denominational auspices, and later, as a newspaper reporter, I was
frequently assigned to conferences and evangelistic meetings. I made my
first “hit” as a reporter by my vivacious accounts of the performances
of a “trance” revivalist, who operated in a skating-rink in my
town. There was something indescribably “woozy” in those cataleptic
manifestations in the bare, ill-lighted hall. I even recall vividly
the bump of the mourners’ heads as they struck the floor, while the
evangelist moved among the benches haranguing the crowd. Somewhat
earlier I used to delight in the calisthenic performances of a “boy
preacher” who ranged my part of the world. His physical activities were
as astonishing as his volubility. At the high moment of his discourse
he would take a flying leap from the platform to the covered marble
baptismal font. He wore pumps for greater ease in these flights, and
would run the length of the church with astonishing nimbleness, across
the backs of the seats over the heads of the kneeling congregation.
I often listened with delicious horripilations to the most startling
of this evangelist’s perorations, in which he described the coming of
the Pale Rider. It was a shuddersome thing. The horror of it, and the
wailing and crying it evoked, come back to me after thirty years.
The visit of an evangelist used to be an important event in my
town; converts were objects of awed attention, particularly in the
case of notorious hardened sinners whose repentance awakened the
greatest public interest and sympathy. Now that we have passed the
quarter-million mark, revivals cause less stir, for evangelists of
the more militant, spectacular type seem to avoid the larger cities.
Those who have never observed the effect of a religious revival upon
a community not too large or too callous to be shaken by it have no
idea of the power exerted by the popular evangelist. It is commonly
said that these visits only temporarily arrest the march of sin; that
after a brief experience of godly life the converts quickly relapse;
but I believe that these strident trumpetings of the ram’s horn are
not without their salutary effect. The saloons, for a time at least,
find fewer customers; the forces of decency are strengthened, and the
churches usually gain in membership. Most of us prefer our religion
without taint of melodrama, but it is far from my purpose to asperse
any method or agency that may win men to better ways of life.
At one time and another I seem to have read a good deal on various
aspects of religion. Newman and the Tractarians interested me
immensely. I purchased all of Newman’s writings, and made a collection
of his photographs, several of which gaze at me, a little mournfully
and rebukingly, as I write; for presently I took a cold plunge into
Matthew Arnold, and Rome ceased to call me. Arnold’s writings on
religious subjects have been obscured by the growing reputation of his
poetry; but it was only yesterday that “Literature and Dogma” and “God
and the Bible” enjoyed great vogue. He translated continental criticism
into terms that made it accessible to laymen, and encouraged liberal
thought. He undoubtedly helped many to a new orientation in matters of
faith.
My reading in church history, dogma, and criticism has been about
that of the average layman. I have enjoyed following the experiments
of the psychical researchers, and have been a diligent student of
the proceedings of heresy trials. The Andover case and the Briggs
controversy once seemed important, and they doubtless were, but they
established nothing of value. The churches are warier of heresy trials
than they were; and in this connection I hold that a clergyman who
entertains an honest doubt as to the virgin birth or the resurrection
may still be a faithful servant of Jesus Christ. To unfrock him merely
arouses controversy, and draws attention to questions that can never
be absolutely determined by any additional evidence likely to be
adduced. The continuance in the ministry of a doubter on such points
becomes a question of taste which I admit to be debatable; but where,
as has happened once in late years, the culprit was an earnest and
sincere doer of Christianity’s appointed tasks, his conviction served
no purpose beyond arousing a species of cynical enjoyment in the bosom
of Smith, and of smug satisfaction in those who righteously flung a
well-meaning man to the lions.
Far more serious are the difficulties of those ministers of every shade
of faith who find themselves curbed and more or less openly threatened
for courageously attacking evils they find at their own doors by those
responsible for the conditions they assail. Only recently two or
three cases have come to my attention of clergymen who had awakened
hostility in their congregations by their zeal in social service. The
loyal support of such men by their fellows seems to me far nobler than
the pursuit of heretics. The Smiths of our country have learned to
admire courage in their politics, and there is no reason for believing
that they will not rally to a religion that practices it undauntedly.
