AN AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY
It will help us, perhaps, to understand still more clearly the religious
revolution which is going on to-day concurrently with the social
revolution if we survey the evolution of Christianity from another
standpoint,--the racial. In the preceding chapter the effort has been to
show that Christianity in its organization and even in its spirit has
been profoundly affected by its social environment and has changed as
that has changed. The most superficial study of the history of
Christianity reveals, moreover, that Christianity has been, also, deeply
affected by the characteristics of each race among which it has made its
home.
1. Jewish Christianity.
The earliest form of Christianity was that which sprang up in Jerusalem
immediately after the Resurrection and the ingathering at Pentecost. It
was the Christianity of the apostles and of the first disciples.
Perhaps it might be called a Christianized Judaism rather than a Jewish
Christianity, for it was the old Judaism unchanged except by the
acceptance of Jesus of Nazareth as the fulfilment of the national hope.
The apostles remained good Jews, even stricter than before in their
discharge of the duties of the old faith, and commanding through their
strictness the respect of the Jews, James the brother of Jesus, in
particular, being held in high esteem for his devoutness.
The chief characteristic of Jewish Christianity, it might almost be
said, was its lack of almost all the features which have since been
counted essential to a Church.
The ancient Jew, as has often been noted, markedly resembled the modern
Englishman in many things, notably in an indifference to theological or
philosophical speculation and in a strong sense of the value of the
ethical and practical. These earliest Jewish Christians, accordingly,
did not seek to analyze and systematize their faith. They did not seek
to draw out its philosophical implications. They were interested in the
construction neither of a creed nor of a theological system. They were
content to hold their faith in Jesus as a vital loyalty and a great
hope. Jesus was to them the long desired Messiah who would redeem
Israel and establish the Kingdom of God upon the earth. That glorious
consummation would take place when He returned, as they confidently
expected He would, in the immediate future. Meanwhile, the door into
the Kingdom of God stood open to all Jews who would accept Jesus as the
Christ, and to such Gentiles as were willing to receive circumcision and
identify themselves with Israel.
Overshadowed with the imminence of the Parousia, this Jewish Church of
the first years had no interest in a reflective interpretation of its
faith or in the elaboration of its organization. The apostles preached;
alms were distributed to those of the disciples who were in need. No
programme was drawn up for the future; no propaganda among the Gentiles
was even dreamed of. The whole attitude was one of almost passive
expectancy that clung to the ancient capital, the holy city, where the
long-expected Hope of Israel would shortly, descending from the heavens,
establish His throne.
Jewish Christianity had only the rudiments of a creed, only the simplest
organization, and the most unelaborated and democratic form of worship.
It was a seed with the germinating impulse unawakened, a bark launched
and rigged but that had no thought of venturing out of the harbour.
This simple, undeveloped, undogmatic, unorganized, and Judaistic
character of primitive Jewish Christianity is strikingly displayed in
the early chapters of the book of the Acts and in the Epistle of James,
which on most, at any rate, of the different hypotheses as to date and
authorship is, at least, a witness to early Jewish Christianity.[#]
[#] A later form of Jewish Christianity, the obscure Ebionitism of the
second century, does not fall within the limits of this sketch. It was,
probably, not so much a development of Christianity as a perversion of
it.
2. Greek Christianity.
But the expansive forces residing in this undeveloped Christianity could
not long remain inactive.
An important element in the population of Jerusalem in the time of our
Lord was the Hellenist. This name was applied to the Jews who for
various reasons, mainly for trade, had made their home in the commercial
cities of the Levant. Here they had learned to speak the prevailing
language of the countries around the Eastern Mediterranean, Greek, and
had been, to a varying extent, intellectually broadened and quickened by
contact with the Greek world. Large numbers of them returned to
Jerusalem for educational purposes or to gratify their devout feelings,
but they were regarded by the Palestinean Jews with something
approaching contempt for their willingness to live away from the sacred
soil of Palestine.
