After Attending a Jewish-Christian Conference

Fellowship with peoples of other religious groups always results in

the grateful experience of discovering unsuspected treasuries of

common sentiment and conviction. More contact between enlightened Jews

and Christians would change the emphasis in many a Christian homily.

This conference was rewarding in many ways. But at one point I fail

absolutely to understand my Jewish friends. All of them, high and low,

intelligent and those who are less so, insist that the story of the

crucifixion is the real root of all or of most antisemitism, and they

seem to have some vain hope that broadminded Christians will be able

and willing to erase the story of the cross from the gospel record. The

least they expect is that the odium of the cross be placed upon the

Romans rather than the Jews.

I can see that there would be some advantage in ascribing a historic

sin to a people who live only in history and who can therefore not

be victimized by belated vindictive prejudices. But would that be

history? The record is pretty plain and the fact that the Jewish elders

rather than Roman soldiers were the real crucifiers is supported not

only by evidence but by logic. The prophets of religion are always

martyred by the religious rather than by the irreligious. The Romans,

being irreligious, were not sufficiently fanatical to initiate the

crucifixion.

It must be admitted that the phraseology of the Fourth Gospel may

easily incite the prejudices of the ignorant. But the enlightened will

find a better method to allay any antisemitic feeling which may result

from the record than to ascribe the crucifixion to the Romans. They

need only ascribe it to the general limitations of human nature and

society. Jews are not the only people who martyr and who have martyred

their prophets. The history of every nation and every people makes the

crucifixion a perennial and a universal historical fact.

That is the very reason why Christians can no more afford to eliminate

the cross than they can ascribe it to the fortunately extinct

Romans. Anyone who incarnates the strategy of love as Jesus did

meets the resistance and incites the passions of human society. The

respectabilities of any human society are based upon moral compromises

and every community is as anxious to defend these compromises against

the prophet who presents some higher moral logic as against the

criminal who imperils the structure from below.

The cross is central in the Christian religion, moreover, because it

symbolizes a cosmic as well as an historic truth. Love conquers the

world, but its victory is not an easy one. The price of all creativity

and redemption is pain. Most modern religionists who understand the God

of creation and not the God of redemption fail in understanding the

latter precisely because they do not see how closely related creation

and redemption are. Which simply means that they don’t understand that

creation is a painful process in which the old does not give way to the

new without trying to overcome it.

The cross of Jesus is truly the most adequate symbol of both the

strategy and the destiny of love not only in history but in the

universe. We may grant our Jewish brethren that it is not the only

possible symbol of eternal verities, but it is a true one, and it

cannot therefore be sacrificed.

Incidentally, I believe that Jewish people have a tendency to

overestimate the religious bases of antisemitism. Racial rather than

religious prejudice is the dominant factor in this social disease.

All ignorant people hate or fear those who deviate from their type.

Religious divergences may be as important as cultural and physical

differences, but they are not dominant. The Jews could accept our

religion and if they maintained their racial integrity they would

still suffer from various types of social ostracism. After all the

Negroes are Christian, but that hasn’t helped them much. Some Jews

dislike this comparison very much. They do not like to be put upon

the same basis with the Negroes. But that reveals unrealistic social

analysis. The majority group is intolerant of minorities whether their

culture is inferior, superior or equal.

_1926_

One is hardly tempted to lose confidence in the future after listening

to a group of young people discussing the important problems of life.

Of course the number who approach the future reflectively and with real

appreciation for the issues involved in the readjustment of traditions

to new situations is not large. There are not many such groups and even

in these the number who really take part in the discussion is small.

Nevertheless their wholesomeness is impressive. I can’t always withhold

a sense of pity for them. With traditions crumbling and accepted

standards inundated by a sea of moral relativity, they have a desperate

task on their hands to construct new standards adequate for their

happiness. There is always the temptation to be too rebellious or too

traditional, to be scornful of the old standard even when it preserves

obvious virtues, or to flee to it for fear of being lost in the

confusion of new standards. Yet the best way of avoiding these dangers

is to subject them to the scrutiny of a thoughtful group which knows

how to discern the limitations of any position, old or new.

On the whole the discussions of our young people at the church seem to

be more wholesome than those in which I participate in the colleges.

Most of these young folks have assumed responsibilities and are

therefore not as inclined to be morbidly critical and sceptical as

the college group. The cases cited from their own experience help to

give vitality to their discussion, and they are not enervated by that

extreme sophistication which imperils the college youth and tempts

him to end every discussion and discount every discovery with the

reflection, “This also is vanity.”

