in late years to hear it said that the churches were losing their hold
upon the people of America. Whether or not that be true, the war has
begun to reveal to America, as it has to our Allies, the depth and
power of the real moral and spiritual life beneath the surface.
Granted that we are witnessing no widespread evangelistic stirrings,
no indications of a great revival. It seems probable, indeed, that the
itinerant evangelists who had lately become the fashion among us, have
passed the heyday of their power. Neither are the "prophetic" folk who
misunderstand their Bibles so persistently and look so confidently for
the second coming of the Lord, winning an assent at all commensurate
with their effort. But there is a vast amount of quiet, sensible,
devoted Christian living in America. There is more of genuine religion
among us than we had realized. That religion, for the most part
inarticulate, and hardly knowing itself to be Christian, is finding
expression in action. The spirit in which America entered the war; the
high moral aims which President Wilson, interpreter yet leader of his
people, has set before the world; the quiet, matter-of-fact and
matter-of-duty way in which the principle of selective service was
accepted and carried out as democracy's method of mobilizing its
power; the cooperation and the giving; the uncomplaining solemn pride
of homes that have already made the supreme sacrifice--these are but
the first evidences in America of a moral virility, a real religion,
which, we may confidently hope, will strengthen us, with our Allies,
not only to carry on to victory, but to resist the victor's
temptations.
Will this deep, elemental, common religion of America come to
understand itself, and to recognize its fundamentally Christian
character? The answer to that question lies with the churches. And
there are clear indications that many of them, at least, will not fail
to realize and meet their opportunity.
Not that we shall do without dogmas. Religion cannot maintain itself
as mere ethics. It is a way of living; but a way of living that
justifies itself by a way of believing about God and duty and
immortality. The point is, that in the natural order of growth life
has a certain priority to belief, action to full understanding. And
that certainly is the order of growth involved in the present
situation.
As the churches share in the expanding and deepening common life and
bring their beliefs to bear upon it, in interpretation of its ultimate
motives and hopes, there will be growth on both sides. Men elementally
Christian in action will come to know what they believe; and on the
other hand the churches themselves will discern more clearly which of
their customs and beliefs are relevant to the real issues of life and
function in essential ways. Our creeds will become simpler, but more
vital. And that will make possible a closer unity of the churches. One
may well question both the possibility and the desirability of a
complete obliteration of denominational lines. We may always have and
need denominational loyalty just as we shall always have and need
patriotism. But denominational loyalties can be incorporated into a
higher loyalty to the inclusive fellowship of Christ's Church as a
whole, just as national loyalties, we now see, can and must be
incorporated into a higher loyalty to humanity which will be given
expression and body in a world-wide League of Nations.
_We may expect religious education after the war, again, to be more
fully Christian in its conception of God as well as in its view of
life._
Jesus, so far as we know, never used the word "democracy." Yet just
such a democratic world-community as we are now beginning in a
practical way to understand and strive for, he taught and lived and
died for. Christianity's ultimate ideal is no longer a mere ideal. It
has become an actual political and social program and possibility.
"The brotherhood of mankind must no longer be a fair but empty
phrase," wrote President Wilson to Russia; "it must be given a
structure of force and reality. The nations must realize their common
life and effect a workable partnership to secure that life against the
aggressions of autocratic and self-pleasing power." The world's choice
is between "Utopia or hell," is Mr. Wells' striking phrase, which he
expounds in a remarkable article in _The New Republic_ on "The
League of Nations." "Existing states," he says, "have become
impossible as absolutely independent sovereignties. The new conditions
bring them so close together and give them such extravagant powers of
mutual injury that they must either sink national pride and dynastic
ambitions in subordination to the common welfare of mankind or else
utterly shatter one another. It becomes more and more plainly a choice
between the League of free nations and famished men looting in search
of non-existent food amidst the burning ruins of our world. In the end
I believe the common sense of mankind will prefer a revision of its
ideas of nationality and imperialism to the latter alternative."
Mr. Wells is right. The proposal to establish a league of nations
presents itself in our day as a matter of plain common sense. Yet if
there is one lesson written with perfect clearness on the pages of
history, it is that common sense alone cannot save the world from the
tragedies of error, self-will and sin, and that common sense motived
by self-interest will in the end defeat itself. In his Lyman Beecher
Lectures on Preaching, Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin has called our
attention to the remarkable prophecy of the present world war made by
Frederick W. Robertson in a sermon preached at Brighton on January 11,
1852, addressed to a generation that glorified commerce as the
guarantor of world unity and sought to establish morality upon a basis
of enlightened self-interest. The passage cannot be quoted too often,
nor too firmly impressed upon the minds of the present generation, for
there were those among us who, even up until the invasion of Belgium,
kept protesting that there could be no war in a world so bound
together by economic and commercial ties, and there are those now who
find in such interests the only durable basis for world
reconstruction. "Brethren," said Robertson, "that which is built on
selfishness cannot stand. The system of personal interest must be
shriveled to atoms. Therefore, we who have observed the ways of God in
the past are waiting in quiet but awful expectation until He shall
confound this system as He has confounded those which have gone
before, and it may be effected by convulsions more terrible and bloody
than the world has yet seen. While men are talking of peace and of the
great progress of civilization, there is heard in the distance the
noise of arms, gathering rank on rank, east and west, north and south,
and there come rolling toward us the crushing thunders of universal
war.... There is but one other system to be tried, and that is the
cross of Christ--the system that is not to be built upon selfishness
nor upon blood, not upon personal interest, but upon love."
