THE NEW LIFE--INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL
The health department of a modern city is charged with a double duty: it
has to care for cases of disease, and it has to suggest and enforce laws
to keep the city sanitary. The former task--the treatment of
sickness--is much more widely recognized as the proper function of the
medical profession; the latter--the prevention of the causes of
illness--is a newer, but a more far-reaching, undertaking. When Pasteur
was carrying on his investigations into the origins of certain diseases,
most of the leading physicians and surgeons made light of his work: "How
should this chemist, who cannot treat the simplest case of sickness nor
perform the most trifling operation, have anything to contribute to
medical science?" But Pasteur's discovery of the part played by bacilli
not only altered profoundly the work of physicians and surgeons, but
opened up the larger task of preventive medicine.
The Gospel of Christ, in its endeavor to make and keep men whole, faces
a similarly double labor. It has its ministry of rescue and healing for
sinning men and women; it has its plan of spiritual health for society.
It comes to every man with its offer of rebirth into newness of life:
"If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature." It comes to society
with its offer of a regenesis, a paradise of love on earth. The life of
God enters our world by two paths--personally, through individuals whom
it recreates, and by whom it remakes society; socially, through a new
communal order which reshapes the men and women who live under it. The
New Testament speaks of both entrances of the Spirit of God into human
life: it pictures "_one_ born from above," and "the holy _city_ coming
down from God out of heaven." The two processes supplement each other.
Consecrated man and wife make their home Christian; a Christian home
renders the conversion of its children unnecessary; they know themselves
children of God as soon as they know themselves anything at all. Saved
souls save society, and a saved society saves souls.
Religion must always be personal; each must respond for himself to his
highest inspirations. A child may confuse the divine voice with that of
its parents, through whom the divine message comes; but a day arrives
when he learns that God speaks directly to him, perhaps differently from
the way in which his parents understand His voice, and he must listen
for himself alone. A Job may take at second-hand the conventional views
of God current in his day, and through them have some touch with the
Divine; but this will seem mere hearsay when the stress of life compels
him to fight his way past the opinions of his most devout friends to a
personal vision of God. Religious experience is hardly worthy the name
until one can say, "O God, Thou art _my_ God." There is no sphere of
life in which a man is so conscious of his isolation as in his dealings
with his Highest. The most serious decisions of his life--his
apprehension of Truth, his obedience to Right, his response to Love--he
must settle for himself.
Space is but narrow--east and west--There
is not room for two abreast.
"Each one of us shall give account of himself to God." In our
consciousness of sin, in our penitence, in our faith, others may
stimulate and inspire us, may point the way saying, "Behold the Lamb of
God," may go with us in a common confession of guilt and a common
aspiration towards the Most High, but we are hardly conscious of their
fellowship; it is the living God with whom we personally have to do.
Points have we all of us within our souls
Where all stand single.
The Gospel comes as a summons to men one by one. Christ knocks at each
man's door, offering the most complete personal friendship with him.
Were there but a single child of God astray, the Good Shepherd would
adventure His life for him, and there is joy in the presence of the
angels over _one_ sinner that repenteth.
The Evangel has always been good news to sinning people who wished to be
different. In _Adam Bede_ Mrs. Poyser says of Mr. Craig, "It was a pity
he couldna' be hatched o'er again, and hatched different." The Gospel
claims to be the power of God which can make the worst and lowest of
men--an Iago or a Caliban--into sons of the Most High in the measure of
the stature of the fulness of Christ.
This has seemed incredible to most outsiders. Celsus in the Second
Century, in his attack on Christianity, wrote, "It must be clear to
everybody, I should think, that those who are sinners by nature and
training, none could change, not even by punishment--to say nothing of
doing it by pity." Dickens' Pecksniff "always said of what was very bad
that it was very natural." But it has been the glory of the Gospel that
it could speak in the past tense of some at least of the sins of its
adherents: "such _were_ some of you." Individual regeneration will ever
remain a large part of God's work through His Church. Unless we can
raise the dead in sin to life in Christ, we have lost the quickening
Spirit of God; so long as the world lieth in wickedness, every follower
of Jesus must go with Him after men one by one, to seek and to save that
which was lost.
But a man's religious experience is vitally affected by social
conditions. Moses' protest against the slavery of the Israelites in
Egypt sprang from his feeling that it hindered their fellowship with
God. "Let My people go," he felt God saying, "_that they may serve Me_."