It was in the Hellenist mind, thus stimulated and developed by the Greek
spirit, that the first development of Christianity occurred. To the
Hellenist Stephen, the first thinker, the first controversialist, and
the first martyr of Christianity, belongs the honor of first discovering
the universal principle of Christianity, and his interpretation of
Christianity brought about his own death and kindled a persecution which
scattered the Christians of Jerusalem up and down the Syrian coast of
the Mediterranean.
To some of these fugitive Hellenist Christians, partakers of the thought
of the martyred Stephen, belongs the not less lofty honor of being the
first to overleap the jealously guarded barriers of Judaism and to open
the door of Christianity to the Gentiles. "They therefore that were
scattered abroad upon the persecution that arose about Stephen travelled
as far as Phoenicia and Cyprus and Antioch, speaking the word to none
save only to Jews. But there were some of them, men of Cyprus and
Cyrene [and therefore Hellenists] who, when they were come to Antioch,
spake unto the Greeks also, preaching the Lord Jesus." Acts 11:19-20.
It is to be noted that it was, probably, this influx of Greeks into the
Church hitherto composed only of Jews which made necessary a new name
applicable to the composite body, and so it came about that "the
disciples were called Christians first at Antioch."
A Church, in part Jewish but, probably, in still larger part Gentile,
thus sprang up in Antioch, which became the mother city of Gentile, or
world-wide, Christianity. From this centre the greatest of all
Hellenist Jews, Saul of Tarsus, fired by that very universalism which
had at first aroused the hatred of his bitter Jewish particularism,
carried Christianity westward through Asia Minor, Greece, Italy and,
possibly, even to Spain.
Thus transplanted from the deeply and exclusively religious and ethical
Hebrew mind to the predominantly speculative mind of the Greek,
Christianity began to undergo an immediate transformation. The Greek
mind, probably never equalled for its curiosity, its acuteness, its
subtlety, could never be content to ask, what? It must also ask, why,
and how? To it we owe science, philosophy, all our ordered thinking.
Christianity, as a mere affection felt for Jesus Christ or purely as a
code of conduct, could not satisfy the Greek mind. The Greek mind, at
first contemptuous of it as a mere vulgar superstition, fascinated at
length by its rational monotheism, its lofty ethics, and, above all by
the charm of its central figure, flung itself with ardor on the task of
adapting this naive and untutored but fascinating religion to its own
tastes and habits of thought.
A place was found for the Jewish Messiah in the philosophical world of
the Greeks as the Logos, or Reason, of God, a familiar philosophical
conception. Plato and Zeno were made His forerunners. The principles
of His teaching were dissected out of the traditions of His ministry and
organized into a coherent body of doctrine. The acutest minds of Greek
Christianity disengaged the great problems which were involved in the
worship paid to Christ and, after centuries of speculation and of strife
(not always intellectual only), achieved those great solutions which,
whether in every respect permanently satisfactory or not, must forever
be recognized as among the sublimest constructions of the philosophic
intellect,--the creeds of Nicaea and Chalcedon.
For good and for ill the simple, almost creedless Christianity of the
Sermon on the Mount and of the Epistle of James had become through Paul,
the author of the Fourth Gospel, the still more mysterious author of the
Epistle to the Hebrews, and countless Greek dialecticians and
theologians, the elaborately and authoritatively dogmatic system which
has, almost till to-day, treated unorthodox opinion as the deadliest of
sins.
The undue emphasis on the intellectual element in Christianity, the
tyrannical control of human thought we to-day must deplore, but he who
repudiates Greek Christianity must also deny that Christianity had any
mission to the Greek mind, and that men have any right to think out
their religious beliefs and adjust them to the rest of their thinking.
3. Latin Christianity.
Latin Christianity cannot altogether be classed as a later stage than
Greek Christianity. It was to a large extent a concurrent development.