Christ, of all things, was no coward.
There is, I believe, nowhere manifest at this time, within the larger
Protestant bodies at least, any disposition to defend the inerrancy of
the Bible, and this is fortunate in that it leaves the churches free to
deal with more vital matters. It seems fair to assume that criticism
has spent its force, and done its worst. The spirit of the Bible has
not been harmed by it. The reliance of the Hebrews on the beneficence
of Jehovah, the testimony of Jesus to the enduring worth of charity,
mercy, and love, have in nowise been injured by textual criticism.
The Old Testament, fancifully imagined as the Word of God given by
dictation to specially chosen amanuenses, appeals to me no more
strongly than a Bible recognized as the vision of brooding spirits,
who, in a time when the world was young, and earth was nearer heaven
than now, were conscious of longings and dreams that were wonderfully
realized in their own hearts and lives. And the essentials of Christ’s
teachings have lost nothing by criticism.
The Smiths who have drifted away from the churches will hardly be
brought back to the pews by even the most scholarly discussion of
doubtful texts. Smith is not interested in the authenticity of lines or
chapters, nor do nice points of dogma touch the affairs of his life or
the needs of his soul. The fact that certain gentlemen in session at
Nicæa in A.D. 325 issued a statement of faith for his guidance strikes
him as negligible; it does not square with any need of which he is
conscious in his own breast.
A church that would regain the lost Smiths will do well to satisfy that
large company of the estranged and the indifferent that one need not
believe all that is contained between the lids of the Bible to be a
Christian. Much of the Bible is vulnerable, but Jesus explained himself
in terms whose clarity has in nowise been clouded by criticism. Smith
has no time, even if he had the scholarship, to pass upon the merits of
the Book of Daniel; but give him Christ’s own words without elucidation
and he is at once on secure ground. There only lately came into my
hands a New Testament in which every utterance of Jesus is given the
emphasis of black-face type, with the effect of throwing his sayings
into high relief; and no one reading his precepts thus presented can
fail to be impressed by the exactness with which He formulated his
“secret” into a working platform for the guidance of men. Verily there
could be no greater testimony to the divine authority of the Carpenter
of Nazareth than the persistence with which his ideal flowers upon the
ever-mounting mass of literature produced to explain Him.
II
Smith will not be won back to the church through appeals to theology,
or stubborn reaffirmations of creeds and dogmas. I believe it may
safely be said that the great body of ministers individually recognize
this. A few cling to a superstition that there is inherent in religion
itself a power which by some sort of magic, independently of man, will
make the faith of Christ triumphant in the world. I do not believe
so; Smith could not be made to think so. And Smith’s trouble is, if I
understand him, not with faith after all, but with works. The church
does not impress him as being an efficient machine that yields adequate
returns upon the investment. If Smith can be brought to works through
faith, well enough; but he is far more critical of works than of faith.
Works are within the range of his experience; he admires achievement:
show him a foundation of works and interest him in strengthening that
foundation and in building upon it, and his faith will take care of
itself.
The word we encounter oftenest in the business world nowadays is
“efficiency”; the thing of which Smith must first be convinced is that
the church may be made efficient. And on that ground he must be met
honestly, for Smith is a practical being, who surveys religion, as
everything else, with an eye of calculation. At a time when the ethical
spirit in America is more healthy and vigorous than ever before, Smith
does not connect the movements of which he is aware in business and
politics with religion. Religion seems to him to be a poor starved side
issue, not a source and guiding spirit in the phenomena he observes and
respects.
