^ Sermon ^nb Snbitation jFor Eftinfeing jWen The sermon printed in this leaflet was preached at St. George’s Episcopal Church, New York (the largest free Episcopal (Church in the United States), by the Rector, the Reverend Doctor Karl Reiland. on the 20th of February, 1916. It is thus republished by some business men who heard it, in the belief that it will have an unusual appeal for other thinking men who usually remain away from church because they resent the restric- tions that an archaic theology would impose upon ■ intelligent thought and scientific research. Such men, it is believed, will find Doctor Reiland’s sermons stimulating and helpful, both mentally and morally. To get their attention in this busy age, this pamphlet is being distributed as an invitation to all thoughtful men to come to St George’s on any convenient Sunday morning. They can ascertain whether Doctor Reiland is to preach by telephoning “Stu 3 rvesant No. 2177.” The church is at the comer of East 16th Street and StU 3 Tvesant Square, half a block east of Third Avenue. It is about five minutes’ walk from the 14th Street station of the Subway and the 18th Street station of the Third Avenue Elevated, and can be conveniently reached by the Broadway, 4th Avenue, 3rd Avenue and 2nd Avenue street cars. The seats are free. There are no rented pews. As the church is generally well filled, it is better to be on time. The morning service is usually over about 12:30. While this is an invitation from men to men, it is not intended to exclude women who are likely to be interested in sermons that are really thoughtful and bold in their defiance of theological convention when that convention is in conflict with freedom and independence of thought. Additional copies of this pamphlet enclosed in envelopes for mailing will be furnished upon appli- cation by mail, telephone, or in person to J. Noah H. Slee, 42 Broadway, New York (Tel. No. 2603 Broad). The lines below are provided for any written message that the sender may care to transmit. If so used, the postage will be two cents and the envelope may be sealed, but a visiting card without any writing upon it may be attached, in which case, H the postage will be only one cent if the envelope is left unsealed. - in tljp Qlilg of Ntm ^ork Harrtii 511), I91fi Ei}s iJprtor’s HfBBagp The Point of View A good friend and a true Christian has shown me a letter which he received from someone in which the writer with gracious entreaty urges him to consider the necessity of conversion. What a hackneyed subject that is! It is a good letter for someone bound in the wrong direction, to turn him ’round and set him going rightly. Conversion means that, but my friend has ever gone in the right direction from a child, and no more needs conversion, as some Christians use the term, than he needs an epitaph. Singular it is what modes of thought men use! It is a great study observing how they get an idea, and are so entirely possessed by it as to let all necessary qualifying ideas shift for themselves. See how one can hold a book so close to his face as to shut out a whole world; or how he can retire so early and sleep so late as never to have seen a midnight sky or the first tint of sunrise, but boast through life of wonderous regular habits. Human opinion is most illusive. You may as well say where a butterfly is going, and why he does not go there, as to say where and why opin- ion sits as it may, in human thought. It is most interesting study, what creates, conditions, shapes, transforms and urges opinion. “Have you never been converted? Then you need it, and here are a dozen texts to prove it. You may be saved if you listen; you will be damned if you refuse.” So it goes, but someone may say, that no two texts mean the same thing; that they have varying significations; that they may represent a writer’s idea of things in his own day and not in our day; that you cannot gather a handful of texts and force them to take on a certain mean- ing any more than you can take a dozen kinds of fruit, force them into a basket and offer them for potatoes. Conversion is only a change of mind, heart, or purpose, for those who need the change. Salvation, regeneration, election and the like, are matters of development and growth. They are progressive, not explosive. We are men, not mushrooms. Being “born again” is a matter of hard work, not holy water. Regeneration is evolu- tion, not an electric shock. In any one, where the process had the right start, you have a subject, not for conversion but for congratulation, and he need wear no text that does not fit. K. R. SERMON Preached at St. George’s Church, New York February SO, 1916 BY THE RECTOR REV. KARL REILAND, LL.D Text: St. John VIII — 32 — “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” Knowledge is just as essential to spiritual and moral progress as to any other progress, and if, as St. James said, “Faith without works is dead,” it seems fitting to assert that conviction without thought is dead also. It is undeniably true that we think, and think hard, in every other department of knowledge ex- cept the religious and the consequence is that re- ligious thinking always lags behind, until it is no un- common thing to hear people saying that when you enter a church you must leave your brains at the door, much as you leave your umbrella when you enter the museum or gallery of art, lest you poke at something and injure it. Thus we have a large number of people who live