As far as its theological features were concerned, it was little more
than the uncritical acceptance of dogmas worked out by the Greeks. But,
eventually, the distinctive gifts of the Latin race asserted themselves
and those races which had built up the Roman Empire, or as subjects of
it had become embued with its spirit, applied their organizing genius to
the Christian Church and moulded the Church of the West into a replica
of the Empire, and in such closely-knit fashion that, when under its own
inherent weaknesses and through the irruption of the northern
barbarians, that mightiest of all organizations of antiquity collapsed,
the Church that came eventually and fittingly to know itself as Roman
took its place and proved itself an even mightier organization, subduing
restless and fierce peoples on which Imperial Rome had never been able
to impose her yoke.
The Latin mind, then, with its reverence for order and law, its genius
for government, its detestation of lawless individualism, discerned the
possibilities of the Christian Church as an organization, and out of the
simple piety of Jesus and the reasoned theology of the Greeks fashioned
the mightiest instrument of discipline and order the world has ever
seen.
Here, again, there may be a protest. This Latinization, or
imperialization, of Christianity may be indignantly termed a perversion
rather than a development. This only need be said in reply, that it
would be difficult for anyone who has studied, without prejudice, the
period between the overthrow of the Western Empire and the Protestant
Reformation to deny the providential character of Latin Christianity.
No other form of Christianity has as yet rendered so great a service to
the race. It is questionable whether any other form of Christianity,
even if it had been in existence, could at that stage have rendered so
great a service. It was precisely those features in the attitude of the
Roman Catholic Church towards her people which are most uncongenial to
the Protestant temper which were the disciplinary agencies needed by the
lawless, seething Europe of the Dark Ages to qualify it for the personal
liberty the vindication of which has been the faith and service of
Protestantism.
4. Teutonic Christianity.
The Greek mind moulded Christianity into a reasoned and systematized
theology; the Latin, into an organization closely knit and marvellously
efficient for the end to which Latin Christianity was largely and,
perhaps, inevitably content to aim,--external control. Now, at least, we
can see how inevitable it was that a third development of Christianity
should take place after it had been transplanted among the Teutonic
peoples. That development was slower in taking place than either the
Greek or Latin forms. Those northern races which, until their
conversion to Christianity, had stood almost completely outside the
circle of ancient civilization, coming under the spell of a powerful
religion and a civilization, even in its decay, majestic, were brought
so thoroughly under the yoke that for centuries they were content to be
ruled by a spiritual imperialism enthroned at Rome.
But that authority never ceased to be regarded by the northern races as
a foreign one. The Teutonic peoples whose home lay outside the limits of
the old Roman Empire were never Latinized in spirit. When they attained
intellectual maturity and sought the free development of their own
nature, they shook off the authority of Rome and brought to light those
free and individualistic and spiritual germs in Christianity which,
hitherto, in the luxuriant and stately growth of Greco-Roman Catholicism
had remained almost dormant.
The Protestant Reformation, as has been noted, was a complex movement.
It involved many factors. But fundamentally it was the outcome of the
determination, not always clearly conscious, of the Teutonic peoples to
discover a Christianity which should be consonant with that passion for
freedom and that high sense of personal dignity which from the beginning
had characterized the men of the Teutonic stock.
It is an interesting illustration of this that the movement of reform,
or, rather, of revolt, which swept like a prairie fire over all Teutonic
Europe that had never been permanently subdued by the Empire, flickered
and died as soon as it crossed what had been the boundary of the old
Empire, and that that boundary is still the dividing line between those
countries of Western Europe which are preponderatingly Protestant and
those which are preponderatingly Roman Catholic. The Roman Church held
only what the Roman Empire had won. Only where the old Teutonic love of
liberty had been subdued by centuries of the masterful and, on the
whole, beneficent rule of old Rome did it cease to feel the spiritual
rule of the new Rome alien and irksome.
