manliness.” Even 
 the command about turning the other cheek is not a counsel 
 of cowardice. He says, in effect, “Give yourself to the will 
 of God so unreservedly, so passionately that you will go on, 
 unmindful of the blows that fall upon you; if a man strikes 
 you, let him hit you again; you cannot afford to stop for little 
 personal quarrels; go on and do the will of God.” To be 
 meek as Jesus was demands immeasurably greater strength 
 than any exhibition of mere might. 
 
 Dramatically that decision of Jesus to follow meekness 
 rather than might is set before us in the opening of the Gospel 
 story. Baptized as a sign that His mission is begun. He is 
 driven by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted. Conscious 
 of great powers, knowing that He could master men and make 
 them do His bidding. He is shown the kingdoms of the world 
 and their glory, but only to make the final identification of 
 might with Satan rather than with God, and to go down from 
 the mountain to win His way and God’s way through suffering 
 and extreme sacrifice. Consistently through life and teaching 
 does our Lord uphold the ideal of meekness, and reject the 
 ideal of might. Out of the very few words He adopts from 
 the Old Testament, incorporating them into His Gospel, He 
 
 lO 
 
sets in the place of honor among the Beatitudes this ancient 
 text, “The meek shall inherit the earth.” It is impossible for 
 anyone seriously to question the assertion that Jesus definitely 
 and positively ranged Himself on the side of the ideaT of 
 meekness as opposed to the ideal of might. He set the seal 
 of God’s approval on the Servant, not on the King, as the ideal 
 man. “I am among you as one that serveth.” “The kings of 
 the Gentiles lord it over them. But it shall not be so among 
 you. But he that would be great among you, let him become 
 your servant.” Could there be a more solemn and decisive 
 seal to this truth than that scene where our Lord, “knowing 
 that the Father had given all things into His hands, and that 
 He came from God and was going to God,” rose and washed 
 the disciples’ feet? Once for all in that scene the ideal of the 
 mighty man was disowned, and that of the servant enthroned. 
 
 If Christianity means anything practical, then this choice 
 of Jesus makes it obligatory for Christians to choose as He 
 did. Following Him becomes a meaningless phrase unless, 
 when His decision is so clear, we decide to stand with Him. 
 
 Yet, my friends, in all the dark mass of un-Christian 
 characteristics of Christian people is there one place where 
 the stinging question of Emerson strikes us with more 
 deserved rebuke, “Every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christen¬ 
 dom where is the Christian ?” A strong and wise man who has 
 just returned from Europe, where with keen insight he judged 
 the conditions of life, says that in every nation the chief 
 bulwark of the war party is the church. There are many pro¬ 
 fessing Christians whose real religion is the religion of valor. 
 Many a man, if he should let the faith of his heart come to 
 the light, would echo the words of Nietzsche: “It has been 
 said by them of old time. Blessed are the meek, for they shall 
 inherit the earth; but I say. Blessed are the valiant, for they 
 shall share Valhalla with gods and heroes.” There is strength 
 still in the conviction that the mighty man ought to have the 
 earth, and is surest to get it; that the way to win what is 
 worth having is to be strong and go out and take what you 
 want. Among nations and individuals the faith in might 
 
 II 
 
persists. Of course we have learned courtesy and fairness 
 and much kindliness as the ages have gone on; but after all 
 the supreme arbiter must be power, might. The ideal is to 
 be strong and so to be masterful. 
 
 Let us not fall into the error of judging that the guilt 
 of following this ideal of the mighty man rests on any 
 one race or nation. Because the religion of valor, the defense 
 of force, has found its most skilful and relentless exponents 
 in certain German writers, and because so many Americans 
 are convinced that German aggression is the real underlying 
 cause of the present war, it is easy for us to single out that 
 one nation as chief among sinners in the worship of the idol 
 of force, forgetting or ignoring the peace-loving traits of 
 German character, forgetting also the sins of other nations. 
 Whatever we may judge as individuals, we must not, 
 as a body of Christians, let our judgment be directed against 
 any one nation; and that for two reasons—the first is, that 
 our business is not to judge others, but to submit our own 
 lives to judgment; the second is, that if we direct toward our 
 American Christianity all the condemnation it deserves, we 
 shall have little or none for other people. Let us look 
 near home and judge ourselves, asking, Which is our ideal, 
 might or meekness? Which have we chosen, and which 
 do we follow, which do we instil into the minds and 
 hearts of our children, which do we count the truly success¬ 
 ful man, the mighty or the meek, the king or the servant, the 
 man who dominates others by his power, or the man who 
 puts his strength into humble helpfulness? 
 