Mencius, the Chinese sage, wrote: "If the people have not a certain
livelihood, they will not have a fixed heart. And if they have not a
fixed heart, there is nothing which they will not do in the way of
self-abandonment. An intelligent ruler will regulate the livelihood of
the people, so as to make sure that, above, they have sufficient
wherewith to serve their parents, and, below, sufficient wherewith to
support their wives and children; that in good years they shall always
be abundantly satisfied, and that in bad years they shall escape the
danger of perishing. After this he may urge them, and they will proceed
to what is good." Christian workers, today, know well how all but
impossible it is to get a man to live as a Christian, until he is given
at least the chance to earn a decent living.
But we have to be on our guard lest we overemphasize the force of
circumstances either to foster or hamper a man's fellowship with God.
The life of Jesus is the irrefutable argument that the Lord's song may
be sung in a strange land. It is always possible to be a Christian
under the most unfavorable conditions, provided the Christian does not
shirk the inevitable cross. But the social order under which men live
shapes their characters. Ibsen calls it "the moral water supply," and
religion is intensely interested in the reservoirs whence men draw their
ideals.
A glance over a few typical forms of social order will illustrate its
influence on character:
Perhaps the noblest society of antiquity was the Greek city state. It
expected its citizens to be all of them warriors, statesmen,
legislators, judges. It set a premium upon the virtues of courage,
self-control, justice and public spirit. It delivered its citizens from
that "greasy domesticity" which Byron loathed in the typical Englishman
of the Georgian epoch, and made them civic minded. But its ideal was
within the attainment of but a fraction of the population. The slaves
had no incentive to these virtues; and it is estimated that in Athens in
the Fourth Century B.C. there were 400,000 slaves and 100,000 citizens.
The many did the hard work, debarred from the highest inspirations, in
order that the privileged few might have freedom to achieve their lofty
ideals. And outside the state, or the Greek world, the rest of mankind
were classed as "barbarians," to whom no Greek ever thought of carrying
his ideals.
Nominally Christian Europe in the Middle Ages presented in the Feudal
System a different type of society. A vast hierarchy in Church and
State, with the pope and emperor at the top, ran down through many
gradations to the serf at the bottom. It was an improvement on the
little Greek state in that it embraced many more in a single order and
bound them together with common faith and standards. It prized not the
civic virtues, but the militarist qualities of loyalty, obedience,
honor, chivalry. Its typical hero is the Chevalier Bayard, the good
knight without fear and without reproach. But a career like his is
manifestly possible only to a few. The agricultural laborer chained to
the soil, and the trader--often the despised Jew confined to the
Ghetto--had no part in the life of chivalry. Outside of Christendom the
Saracen was to be converted or slain, and he was far oftener slain than
converted.
Under the revival of classical ideals at the Renaissance, in the new
emphasis upon individual rights born of the Reformation, in the
rebellion of the Puritan English and Scotch against the divine right of
kings and bishops to rule them against their conscience and will, in the
Revolution of 1789 and the Napoleonic wars, the Feudal System passed,
and the commercial order took its place. Its cherished virtues are
initiative, industry, push, thrift, independence. As its _beau ideal_ it
substitutes for the Chevalier Bayard the successful business man. It
sincerely tries to open its privileges to everyone; and under favorable
circumstances, in Revolutionary America for instance, its ideals were
accessible to practically every white inhabitant. The Comte de Ségur,
one of the young French officers who came to take part in our War of
Independence, wrote: "An observer fresh from our magnificent cities, and
the airs of our young men of fashion--who has compared the luxury of our
upper classes with the coarse dress of our peasants and the rags of our
innumerable poor,--is surprised on reaching the United States, by the
entire absence of the extremes both of opulence and of misery. All
Americans whom we met wore clothes of good material. Their free and
frank and familiar address, equally removed from uncouth discourtesy and
from artificial politeness, betokened men who were proud of their own
rights and respected those of others." But under other conditions its
ethical incentives are often without appeal to the man who lacks
capital, or to the man with so large an assured income that he desires
no more. It can do little for the dregs or the froth of society--those
so oppressed that they cannot rise to its social responsibilities, and
those so lightened that they do not feel them. It looks upon the
so-called backward peoples as markets where it can secure raw materials
needed for its factories--its rubber, ivory, jute,--or engage cheap
labor, and as a profitable dumping-ground for its surplus products. It
has done much for the less developed sections of the race by its
missionaries, educators and physicians; but all their efforts have been
almost offset by the evils of exploiting traders or grasping government
agents, and the exported vices of civilization.
Christianity has a social order of its own--the Kingdom of God. It is
not an economic system, nor a plan of government, but a religious
ideal--society organized under the love of God revealed in Christ. This
ideal it holds up in contrast with the existing social order in any age
as a protest, a program and a promise.
