This is the latest word of the latest philosophy; there is a

Transcriber's Note: Footnotes have been renumbered and moved to the end

of the book.

The Church and Modern Life

By

Washington Gladden

1908

Preface

"The time is come," said a New Testament prophet, "for judgment to begin

at the house of God." Perhaps that time ought never to pass, but if, in

any measure, the criticism of the church has of late been suspended, it

is certainly reopened now, in good earnest. Nor is this criticism

confined to outsiders; the church is forced to listen in these days to

caustic censures from those who speak from within the fold.

That such self-criticism is needed these chapters will not deny. That

the church is passing through a critical period must be conceded. But

the way of life is not obscure, and it seems almost absurd to indulge

the fear that the church, which has been providentially guided through

so many centuries, will fail to find it.

These pages have been written in the firm belief that the Christian

church has its great work still before it, and that it only needs to

free itself from its entanglements and gird itself for its testimony to

become the light of the world. Something of what it needs to do to make

ready for this great future, this little book tries to show.

Through all this study the thought has constantly returned to the young

men and women to whom the future of the church is committed; and while

the book is most likely first to fall into the hands of their pastors

and teachers, the author hopes that ways will be found of conveying its

message to those by whom, in the end, its truth will be made effective.

W. G.

First Congregational Church,

Columbus, Ohio, December 17, 1907.

Contents

I. The Roots of Religion

II. Our Religion and Other Religions

III. The Social Side of Religion

IV. The Business of the Church

V. Is the Church Decadent?

VI. The Coming Reformation

VII. Social Redemption

VIII. The New Evangelism

IX. The New Leadership

The Church and Modern Life

I

The Roots of Religion

The church with which we are to deal in the pages which follow is the

Christian church in the United States, comprising the entire body of

Christian disciples who are organized into religious societies, and are

engaged in Christian work and worship.

This church is not all included in one organization; it is made up of

many different sects and denominations, some of which have very little

fellowship with the rest. Among these groups are some who claim that

their particular organizations are the true and only churches; that the

others have no right to the name. Such is the claim of the Roman

Catholic church and of the High Church Episcopalians. Their use of the

word church would confine it to those of their own communions. Others

would apply the term more broadly to all who _profess and call_

themselves Christians, and who are united in promoting the teachings

and principles of the Christian religion.

The church, as thus defined, has no uniform and authoritative creed, and

no ruling officers or assemblies who have a right to speak for it; it is

difficult, therefore, to make any definite statements about it. It is

possible, nevertheless, to think of all these variously organized groups

of people as belonging to one body. In some very important matters they

are united. They all believe in one God, the Father Almighty; they all

bear the name of Christ; they all acknowledge him as Lord and Leader;

they all accept the Bible as containing the truth which they profess to

teach. The things in which they agree are, indeed, far more important

than the things in which they differ, and it is our custom often to

speak of this entire body of Christian disciples as "the church,"

forgetting their differences and emphasizing their essential unity. This

is the meaning which will be given to "the church" in these discussions.

The church is concerned with religion. As the interest of the state is

politics, of the bank finance, of the school education, so the interest

of the church is religion. Religion organizes the church, and the

church promotes religion.

Religion is a fact of the first magnitude. We sometimes hear ministers

complaining that the people do not give it so much attention as they

ought, but we shall find it true in all countries and in all the

centuries that it is one of the main interests of human life. There are

few subjects, probably there is no other subject, to which the human

race has given so much thought as to the subject of religion. The

greatest buildings which have been erected on this planet were for the

service of religion; more books have been written about it than about

any other theme; a large part of the world's art has had a religious

impulse; many, alas! of the most destructive wars of history have been

prompted by it; it has laid the foundations of great nations, our own

among them, and has given form and direction to every great civilization

under the sun.

It is not a churchman, or a theologian, it is Mr. John Fiske, one of the

foremost scientific investigators, who has said of religion: "None can

deny that it is the largest and most ubiquitous fact connected with the

existence of mankind upon the earth."[1]

About the size of the fact there is no disputing, but how shall we

explain it? Where did it come from?

The scientific people have puzzled their heads not a little over the

question where the life on this planet came from. They cannot make up

their minds to say that it came from non-living matter; and some of them

have ventured a guess that the first germs might have been brought by a

meteorite from some distant planet. That, however, only pushes the

mystery one step further back: how did it come to be on that distant

planet?

The origin of religion has furnished a similar puzzle to these

investigators. There are those among them who assume that religion is an

invention of crafty men who find it a means of obtaining ascendency over

their fellows. That it is all imposture--the product of priestcraft--is

the theory of some small philosophers. Such being the case, they expect

that the progress of knowledge will cause it to disappear.

