THE GREAT CHRISTIANITY
But American Christianity is not final Christianity, nor even the
highest and richest form of Christianity in sight, unless it blossom
into a yet richer and more varied loveliness than it at present gives
promise of. Of all actual forms of Christianity it seems to have the
fairest promise, but it will probably prove to be only a tributary,
though a great one, of a still mightier river.
Is it possible for us at this stage to discern at least the outline of
the Great Christianity that is to be?
Certainly, every great historic form of Christianity has been tried by
history and found wanting. As much of primitive Jewish Christianity as
refused to merge in the large Catholic Christianity of the Greco-Roman
world dried up into an unfruitful, bigoted, and eccentric heresy and
perished.
Greek Christianity emphasized doctrine and tore itself by doctrinal
disputes into a shattered, helpless welter of vituperative sects,
powerless to spread the Gospel, powerless to withstand the
Mohammedan,--the shame and tragedy of Christian history.
Latin Christianity emphasized the organization and became the enemy of
freedom and progress which, with few exceptions, every Roman Catholic
people has had to fight and dethrone to escape intellectual and moral
decay and death.
Teutonic Christianity has emphasized freedom and the rights of the
individual. Like Islam, it has been a fighting faith. And judgment has
fallen on it in its loss of unity, its bitter and wasteful sectarian
wrangles, and the ferocious strife between labor and capital, the
outcome of which may be one of the great tragedies of history.
[#] It is, perhaps, scarcely necessary to remark that Protestantism is
here being compared, not with Roman Catholicism, but with ideal
Christianity. Roman Catholicism, too, has been a fighting faith, and in
the appalling century and a half of religious wars that set in with the
Protestant Reformation it was the older faith that first resorted to
force. [Transcriber's note: there was no reference to this footnote in
the source book.]
Protestantism has taught her people to fight for their rights and now is
helpless before the selfish conflict of her own children that have
learned too well her spirit.
In the great industrial conflict now reaching its height, one may safely
prophesy Protestantism will perish--or be transformed.
She has taught her children to think; she has taught them to cherish
freedom; she has not taught them to love.
Since by far the most of any readers this little book may be fortunate
enough to find will be Protestant, it may be fitting and useful to point
out more specifically the defects of Protestantism than the defects of
other forms of Christianity among whose adherents, probably, the writer
can scarcely hope to find many readers.
The Protestant Reformation, so far as it was not a struggle for liberty,
national and intellectual and religious, was a doctrinal reformation.
There was not much more of the spirit of Jesus, His gentleness,
meekness, love, on one side than on the other. Erasmus understood
Christianity on the whole better than Luther. Sir Thomas More was more
Christian than John Calvin.
The Protestant Reformation was in its successful forms marked by little
sympathy with the poor and the oppressed. It declined to recognize any
duties to the serf except that of giving him the Gospel. Luther washed
his hands of the peasants and calmly abandoned them to the savage
vengeance of the princes when they refused to be satisfied with the
liberty of Gospel preaching.
Protestantism has been, except in a few despised sects, militant,
dogmatic, self-reliant, in a word, masculine. The gentler feminine
characteristics of Christianity it has very slightly recognized.
When we think of the genius of Protestantism, we think of a humble monk,
in the majesty of a conscientious conviction defying the two most
powerful rulers of Europe, the Pope and the Emperor; we think of the
indomitable sea-beggars of Holland and the heroic defence of Leyden; of
the white-plumed Henry of Navarre and the battles of the League; of the
splendidly audacious execution of Charles I., of Jenny Geddes' stool,
the solemn League and Covenant and the bloody field of Drumclog; of the
soldiers of Gustavus Adolphus, the Lion of the North, singing Luther's
great hymn, _Ein'feste Burg ist unser Gott_, as they moved on to the
glorious but dear-bought victory of Luetzen; we think of the massacre of
Drogheda and the undying defence of Derry; and of that typical
Protestant and superb fighter, the rugged, dour, and unconquerable
Ulster man whose unrelenting opposition and deep-rooted passion for
domination have been so great an obstacle to Irish peace and the unity
of the English-speaking world. Protestantism has had a great and a
beneficent and a heroic history, but it has reproduced only imperfectly
the Christianity of Jesus.