Another illustration of how essentially Teutonic is the spirit of
Protestantism is in the slight influence Protestantism has had on the
Celtic peoples islanded in the Teutonic populations. Celtic Brittany is
the most fervidly Catholic part of France to-day. Celtic Ireland
remains solidly and deeply Catholic. Celtic Scotland, despite
overwhelming Protestant influences, is still largely Catholic. Celtic
Wales has become wholly Protestant, but it has seized and developed the
least prominent and least Protestant of all the elements embraced in
Protestantism,--the emotional and the mystical.
The rule of Rome under the Emperors and under the Popes had been the
rule of the machine--a superb machine, ingeniously contrived for what
were conceived as the best ends, and operated with indomitable
pertinacity and boundless devotion, but still a machine; and Protestant,
or Teutonic, Christianity, in the last analysis, was the overthrow of
the machine. To the Teutonic race belongs the honor of being the first
on a racial scale to establish a religion without ceremonial or a
priesthood or any privileged class whatever. Hebrew prophetism with its
magnificent protest against ritual, and its culmination in the
democratic simplicity of Jesus, now for the first time found recognition
on a national scale.
Teutonic Christianity is the exaltation of the individual. It was born
of individualism and glorifies individualism. It affirms the right and
duty of individual judgment, the supremacy of the individual conscience,
the privilege of the individual access to God. It finds the authority
and proof of the Christian religion in its consonance with, and its
satisfaction of, the capacities and needs of the individual soul.
The distance between the spirit of Latin and that of Teutonic
Christianity, and, also, it should be noted, the distance between the
twelfth century and the sixteenth may be seen in the two appeals of
Abelard and Luther. Peter Abelard, a great and pathetic and only a
little less than a heroic figure, was a Protestant, and in the best
sense of the term, a free thinker, three hundred years before the
Renaissance and four hundred years before Luther. Accused of heresy by
the saintly but censorious and bigoted Bernard, and brought to trial
before a tribunal carefully packed by his relentless and unscrupulous
adversary, Abelard, despairing of a fair hearing, refused to defend
himself and appealed to the Pope. Another monk charged with heresy four
hundred years later, inferior to Abelard in clearness and energy of
thought but of more heroic moral fibre, before the most august
assemblage Europe could gather, closed his defence with the undying
words, "It is not safe for a man to do aught against his conscience.
Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me, Amen."
Abelard appeals to the Pope, Luther to his conscience. That is the
supreme contrast between Latin and Teutonic Christianity.
5. American Christianity.
Since the revolt of the Teutonic peoples, the most remarkable phenomenon
of Christian history has been the growth of a branch of Teutonic
Christianity under the novel political and social conditions of the new
world.
This has been a transplantation of Christianity quite as significant as
any of its transplantations in the past, and the new soil has produced
just as unmistakably new a growth.
Doubtless none of the great phases of Christianity in the past knew
themselves to be new. Neither Greek nor Latin Christianity was conscious
of any departure from primitive Christianity. Indeed, to this day, in
their conception of the history of the Church, they persist in
impressing their own type on that primitive and undeveloped type.
Teutonic Christianity took centuries to come to clear consciousness of
itself and of its irreconcilability with Latin Christianity. It is not
wonderful, therefore, that hitherto, as far as I am aware, American
Christianity has been, if at all, very dimly and imperfectly conscious
of the difference between its spirit and that of the Teutonic
Christianity of the old world.
American Christianity has not yet arrived. It is only on the way. It
has not yet found itself. It is not yet conscious of its own
individuality, not yet self-reliant, independent. It is a youth, but a
youth rapidly approaching manhood. Perhaps the characteristics that are
unfolding themselves can be most clearly brought out by an attempt to
show wherein it resembles, and wherein it differs from, each of the four
great phases of Christianity which have just been under consideration.
_a_. American Christianity compared with Jewish.
Compared with Jewish Christianity, American Christianity resembles the
latter in its simplicity of creed, its emphasis on the practical and
ethical, and (to a distinct and growing degree) in its brotherliness and
democratic equality.
