7 
 
 Ammmm for a 
 
 THREE GATES TO AMERICA 
 
 BISHOP EDWIN HOLT HUGHES 
 
 Published by The Board of Home Missions and 
 Church Extension of the Methodist Episcopal 
 Church, 1026 Arch Street, Philadelphia, Pa. 
 
NEW AMERICANS FOR A NEW AMERICA 
 
 From "Militant Methodism,'" Methodist Book Concern 
 
 THREE GATES TO AMERICA 
 
 BISHOP EDWIN HOLT HUGHES 
 
 Published by The Board of Home Missions and 
 Church Extension of the Methodist Episcopal 
 Church, 1026 Arch Street, Philadelphia, Pa. 
 
" The work of Home Missions and Church 
 Extension is essentially a work of patriotism. 
 Every lover of his country should gladly 
 contribute to aid the needy in the erection of 
 churches and in the support of the men who 
 on small salaries preach the gospel in these 
 churches.'"— Robert Forbes. 
 
New Americans for a New America 3 
 
 Three Gateways to America 
 
 New Americans come to us through 
 three gates; the gate of immigration, the 
 gate of birth, and the gate of character. 
 The problem with immigration is spiritual 
 assimilation. The problem with youth is 
 spiritual education. The problem with 
 character is spiritual regeneration. If we 
 are to have a new America, it must arrive 
 from these three directions. 
 
 America Just Entering Upon Its 
 Career 
 
 That adjective "new" has played a huge 
 part in all our American life. Its use be- 
 gan in colonial days. The hope for the 
 future as well as the reverence for the past 
 was expressed by its recurrence even in 
 geography. New England, New Hamp- 
 shire, New York, New Brunswick, New 
 Amsterdam, New Orleans, New Rochelle, 
 —all these names, whether English or 
 Dutch or French, were symbols of expec- 
 tancy as well as reminders of fond experi- 
 ence in the lands beyond the sea. In truth, 
 the adjective "new" has been used in a 
 wholesale manner; and we speak of our 
 country still as the "New World." More 
 than four hundred years have passed since 
 Christopher Columbus touched these shores 
 with the cross of our faith. Yet our Na- 
 tional hope is so large and bright that, in 
 spite of well-nigh half a millenium of his- 
 
4 New Americans for a New America 
 
 tory and the passing of about twelve gen- 
 erations of human beings, we persist in 
 calling America the "New World." The 
 emblem of our Nation is not tottering age, 
 nor even staid and completed mid-life; it 
 is rather youth, — buoyant, eager, glad. The 
 visitor to our land is not treated to the sight 
 of many ruins, but he is regaled with the 
 vision of many castles in the American air. 
 We still look here for a "new earth wherein 
 dwelleth righteousness." The mood of the 
 New Testament is in our blood. 
 
 Making Americans Is a Holy and 
 Serious Task 
 
 The ever-present danger is that we shall 
 think of new Americans as creations rather 
 than achievements, and of the new America 
 as an inevitable happening rather than as 
 a holy and serious task. The pillars of 
 State are not flung into their places by the 
 lazy fancy of men, nor are they pushed be- 
 neath the temple of State as structural ac- 
 cidents. They are shaped and cemented 
 in the sweat and blood of men. It is nearly 
 three hundred years since Plymouth Rock 
 became historic, and nearly a century and 
 a half since the Liberty Bell became mu- 
 sical. The dust of millions and of hun- 
 dreds of millions is lying beneath the sod 
 of valley and mountain. Still do we speak 
 of the "new land," and "new Americans." 
 and of the "New America." We toss these 
 phrases upon a program as if the normal 
 
New Americans for a New America 5 
 
 American heart needed no explanation of 
 their meaning. It may be said that Chris- 
 tianity as a religion and the United States 
 as a nation have this in common : that both 
 hear some adequate power saying, "Behold, 
 I make all things new." 
 