If Wells has stated the world's alternative, Robertson has shown the
way of final and permanent right decision. To common sense must be
added love. The brotherhood of man must be established upon a common
acknowledgment of the Fatherhood of God. The world community can
ultimately be motived by nothing less than the life within the hearts
of men of the God whom they come to know through Jesus Christ.
This means both that the world must become more religious, and that
religion must become more fully Christian. We can no longer believe in
any God less great or less good than the God whom Jesus Christ
reveals. However much it may be tempted to the lower view from time to
time, we may reasonably expect that henceforth the world is done with
belief in a mere tribal or national God. The supreme and inmost bond
of the world community can be nothing other and nothing less than the
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who regards all men as his children
and who steadfastly seeks, with them and through them, the good of
all.
Religious education after the war will be more democratic, more
immediately concerned with life, more fully Christian. In so
interpreting the present situation, we have had in mind especially the
more or less formal religious education in the church and the church
school. The same tendencies will influence the more informal and
indirect religious education of children in the family. We have
reason, indeed, to hope for a strengthening of family ties and a
renewal of family religion. The sacrifices of these days are rendering
relationships very precious that in a more careless, unthinking time
we had accepted as a matter of course. And it is entirely possible
that victory may wait until in America, as in England and France,
there are few families that do not live in closer fellowship with the
unseen world because their sons are there. The gradual disintegration
of family life which the past half century has witnessed was but
incidental to a rapid change in social, economic and industrial
conditions. There is reason to expect that the family will so adjust
its life to these conditions as to maintain its character as a social
group, wherein genuine democracy and true religion may be propagated
from generation to generation by that sharing of interests,
occupations and affections which is the most potent and vital of all
educational methods. That it should so adjust itself and so fulfill
its primary educational function, should be a matter of the utmost
concern to both Church and State, for it is hard to conceive how
either the Christian religion or a democratic society could maintain
itself without the aid of the family.
[1] "The Church in the Furnace," pp. 53-54.
VII
FOREIGN MISSIONS AND THE WAR, TODAY AND TOMORROW
HARLAN P. BEACH
It might seem to the uninformed reader that foreign missions and war
have nothing in common; for "what communion hath light with
darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial?" Fuller
knowledge of the varied work of missions and of its many helpful
contributions to African, Asiatic and Oceanic peoples would remove
this misapprehension. Professor Coolidge, of Harvard, suggests some
important points of contact between missions and the less developed
races, particularly of the enterprise as carried on today in
contrast with its earlier objectives.[1] How the races of mission
fields that have been thus affected are contributing to the war at
home and in the trenches, Dr. Arthur J. Brown has described most
vividly in a paragraph upon the cosmopolitan composition of the
allied forces at the front.[2] Missionary periodical files abound in
references to the war's inroads upon missionary enterprises, and to
the important mediating work of missions. A great volume of
testimony would show that while missionaries still regard the
upbuilding of the mind and the saving of souls as fundamentally
desirable, the enterprise affects every phase of the personal and
community life of the peoples to which it ministers.
Statistics of the missionary situation at the beginning of the war
reveal the extent and scope of present-day foreign missions. In the
latest full collection of such statistics,[3] one finds a series of
tables devoted to "General and Evangelistic" data, to "Educational"
activities of missions, and to "Medical and Philanthropic" enterprises
conducted by missionaries. It is impracticable to present the totals
of the seventy-two columns, suggestive of the many subordinate
activities of missions; a few items will indicate the more important
contacts established between the Protestant churches of Christendom
and the fifty fields which their missions have touched in many helpful
ways. In these mission countries 351 Protestant societies had as their
foreign staff 24,039 missionaries, including 13,719 women workers and
wives. Stationed at 4,094 towns and villages, they directed the
activities of a native staff of 109,099 and of 26,210 churches, the
communicant membership of which was 2,408,900, with 1,423,314 others
under religious instruction. In their elementary schools were
1,699,775 pupils, while in secondary schools were 218,207, and in the
colleges and universities 15,636 students were enrolled. In
theological and Bible training institutions 10,588 were preparing for
the Christian leadership of the churches. Their industrial schools had
an enrolment of 10,125, and their normal students numbered 7,504.