To others it seems probable that religious ideas may have originated in

the phenomena of dreams. In the visions of the night those who have

passed out of life reappear; this gives room for the belief that they

are still in existence, and suggests that there may be another world

whose inhabitants exert an important influence over the affairs of this

world. According to this ghost theory, religion is all an illusion.

Such crude explanations are, however, not much credited in these days by

thoughtful men. It is easy to see that the foundations of religion are

deeply laid in human nature. Aristotle told a great truth, many

centuries ago, when he said that man is a political animal. That is to

say, there is a political instinct in him which causes him to organize

political societies and make laws; he is a state builder in the same way

that the beaver is a dam builder, or the oriole is a nest builder, or

the bee is a comb builder.

With equal truth we may say that man is a religious animal. The impulse

that causes him to worship, to trust, to pray, is as much a part of his

constitution as is the homing instinct of the pigeon. This natural

instinct is, however, reinforced by the operation of his reason. Feeling

is deeper than thought; we are moved by many impulses before we frame

any theories. But the normal human being sooner or later begins to try

to explain things; his reason begins to work upon the objects that he

sees and the feelings that he experiences. And it is not long before

something like what Charbonnel describes must take place in every human

soul:--

"Every man has within him a sense of utter dependence. His mind is

irresistibly preoccupied by the idea of a Power, lost in the immensity

of time and space, which, from the depths of some dark mystery, governs

the world. This power, at first, seems to him to manifest itself in the

phenomena of nature, whose grandeur surpasses the power or even the

comprehension of mankind."[2]

Toward this unknown power, or powers, his thought reaches out, and he

begins to try to explain it or them. He forms all kinds of crude and

fantastic theories about these invisible forces. At first he is apt to

think that there are a great many of them; it is long before he clearly

understands that there can be but One Supreme. The moral quality of the

being or beings whom he thus conceives is not clearly discerned by him;

he is apt to think them fickle, jealous, revengeful, and cruel; most

often he ascribes to them his own frailties and passions.

In some such way as this, then, religion begins. It is the response of

the human nature to impressions made upon the mind and heart of man by

the universe in which he lives. These impressions are not illusions,

they are realities. All men experience them. Something is here in the

world about us which appeals to our feelings and awakens our intellects.

Being made as we are, we cannot escape this influence. It awes us, it

fills us with wonder and fear and desire.

Then we try to explain it to ourselves, and in the beginning we frame a

great many very imperfect explanations. Sometimes we imagine that this

power is located in some tree or rock or river; sometimes it is an

animal; sometimes it is supposed to exist in invisible spirits or

demons; sometimes the sky or the ocean represents it, or one of the

elements, like fire, is conceived to be its manifestation; sometimes the

greater planets are the objects of reverence; sometimes imaginary

deities are conceived and images of wood or stone are carved by which

their attributes are symbolized.

These religious conceptions of the primitive races seem to us, now, as

we look back upon them from the larger light of the present day, to be

grotesque and unworthy; we wonder that men could ever have entertained

such notions of deity, and we are sometimes inclined, because of these

crudities, to dismiss the whole subject of religion as but a farrago of

superstitions. But these imperfect conceptions do not discredit

religion; they are rather witnesses to its reality. You might as well

say that the speculations and experiments of the old alchemists prove

that there is no truth in chemistry; or that the guesses of the

astrologers throw doubt on the science of astronomy. The alchemists and

the astrologers were searching blindly for truth which they did not

find, but the truth was there; the fetish worshipers and the magicians

and the idolaters were also, as Paul said, seeking after the unknown

God. But they were not mistaken in the principal object of their search;

what they sought was there, and the pathetic story of the long quest for

God is a proof of the truth of Paul's saying, that God has made men and

placed them in the world "that they should seek God, if haply they might

feel after him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us."

It was not a delusion, it was a tremendous reality that they were

dealing with. The fact that they but dimly conceived it does not lessen

the greatness of the reality.

Not many intelligent thinkers in these days doubt the reality and the

permanence of religion. Herbert Spencer did not profess to be a

Christian believer; by many persons he was supposed to be an enemy of

the Christian religion; yet no man has more strongly asserted the

permanency and indestructibility of religion. As to the notion that

religions are the product of human craft and selfishness, he says: "A

candid examination of the evidence quite negatives the doctrine

maintained by some that creeds are priestly inventions."[3] And again:

"An unbiased consideration of its general aspects forces us to conclude

that religion, everywhere present as a weft running through the warp of

human history, expresses some eternal fact."[4] And again: "In Religion

let us recognize the high merit that from the beginning it has dimly

discerned the ultimate verity and has never ceased to insist upon it....