I really wonder how we are going to build a civilization sufficiently

intelligent to overcome dangerous prejudices and to emancipate itself

from the inadequacies of conventional morality without creating the

kind of sophistication which destroys all values by its scepticism and

dampens every enthusiasm by its cynicism. In America that possibility

is particularly dangerous because our intellectualism is of the

sophomoric type. There is no generation, or only one generation,

between the pioneers who conquered the prairies and these youngsters

who are trying to absorb the whole of modern culture in four years. The

traditions against which they react are less adequate, less modified by

experience and culture, than those which inform the peoples of Europe.

And the teachers who guide them into the world of new knowledge are

frequently themselves so recently emancipated that they try to obscure

their cultural, religious and moral heritages by extreme iconoclasm.

It is difficult to be patient with one of these smart aleck Ph.D.s

on a western campus who imagines that he can impress the world with

his learning by being scornful of everything that was thought or done

before this century.

_1926_

A letter from Hyde brings the sad news that C---- has lost his

pastorate. I am not surprised. He is courageous but tactless.

Undoubtedly he will regard himself as one of the Lord’s martyrs.

Perhaps he is. Perhaps loyalty to principle will always appear as

tactlessness from the perspective of those who don’t agree with you.

But I agree with C---- and still think him wanting in common sense. At

least he is pedagogically very awkward.

You can’t rush into a congregation which has been fed from its very

infancy on the individualistic ethic of Protestantism and which is

immersed in a civilization where ethical individualism runs riot, and

expect to develop a social conscience among the people in two weeks.

Nor have you a right to insinuate that they are all hypocrites just

because they don’t see what you see.

Of course it is not easy to speak the truth in love without losing a

part of the truth, and therefore one ought not be too critical of those

who put their emphasis on the truth rather than on love. But if a man

is not willing to try, at least, to be pedagogical, and if in addition

he suffers from a martyr complex, he has no place in the ministry.

Undoubtedly there are more ministers who violate their conscience than

such as suffer for conscience sake. But that is no reason why those

who have a robust conscience should not try to master the pedagogical

art. Perhaps if they would learn nothing else but to be less emotional

and challenging in the pulpit and more informative and educational not

only in the pulpit but in their work with smaller groups, they could

really begin to change the viewpoints and perspectives of their people.

_1926_

Spoke tonight to the Churchmen’s Club of ----. The good Bishop who

introduced me was careful to disavow all my opinions before I uttered

them. He assured the brethren, however, that I would make them think.

I am getting tired of these introductions which are intended to

impress the speaker with the Christian virtue of the audience and its

willingness to listen to other then conventional opinions. The chairman

declares in effect, “Here is a hairbrained fellow who talks nonsense.

But we are Christian gentlemen who can listen with patience and

sympathy to even the most impossible opinions.” It is just a device to

destroy the force of a message and to protect the sensitive souls who

might be rudely shocked by a religious message which came in conflict

with their interests and prejudices.

There is something pathetic about the timidity of the religious leader

who is always afraid of what an honest message on controversial

issues might do to his organization. I often wonder when I read the

eleventh chapter of Hebrews in which faith and courage are practically

identified whether it is psychologically correct to assume that the one

flows from the other. Courage is a rare human achievement. If it seems

to me that preachers are more cowardly than other groups; that may be

because I know myself. But I must confess that I haven’t discovered

much courage in the ministry. The average parson is characterized by

suavity and circumspection rather than by any robust fortitude. I do

not intend to be mean in my criticism because I am a coward myself and

find it tremendously difficult to run counter to general opinion. Yet

religion has always produced some martyrs and heroes.

I suppose religion in its most vital form does make men indifferent to

popular approval. The apostle Paul averred that it was a small thing

to be judged of men because he was seeking the approval of God. In

a genuinely religious soul faith does seem to operate in that way.

Issues are regarded _sub specie aeternitatis_ and the judgment of

contemporaries becomes insignificant. But the average man fashions his

standards in the light of prevailing customs and opinions. It could

hardly be expected that every religious leader would be filled with

prophetic ardor and heedless courage. Many good men are naturally

cautious. But it does seem that the unique resource of religion ought

to give at least a touch of daring to the religious community and the

religious leader.

_1926_

The excitement about the Federation of Labor convention in Detroit

has subsided, but there are echoes of the event in various magazines.