The economic waste represented in church investment and administration
does not impress Smith favorably, nor does it awaken admiration in
Jones or in me. Smith knows that two groceries on opposite sides of the
street are usually one too many. We used to be told that denominational
rivalry aroused zeal, but this cannot longer be more than an absurd
pretense. This idea that competition is essential to the successful
extension of Christianity continues to bring into being many crippled
and dying churches, as Smith well knows. And he has witnessed, too,
a deterioration of the church’s power through its abandonment of
philanthropic work to secular agencies, while churches of the familiar
type, locked up tight all the week save for a prayer-meeting and
choir-practice, have nothing to do. What strikes Smith is their utter
wastefulness and futility.
The lack of harmony in individual churches--and there is a good deal
of it--is not reassuring to the outsider. The cynical attitude of
a good many non-church-going Smiths is due to the strifes, often
contemptibly petty, prevailing within church walls. It seems difficult
for Christians to dwell together in peace and concord. In almost every
congregation there appears to be a party favorable to the minister and
one antagonistic to him. A minister who seemed to me to fill more fully
the Christian ideal than any man I have known was harassed in the most
brutal fashion by a congregation incapable of appreciating the fidelity
and self-sacrifice that marked his ministry. I recall with delight
the fighting qualities of another clergyman who was an exceptionally
brilliant pulpit orator. He was a Methodist who had fallen to the lot
of a church that had not lately been distinguished for able preaching.
This man filled his church twice every Sunday, and it was the one
sought oftenest by strangers within the city’s gates; yet about half
his own membership hated him cordially. Though I was never of his
flock, I enjoyed his sermons; and knowing something of his relations
with the opposition party in his congregation, I recall with keenest
pleasure how he fought back. Now and then an arrow grazed his ear; but
he was unheedful of warnings that he would be pilloried for heresy. He
landed finally in his old age in an obscure church, where he died,
still fighting with his back to the wall. Though the shepherd’s crook
as a weapon is going out of style, I have an idea that clergymen who
stand sturdily for their own ideals receive far kindlier consideration
than those who meekly bow to vestries, trustees, deacons, elders, and
bishops.
Music has long been notoriously a provoker of discord. Once in
my news-hunting days I suffered the ignominy of a “scoop” on a
choir-rumpus, and I thereupon formed the habit of lending an anxious
ear to rumors of trouble in choir-lofts. The average ladder-like _Te
Deum_, built up for the display of the soprano’s vocal prowess, has
always struck me as an unholy thing. I even believe that the horrors of
highly embellished offertories have done much to tighten purse-strings
and deaden generous impulses. The presence behind the pulpit of a
languid quartette praising God on behalf of the bored sinners in the
pews has always seemed to me the profanest of anomalies. Nor has long
contemplation of vested choirs in Episcopal churches shaken my belief
that church music should be an affair of the congregation.
There seems to exist inevitably, even in the smallest congregation, “a
certain rich man” whose opinions must be respected by the pulpit. The
minister of a large congregation confessed to me despairingly, not long
ago, that the courage had been taken out of him by the protests evoked
whenever he touched even remotely upon social topics like child labor,
or shorter hours for workingmen. There were manufacturers in that
church who would not “stand for it.” Ministers are warned that they
must attend to their own business, which is preaching the Word of God
not so concretely or practically as to offend the “pillars.”
Just what is it, I wonder, that a minister may preach without hazarding
his job? It is said persistently that the trouble with the church at
the present day is that the ministers no longer preach the Word of God;
that if Christian Truth were again taught with the old vigor, people
would hear it gladly. This is, I believe, an enormous fallacy. I know
churches where strict orthodoxy has been preached uninterruptedly for
years, and which have steadily declined in spite of it--or because
of it. Not long ago, in a great assembly of one of the strongest
denominations, when that cry for a return to the “Old Bible Truth” was
raised, one minister rose and attacked the plea, declaring that he had
never faltered in his devotion to ancient dogma, and yet his church
was dying. And even so, many churches whose walls echo uninterruptedly
an absolutely impeccable orthodoxy are failing. We shall not easily
persuade Smith to forego the golf-links on Sunday morning to hear the
“Old Gospel Truth” preached in out-worn, meaningless phrases. Those old
coins have the gold in them, but they must be recast in new moulds if
they are again to pass current.