But its creedal simplicity is not the same as that of the primitive
Jewish Church. That Church was wise in the brevity and simplicity of
its creed, but it did not know its own wisdom. American Christianity is
wise and knows its wisdom. It will not, like the Jewish Church, allow
itself to be seduced into interminable theological controversies and
into the superstition of orthodoxy. Seventeen hundred years of bitter
wrangling and bloody conflict and cruel persecutions have taught it
something. It has a short and a simple creed, not because it knows so
little, but because it knows so much.
It differs, again, in its extensive and manifold organization, in the
variety and elaborateness of its forms of worship, and, most markedly of
all, in its attitude toward the present life. Primitive Jewish
Christianity had no interest in the present social order. Intoxicated
with apocalyptic visions, it stood on tiptoe awaiting with outstretched
arms the return of the Saviour and the overthrow of this whole order by
supernatural power. Its primary interest was eschatological. Its
deepest feeling was expressed by St. Paul when he relegated all social
relations and arrangements to the region of unimportance. "But this, I
say, brethren, the time has been cut short, that henceforth both those
that have wives may be as though they had none; and those that weep, as
though they wept not; and those that rejoice, as though they rejoiced
not; and those that buy, as though they possessed not; and those that
use the world, as not using it to the full: for the fashion of this
world is passing away." Cor. 7:29-31.
In this respect American Christianity is at the opposite pole. It does
not look for the end of the world. It has largely ceased to believe in
such a future and, where it still professes the apocalyptic faith, for
the most part, it allows that faith little or no influence in actual
life. American Christianity believes in the progressive and aggressive
amelioration of things. It believes in this life and its glorious
possibilities. It is bent on attaining them as no other sort of
Christianity ever was before. It is steeped in optimism. It believes
that the leaven of Christianity possesses the power to leaven all the
relations and institutions of civilization. It believes that the
fulfilment of our Lord's prayer, that God's Kingdom may come and His
will be done on earth as it is in heaven, rests with the Church. Its
real and, to an ever-increasing extent, its conscious and avowed faith
is expressed by Dr. Henry Burton in the fine hymn:
There's a light upon the mountains and the day is at the spring,
When our eyes shall see the beauty and the glory of the King:
Weary was our heart with waiting, and the night-watch seemed so
long,
But His triumph-day is breaking and we hail it with a song.
In the fading of the starlight we may see the coming morn;
And the lights of men are paling in the splendours of the dawn:
For the eastern skies are glowing as with light of hidden fire,
And the hearts of men are stirring with the throbs of deep
desire.
He is breaking down the barriers, He is casting up the way;
He is calling for His angels to build up the gates of day:
But His angels here are human, not the shining hosts above;
For the drum-beats of His army are the heart-beats of our love.
_b_. American Christianity compared with Greek.
Of all the great historic forms of Christianity, it is the Greek from
which American Christianity might seem, at first sight, farthest
removed. The punctilious orthodoxy of the former, its bitter doctrinal
polemic are utterly abhorrent to American Christianity. American
Christianity is more and more indifferent to theological agreement, more
and more tolerant of wide doctrinal differences. And it has little
interest in the great historic creeds.
Yet it is not so far away from the Greek spirit after all. It is
inquisitive and speculative and as interested as the Gnostics in great
sweeping theories of the universe. America is of all Christendom, past
and present, the most tolerant country, yet it is, at the same time, a
hotbed of religious speculation, even of religious vagaries. But, at
last, there has been born a kind of Christianity which can think and let
think, which is interested in thinking, but does not believe that
opinions determine a man's character here or his destiny beyond.
It should not be overlooked in comparing Greek and American Christianity
that American Christianity in its most thoughtful form would have felt a
great sympathy with the bold and free and comprehensive thought of the
great Alexandrians, Clement and Origen. It is the later and narrower and
bigoted Greek Christianity, which fittingly chose for itself the
designation, the Orthodox Church, that I have been contrasting with
American Christianity.
