Although it is two years since its publication, Mr. Lytton Strachey's
_Eminent Victorians_ still leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
Mr. Strachey made it his business to destroy the halo around some
well-known and long-venerated heads. He spoke what he believed to
be the truth, not always in love, about Thomas Arnold and Florence
Nightingale and General Gordon and others. He suggested that Gordon
had been intemperate, and that some of his daring had been due to
this fact. To read the insinuation was to remember the day, nearly
forty years ago, when Gordon, at a few hours' notice, stepped out
of London and took his road for Khartoum and death and an immortal
name. The magic of the story is felt beyond the bounds of the British
Empire. A real hero is the possession of all mankind, and the thought
of this one solitary and God-possessed soldier setting out alone
by sheer personality to quench the rebellion that had spread over
half a continent will always make the blood of the lethargic and
the stay-at-home run a little faster. But that temper, if we could
only grasp it, is essentially the temper of religion, and it means
the possession of peace. The materialism of our day has overshot all
our conceptions of peace, and we identify peace with comfort and a
substantial bank balance and a fortification against the vicissitudes
of chance. No wonder that the venture and the happiness have gone out
of faith, which is the trust in the centuries as against the years,
in the unseen instead of in the seen. There is little to be gained
by society congratulating itself in its victory over alcohol if all
the time it judges all success by outward and obvious standards. As
things are, it is regarded almost as a crime not to have made money,
and the doom of the "unsuccessful" is not pity but reprobation. How
is it that, in a universe in which we believe that the fundamental
factors are spiritual, such a conception should have come to rule!
Simply because we have forgotten the rock from which we have been
hewn, and have made a God after our own image. "He granted their
request but sent leanness into their souls" (Ps. 106:15). We have
had our reward. Is it any wonder that church life is stagnant? Why
should it be otherwise if such conceptions virtually rule? Faith
is become a comfortable dogma instead of a living conviction. The
popular conception of faith implies no sacrifice. The faithful do not
live in any way which marks them off from the faithless. Generally
speaking, they pursue the same interests, follow out the same policy
of insuring against most of the inevitable risks of life. Godly and
ungodly alike, they meet the demand of charity, and are not wholly
unmindful of their duty to their neighbors. But that the Christian
Church should be composed of people who truly are casting their
burden upon the Lord is an unknown conception. Nor can they ever
think of themselves launching off like Gordon on a quest that was
inspired simply by belief in a command of God, as the realization
of a need, by faith in an ideal.
If the church of to-day is uninteresting and without appeal to
youth, the reason may very well be found in the lack of any thought
of a living faith. Our Lord depended absolutely upon the Father.
The Father's will was his will, and as the result quiet dwelt with
Christ. But his was no prudential service. Peace had its willing
price. "Peace be unto you ... and when he had thus spoken he showed
them his hands and his side" (John 20:19, 20).
Public life will rise no higher than its source in personal religion.
A quick sense of the brotherhood of man led to the antislavery
movement. The removal of the merely penal idea in punishment has
led to the new treatment of criminals. Every religious revival may
be traced by changes in public administration. A new grasp of the
meaning of faith, as the leading by God out into the wilderness,
will draw out of their pessimism and social ineptitude men and women
who loathe the publicity and mud-slinging of public life and have
hitherto stood apart from it. If, however, they come to it out of
an awakened conscience, they will step forth, not as unwilling
recruits, obeying the uninspiring call of mere duty, but as crusaders
to strive for the kingdom of God upon earth.
* * * * *
The great aim of this and of every day is definite and in itself
simple--to make spiritual things real. Each man has to understand
his dependence upon a world which he cannot control, which was before
he was and will endure when he has gone, a world in which right
rules inevitably and finally, where the secrets of all hearts are
known. And then, having recognized with all its implications his
place in this kingdom of the spirit, he has to play his part through
the institutions of civilized life, the church, the state, the
municipality, in making this unseen life an actuality in the region
of things mundane. But first things come first. The social interest
does not create the clean heart. The power of Christ alone can do
that. The Salvation Army is a mighty factor in moral uplift but it
had its origin in Methodism and in the Christian experiences of a
godly man and of a still more God-inspired woman. Those churches are
not wrong or out of date which lay stress on the relationship of the
believer to his Lord. That, after all, is the fundamental thing, the
source out of which all wider and more impersonal movements flow.
Evangelical faith is not outgrown. It never can be outgrown. It
needs, it is true, constant restatement. The living phrases of one
generation become almost certainly the catchwords of the next. It
is not only the right but the duty of each generation of exercised
Christians to state its belief in its own way; and those who are
older must have faith in those who are young and allow them to tell
their story in their own words. It was a great friendship which
existed between D. L. Moody and Henry Drummond. The older man was
self-educated, brought up to a religious belief that was under attack
by scholars and scientists. The younger man was both a scholar and a
scientist, a setter forth of new views of things. But it was Drummond
who was chosen by Moody to follow up his work, to gather together the
results of the missions. For Moody, "the greatest of living humans,"
as Drummond called him, saw that they were both striving for the same
thing, actually saying it in different words. They both have had
their reward in the affection of countless men and women who think
of them as messengers of the new life. But an awakened soul is the
beginning of things. He who has been truly aroused to the life of God
will not be slack in the life of man.