Several ministers have been commended for “courage” because they

permitted labor leaders to speak in their churches who represented

pretty much their own convictions and said pretty much what they had

been saying for years.

It does seem pretty bad to have the churches lined up so solidly

against labor and for the open shop policy of the town. The ministers

are hardly to blame, except if they are to be condemned for not

bringing out the meaning of Christianity for industrial relations more

clearly in their ministry previous to the moment of crisis. As it

was, few of the churches were sufficiently liberal to be able to risk

an heretical voice in their pulpits. The idea that these A. F. of L.

leaders are dangerous heretics is itself a rather illuminating clue

to the mind of Detroit. I attended several sessions of the convention

and the men impressed me as having about the same amount of daring and

imagination as a group of village bankers.

The ministers of the country are by various methods dissociating

themselves from the Detroit churches and are implying that they would

have acted more generously in a like situation. Perhaps so. There

are few cities in which wealth, suddenly acquired and proud of the

mechanical efficiency which produced it, is so little mellowed by

social intelligence. Detroit produces automobiles and is not yet

willing to admit that the poor automata who are geared in on the

production lines have any human problems.

Yet we differ only in degree from the rest of the country. The

churches of America are on the whole thoroughly committed to the

interests and prejudices of the middle classes. I think it is a bit of

unwarranted optimism to expect them to make any serious contribution

to the reorganization of society. I still have hopes that they will

become sufficiently intelligent and heroic to develop some qualifying

considerations in the great industrial struggle, but I can no longer

envisage them as really determining factors in the struggle. Neither am

I able for this reason to regard them as totally useless, as some of

the critics do.

The ethical reconstruction of modern industrial society is, to be sure,

a very important problem, but it is not the only concern of mankind.

The spiritual amenities and moral decencies which the churches help

to develop and preserve in the private lives of individuals are worth

something for their own sake. Yet it must be obvious that if anyone

is chosen by talent and destiny to put his life into the industrial

struggle, the church is hardly his best vehicle.

The church is like the Red Cross service in war time. It keeps life

from degenerating into a consistent inhumanity, but it does not

materially alter the fact of the struggle itself. The Red Cross neither

wins the war nor abolishes it. Since the struggle between those who

have and those who have not is a never-ending one, society will always

be, in a sense, a battleground. It is therefore of some importance that

human loveliness be preserved outside of the battle lines. But those

who are engaged in this task ought to realize that the brutalities of

the conflict may easily negate the most painstaking humanizing efforts

behind the lines, and that these efforts may become a method for

evading the dangers and risks of the battlefield.

If religion is to contribute anything to the solution of the industrial

problem, a more heroic type of religion than flourishes in the average

church must be set to the task. I don’t believe that the men who are

driven by that kind of religion need to dissociate themselves from the

churches, but they must bind themselves together in more effective

association than they now possess.

_1926_

After preaching at ---- University this morning I stopped off at ----

and dropped in at the Presbyterian church for the evening service. The

service was well attended and the music was very good. The minister had

a sermon which might best be described as a fulsome eulogy of Jesus

Christ. I wonder whether sermons like that mean anything. He just piled

up adjectives. Every hero of ancient and modern times was briefly

described in order that he might be made to bow before the superior

virtue of the Lord. But the whole thing left me completely cold.

The superiority of Jesus was simply dogmatically asserted and never

adequately analyzed. There was not a thing in the sermon that would

give the people a clue to the distinctive genius of Jesus or that would

help them to use the resources of his life for the solution of their

own problems.

Through the whole discourse there ran the erroneous assumption that

Christians are real followers of Jesus and no effort was made to

describe the wide chasm which yawns between the uncompromising idealism

of the Galilean and the current morality. I wonder how many sermons of

that type are still being preached. If that sermon is typical it would

explain much of the conventional tameness of the church.

How much easier it is to adore an ideal character than to emulate it.

_1926_

That resolution we passed in our pastors’ meeting, calling upon the

police to be more rigorous in the enforcement of law, is a nice

admission of defeat upon the part of the church. Every one of our

cities has a crime problem, not so much because the police are not

vigilant as because great masses of men in an urban community are

undisciplined and chaotic souls, emancipated from the traditions which

guided their fathers and incapable of forming new and equally potent

cultural and moral restraints. The children of the puritans are in

this respect no better than the children of the immigrants. Both have

reacted against traditions which do not fit their new circumstances and

both are unable to escape license by new and better standards.