 It is a serious question. We are all too apt to deceive 
 ourselves. Professing to follow Jesus, we hold in our hearts 
 a painfully incongruous ideal. We want our children to be 
 like Jesus, but we want them also to be rich and famous, and 
 to be served by others. Cut deep into the heart of many a 
 professing Christian until you have found his ideal and 
 brought it to the light; and there you see a strange compound, 
 with the face of Jesus, but with the mind of Napoleon, an 
 ideal in which the meekness is manner, but the might is 
 
 12 
 
secret master. How many of us actually want ourselves and 
 our children to be, as nearly as possible, what Jesus really 
 was? That is a question we must let sink into the heart 
 slowly, to stay there for many days and years, till the pain 
 of it shall drive us to the Great Physician. Far be it from 
 me or from any one man to stand and judge others. We are 
 all in the Confessional. For it is not true that Protestant 
 Churches have no confessional. They have a harder one to 
 face than is found in the Roman Catholic Church. For we 
 know well that we are continually under obligation to tell 
 the truth about ourselves to the Son of Man, and hear what 
 He says to us about our failures. 
 
 If we begin to look at present life with the “eyes of the 
 glory of God,” must we not admit that the mighty man still 
 bulks large in our ideal as compared with the Servant? We 
 are men of the cross; but it is too often a cross made of two 
 sharp blades of steel, or two heavy cannon, or two bars of 
 gold, to be worn as a decoration, or used to batter or buy 
 our way. 
 
 There is need just now that Christians in America should 
 do all that in them lies to see that this country stands before 
 the world committed to the Servant-ideal, rather than to 
 the King-ideal, to meekness rather than to might. In his last 
 message to Congress the President spoke words which glowed 
 with the spirit we should feel and show. We may differ 
 as to his policies, we may disagree as to the need of inquiry 
 into the efficiency of our military and naval defences; good 
 citizens and true Christians do differ as to these matters. 
 But on the supreme issue we must be one with him, in hold¬ 
 ing that, above all, America must just now manifest moral 
 might, must proclaim and defend her ideals of friendship 
 and peace, and must jealously hold aloof from anything, how¬ 
 ever innocent, which might jeopardize her reputation for 
 friendliness and confidence toward other nations, and her 
 desire to act as peacemaker when the time comes. Those 
 are right who insist that, if we are to have an army and navy, 
 these departments of government should be kept efficient 
 
 13 
 
and strong, as all departments of government should be. But 
 the supreme need just now, to which all other desires and 
 aims must yield, is that the national spirit and conscience 
 should be set and kept in order for the great task of peace 
 making in which America will have the opportunity to play 
 a great part. 
 
 But even more than upon our consciences as Americans 
 would I press upon our consciences as Christians the obliga¬ 
 tion to follow our Master in choosing the ideal of meekness 
 rather than of might, and of being loyal unto death to that 
 choice. Not the meekness which means weakness, cowardice, 
 tame willingness to submit and be ruled. The Hero of the 
 Cross never calls His followers to such a spirit. To be 
 truly meek, as the Bible uses the word, as Christ was meek, 
 is a hard, and bold, and heroic thing. The choice to which 
 Christ calls us is to have such faith in the supremacy of 
 spirit over force that we shall go unarmed and unafraid 
 against the might of evil, and know that, though the way 
 lead to a cross, it leads at last to victory. 
 
 When the war broke out, a band of strong young men 
 in England were sorely perplexed. They belonged to a religious 
 body which believes that war is always wrong. Yet they 
 could not endure to stay at home, while their friends were 
 giving up their lives. At last they organized, sixty or more, 
 for volunteer relief service at the front. They refused to 
 carry arms. But there they are, at the front, exposed to 
 death as are the fighting men, helping the wounded, showing 
 kindness, risking their lives; but definitely committed to the 
 ideal of the servant, not to that of the warrior. 
 
