From this point of view, the definition of religion given in the Old
Testament should be revised, "Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly
before thy God." In doing justice we must first be just to self; in
loving mercy it must not be at the expense of our own interests and
advantage, and we must not walk so humbly before our God as to give to
the world the appearance of weakness or lack of independence. As
Nietzsche insists, "The man who loves his neighbor as himself must have
an exceedingly poor opinion of himself." If the race is to be perfected,
everything and every person must be sacrificed in order to produce and
preserve the strong man at all hazards. There is a kind of "moralic
acid," as Nietzsche styles it, which is corroding the strength of
humanity in our modern day. We have discoursed too much of character,
too little of power; too much of self-sacrifice and too little of
self-assertion; too much of right, too little of might. Conscience not
only interferes with success, but also prevents the evolution of a
superior type of man, that superman who is not constrained by duty nor
limited by law, living his life "beyond good and evil."
The serious question which presents itself to our minds at this time is
whether our modern world has not been unconsciously incorporating these
ideas into its living beliefs--that is, those beliefs which reveal
themselves in actual living and doing, in daily purpose, in the
adaptation of means to ends, in the deeds which the world honors, and in
the achievements which it crowns with glory. There are many persons who
would not have the frankness of Nietzsche to say that might makes right,
and that a moral sense is the great obstacle to progress, and that in
"vigorous eras noble civilizations see something contemptible in
sympathy, in brotherly love, in the lack of self-assertion and
self-reliance." Our modern world may not explicitly subscribe to such
doctrines in their extreme and exaggerated expression, but nevertheless
may be unconsciously influenced by them. Our real opinions, however, are
to be tested by our sense of values as revealed by the things which we
crave, which we set our hearts upon, which we strive early and late to
gain, and sacrifice all else in order to secure. Have we not offered our
prayers to the God of might rather than the God of righteousness, to the
God of power rather than the God of justice, the God of mercy and of
love?
The time has come, in my opinion, for us to take account of the things
which we really believe, and of the God Whom we really worship. If we
have been following false gods, let us honestly endeavor to re-establish
fundamental and essential values, to discover anew what is of supreme
worth and set our faces resolutely toward its realization. The need of
our modern world today is the same as that of the ancient world at the
time of the coming of Christ. His message to the world as indicated by
His teaching, and His life was an arraignment of the ancient régime as
regards three crucial points.
The Brotherhood of Man.
First, the religious and moral beliefs of that age had become purely
formal. There was the letter of conviction, but not the spirit of it.
The creed, the ritual, the ceremony were there, but the life had
departed. And so today our beliefs have lost vitality to a large extent
because we have been content to indulge in formulas oft repeated, which
have ceased to have significance for our thoughts or for our feelings.
We have allowed ourselves to be betrayed by words which are mere sounds
without substance. We have verbalized our beliefs, and have
depotentialed them of vital significance. Take, for instance, the
phrases, "The fatherhood of God" and "The brotherhood of man." They have
been so often upon our lips as to become trite; their real meaning has
disappeared. It is easy to repeat the words, and to be satisfied with
the repetition, and nevertheless remain wholly insensible to their
profound import, and under no compulsion whatsoever to obey their
sublime command. We assent to the formula: but it does not become a
determining factor in our purposes and plans. There is perhaps no age in
the history of the world which has so emphasized the idea of the
brotherhood of man as our own, and never in all history has there been
such a denial of this idea as by the present European war. If the
brotherhood of man had been the living, dominant idea of our
civilization, could this present tragedy of the nations have occurred?
If the world had believed profoundly in the idea of God, would we now be
daily reading of the ghastly scenes where human life is no longer
sacred, where love gives place to hate, where the constructive forces of
the world are superseded by the destructive, and all the passions of
man's brute inheritance are given full play and scope?
Second--In the teachings of Christ there was a remarkable expansion of
the idea of God. Instead of the tribal God worshipped as the God of
Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, He substituted the idea of God, as the
God of all peoples and all races, the God of the Jew and Gentile, of the
Greek and barbarian, of the bond and the free. It was the great apostle
of the Gentiles who at the centre of Greek civilization announced this
fundamental conception of Christianity to the old world:
God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on
all the face of the earth.
This was the sublime idea of the God of a united humanity. The God of
the tribe had given place to the God of the whole world. That conception
was very foreign to the popular religious notions current at the time
of Christ, and it seems still further away from our ideas of the present
day. It is a very narrow and circumscribed view of God to regard Him as
concerned merely for our little insular affairs, to regard Him simply as
a God of the individual or of the home, or even one's nation. He
transcends all these limitations of particular interests and particular
needs. He is not merely our God but the God of all mankind. The children
of Israel called Him the God of battle, the God of hosts, that is, the
one who would give victory to them in their battles, and who would prove
the leader of their hosts. But Christ came to the world in God's name to
universalize this narrow tribal idea of God, proclaiming peace on earth
and good will to men. It was the dawn of a new era, the Christian era.
That light which shone upon the old world is darkened by the cloud
hanging low over Europe at the present time. We cannot think, however,
that it is permanently extinguished. To that light the nations of the
earth must again return.
The Area of Moral Obligation.
Third--Christ gave to the world of His day an enlarged idea of the area
of moral obligation. He insisted most stoutly upon the expansion of the
scope of individual responsibility. This freeing of the idea of duty
from the limitations of race prejudice is a natural corollary to the
idea of the universality of God's relation to the world. Corresponding
to the tribal view of God there is always an accompanying idea of the
restricted obligation of the individual. To care for one's own family or
one's own clan or tribe and present a hostile front to the rest of
mankind has always been the characteristic feature of primitive
morality. It was peculiarly the teaching of Christ which brought to the
world the idea that the area of moral obligation is co-extensive with
the world itself. There are no racial or national lines which can limit
the extent of our responsibility. The world today needs to learn this
lesson anew, and it is evident that it must acquire this knowledge
through bitter and desperate experiences. We must interpret in this
large sense the great moral dictum of the German philosopher, Kant, that
every one in a particular circumstance should act as he would wish all
men to act if similarly circumstanced and conditioned. This is the
complete universalizing of our moral obligations--stripping our sense of
duty of everything that is particular and local and isolated. The
natural tendency of human nature is to particularize our relations to
God and bound our relations to our fellow-men; to narrow our relations
to God so as to embrace only our direst needs, and to circumscribe our
relations to man so as to include in the field of responsibility only
those who are our kin or our own kind. The time has certainly come for
us to take larger views of the world, of man, and of God.
After the great calamity of this present war is passed there must
necessarily follow a period of reconstruction. It will not be merely the
reconstruction of national resources and international relations, but
it must be also a reconstruction of our fundamental conceptions of man
and of the relation of man to man the world over, and of the relation
also of man to God. We must ask anew the question, Who is our neighbor?
In this great moral enterprise you will naturally play a large and
significant part, for you belong to the class of men who are expected to
have strong and decided opinions in the face of a great world crisis,
and are capable of leading others toward the goal of a regenerated
humanity. To know the right and to maintain it, to fight against the
wrong, to impart courage to the timid, strength to the weak, and hope to
the faint-hearted; to forget self in the service of others and extend a
human sympathy to the ends of the earth, this is your vocation. It is
the call of the world, it is the voice of one calling to you out of a
distant past across the nineteen Christian centuries; it is the "spirit
of the years to come," summoning you to establish the Kingdom of God
upon earth.