For its essentially valid belief, Religion has constantly done battle.

Gross as were the disguises under which it at first espoused this

belief, and cherishing this belief, though it still is, under

disfiguring vestments, it has never ceased to maintain and defend it. It

has everywhere established and propagated one or other modification of

the doctrine that all things are manifestations of a power that

transcends our knowledge."[5]

That religion is, in John Fiske's strong phrase, an "everlasting

reality" is a fact which few respectable thinkers in these days would

venture to call in question. But, as we have seen, this reality takes

upon itself a great variety of forms. Looking over the world to-day, we

discover many kinds of religion. Religious ideas, religious rites and

ceremonies, religious customs and practices, as we gather them up and

compare them, constitute a variegated collection.

Professor William James has a thick volume entitled "The Varieties of

Religious Experience," in which he brings together a vast array of the

documents which describe the religious feelings and impulses of persons

in all lands and all ages. It is not a study of creeds or philosophies

of religion, it is a study of personal religious experiences; of the

fears, hopes, desires, contritions, joys, and aspirations of men and

women of all lands and ages, as they have been dealing with the fact of

religion.

Not only do we find many different kinds of religion existing side by

side upon this planet; we also find that each of these types has been

undergoing constant changes in the course of the centuries. To trace the

religious development of any people from the earliest period to the

present day is a most instructive study.

Take our own religion. Christianity is not an independent form of faith.

Its roots run down into the Hebrew religion, whose record is in the Old

Testament; and the Hebrew religion grew out of the old Semitic faiths,

and these again sprang from the ancient Babylonian religions or grew

alongside of them. So we are compelled to go far back for the origin of

many of our own religious ideas. Jesus did not claim to be the Founder

of a new religion; he claimed only to bring a better interpretation of

the religion of his people. He said that he came not to destroy but to

fulfill the law and the prophets. The New Testament religion is a

development of the Old Testament religion. It is a wonderful growth.

When we go hack to the old monuments and the old documents and trace the

progress of religious beliefs and practices from the earliest days to

our own, we learn many things which are well worth knowing.

The central fact of religious progress is improvement in the conception

of the character of God. As the ages go by, men gradually come to think

better thoughts about God. Little by little the old crude and savage

notions of deity drop out of their minds, and they learn to think of him

as just and faithful and kind.

The Bible shows us many signs of this progress. The earlier stories

about God give him a far different character from that which appears in

the later prophets. It was believed by the earlier Hebrews that God

desired to have them put to death all the inhabitants of the land of

Canaan when they took possession of it; and when they put to the sword

not only the armed men of the land, but the women and the little

children, they supposed that they were obeying the command of God. They

learned better than that, after a while.

When Abraham started with Isaac for Mount Moriah, he undoubtedly

thought that he should please God by putting to death his own

well-beloved son; but before he had done the dreadful deed the

revelation came to him that that was a terrible mistake; he saw that God

was not pleased by human sacrifices. That was a great day in the history

of religion. Because of that experience, Abraham was able to make his

descendants believe the truth that had been given to him, and from that

time onward human sacrifices probably ceased among the Hebrews. A long

step had been taken toward the purification of the idea of God of one of

its most degrading elements.

This superstition lingered long in other faiths; probably it survived

among our own ancestors after Abraham's day. Tennyson's poem, "The

Victim," is a vivid picture of human sacrifice among the Teutonic

peoples:--

"A plague upon the people fell,

A famine after laid them low;

Then thorpe and byre arose in fire,

For on them brake the sudden foe;

So thick they died the people cried,

'The Gods are moved against the land.'

The priest in horror about his altar

To Thor and Odin lifted a hand:

'Help us from famine

And plague and strife!

What would you have of us?

Human life?

Were it our nearest,

Were it our dearest,--Answer,

O answer!--

We give you his life.'"

The Gods seemed to say that the victim must be either the king's wife or

the king's child; which it should be, was the terrible question that the

king had to answer. The choice seemed to have fallen on the child, but

the wife would not have it that he was the king's dearest, and she

rushed to her own immolation. The poem reflects the common notion of

those dark days, that the angry Gods could only be propitiated by the

slaughter of those whom men loved the best. From this horrible idea the

Jewish people were delivered by the insight of their great ancestor.

Dark notions about God still lingered among them, however, and the Old

Testament record shows us how they slowly disappeared. Moses and Samuel

were good men for their time, but the God whom they worshiped was a very

different being from the God of Hosea or of the later Isaiah.

This development of the idea of God has been going on in modern times.

