I
Hitherto in the development of our thought, we have been considering the
Christian Gospel as an entity set in the midst of a progressive world,
and we have been studying the new Christian attitudes which this
influential environment has been eliciting. The Gospel has been in our
thought like an individual who, finding himself in novel circumstances,
reacts toward them in ways appropriate alike to them and to his own
character. The influence of the idea of progress upon Christianity,
however, is more penetrating than such a figure can adequately portray.
For no one can long ponder the significance of our generation's
progressive ways of thinking without running straight upon this question:
is not Christianity itself progressive? In the midst of a changing world
does not it also change, so that, reacting upon the new ideas of
progress, it not only assimilates and uses them, but is itself an
illustration of them? Where everything else in man's life in its origin
and growth is conceived, not in terms of static and final creation or
revelation, but in terms of development, can religion be left out?
Instead of being a pond around which once for all a man can walk and take
its measure, a final and completed whole, is not Christianity a river
which, maintaining still reliance upon the historic springs from which it
flows, gathers in new tributaries on its course and is itself a changing,
growing and progressive movement? The question is inevitable in any
study of the relationship between the Gospel and progress, and its
implications are so far-reaching that it deserves our careful thought.
Certainly it is clear that already modern ideas of progress have had so
penetrating an influence upon Christianity as to affect, not its external
reactions and methods only, nor yet its intellectual formulations alone,
but deeper still its very mood and inward temper. Whether or not
Christianity ought to be a changing movement in a changing world, it
certainly has been that and is so still, and the change can be seen going
on now in the very atmosphere in which it lives and moves and has its
being. For example, consider the attitude of resignation to the will of
God, which was characteristic of medieval Christianity. As we saw in our
first lecture, the medieval age did not think of human life upon this
earth in terms of progress. The hopes of men did not revolve about any
Utopia to be expected here. History was not even a glacier, moving
slowly toward the sunny meadows. It did not move at all; it was not
intended to move; it was standing still. To be sure, the thirteenth
century was one of the greatest in the annals of the race. In it the
foremost European universities were founded, the sublimest Gothic
cathedrals were built, some of the world's finest works of handicraft
were made; in it Cimabue and Giotto painted, Dante wrote, St. Thomas
Aquinas philosophized, and St. Francis of Assisi lived. The motives,
however, which originated and sustained this magnificent outburst of
creative energy were otherworldly--they were not concerned with
anticipations of a happier lot for humankind upon this earth. The
medieval age did not believe that man's estate upon the earth ever would
be fundamentally improved, and in consequence took the only reasonable
attitude, resignation. When famines came, God sent them; they were
punishment for sin; his will be done! When wars came, they were the
flails of God to thresh his people; his will be done! Men were resigned
to slavery on the ground that God had made men to be masters and slaves.
They were resigned to feudalism and absolute monarchy on the ground that
God had made men to be rulers and ruled. Whatever was had been ordained
by the Divine or had been allowed by him in punishment for man's
iniquity. To rebel was sin; to doubt was heresy; to submit was piety.
The Hebrew prophets had not been resigned, nor Jesus Christ, nor Paul.
The whole New Testament blazes with the hope of the kingdom of
righteousness coming upon earth. But the medieval age was resigned. Its
real expectations were post-mortem hopes. So far as this earth was
concerned, men must submit.
To be sure, in those inner experiences where we must endure what we
cannot help, resignation will always characterize a deeply religious
life. All life is not under our control, to be freely mastered by our
thought and toil. There are areas where scientific knowledge gives us
power to do amazing things, but all around them are other areas which our
hands cannot regulate. Orion and the Pleiades were not made for our
fingers to swing, and our engineering does not change sunrise or sunset
nor make the planets one whit less or more. So, in the experiences of
our inward life, around the realm which we can control is that other
realm where move the mysterious providences of God, beyond our power to
understand and as uncontrollable by us as the tides are by the fish that
live in them. Captain Scott found the South Pole, only to discover that
another man had been there first. When, on his return from the
disappointing quest, the pitiless cold, the endless blizzards, the
failing food, had worn down the strength of the little company and in
their tent amid the boundless desolation they waited for the end while
the life flames burned low, Captain Scott wrote: "I do not regret this
journey. . . . We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out
against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the
will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last." [1]
That is resignation at its noblest.