Perhaps the real reason that we live such chaotic lives in urban

communities is because a city is not a society at all, and moral

standards are formed only in societies and through the sense of mutual

obligation which neighbors feel for one another. A big city is not a

society held together by human bonds. It is a mass of individuals, held

together by a productive process. Its people are spiritually isolated

even though they are mechanically dependent upon one another. In such

a situation it is difficult to create and preserve the moral and

cultural traditions which each individual needs to save his life from

anarchy.

All of us do not live in moral chaos. But in so far as we escape it,

it is due to our loyalty to religious, moral and cultural traditions

which have come out of other ages and other circumstances. That is

why churches, Protestant, Catholic and Jewish, however irrelevant

their ethical idealism may be to the main facts of an industrial

civilization, are nevertheless indispensable. It is enough that our

society should be morally chaotic without also losing the kind of moral

restraint which still determines the life of many individuals.

There is something very pathetic about the efforts of almost every one

of our large cities to restore by police coercion what has been lost by

the decay of moral and cultural traditions. But of course we do have

to save ourselves from anarchy, even if it must be done by force. Only

I think the church would do well to leave the police problem alone. If

violence must be used temporarily, let the state do so without undue

encouragement from the church. The church must work in another field

and if it has failed in that field, it cannot recoup its failures by

giving advice to the police department. The priest as a sublimated

policeman is a sorry spectacle.

_1926_

We were discussing the first commandment in the preparatory class

today. The boys were trying to see whether “Thou shalt have no other

Gods before me” meant anything in modern life. It is a constant source

of surprise and delight to see with what profundity these boys and

girls deal with the problems of life. They decided that anything

that we loved more than God was in effect another god. But how do we

love God, I asked. There were the usual answers which show how some

children still identify religion with religious practices and customs,

particularly Sunday observance. But one of the boys came through with

this answer, “We love God by loving the best we know.” That seemed to

me not bad at all.

Now we put on the blackboard all those interests which threatened to

become gods to us: money, clothes (volunteered by a girl, of course),

automobiles, eating, playing. We took up each one of these interests

and tried to determine when they were in danger of becoming too central

in life. On automobiles the boys didn’t have much conscience except

that they thought one ought not to clean them on Sunday. They take the

cult of the automobile for granted as everyone else. The girls had

quite a time defining the place where clothes cease to be a legitimate

interest and become an obsession. I was probably a poor one to lead

them in that discussion.

On the matter of eating there was considerable difficulty. “We have

to eat to grow,” said one of the boys. Correct answer. When then,

is eating a form of idolatry? “When we eat all the time,” suggested

another boy. That left Junior in a corner. “I like to eat most all the

time,” he confessed ruefully. How can a hungry boy be anything but a

sceptic about a philosophy of values which does not have eating at the

center of it? Thus do the necessities of a robust organism defy the

value schemes prompted by tradition or arrived at by reflection.

Junior just about stopped our discussion of comparative values by that

confession, “I like to eat most all the time,” and I couldn’t help but

think that my pedagogical impotence before this demand of natural life

was closely akin to the impotence of the church before a youthful and

vigorous national life, immersed in physical values and intent upon

physical satisfactions. Our youthful nation is also declaring, “I love

to eat most all the time”; and the error in its judgment is not easily

overcome by preachment and precept until time and experience will show

it the limits of animal satisfactions and teach it that man does not

live by bread alone.

_1926_

I had a letter from a young preacher today who told me how he was

suffering for truth’s sake. He had merely been telling his congregation

that Jesus was a great spiritual teacher, as was Confucius and Laotsze,

and that the Christ idea was the product of Greek legend and ancient

mythology. His good people were so ignorant, he thought, that they

failed to show proper appreciation of his learning and resented his

iconoclasm.

I find myself reacting violently to the sophomoric cocksureness of

this young fellow. I suppose I am getting old and have made those

compromises with the devil of superstition against which the editor of

the Christian Register warns so hysterically. But for the life of me I

can no more reduce Jesus to the status of a mere Galilean dreamer and

teacher than I can accept the orthodox Christologies. The person who

can make no distinction between a necessary symbolism and mythology

seems to me no better than the wooden-headed conservative who insists

that every bit of religious symbolism and poetry must be accepted

literally and metaphysically.