The Kingdom _protests_ against any features in prevailing conditions
that do not disclose Christlike love. It scans the industrial world of
today, and finds three fundamental evils in it: competition as a motive,
arraying man against man, group against group, nation against nation, in
unbrotherly strife; gain-seeking as the stimulus to effort, inducing men
to invest capital, or to labor, primarily for the sake of the returns to
themselves; and selfish ownership as the reward of success, letting men
feel that they can do as they please with their own. Certain callings,
upon which the Christian Spirit has exerted a stronger influence, have
already been raised above the level of the commercial world. It is not
good form professionally for physicians, or ministers, or college
professors to compete with each other and seek to draw away patients,
parishioners or pupils; to exercise their callings mainly for the sake
of financial gains; nor to regard as their own their skill, or
inspiration, or learning. But as yet the butcher, the baker, the grocer,
the banker, the manufacturer, the promoter, are not supposed to be on
this plane. They are urged to compete, even to the extent of putting
their rivals out of business, in defiance of an old Jewish maxim, "He
that taketh away his neighbor's living slayeth him," and in face of the
Lord's Prayer in which we ask not for "my daily cake," but for "_our_
daily bread." They are expected to consider profits, dividends, wages,
as the chief end in their callings; and if out of their gains they
devote a portion to public uses, that is charity on their part. A few
individuals are undoubtedly superior to the ideal set before them, and
are as truly dedicated servants of the community as any physician or
minister of the gospel, but they are a small minority; and the false
ideal ruins characters, and renders the commercial world a battlefield,
instead of a household of co-working children of God.
It scans international relations, and finds patriotism still a pagan
virtue. Mr. Lecky calls it "in relation to foreigners a spirit of
constant and jealous self-assertion." When a tariff is under discussion,
high, low or no duties are advocated as beneficial for the industries of
one's own country, regardless of the welfare of those of other lands.
The scramble for colonies with their advantages to trade, the
imperialistic spirit that seizes possessions without respect to the
wishes of their inhabitants, the endeavor to secure in other countries
special concessions or large business orders at an extraordinary profit,
are all sanctified under the name of patriotism. The peace of the world
is supposed to be maintained by keeping nations armed to the teeth, so
that rival powers will be afraid to fight, and huge armies and navies
are labelled insurance against war. A sentence in a letter of Erasmus
has a singularly modern sound: "There is a project to have a congress of
kings at Cambrai, to enter into mutual engagements to preserve peace
with each other and through Europe. But certain persons, who get
nothing by peace and a great deal by war, throw obstacles in the way."
The armament argument for peace has been given its _reductio ad
absurdum;_ but it is by no means clear that the world-wide war will free
the nations from the burdensome folly of keeping enormous armies and
navies. As Christians we must protest without ceasing that international
relations, based on mutual fear and maintained by the use of brute
force, can never furnish the peace of Christ.
It scans the system of justice in its treatment of the wrong-doer, and
declares that the crude attempt to fit the punishment to the crime, and
to protect society by deterrent penalties, is not the justice of Him who
is "faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all
unrighteousness." Divine justice is redemptive; and society, if it
wishes to be Christian, must pay the heavy cost of making all its
contacts with the imperfect transforming.
It scans the educational institutions of our land, and sees many
students viewing learning only with reference to its immediate
commercial availability, spurning all studies as "unpractical" which do
not supply knowledge that can be coined into financial returns; and it
sees many others without intellectual interest, prizing schools and
colleges merely for their social pleasures, lazily choosing courses
which require a minimum of labor, and disesteeming the great
opportunities of culture and enrichment provided by the sacrificial
studies and labors of the past. It insists that a moral revival is
needed for an intellectual renaissance. All students must be baptized
with a passion for social service, before studies that enrich the mind
and enlarge the character will be pursued with eager devotion. The
blight of irresponsibility is almost universal upon the students in the
higher educational institutions of our country.
So the Christian social order contrasts itself with every phase and
aspect of our present life, and exposes the impoverishing absence of the
Spirit of God. Its protest is reinforced by widespread social
restlessness and the feeling that the existing state of things has gone
into moral bankruptcy.
But the Kingdom of God is no mere protest; it is a _program_ of social
redemption. Some thinkers flatly deny that Christianity can provide a
constructive plan for society. Mr. Lowes Dickinson makes his imaginary
Chinese official write of the social teachings of Jesus: "Enunciated
centuries ago, by a mild Oriental enthusiast, unlettered, untravelled,
inexperienced, they are remarkable not more for their tender and
touching appeal to brotherly love, than for their aversion or
indifference to all other elements of human excellence. The subject of
Augustus and Tiberius lived and died unaware of the history and
destinies of imperial Rome; the contemporary of Virgil and of Livy could
not read the language in which they wrote. Provincial by birth, mechanic
by trade, by temperament a poet and a mystic, he enjoyed in the course
of his brief life few opportunities, and he evinced little inclination,
to become acquainted with the rudiments of the science whose end is the
prosperity of the state. The production and distribution of wealth, the
disposition of power, the laws that regulate labor, property, trade,
these were matters as remote from his interests, as they were beyond his
comprehension. Never was man better equipped to inspire a religious
sect; never one worse to found and direct a commonwealth."