_c_. American Christianity compared with Latin.
The comparison of American and Latin Christianity is much more complex.
No two kinds of Christianity could well be more sharply opposed than
these two in regard to the exalted claims of the clergy in the Latin
Church. American Christianity is deeply and intensely democratic.
Sacerdotalism in any form it instinctively rejects. The very idea of
priest is passing out of its thought. The preacher it can appreciate.
The competent ecclesiastical manager has its respect. The religious
leader and pastor it can thoroughly understand and cordially recognize
where genuine. But that any class of men should occupy a mediating
position between God and man or possess a monopoly of any spiritual
gifts is foreign to the American consciousness. "Kings and priests unto
God and the Father." Those who are taught from childhood that they are
kings are quite as conscious that they are also priests. The essential
democracy of primitive Christianity has never established itself in any
land before. This is the gift--and a great one--of American democracy to
the Church.
What has been said of sacerdotalism holds true, to a still greater
degree, of that thin, shadowy form of sacerdotalism, clericalism. The
way in which the garb and badges of clericalism are disappearing in
America is symbolical of the disappearance of the idea.
Latin Christianity, as we have seen, on account of the conditions of its
origin and early history intensely autocratic, has always given a very
humble place to the laity. Obedience and money were all that was
required of them. The High Church theory, indeed, of the Roman Catholic
Church and of the so-called High Church section of the Church of England
is not a High Church theory at all. It is a High Clerical theory. The
Church has been virtually identified with the clergy. Against the
over-weening claims of Boniface VIII., Philip of France protested that
"Holy Church, the spouse of Christ, is made up not of clergy only but of
laymen." But that is not the working theory of Latin Christianity. A
quaint medieval preacher suppressed what he thought was an undue
bumptiousness on the part of his people by a sermon from the text Job
1:14, "The oxen were plowing and the asses feeding beside them," which,
he showed his too forward hearers, clearly indicated the functions of
the clergy, who were typified by the oxen, while the duty of the laymen
was set forth by the feeding asses.
Luther's flight to the monastery when he became alarmed about his
salvation was partly prompted by a picture which made a profound
impression on him as a boy and haunted him for years. It was "an
altar-piece in a Church, the picture of a ship in which was no layman,
not even a King or a Prince; in it were the Pope with his Cardinals and
Bishops, and the Holy Ghost hovered over them, directing their course,
while priests and monks managed the oars and the sails, and thus they
went sailing heavenwards. The laymen were swimming in the water beside
the ship; some were drowning, others were holding on by ropes which the
monks and priests cast out to them to aid them. No layman was in the
ship and no priest was in the water." (Cambridge Mod. Hist. II.,
109-110.)
American Christianity is bent on an ever larger place for the laity in
the Church and an ever-growing activity. The Y.M.C.A. and Y.W.C.A., the
Young People's Society of Christian Endeavor and the Epworth League, the
Laymen's Missionary Movement, the Men and Religion Movement, all
illustrate the increasingly practical and lay aspect of American
Christianity.
The Papacy, too, is another feature of Latin Christianity peculiarly out
of harmony with characteristic American thought. The remoteness of the
United States from the cradle of that institution, the hostility with
which Washington inspired the young republic in regard to entangling
alliances with European nations, its intensely American and democratic
consciousness, all conspire to make the idea of a foreign ruler
uncongenial to the American mind. The national consciousness of the
United States is as exacting as religion. Its first commandment is,
Thou shalt have no other country and no other ruler than the United
States.
The authority of the Pope in the United States is maintained by being
carefully withheld from all danger of challenge. The American Catholic
is not conscious of any restraint in the tie that binds him to Rome
because the rope is always paid out as freely as his movements require.