It is not long since devout men were in the habit of saying that God's

displeasure with the wickedness of cities was exhibited in the scourges

of cholera and scarlet fever in which multitudes of little children were

the victims. Not two hundred years ago the great majority of our Puritan

ancestors were believing in a God who, for the sin of Adam, was sending

millions of infants, every year, to the regions of darkness and despair.

The God of Cotton Mather or of Edward Payson could hardly have lived in

the same heaven with the God of Dwight Moody or Phillips Brooks.

The changes which have been taking place in our ideas about God have

been mainly in the direction of a purified ethical conception of his

character. We have been learning to believe, more and more, in the

justice, the righteousness, the goodness of God. In the oldest times men

thought him cruel and revengeful; then they began to regard him as

willful and arbitrary--his justice was his determination to have his own

way; his sovereignty was his egoistic purpose to do everything for his

own glory. We have gradually grown away from all that, and are able now

to believe what Abraham believed, that the Judge of all the earth will

do right.

In the presence of a God who, I am assured, is a being of perfect

righteousness, who never blames any one for what he cannot help, who

never expects of any one more than he has the power to render, who means

that I shall know that his treatment of me is in perfect accord with my

own deepest intuition of truth and fairness and honor, I can stand up

and be a man. My faith will not be the cringing submission of a slave to

an absolute despot, but the willing and joyful acceptance by a free man

of righteous authority.

Now it is certain that the belief of the Christian church respecting the

character of God has been steadily changing, in this direction, through

the Christian centuries. Enlightened Christians have been coming to

believe, more and more, in a good God; and by a good God I mean not

merely a good-natured God, but a just God, a true God, a fair God, a

righteous God. The growth of this conviction has been purging theology

of many crude and revolting dogmas.

It is a great deliverance which is wrought out for us when we are set

free, in our religious thinking, from the bondage of unmoral

conceptions, and are encouraged to believe that God is good. It is a

great blessing to have a God to worship whom we can thoroughly respect.

A tremendous strain is put upon the moral nature when men are required,

by traditional influences, to pay adoration and homage to a being whose

conduct, as it is represented to them, is, in some important respects,

conduct which they cannot approve. All the religions, through the

imperfection of human thought, have put that burden on their worshipers.

Christianity has been struggling, through all the centuries, to free

itself from unworthy conceptions of the character of its Deity, and each

succeeding re-statement of its doctrines removes some stain which our

dim vision and halting logic had left upon his name.

What, now, has caused these changes to take place in men's thoughts

about God? What influences have been at work to clarify their ideas of

the unknown Reality?

From three principal sources have come the streams of light by which our

religious conceptions have been purified.

The first of these is the natural world round about us. We are immersed

in Nature; it touches us on every side; it addresses us through all our

senses; it speaks to us every day with a thousand voices. Nature is the

great teacher of the human race. She knows everything; she waits to

impart her love to all who will receive it; she is very patient; her

lessons are not forced upon unwilling pupils, but whosoever will may

come and take of her treasure. Longfellow said of the childhood of

Agassiz, that--

"Nature, the old nurse, took

The child upon her knee,

Saying: 'Here is a story-book

Thy Father has written for thee.

"'Come, wander with me,' she said,

'Into regions yet untrod;

And read what is still unread

In the manuscripts of God.'"

It is not the child Agassiz alone whom Nature thus invited; to the whole

human race, in its childhood, its adolescence, its maturity, she has

always been saying the same thing. She has been seeking, through all the

ages, to disclose to us all the mysteries of this marvelous universe. We

have been slow learners; it took her a great many centuries to get the

simplest truths lodged in the human mind. The cave-dweller, the savage

in his teepee, were able to receive but little of what she had to give.

Yet before their eyes, every day, she spread all her wonders; with

infinite patience she waited for the unfolding of their powers. All the

marvels of steam, of electricity, of the camera, of the telescope, the

microscope, the spectroscope, the Roentgen rays,--all the facts and

forces with which science deals were there, in the hand of Mother

Nature, waiting to be imparted to her child from the day when he first

stood upright and faced the stars.

Slowly he has been led on into a larger understanding of this wonderful

universe. And what has he learned under this tuition? What are some of

the great truths which have gradually impressed themselves upon his

mind?

He has been made sure, for one thing, that this is a universe; that all

its forces are coherent; that the same laws are in operation in every

part of it. The principles of mathematics are everywhere applicable;

gravitation controls all the worlds and every particle of matter in

every one of them, and the spectroscope assures us that the same

chemical elements which constitute our world are found in the farthest

star. "On every hand," says Walker, "we are assured that the guiding

principle of Science is that of the uniformity of nature."

It has also come to be understood that nature is all intelligible.

Everything can be explained. This is the fundamental assumption of

science. Many things have not yet been explained, but there is an

explanation for everything; of that every thinker feels perfectly sure.