Meekness and long-suffering were outstanding characteristics of Jesus
and of His early followers; they have rarely been outstanding
characteristics of Protestantism. Perhaps Protestantism has been of
necessity a man of war from its youth. Yet primitive Christianity
encountered fiercer persecution and did not take the sword.
Protestantism did not suffer long before she grasped the sword. She
has, on the whole, followed Christ's precepts of non-resistance never
when she had a fighting chance.
Primitive Christianity by patience and love conquered and Christianized
the Roman Empire in three hundred years. Protestantism in more than
three hundred years has gained not a foot beyond the territory won in
the first rush of evangelical enthusiasm, and has lost territories she
at first held. It is the demonstration of the futility of a fighting
Christianity. Nowhere has the interaction of the two religions been
associated with more fighting than in Ireland, and nowhere has
Protestantism as an evangelical missionary force been more of a failure.
Gentleness, patience, humility have not been the strong points of
Protestantism. She has been proud, vigorous, masterful, impatient of
control, and to her have been given the kingdoms of the world. But not
to her has been given the Kingdom Jesus promised to the meek.
In short, in Protestantism there is much of Christianity but there is
also much simply of the old Teutonic spirit. Protestantism is not pure
or primitive or ultimate Christianity. It is Teutonic Christianity, no
more fitted to prevail than Greek or Latin Christianity. It is the
faith of the fighter, the wrestler, the individualist.
Perhaps no community calling itself Christian suggests so remotely the
tender name Jesus gave His disciples, "my sheep." Who, looking on a
prosperous Protestant congregation in town or country, with shrewdness,
vigilance, self-reliance written on almost every face, would think of
saying, "Fear not, little flock"? Freedom is what Protestantism has
demanded and fought for, freedom to think for herself and take her own
course and fight her own battles, every kind of freedom but one, the
only freedom that need not be fought for, that can never be fought
for,--freedom to love and to serve.
Protestantism in its original form is passing away; it has run its
course; its day is nearing its close. Where it has not caught the
vision of the new and the Great Christianity, its churches are being
deserted, its preachers are being seized with stammering lips and
despondent heart,[#] Its spirit cannot solve the problems of the new
age. It must become meek and lowly in heart. It must learn to love.
Rich man and poor man must stand in its churches as they stand in the
sight of God. Like medieval Christianity, it calls for a new
Reformation--not a new creed but a new heart, the heart of a little
child, humble, self-distrustful, not quick to resent, or even to see a
slight, eager to love, delighting to serve.
[#] These words are written with reverent recognition of the innumerable
forms of ministry to the bodies and souls of men that are being carried
on by devoted men and women in the Protestant Churches, but, also, with
the full conviction that these are slight and partial compared with the
outburst of devotion and service which will be aroused when the vision
of the new Christianity seizes great masses of men and women as the
passion for freedom seized Germany in the years 1517 to 1524 or France
in 1789.
Never were the young men and women of Protestant lands so ready for a
great task, but that task must be broadly Christian and broadly human.
It must be a spiritual task but of a spirituality interwoven
inextricably with politics, business, and sport.
Luther cannot help us here with his callousness to the wrongs and
miseries of the peasants, nor Knox with his harshness and his militancy,
nor Calvin with his hatred of those whom he thought God's enemies, nor
the Puritans nor the Covenanters with their bigotry and their blow for
blow and curse for curse.
Another deep lack is in Protestantism. In Isaiah's vision of the
seraphim above the throne of God, "each one had six wings; with twain he
covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he
did fly." Two wings for service and four for worship! A Roman Catholic,
meeting a friend who had become a Protestant, asked him how he liked his
new faith. "I like it well," answered the other, "but one thing I miss,
and that is the spirit of adoration."
How strange to us in Roman Catholic pictures are the faces of the saints
upturned in adoration to the Mother and the holy Child! Protestantism
does not produce faces like those. Shrewd, intelligent, alert, at best
reliable, frank, kindly, they often are; humble, not often; reverent,
adoring, still more rarely. Yet Goethe has said, "The highest thing in
life is the thrill of awe." And Carlyle, too, "Thought without
reverence is barren and poisonous."