It is not easy to define the God idea. Scientifically I suppose God is

“the element of spirituality which is integral to reality,” but for all

practical and religious purposes I find it both helpful and justified

to define him by saying that “God is like Jesus.” The ultimate nature

of reality cannot be grasped by science alone; poetic imagination is

as necessary as scientific precision. Some of the supposedly ignorant

peasants against whom my youthful friend is drawing his heroic sword

may have more truth on their side than any fresh young theologue could

possibly realize.

_1926_

In the young men’s class this morning we continued our discussion of

the Sermon on the Mount. The boys have been making some interesting

contributions. On the whole they are sceptical of the practicability

of the demands which Jesus makes in the matter of trust and love and

forgiveness. It is rather interesting to have this revelation of the

basic cynicism of even the adolescent mind. They think that to follow

Jesus “would put a business man out of business in no time,” as one

expressed it today. Of course, it is better to see the difficulties

than to engage in some kind of sentimental avowal of Christian faith

without realizing how stubbornly life resists the ideal.

After all, those boys are up against what St. Anthony saw when he was

tempted by the vision of the young woman and the old woman. The one

meant life but also lust, and the other meant faith but also death.

At least that is the way Flaubert has it. It is certainly not easy to

separate life from lust without destroying life. Yet Jesus came to give

us a more abundant life.

“Maybe it would work if we tried it hard enough,” thought one of the

boys today when we discussed the practicability of trusting people.

That may be the answer to the whole question.

_1926_

Bishop ---- and I shared the platform tonight. Fortunately, I spoke

first so that I did not have to compete with his powerful eloquence.

His sermon warmed the heart, but it was based upon the uncritical

assumption that modern Christianity is an exact replica of primitive

Christianity and is characterized by the same qualities of heroism and

faith. There was a disquieting tendency to patronize in the good man’s

demeanor. I should think it would be a very difficult achievement for

a bishop to be a real Christian. The position is bound to aggravate

the inclination to pride which all of us possess. I do not know many

bishops intimately. The few that I have known well have been singularly

free of arrogance; but they were unusual, for they were saved by

a sense of humor which is not frequently found in the pulpit and

certainly hardly ever in the episcopacy.

“Be not ye called rabbi,” said Jesus, “and call no man father upon

earth, for one is your father which is in heaven.” I am not interested

in applying the words of Jesus literally, but it seems to me that the

principle involved in these words would wipe out the episcopacy. It

wouldn’t leave much justification either for “The Reverend Doctor.” Of

course the Christian community cannot do without leaders. But it might

learn to save them from pride and arrogance.

The highest type of leadership maintains itself by its intrinsic worth,

sans panoply, pomp and power. Of course, there are never enough real

leaders to go around. Wherefore it becomes necessary to dress some men

up and by other artificial means to give them a prestige and a power

which they could not win by their own resources. But it would be well

if the church realized how dangerous power and prestige are, and how

easily they corrupt a man’s spiritual integrity.

It is certainly not to the credit of the church that it is less

eager than the democratic state to circumscribe the authority and

socialize the power of the leader. The Methodists try to preserve the

proper spirit of humility among the bishops by relegating them to

parliamentary impotence once every four years. But who wouldn’t be

willing to suffer for that brief period for the sake of the power and

authority which the bishop exercises for the rest of the quadrennium?

Somewhere I read the observation of an anthropologist that naked

savages could never have evolved a priesthood or an hereditary

monarchy. No one is so much superior to his fellows that he deserves

the positions of authority which a complex society finally evolves.

That is why the leader must be put over with the proper clothes and

paraphernalia. The throne and the crown make the king. Even the

President of the United States has impressive naval and military

aids to offset the unimposing frock which the democratic tradition

prescribes. As for the bishop, who could be more awe-inspiring than a

hierarch sitting upon his “throne” in his full regalia? That does not

apply to Methodist bishops. But they have so much power that they don’t

need the panoply.

Think how insufferable bishops might be if they had to be both

worshiped and feared. I am afraid that is true of Catholic bishops.

Perhaps that is why the Catholic saints are not frequently found in the

hierarchy.

_1927_

An impertinent youngster at the forum (midwestern college) accused

me today of being an authoritarian because I quoted several modern

philosophers and scientists in my address in support of my theistic

belief. I made a deep bow before him and congratulated him upon being

so proficient in laboratory experiments in every science and so

profound in his philosophical meditations that he could arrive at his

conclusions without the help of anyone else, scientist or philosopher.