"Fifty years ago," says Sir John Lubbock, "the Book of Nature was like

some richly illuminated missal, written in an unknown tongue; of the

true meaning little was known to us; indeed we scarcely realized that

there was a meaning to decipher. Now glimpses of the truth are gradually

revealing themselves; we perceive that there is a reason--and in many

cases we know what that reason is--for every difference in form, in

size, and in color, for every bone and feather, almost for every

hair."[6]

This is the latest word of the latest philosophy; there is a reason for

everything. As Romanes says, Nature is instinct with reason; "tap her

where you will, reason oozes out at every pore."

If all things are rational and intelligible, then all things must be

the product of a rational Intelligence. That conclusion seems

inevitable.

But we can go further than this. It is not merely true that we can find

in the world about us the signs of an Intelligence like our own, it is

also true that our own intelligence has been developed by the revelation

to us of this Intelligence in the world about us. "If," says Walker,

"human reason is but 'the reflection in us of the universe outside of

us,' then, clearly, the Reason was there, expressed in the universe,

before it possibly could be reflected in us. It is _our relation to the

Universe that makes us rational_." And again, "Apart from the Reason

expressed in the Universe around him, man could never have become the

rational being that he is."[7]

This, then, is the first great reason why our religion has gradually

become more rational. The rationality of the universe constantly

presented to our thought has developed a rationality in our thoughts

about the universe. The mind, like the dyer's hand, is subdued to what

it works in. The response of primitive man to the pressure of Nature

upon him was a response of wonder and awe and fear; his religion was

instructive, emotional; but through the long tuition of the ages, the

old nurse has taught him how to use his reason; and he now finds unity

where he once found strife, and order and law where once confusion and

chaos reigned. His religion has become rational.

But what do we mean when we say that man's great teacher has been

Nature? Nature, as we have seen, is instinct with Reason, and the Reason

which is revealed in Nature is only another name for God. It is the

immanent God, the Eternal Reason, who has been patiently disclosing

himself to us in the world round about us, and thus cleansing our minds

from the crude and superstitious conceptions with which in our ignorance

and fear we had invested him.

The second of the sources from which the influences have come for the

purification of religion is humanity itself.

We are told, in the Book of Genesis, that man is made in the image of

God; and the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God, on which the entire

teaching of Jesus rests, is but a stronger statement of the same truth.

It is true that we find human nature, as yet, for the most part, in

very crude conditions; its divine qualities are not clearly seen. It

does not yet appear what we shall be. But we have learned, in our

evolutionary studies, that no living thing ought to be judged in the

earlier stages of its development; we must wait to see the perfected

type before we can make up our minds about it. The eaglet just hatched

does not give us the right idea of the eagle, nor does the infant in his

swaddling clothes reveal to us the man. So it is with species and races;

if they are undergoing a process of development, we must wait for the

later stages of the process before we judge. The apple is not the crab,

but the Northern Spy; the horse is not the mustang, but the Percheron or

the German roadster. In estimating any living thing, you take into

consideration its possibilities of development; the ideal to which it

may attain must always be in sight.

In the same way when we think of man, we do not take the Patagonian as

the type, but the best specimens of European or American manhood.

If, then, we are taught to believe that man is a child of God, we should

be compelled to believe that it is the most perfectly developed man who

most resembles God. We have some conception of the ideal man. Our

conceptions are not always correct, but they are constantly improved, as

we strive to realize them. And in the ideal man we see reflected the

character of God. We are sure that a perfect humanity would give us the

best revelation we could have of divinity. If we could see a perfect

man, we could learn from him more about God than from any other source.

Most of us believe that a perfect Man appeared in this world nineteen

hundred years ago; and the best that we know about God we have learned

from him. More has been done by his life and teachings to purify

religion of its crudities and superstitions than by all other agencies.

The worst of the crudities and superstitions that still linger in our

own religion are due to the fact that the people who bear his name only

in part accept his teachings and very imperfectly follow his example. If

we could all believe what he has told us and do what he has bidden us,

our religion would soon be cleansed from its worst defilements.

The manifestation of the life of God in Jesus Christ we call The

Incarnation; and it was a manifestation so much more perfect than any

other that the world has seen, that we do well to put the definite

article before the word. Yet it is a mistake to overlook the fact that

God dwells in every good man, and manifests himself through him. And

whenever, in any character, the great qualities of truth and justice and

purity and courage and honor and kindness are exhibited, we see some

reflection of the character of God.

In many a home the father and the mother, by their faithfulness and

kindness and self-sacrifice, make it easy for the children to believe in

a good God; and in every community brave and true and saintly men and

women are revealing to us high qualities which we cannot help

interpreting as divine. We cannot imagine that God is less just or fair

or kind than these men and women are; they lift up our ideals of

goodness, and they compel us to think better thoughts of him in whom all

our ideals are united.