Protestantism tends to be shallow, with the thinness and hardness and
tinniness of mere intellectualism. It needs to tap great fountains of
tenderness, humility, adoration, to be deepened, mellowed, enriched. Of
the two ultra types of worship--the bright church, comfortable with
plush cushions and glittering with brass work, where the people sit with
wide-open eyes and curiously watch the preacher while he prays, and
where the preacher with conscious cleverness clears up all the mysteries
of life and _coloratura_ quartettes display their technique (an ultra
type, confessedly, and not common, but actual), and the dim church with
the drooping Christ on the cross and pictured saints gazing in adoration
and the congregation on their knees before the divine Presence in the
Sacrament, one may be a convinced Protestant and yet believe the latter
form of worship the more fruitful of the two.
American Protestantism needs new inspiration. So far as the past can
yield this, it would seem that it should look particularly to three
great leaders and saints--St. Francis of Assisi, St. John of England (to
use W. T. Stead's deserved designation of John Wesley), and General
Booth.
Perhaps the most winsome and Christ-like figure that Roman Catholicism
presents, the loveliest flower in her rich garden of sainthood, is the
poverty-loving, utterly lowly and loving, care-free and joyous Francis
of Assisi, and perhaps, too, it may be said that no Christian character
better deserves the study of Protestants. St. Francis is not an ideal
figure; he lacks the balance and sanity of Jesus. Yet, perhaps, of all
who have passionately set themselves to reproduce the life of Jesus, St.
Francis in his utter humility, his complete unworldliness, and his
overflowing tenderness can best bring home to Protestantism its hardness
and shrewdness, its worldly-wisdom and its self-complacency. What a
far-distant world is the world of the man who renounced all possessions,
went about to preach and serve in coarsest, meagrest garb, who despised
money and loved poverty, whose sympathies went out to birds and fishes,
to Brother Fire and Sister Water, who could captivate robbers and even,
it was believed, wild creatures of the woods, and at whose coming the
Umbrian cities rang their bells and poured out with branches and flags
to greet the mean little man with the shabby grey gown and the rapt,
pale, worn face.
Let it be granted Protestant countries are more wealthy than Roman
Catholic, more progressive, more successful in trade and manufacture,
St. Francis gives us a glimpse into the simplicity and childlikeness,
humility and romance, that may sometimes find a Roman Catholic
atmosphere more genial than a Protestant.
Associated with the Franciscan order of tonsured monks and cloistered
nuns, there grew up a great society of men and women taking a middle
path between the world and the cloister--plainer in dress, abstaining
from the dance and the theatre, eschewing all quarrels, praying and
fasting more regularly, practising a more systematic beneficence than
ordinary Christians. And it is noteworthy that, in 1882 on the seven
hundredth anniversary of the birth of Francis, Pope Leo XIII. in an
encyclical declared that the institution of these Franciscan Tertiaries
was alone fitted to save humanity from the social and political dangers
which threatened it.
Wesley and Francis are not far removed. The Saint of Epworth was almost
as ardent a devotee of poverty as the Saint of Assisi. If he did not
absolutely strip himself, he gave away immensely more. He, too, had a
passion for the souls of men, all of St. Francis' pity for the poor, and
he won a wealth of reverence and love. He was a far wiser man, living
in a more rational age. But he was not only extraordinarily competent.
He knew, too, his own competence. There is a wildflower grace of the
childlike in St. Francis that we miss in the far more intelligent and
commanding figure of Wesley.
Primitive Methodism had much of the enthusiasm and devotion and
joyousness of the Franciscan brotherhood. Francis' friars and Wesley's
helpers had a common unworldliness, joyousness, and passion for the
souls of men. But even as the Franciscan movement diverged from the
ideals of St. Francis, so Methodism soon developed on lines of its own.
It has preserved much of the evangelical fervor and the practical
helpfulness of its original inspiration. Considered in its direct and
indirect effects, its union of evangelicalism, mysticism, and practical
kindliness, there has been no other Christian movement which has
combined such a measure of purity with such vastness of influence. In
genuine Christian influence it has surpassed even the Reformation.
