Too many churches and too much partyism! It is love—love through grace
of God—truth where we can find it—which shall irradiate the life that
is. If when we have prepared ourselves for the life to come love be
wanting, nothing else is much worth while. Not alone the love of man
for woman, but the love of woman for woman and of man for man; the
divine fraternity taught us by the Sermon on the Mount; the religion of
giving, not of getting; of whole-hearted giving; of joy in the love and
the joy of others.
_Who giveth himself with his alms feeds three— Himself, his hungering
neighbor and Me_.
For myself I can truthfully subscribe to the formula: “I believe in God
the Father Almighty; Maker of heaven and earth. And Jesus Christ, his
only Son, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried; He
descended into hell, the third day He rose again from the dead; He
ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God, the Father
Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.”
That is my faith. It is my religion. It was my cradle song. It may not
be, dear ones of contrariwise beliefs, your cradle song or your belief,
or your religion. What boots it? Can you discover another in word and
deed, in luminous, far-reaching power of speech and example, to walk by
the side of this the Anointed One of your race and of my belief?
As the Irish priest said to the British prelate touching the doctrine
of purgatory: “You may go further and fare worse, my lord,” so may I
say to my Jewish friends—“Though the stars in their courses lied to the
Wise Men of the desert, the bloody history of your Judea, altogether
equal in atrocity to the bloody history of our Christendom, has yet to
fulfill the promise of a Messiah—and were it not well for those who
proclaim themselves God’s people to pause and ask, ‘Has He not arisen
already?’”
I would not inveigh against either the church or its ministry; I would
not stigmatize temporal preaching; I would have ministers of religion
as free to discuss the things of this world as the statesmen and the
journalists; but with this difference: That the objective point with
them shall be the regeneration of man through grace of God and not the
winning of office or the exploitation of parties and newspapers.
Journalism is yet too unripe to do more than guess at truth from a
single side. The statesman stands mainly for political organism. Until
he dies he is suspect. The pulpit remains therefore still the moral
hope of the universe and the spiritual light of mankind.
It must be nonpartisan. It must be nonprofessional. It must be manly
and independent. But it must also be worldy-wise, not artificial,
sympathetic, broad-minded and many-sided, equally ready to smite wrong
in high places and to kneel by the bedside of the lowly and the poor.
I have so found most of the clergymen I have known, the exceptions too
few to remember. In spite of the opulence we see about us let us not
take to ourselves too much conceit. May every pastor emulate the
virtues of that village preacher of whom it was written that:
_Truth from his lips prevailed with double sway, And fools who came to
scoff, remained to pray._
_A man he was to all the country dear, And passing rich with forty
pounds a year._
_His house was known to all the vagrant train, He chid their
wanderings, but relieved their pain; The long-remembered beggar was his
guest, Whose beard descending swept his aged breast; The ruined
spendthrift, now no longer proud, Claimed kindred there, and had his
claims allowed; The broken soldier, kindly bade to stay, Sate by the
fire, and talked the night away; Wept o’er his wounds, or, tales of
sorrow done, Shouldered his crutch, and showed how fields were won.
Pleased with his guests, the good man learned to glow, And quite forgot
their vices in their woe; Careless their merits or their faults to
scan, His pity gave ere charity began._