His question did set me thinking on the problem of freedom. Why do we

believe what we believe, and why do we do what we do? If the religion

of my home had been harsh and unlovely I would probably be today where

that young man is, in a position of rebellion against all religion. If

I had not had the aid of this helpful professor and that illuminating

book when my religious convictions were undergoing adjustment I might

not have made the necessary adjustments but would have thrown religious

convictions into the discard.

If I were not in a position where human nature reveals itself in its

more lovely characteristics would I be able to maintain confidence

in the integrity of man, upon which so much of the confidence in God

depends? Has the class-conscious worker not a right to dismiss both

my political and my religious convictions as bourgeois prejudices? And

could I not with equal justice condemn his as myopic views which his

resentments against society explain but do not prove true?

What we know as truth is determined by peculiar and individual

perspectives. Pressures of environment, influences of heredity, and

excellencies and deficiencies of teachers help to determine our life

philosophies. We ought therefore to hold them with decent humility and

a measure of scepticism. But if we permit ourselves to be tempted into

a complete subjectivism and scepticism by these facts, we put an end to

all philosophy and ultimately to civilization itself. For civilization

depends upon the vigorous pursuit of the highest values by people who

are intelligent enough to know that their values are qualified by their

interests and corrupted by their prejudices.

_1927_

Perhaps there is no better illustration of the ethical impotence of the

modern church than its failure to deal with the evils and the ethical

problems of stock manipulation. Millions in property values are created

by pure legerdemain. Stock dividends, watered stock and excessive rise

in stock values, due to the productivity of the modern machine, are

accepted by the church without a murmur if only a slight return is made

by the beneficiaries through church philanthropies.

Here is C---- recapitalizing his business and adding six million

dollars in stock. At least five of these millions will not be invested

in physical expansion but pocketed by the owner. They simply represent

capitalization of expected profits. Once this added burden has been

placed upon the industry any demands of the workers for a larger share

in the profits will be met by conclusive proof that the stock is

earning only a small dividend and that further increase in wages would

be “suicidal” to the business.

Meanwhile C---- has become quite philanthropic. He gives fifty thousand

dollars here and a hundred thousand there. Since the good man is a

“Christian,” religious organizations profit most by his benefactions.

Every new donation is received with paeans of praise from church and

press.

What I wonder is whether the gentleman is deceiving himself and really

imagines himself a Christian or whether he is really quite hard-boiled

and harbors a secret contempt for the little men who buzz about his

throne, singing their hallelujahs. One can never be sure how much we

mortals are fooled by our own inadequate virtues and sanctified vices

and how much we accept the world’s convenient tribute without being

convinced by it. Nor do I know which interpretation of the facts is to

be preferred, not as a matter of truth, but as a matter of charity.

What is worse--to be honest with yourself while you are dishonest with

the world, or to be dishonest with the world because you have deceived

yourself?

_1927_

Dropped in on the First ---- Church of ---- on my way back from ----

University. Went into the young people’s meeting before the evening

service and found a typical Endeavor meeting in progress. Some ninety

wholesome youngsters were in attendance. All the various tricks of a

good Endeavor meeting were used. Several little poems clipped from

the Endeavor World were recited at the appropriate time and some of

the members contributed quotations from Scripture and from well-known

authors. The leader gave a good but platitudinous talk. There was no

discussion. My impression was that this type of meeting, if still held,

would be very poorly attended. But here the facts belied my theories.

So much the worse for the young people of the church. Only a very inert

type of youngster could be satisfied with such a meeting, and only a

very uncritical mind would accept the pious platitudes which filled it,

without uttering a protest or challenging a dozen assumptions.

However much such meetings may cultivate habits of loyalty to the

church among young people and preserve among them the traditional

religious attitudes and customs, they do nothing to fit young people

to live a Christian life amid the complexities of the modern world

or to hold to the Christian faith in the perplexities of a scientific

world view. What worries me particularly in regard to these meetings

is the assumption which underlies them that nothing but moral good

will is necessary to solve the problems of life. Almost every other

meeting is a consecration meeting. No one seems to introduce the young

people to the idea that an ethical life requires honest and searching

intelligence. Nothing is done to discover to their eyes the tremendous

chasm between the ideals of their faith and the social realities in

which they live.

Under such circumstances we can expect no new vitality in the Christian

life as the new generation takes hold. Old virtues and respectabilities

will be maintained, but the areas of life which are still unchristian

will remain as they are. I see the danger in our own discussion groups

that the young people may satisfy all their idealism in incessant talk.