When, however, a modern Christian tries to do what the medieval
Christians did--make this attitude of resignation cover the whole field
of life, make it the dominant element in their religion, the proof of
their trust and the test of their piety--he finds himself separated from
the most characteristic and stirring elements in his generation. We are
not resigned anywhere else. Everywhere else we count it our pride and
glory to be unresigned. We are not resigned even to a thorny cactus,
whose spiky exterior seems a convincing argument against its use for
food. When we see a barren plain we do not say as our fathers did: God
made plains so in his inscrutable wisdom; his will be done! We call for
irrigation and, when the fructifying waters flow, we say, Thy will be
done! in the way we think God wishes to have it said. We do not
passively submit to God's will; we actively assert it. The scientific
control of life at this point has deeply changed our religious mood. We
are not resigned to pestilences and already have plans drawn up to make
the yellow fever germ "as extinct as the woolly rhinoceros." We are not
even resigned to the absence of wireless telephony when once we have
imagined its presence, or to the inconvenience of slow methods of travel
when once we have invented swift ones. Not to illiteracy nor to child
labour nor to the white plague nor to commercialized vice nor to
recurrent unemployment are we, at our best, resigned.
This change of mood did not come easily. So strongly did the medieval
spirit of resignation, submissive in a static world, keep its grip upon
the Church that the Church often defiantly withstood the growth of this
unresigned attitude of which we have been speaking and in which we glory.
Lightning rods were vehemently denounced by many ministers as an
unwarranted interference with God's use of lightning. When God hit a
house he meant to hit it; his will be done! This attitude, thus absurdly
applied, had in more important realms a lamentable consequence. The
campaign of Christian missions to foreign lands was bitterly fought in
wide areas of the Christian Church because if God intended to damn the
heathen he should be allowed to do so without interference from us; his
will be done! As for slavery, the last defense which it had in this
country was on religious grounds: that God had ordained it and that it
was blasphemous to oppose his ordination. In a word, this spirit of
passive resignation has been so deeply ingrained in religious thinking
that it has become oftentimes a serious reproach to Christian people.
Now, however, the mood of modern Christianity is decisively in contrast
with that medieval spirit. Moreover, we think that we are close to the
Master in this attitude, for whatever difference in outward form of
expectation there may be between his day and ours, when he said: "Thy
kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth," that was not
passive submission to God's will but an aggressive prayer for the victory
of God and righteousness; it was not lying down under the will of God as
something to be endured, but active loyalty to the will of God as
something to be achieved. To be resigned to evil conditions on this
earth is in our eyes close to essential sin. If any one who calls
himself a conservative Christian doubts his share in this anti-medieval
spirit, let him test himself and see. In 1836 the Rev. Leonard Wood, D.
D., wrote down this interesting statement: "I remember when I could
reckon up among my acquaintances forty ministers, and none of them at a
great distance, who were either drunkards or far addicted to drinking. I
could mention an ordination which took place about twenty years ago at
which I myself was ashamed and grieved to see two aged ministers
literally drunk, and a third indecently excited." [2] Our forefathers
were resigned to that, but we are not. The most conservative of us so
hates the colossal abomination of the liquor traffic, that we do not
propose to cease our fight until victory has been won. We are
belligerently unresigned. Or when militarism proves itself an
intolerable curse, we do not count it a divine punishment and prepare
ourselves to make the best of its continuance. We propose to end it.
Militarism, which in days of peace cries, Build me vast armaments, spend
enough upon a single dreadnaught to remake the educational system of a
whole state; militarism, which in the days of war cries, Give me your
best youth to slay, leave the crippled and defective to propagate the
race, give me your best to slay; militarism, which lays its avaricious
hand on every new invention to make gregarious death more swift and
terrible, and when war is over makes the starved bodies of innumerable
children walk in its train for pageantry,--we are not resigned to that.
We count it our Christian duty to be tirelessly unresigned.
Here is a new mood in Christianity, born out of the scientific control of
life and the modern ideas of progress, and, however consonant it may be
with the spirit of the New Testament, it exhibits in the nature of its
regulative conceptions and in its earthly hopes a transformation within
Christianity which penetrates deep. Progressive change is not simply an
environment to which Christianity conforms; it is a fact which
Christianity exhibits.