Again, it would seem that the Roman Catholic exaltation of the
contemplative life over the active can never be accepted by American
Christianity. There are no Catholics to whom the monastic life makes so
faint an appeal as the Catholics of the United States. Perhaps a
stronger admixture of the spirit of Mary might be beneficial, but
American Christianity is emphatically a child of Martha.
On the other hand, however, there is much in Latin Christianity that
appeals strongly to the American. His extraordinary genius for
organization, in which he probably surpasses even the modern German
whose great organizing capabilities have less of individual initiative,
and the ancient Roman with whom, again, it was the characteristic of a
class rather than of a people, dispose him to appreciate the great
organizing skill that has always been shown by the Roman Catholic
Church.
Further, the catholicity of that Church, its wonderful power to
assimilate and build up within itself all races and languages and
classes, cannot but appeal to a people engaged in solving a parallel
problem. Modern American Christianity, moreover, is more and more
unsectarian, even anti-sectarian. It does not glory in division and
isolation. There is in it a growing passion for unity, a growing
yearning for a strong, commanding, national type of Christianity that is
much more akin to the imperialism of the great Popes, like Gregory VII.
and Innocent III., than to the parochialism and sectarianism that have
generally and naturally been associated with Protestantism. American
Christianity is fast losing all interest in denominationalism. All this
is bringing it nearer to the temper of Latin Christianity.
_d_. American Christianity compared with Teutonic.
It may seem absurd to try to compare Protestantism and American
Christianity, since the American Christianity that is here being
discussed is mainly the Protestantism of America. But it is not
exclusively the Protestantism of America. The Roman Catholicism of the
United States shows, though less markedly, the same traits. And within
the Protestant Churches of America another kind of Christianity is
growing up as the butterfly develops within the chrysalis. And,
moreover, it is not wholly within the organized Protestantism of America
that the new Christianity is developing. There is an unknown but vast
amount of the new American Christianity outside the organized Churches
of America. A part of this was once in the organized Churches but has
lost interest in their spirit and aims. A part of it has never been
attracted by the organized Churches. Another great--probably the
greatest--element in the coming American Christianity is the Labor
movement which, as it has been suggested, needs only to be broadened and
more consciously spiritualized to be identical with the coming true and
indigenous Church of America. It is, indeed, a grave question whether
the coming American Christianity will gradually capture and transform
the present Churches or whether, as in the Protestant Reformation, the
new wine will have to be poured into new bottles, and a new Church arise
distinct from, and even in conflict with, the present Churches.
One thing, at least, is clear.
Protestantism in its present form will not survive. The very name is
inadequate. It is not self-explanatory. It can only be understood by
reference to another and earlier Church. It is negative. It has no
positive or vital content. It carries with it the unhappiness and
partialness of division. It is essentially and incurably sectarian.
The more extensive and comprehensive the body becomes, the less
intelligible becomes the name. If Protestantism should become really
catholic, that is, universal, the name would become a complete misnomer.
American Christianity, so far as it still calls itself Protestant, only
continues to bear the name through unthinking habit. As soon as it
reflects upon the name, it must disown it. American Christianity is too
essentially catholic and comprehensive, too little concerned with the
past, too impatient of the old outworn disputes, to be content with a
name that must always convey a flavor of division and controversy.
Protestantism, sectarian in its nature as in its name, is inadequate to
express the genius of American Christianity. The dominating principle
of Protestantism has been individualism, and the dominant note of
American Christianity is fraternity. America is the chosen home of
fraternal societies. It is Rudyard Kipling, I think, who has said that
of the famous revolutionary motto, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, the
Frenchman cares only for equality, the Englishman is resolute for
liberty and despises both equality and fraternity, while the American
who knows neither liberty nor equality will forgive a man for anything
if only he is a good fellow. The American loves a "good mixer." A
shrewd French observer nearly twenty years ago in "La Religion dans la
Societe aux Etats-Unis" caught the spirit of this nascent American
Christianity.