Thus it is that our humanity, as glorified by the Word made flesh, and

as lifted up and sanctified by the lives of good men and women, has been

a great teacher of pure religion. We have learned what to think about

God and how to worship him aright by what he has shown us in the living

epistles of his goodness and grace which he has sent into the world,

and, above all, in that "strong Son of God" whom we call our Master.

The other source from which the influences have come by which religion

has been purified, is that divine Spirit who is always in the world, and

always waiting upon the threshold of every man's thought, and in the

sub-conscious depths of every man's feeling, to enlighten our

understanding and purify our desires. To every man he gives all that he

can receive of light and power. To many his gifts are but meagre,

because their capacities are small and their receptivity is limited; but

there are always in the world open minds and docile tempers, to whom he

imparts his larger gifts. Thus we have the order of prophets and

inspired men, whose words are full of light and leading. In the Bible we

have a record of the messages given by such men to the world. In that

teaching, rightly interpreted, there is great power to correct the

errors and cleanse away the delusions and superstitions which are apt to

gather about our religion. We cannot estimate too highly the work that

has been done by these sacred writings in purifying our conception of

God.

It is possible, however, to treat this book in a manner so hard and

literalistic that it shall become a hindrance rather than a help to the

better knowledge of God. The one fact that it brings vividly before us

is that fact of progress in religious knowledge which we are now

considering. It shows us how men have gone steadily forward, under the

leadership of the divine Spirit, leaving old conceptions behind them,

and rising to larger and larger understanding of divine things. Any

treatment of the Book which fails to recognize this fact--which puts all

parts of the Bible on the same level of spiritual value and

authority--simply ignores the central truth of the Bible and perverts

its whole meaning.

The truth which we need to emphasize in our use of the Bible is the

truth that the same Spirit who gave the men of the olden time their

message is with us, to help us to the right understanding of it, and to

give us the message for our time. Nor is his illumination confined to

any guild or rank of believers; the day foretold by the prophet has

surely come, when the Spirit is poured upon all flesh, and the prophetic

gift may be received by all the pure in heart.

The one glorious fact of our religion--a fact but dimly realized as yet

by the church--is the constant presence in the world of the Spirit of

Truth. If there is anything at all in religion, this divine Spirit is

ready to be the Counselor, Comforter, and Guide of every human soul. And

we cannot doubt that the steadily enlarging conception of the character

of God is due to his gracious ministry.

* * * * *

Such, then, are the sources from which have come that better knowledge

of God which makes the religion of our time to differ from the religion

of past generations. And it will be seen that these three sources are

but one. It is the divine Reason and Love himself who has been revealing

himself to us in the unity and order of nature, in the enlarging life of

humanity, in the inspired insights and convictions of devout believers.

What we are looking upon is that continuing revelation of God to the

world which has been in progress from the beginning, and which will

never cease until the world is full of the knowledge of God as the sea

is full of water.

With this great and growing revelation the church is intrusted. Its

business in the world is to take this truth about God, this new truth,

this larger and fairer truth, which God himself, in the creation and

through the incarnation and by the Indwelling Spirit, has been clearing

up and lifting into the light, and fill modern life full of it. This is

the truth which modern life needs. Religion is a permanent fact, but its

forms change with advancing knowledge. There are forms of truth which

are suited to the needs of modern life. God himself is always at work

preparing the truth for present needs. It is the function of the church

to understand this truth, and make it known in every generation.

II

Our Religion and Other Religions

Our religion is the Christian religion. This is the form of faith which

the church in our country is organized to promote. Ours is a Christian

country.

This is not by virtue of any legal establishment of Christianity, for

one of the glories of our civilization is that first amendment to our

national constitution, which declares that "Congress shall make no law

respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise

thereof." Buddhists, Hindus, Mohammedans, Parsees, Jews, are just as

free to exercise their respective forms of religion in this country as

are the Christians. The government neither forbids nor fosters any kind

of faith.

Ours is a Christian country because nearly all the people of the country

are, by birth and by choice, identified with the Christian faith.

Still it is true that the freedom extended by our constitution to other

forms of faith has been claimed by some of their adherents, and we have

in the United States a goodly number of groups representing

non-Christian creeds. Of these the Jews constitute much the largest

number, there being, perhaps, six or seven hundred Jewish congregations

in all parts of the country. There are also sixty or seventy Chinese

temples, a few groups of Parsees and Mohammedans, a few hundred

companies of Spiritualists, and a few scores of societies of Ethical

Culture and Free Religion. All told there are not, probably, among the

eighty millions of our people, more than a million and a half who are

not either traditionally or nominally Christians.