 The Definite Work of the Methodist 
 Episcopal Church 
 
 It is our duty as Christian men to see to 
 it that America shall turn to Jesus Christ 
 for all its newness. Those who come to us 
 through the gates of immigration must be 
 met in His spirit. Those who come to us 
 through the gates of birth must be received 
 as His immortal charges, to be kept as His 
 own forever. Those who would seek the 
 gates of regeneration must be persuaded 
 out of the hostile country and the neutral 
 ground until the touch of Christ's power 
 shall make them new men and, therefore, 
 best Americans. At whichever of the three 
 points we meet our problem, the method 
 and spirit of Jesus are our only hope. God 
 stations us at all three of the gates through 
 which the new Americans come in order 
 that, by ushering them into His life, we 
 may likewise usher in the New America. 
 
 The Command to Board of Home 
 Missions and Church Extension 
 
 What, then, is the command that comes 
 to us from the spirit of Jesus as to our at- 
 titude toward those who arrive through the 
 
6 New Americans for a New America 
 
 gates of immigration? This is not the oc- 
 casion for debating the wisdom of our im- 
 migration laws. Among Christian men 
 there can be no possible controversy on one 
 point : If our laws give men and women 
 and children either invitation or liberty to 
 come to our shores, they must here be 
 fashioned after our political life, and they 
 must be met and conquered by that free 
 gospel that is alone the safeguard of our 
 Republic. If each year a million new 
 faces turn eagerly to our ports, it will be 
 national idiocy and religious apostasy for 
 us to withhold that sympathy that is the 
 very beginning of spiritual assimilation. 
 Let it be said without sentimentality that 
 the great assimilator is love. In the long 
 run, that section of the Church of Christ 
 that most loves the immigrant will most 
 claim the immigrant. Physicians will tell 
 us, in their medical vocabulary, that very 
 often the immigrant is afflicted with "nos- 
 talgia." He longs for the vision of the 
 native hills and valleys and of the dear 
 faces of his family and friends until at last 
 his heart breaks for very loneliness. The 
 steerage of the ships and the files of Castle 
 Garden are filled with the germs of home- 
 sickness. Christian men must furnish the 
 antidote. Jesus would do just that. His 
 heart would yearn toward those newcom- 
 ers. He who said, "The foxes have holes, 
 and the birds of the air have nests, but the 
 Son of man hath not where to lay his head," 
 would enter into sympathy with those 
 
New Americans for a New America 7 
 
 homeless arrivals. God put the "stranger" 
 into the Ten Commandments and allied the 
 dispensation of law with the treatment of 
 every newcomer. Jesus put the "stranger" 
 into the tests of the judgment and allied 
 Himself with every foreigner whose anx- 
 ious eyes really look for the face of Christ 
 in the American welcome. Those who 
 know best will tell us that the stranger is 
 peculiarly susceptible to Christian friendli- 
 ness. Our Lord knew this when He identi- 
 fied Himself with him and said. "I was a 
 Stranger, and ye took Me in." The Chris- 
 tian attitude toward this candidate for 
 Americanism is not simply that he repre- 
 sents Caesar or Savonarola, Luther or 
 Goethe, Huss or Copernicus, Shakespeare 
 or Milton; it is rather that he represents 
 Christ. Long ago four Greeks came and 
 said, "Sirs, we would see Jesus." In their 
 coming our Lord beheld the coming of His 
 own Kingdom. Out of a vast hope He said 
 that those fragments of the outside world 
 were prophecies of His wide reign over all 
 the world. 
 