Mission hospitals and dispensaries were presided over by 1,589
physicians and trained nurses, aided by a native staff of 2,336. In
the year reported, 3,107,755 individuals were treated, in single
visits or during prolonged residence in hospitals. Orphanages numbered
245, with 9,736 inmates, and 39 leper homes sheltered 1,880
unfortunate outcasts. Such an exhibit, incomplete as it is, will
indicate the manifold tendrils which have bound Christian missionaries
to the hearts of the nations; and if Roman Catholic statistics for
this date were available,[4] the importance of missions as a steadying
and reconstructive force at present and in post-bellum readjustments
would be even more manifest.
In discussing the war as affecting missions, only a few outstanding
facts can be mentioned. Practically all of the mission world has taken
sides in the tremendous conflict, most of these nations declaring for
the Allies. Many of them have generously contributed the means and man
force to hasten the day of peace. In 1917 nearly half a million from
India were enlisted, of whom 285,200 were combatants and the rest were
employed behind the lines in multifarious tasks. As a result of the
recent conference at Delhi, it is hoped that another half million may
be secured this year,[5] thus giving that Empire the numerical
precedence among Britain's dominions. From North China alone some
135,000 laborers are serving the British forces in varied ways. "They
come, also, from Morocco, Algeria, Tunis and the jungles of Senegal;
from Madagascar and Tahiti, and several hundred thousand from French
Indo-China and China proper. Black, yellow and white, East and West,
educated and ignorant, progressive and backward, are laboring side by
side."[6] So important is it that these polyglot assistants and
warriors should be cared for in a Christian way that many missionaries
have been called away from their distant fields to a manifold ministry
to their adopted countrymen behind the trenches. Many of these
recruits are Christian volunteers, especially so in the Indian
contingent.
The effects of this European Armageddon upon the mission fields
themselves has been less harmful than had been expected and more
advantageous than was anticipated. German missions have been affected
most among the Protestants, and among Roman Catholics France has been
the chief sufferer. In the latter country there is no exemption for
either Protestant or Catholic ministers of military age.
Missions-Direktor Axenfeld of Berlin, in a recent publication,[7]
states that German Protestant work in Africa has been practically
disrupted, in India crippled by enforced withdrawals, in smaller
British colonies similarly weakened by the expulsions, and permitted
to go on with restrictions in other parts of Asia and North America.
According to later information, about 400 German Protestant
missionaries and missionary candidates are in military service, 68 are
in hospitals, 120 are prisoners of war in various countries, and about
1,000 missionaries are still working in various fields. Referring to
the _Zeitschrift fuer Missionswissenschaft_, in the files for 1915
and 1916, one learns that 3,000 Catholic missionaries are estimated to
have been called to the colors, and that in 1916 there were 2,336
serving in the army. French Protestant missions, with a much smaller
force abroad, have suffered in similar proportion; so that in French
and German mission fields the personnel has been greatly reduced,
limited, or has been obliterated entirely. British missions have
likewise sent to the colors many of their best men from the field and
the candidate list, while a number have been transferred from field
service to work among their constituency in Mesopotamian and French
camps. Relatively few native Christian leaders have enlisted.
The Christian communities in mission lands have suffered in various
ways through the war. The removal of supervising missionaries in
part--almost wholly in the case of German societies--has left many
flocks without their chief shepherds. Great as has been this loss, it
has wrought a greater benefit in churches whose native leaders thus
have been brought to the front and have proved to their congregations
that the church was so far indigenous as to survive the withdrawal of
missionaries. To help their pastors, the people have undertaken
responsibilities which without this necessity would not have been
borne, thus developing unsuspected gifts and engendering hope for the
future. During the war, evangelistic campaigns, largely participated
in by the native church, have been carried on in a number of countries
and with marked success.