Modern Christianity (and there is a distinguishable modern Christianity)
is of all forms that Christianity has assumed the nearest to the
Christianity of Jesus, and in its fashioning the Methodist Revival has
been the chief agency. Yet Methodism has not realized the ideals of its
human founder. It did not perpetuate his unworldliness. It failed, as
R. W. Dale pointed out, to the great loss of Christendom, to develop the
ethical implications of his great doctrine of perfect love. It
cherished his memory and his organization, but it refused to inherit his
dread and hatred of riches. Its very thrift and industry and morality
have been its undoing. It became, in great measure, like Protestantism
in general, a _bourgeois_ religion, eminently suited for people who want
to get on in the world. Its chief abhorrence has never been of social
inequality and injustice but of the wasteful frivolities and vices,
dancing, card-playing, theatre-going, and, pre-eminently, intemperance.
The Report already cited shows, however, a new spirit at work in the
Methodism of Canada, a spirit in which Wesley would rejoice, and it is
not in Canadian Methodism only that it is at work.
A still closer resemblance obtains between the Franciscan order and the
Salvation Army than between the former and Methodism. No two movements,
perhaps, so widely apart in time and methods are so closely akin.
Poverty, humility, obedience, love are the dominant features of them
both.
Francis is a more winsome figure than General Booth but incomparably
less intelligent and efficient. Francis awakened a great religious
revival but probably wrought little improvement on the face of
Europe--on its ferocity, chronic warfare, sensuality, oppression of the
poor. The Salvation Army has redeemed countless victims of poverty and
vice. It has probably proved itself the most effective agency in all
history for the salvation of the down and out.
The Order and the Army have the same limitations.
1. Both are too exclusively inward and individualistic. They do not
deal adequately with conditions and causes, the Franciscan movement not
at all, the Salvation Army very timidly. The weakest element in the
latter is its willingness to accept gifts from even those who have made
their wealth out of the degradation of men and women, and its seeming
reluctance to engage in any drastic social reforms which might dry up
such bounty. It is content with ambulance work, and even the most
devoted and heroic ambulance work will never stop the war.
2. Both, too, are sectional; fitted only for the few, the enthusiasts.
Each has cared for the saint; neither has made provision for the
ordinary man. Christian perfection, in the thought of Francis and of
General Booth, is for the man who withdraws from the ordinary work of
the world, turns away from its culture, crucifies a thousand human
instincts, breaks all the strings of the human lute but one. Both
movements organized by these great saints are eccentric, abnormal.
Neither is workable on a catholic, or universal, scale. Both
sectionalize the holy life.
What is needed to-day is another leader, a leader for the ordinary man.
The ordinary man is neither saint nor fanatic, neither preacher nor
monk; he would be bored to death if he had to sing or pray or meditate
all day; his joy is in building bridges and planning railways and
ripping up the matted prairie sod with gasoline engines; he likes his
wife and children and does not feel called upon to become a missionary
to China or Central Africa. The need is for the leader who can show
this ordinary man how to bring the truest love and the deepest piety
into the ordinary, commonplace, work-a-day life, revealing the glory of
God, not alone as gilding the cold snows of Alpine peaks or bathing the
distant desert with unearthly beauty, but transfiguring the city street,
the cozy home, the quiet fields where lovers walk at even.
Francis, Wesley, Booth--the time has come for each section of the
Christian Church to remember that "all things are hers: whether Paul or
Apollos or Cephas." We Protestants may think the Roman Catholic Church
less likely to appropriate our saints than we theirs. This judgment of
ours may be right or wrong, but we have no right to pass it until we
ourselves have recognized the limitations of Protestantism and set
ourselves heartily to appropriate the great elements of the Christian
life that are the distinctive glories of Latin Christianity.
Protestantism, too, has its own peculiar glories. Neither great
division of Christendom is adequate to meet the religious needs of
to-day. The hour has struck for the great Christianity.
The future belongs neither to Roman Catholicism nor to Protestantism.