 Success Attending Home 
 Mission Work 
 
 Already our Lord has given us these 
 tokens of optimism. Already many thou- 
 sands of immigrants are walking the ways 
 of loyal Americanism and likewise the ways 
 of a free and spiritual religion. Some of 
 them are in all our Churches. In a union 
 
8 New Americans for a New America. 
 
 Thanksgiving service of our denomination 
 in San Francisco one would have noted the 
 Japanese here, the Chinese there, the Scan- 
 dinavians on the left, the Swedes on the 
 right, the Germans in the center, and a little 
 group of Italians sitting, shy and modest, 
 in the front seats. He would be dull, both 
 in his American faith and in his Christian 
 faith, who would not see the significance 
 of such a scene as that. My brethren, 
 every year God gives His Church in Amer- 
 ica a million opportunities in as many im- 
 migrants. William Nast was one of those 
 opportunities in the not distant past. We 
 seized that human chance for Christ, and 
 to-day many thousands of voices, both 
 German and English, bless the event, while 
 a fine stream of Teuton blood helps to make 
 both the New America and the new Meth- 
 odism. God give grace to his Church that 
 we may more and more make Castle Gar- 
 den one of the entrances to His Kingdom 
 and that we may turn the Panama Canal 
 into a river of life along whose borders 
 will grow the trees for the healing of the 
 nation ! 
 
 Work Among the Children 
 
 We must not, however, neglect that other 
 road along which wee feet walk into our 
 National and Church life. Far more than 
 a million little people come annually out 
 of the everywhere into the here. Around 
 each of a thousand cradles men and women 
 
New Americans for a New America 9 
 
 stand daily saying, "What manner of child 
 shall this be?" George McDonald makes 
 this dialogue to occur with each blessed and 
 breathing arrival : 
 
 "And how did you come to be just you? 
 God thought of me, and so I grew. 
 
 "And how did you come to us, you dear? 
 God thought of you, and so I am here." 
 
 It requires no great strain on faith to say 
 that this is quite as true in the National 
 and in the Church sense as it is in the fam- 
 ily sense. Every child is God's thought for 
 the future of the Church and the Nation. 
 Those eager feet romp on to take our 
 places. The boys that shouted on their 
 way to school this very day will run the 
 Men's Convention twenty-five years hence. 
 The chairman of those coming sessions to- 
 day gave the mystic signals on the gridiron. 
 The speakers of that coming program to- 
 day exercised their vocal powers in shout- 
 ing teams onward to the goal. He is an 
 infidel who does not believe that those 
 boundless powers belong to Christ, and he 
 is a new betrayer of our Lord who takes 
 no earnest part in keeping their feet in the 
 path everlasting. These are the new Amer- 
 icans that will fashion the new America, — 
 these the new souls that will make the new 
 Christian Republic. 
 
10 New Americans for a New America 
 
 Christ's Mood Toward the Children 
 
 Nor can there be any real doubt as to the 
 attitude of Christ toward the subjects of 
 this problem. To rich men Jesus snowed a 
 differing mood. To the adults who sought 
 His teaching He gave widely differing com- 
 mands. But to children He was ever the 
 same, — gentle, hopeful, and utterly dog- 
 matic in reference to their spiritual stand- 
 ing, — saying : "Take heed that ye despise not 
 one of these little ones ;" "Whosoever shall 
 offend one of these little ones ;" "The King- 
 dom of Heaven belongeth unto such." We 
 will search the words of Jesus all in vain 
 for any utterance that did not distinctly 
 claim all childhood as His own. Beyond the 
 earthly parenthood He saw the Heavenly 
 Fatherhood. Above the family tree He saw 
 the eternal reach of ancestry. The chil- 
 dren's names were written in the Lamb's 
 book of life ere they were penned in the 
 family Bible of earth. Jesus on the streets 
 of Jerusalem represents God, gathering the 
 children in His arms and saying forever, 
 "Suffer the little ones to come unto Me 
 and forbid them not." They will come if 
 they are merely suffered to come. They 
 will come if they are not forbidden. The 
 time may arrive when they will walk the 
 byways and highways and when the Lord's 
 word will be, "Compel them to come in." 
 It is not so now. Children are the primary 
 opportunity of the people of God. They are 
 the hope of America and of the Church. 
 