by the religious thought of some previous century and who carry from some former age the Gods they worship, just as Rachel desired to do when, in running away with her husband Jacob, she stole her father’s Gods and took them secretly along. The result of this is more costly to the general dis- tribution of decent living than is usually thought, because the mental light gained in other fields re- veals the rough edges of religious conceptions and w’e discover our theological misfits. We refuse to apply to life what does not fit it, just as we refuse to wear father’s clothes, or even those which were ours, in our younger, slenderer days. The truth is, what little religious thinking we do has dropped down into the medulla where the nat- ural reflexes are and seldom rises into the full flush of consciousness in the cortex. There is an epi- demic of orthopedic moral deformity — to dip into the terms of plastic surgery — which accounts for the irregular way in which we walk as opposed to the regular orthodox way in which we think we think. The will and the mind do not connect at the heart and hence it is that many of us “are better than our Creeds.” The result is a malformation of the religious con- science which does not know just where it is or how it got there, and makes havoc amid sense percept and cognition. Conscience is not “an inherent divinity pronounc- ing infallible judgments of moral truth.” It is, as many have pointed out, the reflection in each heart of the light which “lighteth every man coming into the world” ; and in proportion as it lights up the dark recesses of our nature, we become the “lights of the world.” All the powers of man including his God-given rational faculty must do their honest work if the character is to give the right light. Each faculty, just as each color of the spectrum, must contribute its part to the prism of conscience before it can give out its rightful reflection, a white light, and be “void of offense toward God and toward man.” In the synthetic society of gifts the intellect has a chief place. A badly nourished intellect means a con- science off-color. Here are examples from legend and history. Abraham, taking his son to the moun- tain — expounded as a type of Christ, which it is not — to offer him as a sacrifice — which he did not — is a type of conscience that saved itself in the nick of time. Elijah who turned murderer from being sent a missionary, and wanted to die of remorse, because he was no better than his fathers ; Elisha, with a double portion of his Master’s spirit, cursing forty lads to be devoured of bears “in the name of the Lord” ; Paul at Stephen’s death ; and the younger Pliny, punishing harmless Christians, are illustra- tions of a good conscience at its worst. Several things have succeeded in confusing clear religious thinking and in distorting the idea of a healthy conscience. No one has been more successful in the analysis of our time than a certain “unsafe” non-conformist writer who is helping me in this ser- mon. He speaks of “aberration,” the ban on thought and “exclusions.” I wish to speak of three things more or less expressive of these, [ 2 ] 1. There is a type of religious temperament which exists in an atmosphere where the pressure is not fourteen pounds to the square inch, but only about two and a half. 1 mean the delicately attenu- ated, highly sensitive, exquisitely refined species; the mystical, transcendent, vague and illusive order ; the transported, quietistic, gnosiological, absolutely saved, psychically perfect, supernaturally elevated being. You find your holy man closed up for life in a Thebitan monastery ; or in your Anchoret of the desert; St. Francis with his vision, stigmata and miracles. Their offspring are with us in many vary- ing forms today ; the esoteric spirituals and the brotherhood of hot house holiness. I do not under- stand them at all. Their language is not mine. I want something concrete and practical, as well as abstract and ideal, from that word “spiritual.” In the language of the New Testament I can read what the “fruits of the spirit” are, and in the Gospel, Jesus very clearly said “by their fruits ye shall know them.” That brings something rational down to this poor old earth where I live and I can deal with the subject on the basis of human experience, for a salvation here, not hereafter. These people of whom I speak may be God’s very best, I do not know, but I do not want anyone to tell us that this method is the one for all of us, for we cannot use it; it is beyond or apart from the thoroughfares of gen- eral human experience and I deny to this type the exclusive right to legislate for us in the realm of religious thought. It discourages the average man who cannot understand, and thinks he must do so, or dwell “without the camp” of the elect. This class is a temperamental minority and not necessarily a model for the rational, religious con- science. 2. Next is the familiar attitude of the safe toward the unsafe, the orthodox to the suspected, the rap- tured to the rational. You know how easily the mark of Cain is voted to the rash seeker for truth who dares to question the opinion “handed down” or strike off upon the unblessed track of individual inquiry. The dissenter, non-conformist, schmismatist and heretic are very badly burned at the stake of traditional conviction today. '‘Hence that ‘castration of the intellect” to use Nietzsche’s terrible phrase which for centuries characterized ecclesiastical procedure; the feeling that [3] led Augustine to assert that schismatics would suffer eternal punishments ‘although for the Name of Christ they had been burned alive’ ; which found voice in Cardinal Pole’s dictum that murder and adultery were not to be compared in heinousness with heresy; and made the gentle Kebel regard scholars who applied modern scientific criticism to the Bible as ‘men too wicked to be reasoned with; and Erasmus, declare that ‘our theologians call it a sign of holiness to be unable to read.’ ” We feel a thrill today as we read of Galileo, with his pathetic little 30-inch telescope, angrily ordered before the tribunal to have his wisdom and spirit put upon the index, though the pope could not put the earth there. You would think Pasteur was inventing a microbe out of nothing and intended to hoodwink the scientific world into insanity, to read the vicious treatment they accorded that patient and persistent saviour of human suffering. Darwin was a devil in disguise to suggest a theory which did violence to Genesis and Usher’s date for the creation of man. The scientist creates nothing; he simply dis- covers what is there and declares it, so unlike many theologians who discover what is not there and declare it, — as though you could sin against God by looking earnestly into that which He has made, knowing all you can of everything there is everywhere and always ; as though the good reputation of God depended upon shutting off inquiry concerning His own doings. This habit is far reaching. Our theological students are seldom encouraged to think. Their thinking is done for them and they are only expected to receive and remember. Last week a student showed me his ex- amination paper with a section crossed out and his mark lowered because he failed to answer the question “properly.” He said “Jesus cast out devils” and he should have said “demons,” not “devils,” for that is what he was taught. I would like to ask the pro- fessor to get a specimen of each, so that I might take them to the Rockefeller Institute, stain cross sections, put them under the microscope and get a pathological reading of the difference. I am sure some of my medical friends in this congregation this morning would be glad to assist my unscientific efforts with devils and demons. A student should be encouraged to do all the thinking he is capable of, as freely as his faculty goes, and he should meet a helpful, gentle, sympathetic inducement to express his whole mind. [4] I know what it is to be shot through with suspicion, branded a heretic, labelled unsafe, and I know now who really and richly deserved the distinction of these degrees eagerly conferred by shallow scholarship and limp intellects. I have only one Commentary on the Bible; (I threw away one of my Commentaries and sent two to African missionaries — God help the na- tives) it was recommended by a great scholar and edited by a great Bishop. I keep it to find out mostly what not to say. The other day I wondered what it would say about that verse in Genesis : “And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife coats of skins.” so I took it down and read “coats of skins — Animals therefore were killed even in Paradise nor is it certain that man’s diet was until the flood entirely vegetarian (reference) but undoubtedly the food originally assigned to man was vegetable. Until sin entered the world no sacrifices could have been offered, if therefore there were the skins of animals offered in sacrifice, as many suppose, Adam must in some way, im- mediately after the fall, have been taught that without shedding of blood is no remission of sin, but God will accept a vicarious sacrifice.” This is really too fascinating for abbreviation, and yet it touches very definite orthodox opinions in pulpit and seminary. These same old “coats of skins” still I fit some intellectual shapes, and hang conspicuously I with religious regalia today. j The real difficulty is with the background con- ditions which the things I have been saying reflect. Many pulpits are not free to deliver fearlessly the larger convictions and truths which must be preached if men are to be drawn to the attractiveness of Christ’s simple gospel. The theological students for the most part cannot afford to think honestly and openly for if they did they would be in danger of “godly admon- ition” from their superiors or else find themselves ' travelling in a land of promise with many of their professors, self restrained prisoners on the nether side I of Jordan, constituting a difficult situation. There are young college men who have told me frankly they could not go into the ministry and keep faith with I their scientific and general knowledge. The con- ’ science which blocks free expression of thought and . leans upon an intellectual crutch cannot reproach me [ 5 ] in advising students to develop their capacity for independent thinking and private judgment. A man’s trust in God is to be measured very largely by the way he trusts himself, and much of the orthodoxy of the day is nothing more than “skepticism con- cerning the divine,” as the term is used, and really reaches back to the man-made institutions and in- terpretations with which the Holy Spirit has had little, and the human spirit much, to do. A full, free, active truth-seeking intellect is the best solvent religious faith can have, for the seeker finds, and the pure in heart will see God most clearly. 