Participation in the great conflict by the Christians and
non-Christians of mission lands has had mixed results. On the one
hand, any delusion as to the civilization and attitudes of so-called
Christian countries has been dissipated by the undreamed of savagery
and international hatred which they have seen. This has led to
opposition to missionaries on the fields, especially in Persia and in
Morocco, where a Moslem said to Dr. Kerr: "Why don't you turn your
attention to Christians? With all our faults, we have some religion
left, but the Christians have none." On the other hand, it has
revealed to the peoples so aiding their European rulers their real
values to them. This has given to Indians especially a renewed
determination to secure from England _quid pro quo_ in the form
of greater political liberty and social privileges. While this has
been especially emphasized by Moslems and Indians, it has affected the
Christians with so great a spirit of nationalism that the recent
All-India Christian Council sent a deputation to the Viceroy
requesting the Government to recognize the 3,876,203 Christians of the
1911 census as a community deserving political representation in the
Imperial Legislative Council. The increasing demand of all Indians for
greater freedom led Parliament to send out a Commission to investigate
the situation; and while their report at time of writing has not been
published in full, the people of that Empire are assured of many
alleviations of existing disabilities. The independent Powers of the
Far East also will be benefited in many ways through their cooperation
in the war. A greatly feared backset to the cause of missions in
China, through the exposure to fierce temptations and from the harsh
treatment unavoidable in war of its labor contingent in France, has
been met in part by sending to those camps many successful
missionaries from North China, as well as a delegation of Christian
Chinese studying in American institutions. In Mesopotamia, also,
similar work undertaken by Indian missionaries will do much to lessen
the ill effects of the war.
Another resultant of the unprecedented conflict comes from the ethical
and religious reactions occasioned by seas of Christian blood. An old
convert in India pathetically asked his pastor if the great fire in
the West were still burning, and a South Sea islander stood bewildered
and shaken when he learned that the war was primarily between
Christian nations. Keen Japanese were at first ready to declare
Christianity a failure because of this stupendous crime of
Christendom; but their maturer thought and the increasing barbarity in
German initiative has convinced them that instead of its proving the
bankruptcy of Christianity, to quote Secretary Oldham, "the War has
shown the bankruptcy of a society which has refused to accept and
apply the principles of Christianity in social, national and
international affairs. As has been well said, 'Christianity has not
been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and never
tried.'"[8] So contrary is it to Christian teachings that for a time
the churches in one district in China set apart a day each week for
special prayer that this demoniacal evil might be divinely conquered.
But it is more than a problem of Christianity. The Moslem world has
been fighting against itself. The Jihad, declared by the
Sheikh-ul-Islam and the Sultan of Turkey most solemnly in November,
1915, failed to call to arms a body of fifty millions of fanatical
Mohammedans, as had been fervently hoped would be the case. "There was
no shock, since there was no sympathetic response. Protests were made
by the Moslems of Turkey, while the eighty millions under British
control proclaimed their unshaken loyalty; and from Persia, Morocco,
Egypt, India, Russia, Algeria and other Moslem countries, Turkey was
taken severely to task for forming an alliance with two Christian
Powers in a conflict with other Christian nations.... Mohammedans are
in despair especially since, as a last fatal blow, the Arabs have
arisen in open rebellion against Turkey, seizing the sacred places of
Islam, and repudiating the right to the office of caliph or of the
sultan of Turkey."[9] Similarly an Arabic periodical published in
Zanzibar says: "The pillars of the East are tottering, its thrones are
being destroyed, its power is being shattered and its supremacy is
being obliterated. The Moslem world is divided against itself."[10]
But what have been the effects of this war upon the home base of
missions? The financial drafts made by the governments and voluntary
organizations of warring nations upon their peoples and the increased
cost of everything have affected the treasuries of some of the smaller
societies unfavorably. For the most part, however, the mission boards
have not only met their expenses but in many cases receipts have been
larger than ever before. The contributions thus given have called
attention to missions as being both worthy and indispensable elements
in the world situation, and hence necessitating their support. Perhaps
this is felt most generally among friends of British missions.
Man power causes the societies greater difficulty. Practically the
entire German force has been sent from India, or else interned, and to
fill their places has made new demands upon other nationalities. The
depleted ranks of French societies have not been filled. Great Britain
needs all her men for the trenches and has been sorely pressed in
trying to supply the foreign fields with the workers absolutely
required. Even the United States, since her entry into the war, is
experiencing difficulty in keeping missionary candidates from going to
the front in Europe instead of re-enforcing the thin Asiatic and
African battle lines. Hope for improvement in this recruiting is
slight, since the call to arms has laid strongest hold upon college
and university men. Thus in 1915, out of 52,000 students in German
universities, 41,000 were under arms; in France all students except
those physically unfit were called out; in Great Britain and Ireland
about 50 per cent of the male students were in the army or navy, in
Canada 40 per cent, and in Australia 30 per cent.[11] In the United
States volunteering and the draft have emptied the colleges and
universities of practically all the choicest men of twenty-one and
upward. If this continues long, an interim must ensue before another
college generation furnishes a sufficient number of missionary
candidates. Yet it may be expected that the present devotion to a
cause that ends so commonly in death or lifelong crippling will end
forever the old excuse urged against missionary enlistment, that the
service is a hard one and often fatal, in certain unhealthful
countries. Men will join the colors of the Prince of Peace and of Life
even more willingly than they now march under the banners of
destruction and death in the hope of establishing once more justice,
righteousness and lasting freedom in the earth.