New Americans for a New America 11 
 
 Children Included in the System of 
 Redemption 
 
 It might not be amiss for us to imitate the 
 splendid dogmatism of Jesus with reference 
 to the spiritual standing of children. We 
 forbear to do so. Whether our problem be 
 that of keeping them within the Kingdom, 
 or of gaining them for the Kingdom, their 
 plastic lives will answer to our touch. 
 Among all hopeful signs for our Church of 
 the present time, this is the most hopeful : 
 that there is a loving Children's Crusade in 
 the plan of the Kingdom ; not a crusade that 
 sends wee marchers to die on the plains of 
 Italy in a wild attempt to recover Jerusalem 
 from the Saracens ; not the hysterical lead- 
 ership of Nicholas of Vendome and Stephen 
 of Cologne; not a glaring track of small 
 skeletons whitening beyond the passes of 
 the Alps and southward; but rather a 
 crusade which seeks to claim every young 
 life as a recruit for that army that is led by 
 the Son of God as He goes forth to war 
 against strongholds mightier than a walled 
 Jerusalem. If we knew the far and high 
 issues and the sure tokens of progress we 
 would hail the large increase in Sunday 
 school scholars as the prophecy of new 
 Americans, new Methodists, new soldiers 
 for Christ. Here in a Men's Convention 
 Jesus would still place the child in the 
 midst. Directly we shall know that nothing 
 more truly represents Jesus than a proper 
 attitude toward the little people. When 
 
12 New Americans eor a New America 
 
 that attitude claims us wholly, we shall put 
 child labor to death and the two million 
 pairs of small feet that even to-day stood in 
 the mills and factories of our Nation will 
 walk out to their God-appointed places of 
 preparation in the schools and Churches of 
 the Nations and to their God-appointed play 
 amid the daisies of the field. The Christian 
 conception of childhood will soon or late 
 reach the hand of the modern Herod and 
 stop forever the modern slaughter of the 
 innocents. It will do more than this: it 
 will translate the children from the dust of 
 mills and factories, not only into the sun- 
 shine of natural childhood, but even into the 
 Kingdom of God. We shall hear the march 
 of that glad and alert procession of children 
 as it moves through the beautiful gate of 
 the temple. When we allow the Good 
 Shepherd to gather the lambs in His bosom, 
 He will be compelled to make fewer jour- 
 neys out to the wild and bare mountains 
 that He may recover the lost to the safety 
 and peace of His blessed fold. 
 
 The Gate of Character and the 
 Board of Home Missions 
 
 But there is another gate through which 
 new Americans may be brought to the 
 new America. Immigrants may become 
 our anarchists and saloonists. Children 
 may grow up to be grafters and blasphe- 
 mers. Immigration is not regeneration- 
 Assimilation is not sanctification. Educa- 
 
New Americans for a New America 13 
 
 tion is not a new birth. The inspector at 
 Ellis Island cannot see the heart. The pub- 
 lic school teacher may not officially use the 
 penitent form or the mourner's bench. If 
 we but knew it, the hope of America lies 
 with the men who proclaim a redeeming 
 God. A revival of religion is necessarily a 
 revival of assuring Americanism. Crowded 
 altars are the Republic's best hope. 
 
 The Nation Not Made Up of 
 Hills and Valleys 
 
 For, after all, we need a frequent return 
 to the commonplace statement that a 
 Nation is not made up of hills and valleys, 
 but rather of human souls. Every good 
 man makes a better America. When the 
 preacher sees his convert walking the ways 
 of righteousness and service, he can say, 
 "I have helped my country." Rocks and 
 rills and woods and templed hills get their 
 meaning from men. Mrs. Browning does 
 not overstate it in her "Aurora Leigh" : 
 
 "Government, if veritable and lawful 
 Is not given by the imposition of the for- 
 eign hand. 
 
 ***** 
 
 Genuine government is but the expression 
 
 of a people, 
 The loud sum of its silent units." 
 