3. The ridiculous side-stepping of “consistent” religious thought and its exercise of what amounts to a class rather than a social conscience would discourage attempts at fixation and drive us to sus- pect ourselves mentally, if it were not for a sense of humor, and a confusion of ideas actually funny. The categories of religious and secular things in different people is a study in delights at any century that you may please to examine. It reads as amus- ingly as a chapter of the Salic law and makes one wish for a John Seldon to write it up. You need only turn to our Puritan progenitors or the hymn- book we habitually use to see the world-renouncing theory raised to the Nth power. It does not seem to have impressed anybody that “God so loved the world,” and that therefore it might be God-like to love it too. It does not take a casuist to distinguish the vain from the valuable in it, and certain I am, that there is more value in more things than at first appears and our children are surely aiming to deter- mine it. They will find it in art and music, in recrea- tion and a right use of time ; they will count the theatre and the opera among the great influences in the world, directing and shaping human destiny and will lift these into the purity and power they might now have if we could see it. In Shakespeare’s day no respectable woman went to the theatre unless she was heavily veiled, and no woman took part in the plays, for these parts were played by “youths of uncracked voice.” Everybody connected with the institution was under the ban, yet Samuel Pepys enjoyed the plays and railed at the preachers and their sermons. The ban is not entirely lifted now — perhaps that is why there is so much to be desired of the stage — for within seven years a great and [ 6 ] wonderful rector said to me “that a minister lost caste by g’oing to the theatre.” Your wealthy people can do what they list Sunday or weekday. Europe or the country in summer, South and elsewhere in winter, and on Sunday motor or golf as the spirit moves. It may move them to church, but at any rate they reserve the right to legislate for the work-all- the-week, tenement house east-sider and say what he shall not do with his late evenings and Sunday afternoons. Why? Perhaps because they pay pew rents, and money talks. These “supporters” can indulge in their excesses and nerve racking inven- tions all night till dawn, and some of them can- not tell you the day of the week ; they do not ask the Church to set them right but go to Hot Springs for the cure, yet, they have been known to object to a Sunday afternoon song rehearsal for the “east- siders” while they were at golf, and to urge a pro- hibition against sailing a boat on Sunday, when nobody but God’s own breeze did the work and they themselves were working an automobile Jehu over- time. Why not cure the whole sickly secular cate- gory by the only remedy that can cure? Whatever a big man does he does in a big way and it always seems right. By the same token whatever a good man does he honors and elevates by what he is. Wiy not begin to take the kinks out of this con- science and grow a soul so sure of its own generous integrity and self-respect that he finds God in a wide range of things, looks for the central truth at the center of nearly every falsehood and discovers that the truth alone shall make him absolutely “free.” Wherever “righteousness and peace kiss each other,” or “mercy and truth are met together,” there j are possibilities and these places and times are mani- fold and promising. The accidents of such an ex- perience might find us humbly and receptively in church or with the Gospel in our hand, or on our knees — who knows. The world, with such a con- science, would be close to heaven, and, instead of devils or demons, angels unawares ; i.e., better things in almost everybody than we thought. We might live so that our children could be encouraged to imitate us instead of our being under the necessity of forbidding them to do so ; we might discover that men are as honestly holden to that standard of moral social conscience required of women as the women [ 7 ] themselves ; or that there is no separate table of commandments for any day or duty which applies only to the poor. And lastly, we might be inspired to apply on a week day some of the things we say on Sunday and do not mean, as good discipline for pretending to believe much that we confess and do by no means practice. In Puritan days they awoke the sleepers in the churches, but today it is a sign of piety to sleep intellectually, and bless one’s self at not having a doubt or a question mark disturb his seventeenth century nap. Our customary, corrugated thinking is so bad that we must, it seems, actually “get away from God, in order to find Him.” I mean, we must get away from the Conventional God, the Conventional Jesus, in order to get a clear view. Under the narrow minded programme so prevalent today we are in no more danger of working out our own salvation than was Sisyphus in danger of landing his impetuous rock on the mountain. Knowledge, more of it ; intellect more honest ; plain common sense and straight thinking in religion as in other walks of life will kindle the embers of a dying enthusiasm for spiritual things. I like that flash of Paul in his Philippian letter : “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatso- ever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report ; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. [ 8 ]