_Standards_.
The new Century will demand high standards, both of character and conduct.
Explain it how we may, the fact is evident that religion has greatly
disappointed the world. The wretched distortion of Christ's teaching which
appears in the lives and business of tens of thousands of professed
Christians, the namby-pambyism of the mass of Christian teachers towards
the evil of sin, and the unholy union, in nearly all the practical
proceedings of life, between the world and the bulk of the Christian
churches, no doubt largely account for this, so far as Christianity is
concerned.
Mohammedanism is in a still worse plight, for though, alas! it increases
even faster than Christianity, it is helpless at the heart. The mass of
its devotees know that between its highest teaching and its best practice
there is a great gulf, and they are slowly beginning to look elsewhere for
rules by which to guide their lives.
And what is true of Mohammedanism is true also of Buddhism--the great
religion of the East. Its teachers have largely ceased to be faithful to
their own faith; and, as a consequence, that faith is a declining power.
Beautiful as much of its teaching undoubtedly is, millions who are
nominally Buddhist are estranged by its failures; and are, with increasing
unrest, looking this way and that for help in the battle with evil, and
for hope amidst the bitter consciousness of sin.
Such is a cursory view of the attitude of the opening century towards the
great faiths of the world. Perhaps one word more than another sums it all
up--especially as regards Christianity--and that word is NEGLECT--cold,
stony neglect!
And yet men are still demanding standards of life and conduct. The open
materialist, the timid agnostic, no less than the avowedly selfish, the
vicious and the vile, are asking, with a hundred tongues and in a thousand
ways, "Who will show us any good?" The universal conscience, unbribed,
unstifled as on the fateful day in Eden--conscience, the only thing in man
left standing erect when all else fell--still cries out, "YOU OUGHT!"
still rebels at evil, still compels the human heart to cry for rules of
right and wrong, and still urges man to the one, and withholds him from
the other.
And it is--for one reason--because Jesus can provide these high standards
for men, that I say He is _The Man for the Century_. The laws He has
laid down in the Gospels, and the example He furnished of obedience to
those laws in the actual stress and turmoil of a human life, afford a
standard capable of universal application.
The ruler, contending with unruly men; the workman, fighting for
consideration from a greedy employer; the outcast, struggling like an
Ishmaelite with Society for a crust of bread; the dark-skinned, sad-eyed
mother, sending forth her only babe to perish in the waters of the sacred
river of India, thus "giving the fruit of her body for the sin of her
soul"; the proud and selfish noble, abounding in all he desires except the
one thing needful; the great multitude of the sorrowful, which no man can
number, who refuse to be comforted; the dying, whose death will be an
unwilling leap in the dark--all these, yea, and all others, may find in
the law of Christ that which will harmonise every conflicting interest,
which will solve the problems of human life, which will build up a holy
character, which will gather up and sanctify everything that is good in
every faith and in every man, and will unite all who will obey it in the
one great brotherhood of the one fold and the one Shepherd.