Roman Catholicism is too aristocratic and distrustful of freedom. The
modern man will no more go back to medieval Christianity than to
medieval feudalism. There is a drift from Protestantism to-day, but the
drift from Roman Catholicism has been far greater. To fulfil its
destiny, Roman Catholicism must accept freedom of thought; magnificently
democratic as it has been from the beginning in some respects--the chair
of St. Peter being accessible to the humblest peasant's son--it must
accept a deeper and wider democracy.
Protestantism, on the other hand, must become heart-broken over its
divisions, religious and social. It must become more brotherly, more
lowly, more worshipful, in a word, more childlike.
It is unthinkable that either of these great forms of Christianity will
pass away. They will change. They are already changing, and each, as
it changes, moves toward the other.
Thought and life move through conflict to unity.
Thesis--antithesis--synthesis--that is the great law. The great and,
perhaps, inevitable stage of antithesis that has divided Christendom for
four centuries is drawing to a close. Latin Christianity needed
Protestantism. It was the Protestant Reformation that inspired the
counter-reformation. Roman Catholicism owes to Luther and Calvin a
purer faith and a new lease of life. To-day the noblest and most
energetic types of Roman Catholicism are found in Protestant lands, and
the service of Protestantism to Roman Catholicism is not yet finished.
Just as certainly, Protestantism needs Roman Catholicism. Some
exposition of this has already been attempted. It is hard to see how
any one who believes Roman Catholicism to be a tissue of errors can
account for its extraordinary tenacity of life. Why should God preserve
it unless because its mission is not yet accomplished?
Far apart and deeply antagonistic these two great forms of Christianity
may seem, but, after all, it is an inescapable law on this earth that
two people who try to get as far away from each other as possible must
meet at last; and hatred is nearer love than is indifference. Human
nature wearies of antagonism, and the longer it lasts the warmer the
welcome for its passing.
Like denominationalism, this four hundred year old antagonism seems a
mighty tree but, like denominationalism, it is hollow within. Some day
the great winds of God will arise, and when they begin to blow, this
tree, too, will fall.
The thirteenth century was one of the great centuries of Christian
history. In it feudalism reached its height, and chivalry its fullest
flower. In it Gothic architecture and medieval philosophy reared their
noblest monuments. It was the century of the greatest of medieval, or,
perhaps, of distinctively Christian, poets, Dante, the greatest of
Christian theologians, Aquinas, the greatest of Popes, Innocent III.,
the two most winsome of saints, St. Francis and St. Louis of France. In
all its greatness, the thirteenth century is distinctively Roman
Catholic. The nineteenth century, also, is another of the less than
half a dozen of the greatest of Christian centuries, and it is
distinctively a Protestant century. Its great achievements in
geographical and astronomical discovery, scientific investigation,
increase of human comfort and wealth, and above all its unparalleled
extension of liberty--bear all of them the Protestant stamp.
These two centuries have thus established beyond dispute the right of
those two great historic forms of Christianity to the lasting reverence
and gratitude of mankind.
Roman Catholicism has cherished the divine principle of unity. At great
cost it has preserved unity. It has not been equally careful of the
divine principle of liberty.
Protestantism has gloriously fought and suffered and died for liberty.
It has never highly valued unity. It has even gloried in division. But
unity is a diviner thing than even liberty. Liberty is precious only as
the indispensable condition and pre-requisite of true unity.
It is a lovely and thrilling hope that the twentieth century may prove
to be the century of the Great Christianity, the Christianity which will
extinguish neither Latin nor Teutonic Christianity but comprehend and
blend them, the simple, yet free and varied, democratic, passionate
Christianity of all who love the Lord Jesus Christ and seek His Kingdom
on the earth, the Christianity which was the first and will be the last.
This, at least, can be said, that the unparalleled problems of social
and political reconstruction facing the world to-day can be rightly
solved only by a great religious devotion, and it is difficult to see
how that devotion can be secured except by a unification of the great
Churches of Christendom and their common baptism into the spirit of
primitive Christianity.
And let no one say the Great Christianity is only a beautiful dream.
