It is only a clear recognition of the crucial importance of man's
inward transformation which can prepare us for a proper appreciation of
the social movement's meaning. For one point of contact between
religion's approach to the human problem from within out and
reformation's approach from without in lies here: to change social
environments which oppress and dwarf and defile the lives of men is one
way of giving the transforming Spirit a fair chance to reach and redeem
them. All too slowly does the truth lay hold upon the Church that our
very personalities themselves are social products, that we are born out
of society and live in it and are molded by it, that without society we
should not be human at all, and that the influences which play upon our
lives, whether redeeming or degrading, are socially mediated. A man
who says that he believes in the ineffable value of human personalities
and who professes to desire their transformation and yet who has no
desire to give them better homes, better cities, better family
relationships, better health, better economic resources, better
recreations, better books and better schools, is either an ignoramus
who does not see what these things mean in the growth of souls, or else
an unconscious hypocrite who does not really care so much about the
souls of men as he says he does.
An illuminating illustration of this fact is to be seen in the
expanding ideals of missionary work. When the missionaries first went
to the ends of the earth they went to save souls one by one. They went
out generally with a distinctly, often narrowly, individualistic
motive. They were trying to gather into the ark a few redeemed spirits
out of the wreck of a perishing world; they were not thinking primarily
of building a kingdom of social righteousness in the earth. Consider,
then, the fascinating story of the way the missionaries, whatever may
have been the motives with which they started, have become social
reformers. If the missionaries were to take the Gospel to the people,
they had to get to the people. So they became the explorers of the
world. It was the missionaries who opened up Asia and Africa. Was
there ever a more stirring story of adventure than is given us in the
life of David Livingstone? Then when the missionaries had reached the
people to give them the Gospel, they had to give them the Bible. So
they became the philologists and translators of the world. They built
the lexicons and grammars. They translated the Bible into more than a
hundred languages on the continent of Africa alone. Carey and his
followers did the same for over a score of languages in India. The
Bible to-day is available in over six hundred living languages.
Everywhere this prodigious literary labour has been breaking down the
barriers of speech and thought between the peoples. If ever we do get
a decent internationalism, how much of it will rest back upon this
pioneer spade work of the missionaries, digging through the barricades
of language that separate the minds of men! When, then, the
missionaries had books to give the people, the people had to learn to
read. So the missionaries became educators, and wherever you find the
church you find the school. But what is the use of educating people
who do not understand how to be sanitary, who live in filth and disease
and die needlessly, and how can you take away old superstitions and not
put new science in their places, or deprive the people of witch doctors
without offering them substitutes? So the missionaries became
physicians, and one of the most beneficent enterprises that history
records is medical missions. What is the use, however, of helping
people to get well when their economic condition is such, their
standards of life so low, that they continue to fall sick again in
spite of you? So the missionaries are becoming industrial reformers,
agriculturalists, chemists, physicists, engineers, rebuilding wherever
they can the economic life and comfort of their people. The missionary
cause itself has been compelled, whether it would or not, to grow
socially-minded. As Dan Crawford says about the work in Africa: "Here,
then, is Africa's challenge to its Missionaries. Will they allow a
whole continent to live like beasts in such hovels, millions of negroes
cribbed, cabined, and confined in dens of disease? No doubt it is our
diurnal duty to preach that the soul of all improvement is the
improvement of the soul. But God's equilateral triangle of body, soul,
and spirit must never be ignored. Is not the body wholly _ensouled_,
and is not the soul wholly _embodied_? . . . In other words, in Africa
the only true fulfilling of your heavenly calling is the doing of
earthly things in a heavenly manner." [2]
Indeed, if any one is tempted to espouse a narrowly individualistic
gospel of regeneration, let him go to the Far East and take note of
Buddhism. Buddhism in wide areas of its life is doing precisely what
the individualists recommend. It is a religion of personal comfort and
redemption. It is not mastered by a vigorous hope of social
reformation. In many ways it is extraordinarily like medieval
Christianity. Consider this definition of his religion that was given
by one Buddhist teacher: "Religion," he said, "is a device to bring
peace of mind in the midst of conditions as they are." Conditions as
they are--settle down in them; be comfortable about them; do not try to
change them; let no prayer for the Kingdom of God on earth disturb
them; and there seek for yourselves "peace of mind in the midst of
conditions as they are." And the Buddhist teacher added, "My religion
is pure religion." But is there any such thing as really caring about
the souls of men and not caring about social habits, moral conditions,
popular recreations, economic handicaps that in every way affect them?
Of all deplorable and degenerate conceptions of religion can anything
be worse than to think of it as a "device to bring peace of mind in the
midst of conditions as they are?" Yet one finds plenty of Church
members in America whose idea of the "simple Gospel" comes perilously
near that Buddhist's idea of "pure religion."
The utter futility of endeavouring to care about the inward
transformation of men's lives while not caring about their social
environment is evident when one thinks of our international
relationships and their recurrent issue in war. War surely cannot be
thought of any longer as a school for virtue. We used to think it was.
We half believed the German war party when they told us about the
disciplinary value of their gigantic establishment, and when Lord
Roberts assured us that war was tonic for the souls of peoples we were
inclined to think that he was right. When, in answer to our nation's
call, our men went out to fight and all our people were bound up in a
fellowship of devotion to a common cause, so stimulated were we that we
almost were convinced that out of such an experience there might come a
renaissance of spiritual quality and life. Is there anybody who can
blind his eyes to the facts now? Every competent witness in Europe and
America has had to say that we are on a far lower moral level than we
were before the war. Crimes of sex, crimes of violence, have been
unprecedented. Large areas of Europe are to-day in a chaos so complete
that not one man in a thousand in America even dimly imagines it, with
a break-down of all the normal, sustaining relationships and privileges
of civilized life, and with an accompanying collapse of character
unprecedented in Christendom since the days of the Black Plague. If we
are wise we will never again go down into hell expecting to come up
with spirits redeemed.
To be sure, there are many individuals of such moral stamina that they
have come out of this experience personally the better, not the worse.
There are people who would build into the fiber of their character any
experience that earth could offer them. But if we are thinking of the
moral stability and progress of mankind, surely there is nothing in the
processes of war, as we have seen them, or the results of war, as they
now lie about us, that would lead us to trust to them for help. War
takes a splendid youth willing to serve the will of God in his
generation before he falls on sleep and teaches him the skilful trick
of twisting a bayonet into the abdomen of an enemy. War takes a
loyal-spirited man who is not afraid of anything under heaven and
teaches him to drop bombs on undefended towns, to kill perchance the
baby suckled at her mother's breast. The father of one of our young
men, back from France, finding that his son, like many others, would
not talk, rebuked him for his silence. "Just one thing I will tell
you," the son answered. "One night I was on patrol in No Man's Land,
and suddenly I came face to face with a German about my own age. It
was a question of his life or mine. We fought like wild beasts. When
I came back that night I was covered from head to foot with the blood
and brains of that German. We had nothing personally against each
other. He did not want to kill me any more than I wanted to kill him.
That is war. I did my duty in it, but for God's sake do not ask me to
talk about it! I want to forget it." That _is_ war, and no more
damning influence can be thrown around the characters of people in
general or around the victims of military discipline and experience in
particular than that supplied by war. How then could inconsistency be
made more extreme than by saying that Christianity is concerned about
the souls of men but is not concerned about international good-will and
co-operation? After all, the approaches to the human problem from
without in and from within out are not antithetical, but supplementary.
This tunnel must be dug from both ends and until the Church thoroughly
grasps that fact she will lead an incomplete and ineffectual life.