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._