Already, in that forever holy strip of land where towns were reduced to
heaps of dust and trees to splintered trunks, where earth was gashed and
torn as men never gashed and tore the kindly bosom of mother earth
before, and where beautiful human bodies were mutilated and destroyed
with a fury unknown in history, there the Great Christianity has
disclosed itself. There at the mouth of hell unfolded the sweetest
flowers that ever bloomed on earth. There in the brotherhood of the
trenches became visible the Great Christianity. There Anglicans,
Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Salvationists,
and every other kind of Protestants, aye, and Roman Catholics, kneeled
together to commemorate the suffering and love of their Common Redeemer,
the Soldier-King.
"Father," wrote a Manitoba boy to his father from the trenches, in the
spring of 1917, "we have a religion here but, father, it is not the same
as yours. You don't like the Catholics or the Church of England, but,
father, we love everybody here. We are all one. And, father," the boy
went on, "when we come back, our religion is going to blow yours
sky-high."
A prophecy not as yet fulfilled but not, perhaps, beyond fulfillment.
Certain it is that our soldier boys will never crowd into our churches
as they crowded to the colors till those churches are the home of a
Christianity that has the breadth and the brotherliness and something,
at least, of the heroism of the Christianity of the trenches.
But something more must be said about the Great Christianity.
It may be that Latin Christianity and Teutonic combined do not represent
the full splendor and power of Christianity, and that the drastic social
changes which must be carried out in the next quarter of a century, or
even in a briefer period, call for the re-inforcement of another race
and another sort of Christianity.
The distinctive Greek Christianity of the first five or six centuries
made its contribution and passed away with the vanishing of the original
and pure Hellenic race. But there is a Greek Christianity which has
found a new lease of life and a new home in that race which has largely
replaced the Greek in his own home and has diffused itself over most of
eastern Europe, the Slavonic. There is a great Christianity which is
still called Greek, but which is rather Slavonic Christianity, and which
might more narrowly and specifically be called Russian Christianity,
after that people who constitute the largest section of Greek
Christianity and promise to be the most influential.
It may well be that the Great Christianity which the world so
desperately needs will be neither Latin nor Teutonic Christianity nor
both in combination, but a blend of Latin and Teutonic and American and
Russian Christianity, and it does not seem unlikely that the
contribution of the last of the four may be the most precious and vital
of them all. Perhaps in the part Russia is destined to play in the next
fifty years will be found the most striking example in all history of
how it is God's way to choose the foolish things of the world that He
may put to shame them that are wise; and the weak things of the world
that He may put to shame the things that are strong; and the base things
of the world and the things that are despised that He may bring to
nought the things that are.
The Slav has been the Cinderella of the European sisterhood. Perhaps we
might say, the ugly duckling. From a military point of view he has been
no match for the Teuton. In the long struggle of the last thousand
years between the Teuton and the Slav, the Teuton has nearly always
showed himself the stronger. For centuries he has ruled over the Slav.
In the industrial arts, in all that pertains to the utilization of
natural resources for the material well-being of men, in agriculture and
mining and manufacturing and trading, the Slav has been immeasurably
more backward.
Mastered and oppressed by the Teuton on the West, subjugated for
centuries by the Tartar on the East, the Slav has remained until
yesterday a people forgotten and despised, shrouded in poverty,
ignorance, mystery. And now out of that twilight he has stepped,
ignorant, fanatical, and in his ignorance or superstition capable of
ferocity, yet essentially the most child-like, the most religious, the
most brotherly, the most idealistic of European peoples. What other
people call their country, what the Russian calls his--_holy_ Russia?
The peoples of the West, especially the Teutonic or the Anglo-Saxon, are
weak where they are strong. It is their practicalness that has given
them their high place; it is their practicalness which keeps them from
the highest. It is hard for them to believe in a Holy City. If they do
believe in it, they do not care to seek it till they are sure of a
practicable road. But the Slav instinctively believes in a Holy City,
and only needs to be told where it is to be found to set out forthwith
over rivers, bogs, and rugged mountain ranges.