He found it, first, a social religion, and, as such, concerning itself
more with society than with individuals; secondly, a positive religion,
in its interest in what is human rather than in what is supernatural.
It stands chiefly, he thought, for the idea of morality. It encourages
a strong recognition of the fact that good people, without professing
the same faith, are governed by the same rules of conduct, and that, if
dogma divides, morality unites.
"The Americans," he said, "make fraternity, the actual form of which is
social solidarity, the essence of Christianity. The moral unity for
which they strive under the name of Christian unity is only the
co-operation of all for the increased establishment of fraternity and
solidarity. High above sects whose diversity seems a matter of
indifference to them, they organize a religion which pervades society
throughout its length and breadth, and tends towards being only a social
spirit touched by the evangelical feeling.
* * * * *
"This moral unity is indeed a religious unity and a Christian unity;
this positivism is a Christian positivism. American humanism has
received from Christianity all the traditional, sentimental, and
poetical elements which distinguish a religion from a philosophy.
American positivism is only a Christianity which has evolved.... The
American religion may be called a Christian positivism or a positive
Christianity. It has received from the past the traditional and the
evangelical spirit. Traditional, it preserves the names and the forms
of the Churches even when it changes their customs; it develops them
from the interior. Evangelical, it keeps the figure of Jesus Christ
before all, even when it does not recognize his divinity.
* * * * *
"Therefore it is not Protestantism.... The title of Christianity is the
only one broad enough to designate it; yet this must be taken in its
evangelical sense.... The American religion is living and fruitful
because it is national."
To discern a distinct American Christianity in 1902 showed much more
insight than its recognition indicates to-day. American Christianity
has developed greatly since then and is now developing still more
rapidly under the forcing conditions of the war and the great
reconstruction. The work of reconstruction will not have been carried
very far before the incongruity of this new type of Christianity with
the hard, individualistic, militant spirit of Teutonic Christianity will
become apparent to all.
When American Christianity comes to full and clear self-consciousness,
when it, so to speak, finds itself, it will be found to have a very
simple and brief and intelligible creed. Not a shallow creed, however,
but a deep and vital one. It will put, probably, no other question to
candidates for membership than the Apostolic Church put, Dost thou
believe in the Lord Jesus Christ?
Its emphasis will be where Jesus placed it, not on opinions, but on
spirit, the spirit of brotherhood.
Democratic it will, therefore, be as well, for democracy is bound up
with brotherhood.
Finally, with a little creed it will have a big programme. It will live
to establish the Kingdom of God on the earth. Its helpful, healing,
redeeming, Christ-like activities will be infinite in the Christian and
in the heathen lands.
And as pre-eminently practical, clericalism will die out of it.
Preachers, teachers, missionaries there will be, but the gulf that has
divided these from the laity will be closed. Sacerdotalism, even in its
most attenuated and vestigial forms, will disappear.
Throughout this chapter, it is, perhaps, hardly necessary to add, the
word, American, is used in its proper continental sense. By American
Christianity is meant the new and distinct type of Christianity which is
developing in the Protestant churches of the United States and Canada
and also, though less markedly, in the Roman Catholic. Politically
distinct as these countries are likely to remain, socially and
religiously they cannot escape the influences of neighborhood.
In some respects, as has been noted, the United States, on account of
its republican constitution, its political rupture with the old world,
and its more strongly developed self-consciousness, has been more
favorable than Canada to the growth of that new form of Christianity,
yet signs are not wanting, especially in that western section in which
the coming Canada seems to be most clearly discernible, that the younger
and smaller and so, perhaps, the more mobile country may outstrip her
older and greater neighbor in the formation, out of, at least, the
Protestant denominations, of a national Christianity, simple, yet free
and varied, practical, democratic, brotherly, in a word, truly catholic.
Institutions which have outlived their usefulness usually retain an
appearance of strength until the hour of collapse. Denominationalism in
Canada is still a stately tree, but the heart is dust.