Our contact with the Orient, on our western frontier, is likely,

however, to bring us into close relations, in the near future, with

other ancient forms of faith. The Christian church in modern life will

be compelled to meet questions raised by the presence of Buddhists and

Confucians and Mohammedans, and to prove its superiority to these

religions. The study of comparative religion has had hitherto purely an

academic interest for most of us; in the present century it is likely to

become for millions a practical question. Many a young man and young

woman will be forced to ask: "Why is the religion of my fathers a better

religion than that of my Hindu associate or my Japanese classmate?" The

answer, if wisely given, may be entirely satisfactory, but the question

must not be treated as absurd or irrelevant. In the face of the great

competitions into which it must enter, our religion must be ready to

give an intelligent account of itself.

One of the first questions to be asked when we take up this inquiry is,

What is the attitude of our religion toward the other religions? Perhaps

it is better to put the question in a concrete form and ask, What is the

attitude of the Christian people toward the people of other religions?

The answer to this question may not be as prompt and confident as we

could wish. Many, people who profess and call themselves Christians are

not so broad-minded or so generous hearted as they ought to be, and they

are inclined to be partisans in religion as well as in art or politics;

they think that all the truth and all the goodness are in the

institutions with which they are allied, and that all the rest are of

the evil one. But such people are not good representatives of

Christianity. They never learned any such judgment from him whom they

call their Master. And we may safely claim that those who have the mind

of Christ are tolerant and generous toward those whose opinions or whose

religious practices differ from their own. They do not forget that their

Master treated with the greatest sympathy men and women whose faiths

greatly differed from his own; that some of those who received his

strongest testimonies to the greatness of their faith, like the Roman

centurion and the Canaanitish woman, were pagans; that one of his most

intimate and gracious conversations on the deep things of the Spirit was

with a Samaritan woman, and that his representative hero of practical

religion was a Samaritan man whose genuine goodness he placed in sharp

contrast with the heathen selfishness of the priest and the Levite of

his own faith. No Christian ever learned to be a bigot by sitting at the

feet of Jesus Christ. And I think we may justly claim that those who

have entered into the spirit of the Christian religion are always

generous in their attitude toward those who worship by other forms of

faith.

They cannot forget that all these people whose creeds and rites differ

so greatly from their own are children of our Father, and that they can

be no less dear to him than we are; and it is therefore hardly possible

for them to imagine that he can have left them without some revelation

of saving truth. They approach, therefore, the religious beliefs of

other peoples with open minds, expecting to find in them elements of

truth, and desiring to put themselves into sympathetic and cordial

relations with those whose opinions differ from their own.

As has been said, not all those who are known as Christians have this

tolerant temper, because there are many who are known as Christians who

have but dim notions of what it means to be a Christian. It was once the

prevailing assumption that all religions were divided into two classes,

the true and the false; that ours was the true religion and all the

others were false religions. That the heathen were the enemies of God

was the common belief, and it was a grave heresy to insinuate that any

of them could be saved without renouncing their false religions and

accepting the true religion. This was the basis upon which the work of

foreign missions was long conducted, and there are still many who bear

the Christian name who have not yet reached any other conception.

But the church in modern life is learning to see this whole matter in a

different light. Our best modern missionaries decline to take this

attitude in dealing with men of other religions. They do not regard the

heathen as outside the pale of the divine compassion; they seek for

points of sympathy between their own beliefs and those of the people to

whom they are sent. From no other sources have come stronger testimonies

to the sympathy of religions. We must not, these veteran missionaries

insist, assume that our religion is the only true religion, while all

the others are false religions. We may well assume that all human forms

of faith are more or less imperfect--our own as well as theirs, and

invite them to a candid comparison of the differing systems. If our own

is really superior, if it meets universal human needs more perfectly, we

ought not to fear such a candid comparison. But we must be ready to see

and approve the good that is theirs, if we wish them to accept the good

that is ours.

This is not admitting that there is no difference--that one religion is

as good as another; we should stultify ourselves by making any such

admission. But it is a willingness to recognize truth and goodness

everywhere, and to rejoice in them. And we must show that we are not

afraid to take from the many truth which has been revealed to them more

clearly than to us. If we believe in the universal fatherhood and the

omnipresence of the Holy Spirit, we must expect to find, in every form

of faith, some elements that our Christianity needs. In fact

Christianity, through all its history, has been appropriating truth

which it has found in the systems with which it has come in contact, and

it is one of the glories of Christianity that it has the power to do

this.