 The unit of America is an individual 
 heart. Every renewed heart lifts the moral 
 average of the Nation and is a contribution 
 
14 New Americans for a New America 
 
 to the new America. It is the business of 
 the Church, both as a matter of patriotism 
 and of religion, to keep open the gates 
 through which men and women walk the 
 ways of genuine penitence to the peace and 
 pardon and purity of God. 
 
 The Message of Methodism 
 
 This was the message of Methodism to 
 the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It 
 must be our message to the twentieth cen- 
 tury. It may be that at times and by some 
 persons the doctrine of conversion has been 
 held narrowly ; and it is doubtless true that 
 we have confused many good hearts by the 
 preaching of a typical experience. But our 
 main message remains intact : God Al- 
 mighty by the Holy Ghost sent down from 
 above and by the free grace revealed in 
 Jesus Christ, does save men from their sins 
 and does give them new hearts. That con- 
 ception has found its way into literature, 
 both polite and philosophic. William James 
 celebrates it in his "Varieties of Religious 
 Experience," and the Harvard professor 
 leaves the prime contention of Methodism 
 in possession of the field. 
 
 Methodism's Fundamental Doctrine 
 
 Harold Begbie celebrates the same spirit- 
 ual fact in his two books that, recounting 
 actual experiences, none the less read like 
 heaven-inspired romances of the soul. We 
 may well submit, that when the philosopher 
 
New Americans for a New America 15 
 
 and the novelist begin to exalt the doctrine 
 of conversion, it is a poor time for a Metho- 
 dist Episcopal preacher or layman to slur or 
 modify or discount the first and foremost 
 article of our creed. The whole modern 
 movement in religion swings back to the 
 position of our fathers and admits, however 
 falteringly, the gospel of a regenerating 
 God. In that gospel is revealed the one 
 sure process of making new Americans, and 
 from that gospel alone can come a new 
 and exalted America. 
 
 New Americans Must Conquer 
 Themselves 
 
 Years ago Sir Edwin Arnold visited 
 America and spoke to the students of our 
 oldest university. One memorable and even 
 unforgettable sentence seized the memory 
 of every hearer. He gave a succinct and 
 epigrammatic description of the great wars 
 of our past and of the greater contest of out- 
 future. "Gentlemen of Harvard," he said, 
 "in 1776 and in 1812 you conquered youi 
 fathers. In the years from 1861 to 1865 
 you conquered your brothers. Will you 
 permit an Englishman to say that your next 
 victory must be over yourselves?" It is 
 small wonder that the sentiment wins for 
 itself frequent quotation. It approaches the 
 heart of our present American problem. 
 We need not ask for that control over 
 ourselves that is represented merely by cool 
 diplomacy that seeks advantage in commer- 
 
16 New Americans for a New America 
 
 cial or political contest. Rather should we 
 ask for the control that is large enough to 
 yield to God and wise enough to choose His 
 way. 
 
 Christ America's Only Hope 
 
 We boast of the Anglo-Saxon blood. We 
 forget that our ancestors were the wild men 
 of the North until Jesus found them and 
 made them the mightiest people on earth. 
 If America goes back on Him, we will make 
 choice of suicide. One who is from the 
 Pacific Coast may be allowed to say that the 
 only "yellow peril" is a white peril. If 
 America rejects Jesus and if China and 
 Japan accept Him, the yellow man will seize 
 our crown. But if America shall keep 
 Christ and more and more live in His spirit, 
 and if China and Japan shall accept Christ 
 and shall walk in His ways, they will simply 
 become the Eastern and Western partners 
 of the Prince of Peace. 
 
 America for Christ, 
 Christ for America 
 
 By this program America may become 
 the servant of God for the world of God. 
 Claiming the immigrant for our free reli- 
 gion as well as for our free Republic, claim- 
 ing the child for the Stars and Stripes only 
 more because we claim him for the banner 
 of Immanuel, and claiming every sinner for 
 a cleaner Nation and an ampler gospel — we 
 shall make our country great by the great- 
 ness of God Himself.