III
The difficulties of the clergy are greatly multiplied in these days.
The pulpit has lost its old authority. It no longer necessarily follows
that the ministers are the men of greatest cultivation in their
community. The Monday morning newspapers formerly printed, in my town,
pretty full excerpts of sermons. I recall the case of one popular
minister whose sermons continued to be printed long after he had
removed to another city. Nowadays nothing from the pulpit that is not
sensational is considered worth printing. And the parson has lost his
social importance, moving back slowly toward his old place below the
salt. He used to be “asked,” even if he was not sincerely “expected” at
the functions given by his parishioners; but this has changed now that
fewer families have any parson to invite.
A minister’s is indubitably the hardest imaginable lot. Every one
criticizes him. He is abused for illiberality, or, seeking to be all
things to all men, he is abused for consorting with sinners. His
door-bell tinkles hourly, and he must answer the behest of people
he does not know, to marry or bury people he never heard of. He is
expected to preach eloquently, to augment his flock, to keep a hand
on the Sunday school, to sit on platforms in the interest of all good
causes, and to bear himself with discretion amid the tortuous mazes
of church and secular politics. There seem to be, in churches of all
kinds, ambitious pontiffs--lay popes--possessed of an ambition to hold
both their fellow laymen and their meek, long-suffering minister in
subjection. Why anyone should wish to be a church boss I do not know;
and yet the supremacy is sometimes won after a struggle that has
afforded the keenest delight to the cynical Smiths on the outside. One
must view these internecine wars more in sorrow than in anger. They
certainly contribute not a little to popular distrust of the church as
a conservator of love and peace.
There are men in the ministry who can have had no clear vocation to the
clerical life; but there are misfits and failures in all professions.
Some of these, through bigotry or stupidity, do much to justify Smith’s
favorite dictum that there is as much Christianity outside the church
as within it. Now and then I find a Smith whose distrust of religion
is based upon some disagreeable adventure with a clergyman, and I
can’t deny that my own experiences with the cloth have been, on one or
two occasions, disturbing. As to the more serious of these I may not
speak, but I shall mention two incidents, for the reason that they are
such trifles as affect Smith with joy. Once in a parish-meeting I saw
a bishop grossly humiliated for having undertaken to rebuke a young
minister for wearing a chasuble, or not wearing it, or for removing
it in the pulpit, or the other way round,--at any rate, it was some
such momentous point in ecclesiastical millinery that had loosened
a frightful fury of recrimination. The very sight or suggestion
of chasubles has ever since awakened in me the most unchristian
resentment. While we fought over the chasuble I suppose people actually
died within bow-shot of the church without knowing that “if any man sin
we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous.”
And speaking of bishops, I venture the interpolation that that office,
believed by many to be the softest berth in Zion as it exists in the
Episcopal Church, is in fact the most vexatious and thankless to
which any man can aspire; nor have I in mind the laborious lives of
adventurous spirits like Whipple, Hare, and Rowe, but others who carry
the burdens of established dioceses, where the troubles of one minister
are multiplied upon the apostolic head by the number of parishes in his
jurisdiction.
Again, at a summer resort on our North Atlantic Coast once familiar to
me, there stood, within reach of fierce seas, one of the most charming
of churches. It was sought daily by visitors, and many women, walking
the shore, used to pause there to rest, for prayer, or out of sheer
curiosity. And yet it appeared that no woman might venture into this
edifice hatless. The _locum tenens_, recalling St. Paul’s question
whether it is “comely that a woman pray unto God uncovered,” was so
outraged by the visits of hatless women to the church that he tacked
a notice on the door setting forth in severe terms that, whereas men
should enter the church bareheaded, women should not desecrate the
temple by entering uncovered. I remember that when I had read that
warning, duly signed with the clergyman’s name, I sat down on the rocks
and looked at the ocean for a long time, marveling that a sworn servant
of God, consecrated in his service by the apostles’ successors, able
to spend a couple of months at one of the pleasantest summer resorts
in America, should have been horror-struck at the unholy intrusion of
a hatless girl in his church, when people in the hot city he had fled
suffered and died, ignorant of the very name of Christ.