And it is just these things the Western world needs in this crisis--the
spirit of the little child, the spirit of brotherhood, the sense of the
pre-eminence of religion, the idealism that will risk everything for a
dream.
The first movements of the awakened Russian may be unsteady. His new
found freedom may act on him with intoxicating, almost deranging power.
But they know little of the real Russian soul who dread the liberation
of that long-prisoned soul and its free play on the Western world.
In the material ground-work of our civilization, its farming, its
mining, its building of steamships, of railroads, of modern cities, the
Teutonic races have taken the lead. They have builded the house. Now,
it may be, when the finer problems arise of living in the home in
harmony and helpfulness and in a high and holy spirit, it is the Slav
who, in his turn, will take the lead. The Greek, the Italian, the
Frank, the Spaniard, the Anglo-Saxon have successively held the premier
place. The day of the Slav may now be dawning.
Nor yet is our forecast of the Great Christianity complete. It may be
that there awaits us, though in a more distant future, a still more
striking illustration of how God chooses for honor the despised things
of the world. Of all races the most despised, the most oppressed, has
been the African, and that not for generations or centuries but for
millenniums. Europe, Asia, and America have all made Africa their
servant. The dark Continent stands pre-eminent in suffering and in
service. But it is in suffering and in service that He, too, the Coming
King, has been pre-eminent. One reason why Africa has been the hunting
ground of the slaver from immemorial times is because in the African
nature immemorially and inextinguishably is the readiness to serve. All
other races love to rule; some of them, like the Latin and the Teutonic,
have been intensely proud, greedy of power, and averse from service.
The African race is the one race which has by nature the spirit of Him
who came not to be ministered unto but to minister. The African race,
too, is of all races the most child-like, the most care-free, the one
most ready to delight in simple things and the things of to-day. The
white races, in comparison, are old, vigilant, suspicious, anxious,
care-worn. There is no question which, in these respects, is nearest the
ideal of Jesus. The greedy, ambitious spirit of the Western nations,
never contented, their delight in to-day always poisoned by the fear or
the fascination of to-morrow, is far from the spirit of Jesus. It may
be that the white man will yet have to sit at the feet of the black, and
that, when Christ is glorified, it will be that race that has, beyond
all other races, trodden Christ's path of suffering and service which,
beyond all others, will be glorified with Him.
The re-action of the uncounted millions of Asia on Christianity--the
contributions of the ancient and deeply experienced brown and yellow
races to that religion in which alone they can find their fullest
development--is another fascinating subject for enquiry and speculation;
but these influences, potent and inescapable as they promise to be, fall
outside the limits of the period considered by this book.
CONCLUSION
The task before Western civilization to-day, it is probable, is the
greatest civilization has ever faced. It is a complete reconstruction
that is demanded. It must be accomplished with speed. All the Western
nations are involved. There have been other reconstructions as drastic,
but either they have been permitted a much longer period of development,
or they have been confined to much smaller areas.
The struggle will not be over religious opinions, or political theories,
though both are involved. It will be over what touch men ordinarily
much more deeply, their livelihood and their profits, and the war has
seemed to show that men will sacrifice their lives more readily than
their profits. It will be a struggle no class can escape.
The readjustments would be difficult enough in themselves if men engaged
in them in the calmest and kindliest spirit. But many who will be
foremost in the task of reconstruction bring to the problems the
bitterness and distrust engendered by centuries of cruel wrong.
Nothing but Christianity can carry the Western peoples through this
unparallelled crisis. But it must be Christianity in its purity and its
fulness, not a Christianity wasting its energy on doctrinal controversy,
broken by denominational divisions, or absorbed in taking care of its
machinery. It must, in short, be a Christianity neither
intellectualized nor sectarianized nor institutionalized.
It must be a Christianity, born as at the first in the hearts of the
common people, simple, democratic, brotherly; like a tree, its top in
the sky but its roots deep in common earth; treating institutions, even
the most venerable, as the mere temporary contrivances that they are;
with the faith of Jesus in the human heart and in the ultimate triumph
of love, and a willingness, like His, to find a throne in a cross.
Warwick Bro's & Rutter, Limited,
Printers and Bookbinders, Toronto, Canada.