But the talk has at least the merit of exploring all sides of a problem

and of revealing the limitations of traditional attitudes and the need

of new ventures in faith.

_1927_

Whenever I exchange thoughts with H----, as I do with greater frequency

and with increasing profit to myself, I have the uneasy feeling that

I belong to the forces which are destroying religion in the effort

to refine it. He is as critical as I am--well, perhaps not quite so

critical; but in all his critical evaluations of religious forms

he preserves a robust religious vitality which I seem to lack. His

scholarship is of course much more extensive than mine, but it has not

robbed him of religious naïveté, to use Schweitzer’s phrase. He has

preserved a confidence in the goodness of men and the ultimate triumph

of righteousness which I do not lack, but to which I do not hold so

unwaveringly. While we understand each other, we really belong to

different schools of thought.

I have been profoundly impressed by the Spenglerian thesis that culture

is destroyed by the spirit of sophistication and I am beginning

to suspect that I belong to the forces of decadence in which this

sophistication is at work. I have my eye too much upon the limitations

of contemporary religious life and institutions; I always see the

absurdities and irrationalities in which narrow types of religion

issue. That wouldn’t be so bad if I did not use the instruments of

intellectualism rather than those of a higher spirituality for the

critical task.

Nevertheless I hate a thoroughgoing cynic. I don’t want anyone to be

more cynical than I am. If I am saved from cynicism at all it is by

some sense of personal loyalty to the spirit and the genius of Jesus;

that and physical health. If I were physically anaemic I never would

be able to escape pessimism. This very type of morbid introspection

is one of the symptoms of the disease. I can’t justify myself in my

perilous position except by the observation that the business of being

sophisticated and naïve, critical and religious, at one and the same

time is as difficult as it is necessary, and only a few are able to

achieve the balance. H---- says I lack a proper appreciation of the

mystical values in religion. That is probably the root of the matter.

Yet I can’t resist another word in self-defense. The modern world is so

full of bunkum that it is difficult to attempt honesty in it without an

undue emphasis upon the critical faculty.

If in this civilization we cannot enter the kingdom of God because we

cannot be as little children, the fault, dear Brutus, is in our stars

and not in ourselves.

_1927_

I fell in with a gentleman on the Pullman smoker today (Pullman smokers

are perfect institutes for plumbing the depths and shallows of the

American mind) who had made a killing on the stock exchange. His luck

appeared like success from his perspective, and he was full of the

confidence with which success endows mortals. He spoke oracularly on

any and all subjects. He knew why the farmers were not making any

money and why the Europeans were not as prosperous as we. Isn’t it

strange how gambler’s luck gives men the assurance of wisdom for which

philosophers search in vain? I pity this man’s wife. But she probably

regards a new fur coat as adequate compensation for the task of

appearing convinced by his obiter dicta.

_1927_

Seven clergymen sat down today with the national defense committee of

the board of commerce. They invited us to talk over our stand against

compulsory military education in the schools. It was an interesting

experience, particularly as it came but shortly after our conflict with

the same group on the matter of labor speakers in our pulpits. The

contrast in the attitude of the business men in these two controversies

is very illuminating.

In the labor controversy they were hard-boiled realists who simply

wanted to prevent labor from getting its side before the public. At

that time they did not invite us to a round table discussion. They

had nothing to discuss. They simply used their power in the city to

prevent any discussion of the character of their power and the method

of its preservation. In this case they were aggrieved and bewildered

romanticists and idealists. They want military training in the schools

because they have been told by the army officers that such training

makes for patriotism. And patriotism is the only religion they know.

They invited us to a luncheon precisely because they felt themselves

in a morally, not to say spiritually, impregnable position. I think

they were quite sure that a little argument would convince us of the

error of our ways. Our resistance was obviously very disconcerting to

them. Perhaps they had a right to be disconcerted; for it is only a

little while since there was a perfect alliance between the religion

of patriotism and organized Christianity. Since most of the men do not

attend church they had not heard of the qualms of conscience in the

pulpit that had, at least for the time being, dissolved that alliance.

We stood our ground and the meeting dissolved without any results.

I wonder if it isn’t a little bit wicked to challenge the validity of

the only kind of altruism which men know. But no--narrow loyalties may

become more dangerous than selfishness.