 That is an extreme case; but it is one of beauty and 
 power. It is witness-bearing in the very face of the devil and 
 his hosts. What the world needs is more Christians who shall 
 make the great choice which Jesus made, resolving at any 
 cost to follow loyally, in their business, in their hopes and 
 dreams, in their influence all through their life, the ideal 
 of the servant rather than that of the mighty man. When 
 the world, out of its actual experience, learns to define a 
 
 14 
 
Christian as one committed to the ideal of humble, self-sac¬ 
 rificing service, then the world will reverence the Christian 
 church and its Master. 
 
 The saddest scene in religious history is that in which 
 we see the Jewish people, under the leadership of their 
 rulers, face to face with the King in the person of Jesus 
 and crying out, “We have no king but Cjesar.” Heirs of 
 the promises and prophecies, committed to a Messianic hope 
 which was the hope of the whole world, they turned from the 
 very One Who had come to make those prophecies into 
 facts, and chose the incarnation of the ungodlike. Jesus 
 had chosen to be the Servant, not the King; and they could 
 not choose with Him. The glamour of might, of force, of 
 dominant power dazzled them and they denied the hope 
 
 for which their fathers had longed and laid down their 
 lives. 
 
 God keep His church, this nation, the Christians of this 
 age, from any such choice as that. Caesar is still mighty 
 force still dazzles and appeals. We want to be great and 
 powerful, and might seems to be the secret of what we want. 
 God keep us from that awful confession of failure, “We 
 have no king but Caesar.” May we, not only in word and 
 song, but in deed and truth, crown as Lord of all the meek 
 and lowly Son of Man, the great Servant and Friend, whose 
 way was the way of the Cross. In the crisis which is upon us 
 to-aay, when war shakes the earth, and religious values are 
 dim.med and confused, and might seems to stalk on its way 
 crushing beneath its feet the forces of peace and justice and 
 the Chnst-spint, there is one great word which might well 
 be made the motto of the Christian church, of Christian 
 nations, of Christians everywhere, an inscription to keep fly¬ 
 ing on our banners, a word we cannot hear too often or 
 heed too fully, “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit 
 saith the Lord of Hosts.” ^ y > 
 
 iS 
 
The Church Peace Union 
 
 (,Founded by Andrew Carnegie) 
 
 TRUSTEES 
 
 Rev. Peter Ainslie, D.D., LL.D., Baltimore, Md. 
 
 Rev. Arthur Judson Brown, D.D., LL.D., New York. 
 
 Rev. Francis E. Clark, D.D., LL.D., Boston, Mass. 
 President W. H. P. Faunce, D.D., LL.D., Providence, R. I. 
 His Eminence, James Cardinal Gibbons, Baltimore, Md. 
 Rt. Rev. David H. Greer, D.D., LL.D., New York 
 Rev. Frank O. Hall, D.D., New York. 
 
 Bishop E. R. Hendrix, D.D., Kansas City, Mo. 
 
 Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch, LL.D., Chicago, Ill. 
 
 Hamilton Holt, LL.D., New York 
 
 Professor William I. Hull, Ph.D., Swarthmore, Pa. 
 
 Rev. Charles E. Jefferson, D.D., LL.D., New York. 
 
 Rev. Jenkin Lloyd Jones, LL.D., Chicago, Ill. 
 
 Rt. Rev. William Lawrence, D.D., Boston, Mass. 
 
 Rev. Frederick Lynch, D.D., New York. 
 
 Rev. Charles S. Macfarland, Ph.D., New York. 
 
 Marcus M. Marks, New York 
 
 Dean Shailer Mathews, D.D., LL.D., Chicago, III 
 
 Edwin D. Mead, M.A., Boston, Mass. 
 
 Rev. William Pierson Merrill, D.D., LL.D., New York. 
 John R. Mott, LL.D., New York, 
 
 George A. Plimpton, LL.D., New York. 
 
 Rev. Julius B. Remensnyder, D.D., LL.D., New York. 
 Judge Henry Wade Rogers, LL.D., New York. 
 
 Robert E. Speer, D.D., New York. 
 
 Francis Lynde Stetson, New York. 
 
 James J. Walsh, M.D., New York. 
 
 Bishop Luther B. Wilson, D.D., LL.D., New York.