Jesus' teaching concerning the Kingdom of God is contained in a handful
of parables and picturesque sayings. It attempts no detailed account of
a Utopia; it lays down no laws; it offers the world a spirit, which in
every age must find a body of its own. But this indefiniteness does not
fit it the less, but the better, as the inspiration to social
reconstruction. It affords scope for variety and endless progress. It
can take up the social ideals of other ages and of other civilizations,
and incorporate whatever in them is congruous with the Christian social
order. The ideals of Greece and Medieval Europe and of our present
commercialism, and the ideals of China, India and Japan, are not to be
thrown aside as rubbish, but reshaped and "fulfilled" by Christlike
love. It does not stultify human development by establishing a rigid
system; but entrusts to thoughtful and conscientious children of God the
duty of constantly readjusting social relations, so that they are
adequate expressions of their Father's Spirit. In every age Christians
are compelled not only to voice their protest against the existing
order, but to point out precisely what the Spirit of Christ demands, and
try practically to embody it. The fact that our directions are not
explicit is proof that God deals with us not as little children but as
sons and daughters, not as servants but as friends. We have to think out
for ourselves the economic system, the policies of government, the
disciplinary methods, the educational ideals, that will incarnate the
Spirit of our Father. The all-sufficient answer to the charge of the
inadequacy of Jesus as a guide to social welfare is the fact, that only
in so far as we are able to express His mind in our social relations, do
they satisfy us. The advances made in our generation are conspicuous
instances of progress not away from, but up to Him. The crash of our
present commercial order in industrial strife, now scarcely heard in the
greater confusion of a world at war, gives us the chance to come forward
with the principles of Jesus, and ask that they be given a trial in
business enterprises that are based on coöperation, the joy of service
as the incentive to toil, responsible trusteeship of that which each
controls for the benefit of all the rest; in international relations
where every nation comes not to be ministered unto but to minister, and
loves its neighbors as itself--to ask that we seriously try the social
order of love. John Bright, unveiling the statue to Cobden in the
Bradford Exchange, said, "We tried to put Holy Writ into an act of
Parliament." We want the mind of Christ put into commerce, laws,
pleasures and the whole of human life.
And we come forward with confidence, because the Kingdom we advocate is
not merely a protest and a program, but also a divine _promise_. The
ideal of the Kingdom of heaven to which our consciences respond is for
us a religious inspiration, and has behind it a faithful God who would
not deceitfully lure us to follow an illusive phantom. "According to His
promise we look for new heavens and a new earth wherein dwelleth
righteousness." The city of our hope has not been designed by us, but
has been already thought out in God's mind and comes down out of heaven.
In our attack upon existing injustices and follies we raise again the
believing watchword of the Crusaders, "_Deus vult_" In our attempt to
rear the order of love, which cynics pronounce unpractical, we fortify
ourselves in the assurance that it is God's plan for His world, and that
we shall discover a preëstablished harmony between the Kingdom of heaven
and the earth which we with Him must conform to it. We encourage
ourselves by recalling that, in the hearts of men everywhere and in the
very fabric and structure of things, we have countless confederates.
On one of Motley's most glowing pages, we are told how, after the
frightful siege and fall of Haarlem, and with Alkmaar closely invested
by the Duke of Alva, when the cause of the Netherlands seemed in direst
straits, Diedrich Sonoy, the lieutenant governor of North Holland, wrote
the Prince of Orange, inquiring whether he had arranged some foreign
alliance, and received the reply: "You ask if I have entered into a firm
treaty with any great king or potentate; to which I answer, that before
I ever took up the cause of the oppressed Christians in these provinces,
I had entered into a close alliance with the King of kings; and I am
firmly convinced that all who put their trust in Him shall be saved by
His almighty hand. The God of armies will raise up armies for us to do
battle with our enemies and His own." And the opening of the dykes
brought the very sea itself to the assistance of the brave contestants
for truth and liberty.
The prayer on our lips, "Thy Kingdom come," we believe to be of God's
own inspiring. The social order which we seek is His eternal purpose;
and it has sworn confederates in sun and moon and stars of light, and in
every human heart. We wait patiently and we work confidently, in the
assurance that the God and Father of Jesus Christ, the Lord of heaven
and earth, will not fail nor be discouraged, until He has set His loving
justice in the earth, and His will is done among all the children of
men, as it was once done by His well-beloved Son.