A great Christian scholar has just published a book entitled "The Growth

of Christianity," in which he shows how this has been done. He finds

that "just as Jewish morality was ennobled and beautified by the

teaching of Christ and yet made an essential element of that teaching,

so the philosophy of Greece, the mysticism of Asia, and the civic

virtues of Rome were taken up by the Christian religion, which, while

remaining Christian, was modified by their influence. This process

cannot fairly be called degeneration, but growth, such growth and

development as is the privilege of every truly living institution."[8]

It is true, as one critic suggests, that in taking in these foreign

elements Christianity not only made some important gains, but also

suffered some serious losses. Greek philosophy and Asian mysticism and

Roman legalism are responsible for certain perversions of Christianity,

as well as for enlargement of its content. We have great need to be

careful in these assimilations; some kinds of food are rich but not

easily digested. But it is, as I have said, a chief glory of

Christianity that it possesses this assimilative power. It is the

natural fruit of faith in the divine fatherhood. We ought to be able to

believe that God has some revelations to make to us through our brethren

in other lands, as well as to them through us. It is the possession of

this power which fits Christianity to be the universal religion.

It has already given some striking proofs of the possession of this

power. We have had, once, upon this planet, a great Parliament of

Religions, in which the representatives of all the great faiths now

existing in the world were gathered together for comparison of beliefs

and experiences. It was, perhaps, the most important religious gathering

which has ever assembled. The presiding officer, in his opening address,

thus described its import:--

"If this congress shall faithfully execute the duties with which it has

been charged, it will become a joy of the whole earth and stand in human

history like a new Mount Zion crowned with glory and making the actual

beginning of a new epoch of brotherhood and peace.

"In this congress the word 'religion' means the love and worship of God

and the love and service of man. We believe the Scripture 'Of a truth

God is no respecter of persons, but in every nation he that feareth God

and worketh righteousness is accepted of him.' We come together in

mutual confidence and respect, without the least surrender or compromise

of anything which we respectively believe to be truth or duty, with the

hope that mutual acquaintance and a free and sincere interchange of

views on the great questions of eternal life and human conduct will be

mutually beneficial.

"The religious faiths of the world have most seriously misunderstood

and misjudged each other, from the use of words in meanings radically

different from those which they were intended to bear, and from a

disregard of the distinctions between appearances and facts, between

signs and symbols and the things signified and represented. Such errors

it is hoped that this congress will do much to correct and to render

hereafter impossible."

Such was the purpose of this parliament, such the spirit which prompted

the calling of it, and found utterance in its conferences. It was surely

a notable and beautiful thing for, the adherents of these dissimilar

faiths, whose ordinary attitude toward one another has always been

suspicious and oppugnant, to come together in this friendly way, seeking

a better understanding, and emphasizing the things that make for unity.

And whose was this parliament? Which religion was it that conceived of

it, and made provision for it, and set in motion the influences that

drew these hostile bands into harmony? It was the Christian religion

which gave us this great endeavor after unity. And it is highly

improbable that such a movement would have originated in any other than

a Christian country, or among the followers of any other Leader than the

Man of Nazareth. It was the natural thing for the disciples of Jesus to

do; and while many men of the other faiths yielded to this gracious

influence, and were thus brought under the power of the bond that unites

our common humanity, it is not likely that any of them would have taken

the initiative in such an undertaking.

We may hope that this is not the last parliament of religions; that in

the days before us such manifestations of the unity of the race will not

be uncommon. And we are sure that the leaders of all such endeavors will

be found among the followers of the Prince of Peace.

Here, then, we find one clear answer to the question with which we

started. The Christian confessor who is confronted with the question

"What reason have you for thinking that the religion of your fathers is

better than any other form of faith?" may answer, first, "It is better

because it cares more for the unity of the race than any other religion

cares; because it believes more strongly in the essential brotherhood of

all worshipers; because it teaches a larger charity for men of

differing beliefs, and more perfectly realizes the sympathy of

religions. It is far from being all that it ought to be, on this side of

its development; many of its adherents are still full of bigotry and

intolerance and Pharisaic conceit; but these are contrary to its

plainest teachings, and all its progress is in the direction of larger

charity for men of all religions. Already, in spite of its failures, it

has shown far more of this temper than any other religion has exhibited;

and when it gets rid of its own sects and schisms, and comes closer to

the heart of its own Master, it will have a power of drawing the peoples

together which no other religion has ever thought of exercising."

I have spoken of the fact that Christianity claims to be a universal

religion. That was the expectation with which its first messengers were

sent forth. They were bidden to go into all the world and preach the

gospel to every creature. There has never been any other thought among

the loyal followers of Jesus than that the day is coming when every knee

shall bow to him and every tongue confess him.