IV
“My church home” is an old phrase one still hears in communities
whose social life is not yet wholly divorced from the church. There
is something pleasant and reassuring in the sound of it; and I do not
believe we shall ever have in America an adequate substitute for that
tranquility and peace which are still observable in towns where the
church retains its hold upon the larger part of the community, and
where it exercises a degree of compulsion upon men and women who find
in its life a faith and hope that have proved not the least strong of
the bulwarks of democracy. In wholly strange towns I have experienced
the sense of this in a way I am reluctant to think wholly sentimental.
Where, on crisp winter evenings, the young people come trooping happily
in from the meetings of their own auxiliary societies, where vim and
energy are apparent in the gathering congregation, and where one sees
with half an eye that the pastor is a true leader and shepherd of his
flock--in such a picture there must be, for many of us, something
that lays deep hold upon the heart. They are not concerned in such
gatherings with higher criticism, but with cleanness and wholesomeness
of life, and with that faith, never to be too closely scrutinized or
analyzed, that “singeth low in every heart.”
One might weep to think how rare those pictures must become--one
might weep if there were not the great problems now forced upon us,
of chance and change, that drive home to all thinking men and women
the great need of infusing the life of the spirit into our industrial
and political struggles. If, in the end, our great experiment in
self-government fail, it will be through the loss of those spiritual
forces which from the beginning have guided and ruled us. It is only
lately that we have begun to hear of Christian socialism, and a
plausible phrase it is; but true democracy seems to me essentially
Christian. When we shall have thoroughly christianized our democracy,
and democratized our Christianity, we shall not longer yield to moods
of despair, or hearken to prophets of woe.
The Smith for whom I presume to speak is not indifferent to the call of
revitalized democracy. He has confessed to me his belief that the world
is a kindlier place, and that more agencies of helpfulness are at work,
than ever before; and to restore the recalcitrant Smith to the church
it is necessary first of all to convince him that the church honestly
seeks to be the chief of such agencies. The Young Men’s Christian
Association, the Charity Organization Society, and the Settlement House
all afford outlets for Smith’s generous benevolences. And it was a dark
day for the church when she allowed these multiplying philanthropies
to slip away from her. Smith points to them with a flourish, and says
that he prefers to give his money where it is put to practical use. To
him the church is an economic parasite, doing business on one day of
the week, immune from taxation, and the last of his neighbors to scrape
the snow from her sidewalks! The fact that there are within fifteen
minutes’ walk of his house half a dozen churches, all struggling to
maintain themselves, and making no appreciable impression upon the
community, is not lost upon Smith,--the practical, unemotional, busy
Smith. Smith speaks to me with sincere admiration of his friend, the
Salvation Army major, to whom he opens his purse ungrudgingly; but the
church over the way--that grim expensive pile of stone, closed for all
but five or six hours of the week!--Smith shakes his head ruefully when
you suggest it. It is to him a bad investment that ought to be turned
over to a receiver for liquidation.
Smith’s wife has derived bodily and spiritual help from Christian
Science, and Smith speaks with respect of that cult. He is half
persuaded that there must be something in it. A great many of the
Smiths who never had a church tie, or who gave up church-going,
have allied themselves with Christian Science,--what many of Mrs.
Eddy’s followers in familiar talk abbreviate as “Science,” as though
Science were the more important half of it. This proves at least that
the Smiths are not averse to some sort of spiritual food, or quite
clearly demonstrates a dissatisfaction with the food they had formerly
received. It proves also that the old childlike faith in miracles is
still possible even in our generation. Christian Science struts in
robes of prosperity in my bailiwick, and its followers pain and annoy
me only by their cheerful assumption that they have just discovered God.