_1927_

I wonder why it is that so many of the churches which go in for

vaudeville programs and the hip-hip-hooray type of religious services

should belong to the Methodist and Baptist denominations. The

vulgarities of the stunt preacher are hardly compatible with either

the robust spiritual vitality or the puritan traditions of the more

evangelistic churches. Perhaps the phenomenon of which I speak is

due merely to the size of the two denominations. They may have more

showmen simply because they are big enough to have more leaders of all

varieties. Certainly no church surpasses the Methodist in the number

of men who possess real social passion and imagination. Nor are the

old emotionally warm and naïvely orthodox preachers wanting in either

church.

Nevertheless there is a growing tendency toward stunt services in both

denominations. Perhaps it represents the strategy of denominational

and congregational organisms which are too much alive to accept the

fate of innocuous desuetude, which has befallen some other churches.

Finding the masses, which they once attracted by genuine religious

emotion, less inclined to seek satisfaction in religion, they maintain

themselves by offering such goods in entertainment and social life as

the people seem to desire.

When the naïve enthusiasms of those generations, among whom religion is

an emotional experience and not a social tradition, begin to cool, the

churches which serve the new generations must either express religious

feeling through devotion to moral and aesthetic values or they must

substitute a baser emotionalism for the lost religious feeling. Perhaps

the prevalence of cheap theatricality among the churches of our great

democracy is a sign of the fact that the masses in America have lost

the capacity for unreflective and exuberant religious feeling before

they could acquire the kind of religion which is closely integrated

with the values of culture and art.

There is something pathetic about the effort of the churches to capture

these spiritually vacuous multitudes by resort to any device which may

intrigue their vagrant fancies. But it may not represent a total loss.

The entertainment they offer may be vulgar, but it is not vicious,

and without them the people might find satisfaction in something even

cheaper.

_1927_

At the Lenten service today the dynamic speaker dilated upon the heroic

character of the Christian faith. “Someone said to me recently,” he

reported, “‘Do you realize that it is dangerous to be a Christian?’

‘Certainly,’ I answered, ‘It always has been and always will be.’”

Isn’t it strange how we preachers insist on emphasizing the heroic

aspect of the Christian faith? That pose today was exactly like the

one struck by the minister in ---- who loved to say dramatically,

“The church needs a new casualty list,” while it was generally known

that he carefully evaded every issue which might create dissension or

contention.

I think we ministers strike these heroic poses because we are dimly

aware of the fact that the gospel commits us to positions which require

heroic devotion before they will ever be realized in life. But we are

astute rather than heroic and cautious rather than courageous. Thus

we are in the dangerous position of being committed to the cross in

principle but escaping it in practice. We are honest enough to be

uneasy about that fact, but insincere enough to quiet our uneasiness by

heroic poses.

Let any group of ministers gather and you will find someone declaring

fervently, “No one ever tells me what to say. My congregation gives

me perfect liberty.” That is just another way of quieting an uneasy

conscience; for we all know that if we explore the full meaning of a

gospel of love its principles will be found to run counter to cherished

prejudices. It is of course not impossible to retain freedom of the

pulpit, but if anyone is doing so without the peril of defections from

his ranks and opposition to his message, he is deceiving himself about

the quality of his message. Either his message is too innocuous to

deserve opposition or too conventional to arouse it.

An astute pedagogy and a desire to speak the truth in love may greatly

decrease opposition to a minister’s message and persuade a difficult

minority to entertain at least, and perhaps to profit by, his message;

but if a gospel is preached without opposition it is simply not the

gospel which resulted in the cross. It is not, in short, the gospel of

love.

_1927_

Talked today at the open forum which meets every Sunday afternoon in

the high school. The “lunatic fringe” of the city congregates there,

in addition to many sensible people. The question period in such

meetings is unfortunately monopolized to a great extent by the foolish

ones, though not always. Today one old gentleman wanted to know when I

thought the Lord would come again, while a young fellow spoke volubly

on communism and ended by challenging me to admit that all religion

is fantasy. Between those two you have the story of the tragic state

of religion in modern life. One half of the world seems to believe

that every poetic symbol with which religion must deal is an exact

definition of a concrete or an historical fact; the other half, having

learned that this is not the case, can come to no other conclusion but

that all religion is based upon fantasy.

Fundamentalists have at least one characteristic in common with

most scientists. Neither can understand that poetic and religious

imagination has a way of arriving at truth by giving a clue to the

total meaning of things without being in any sense an analytic

description of detailed facts. The fundamentalists insist that religion

is science, and thus they prompt those who know that this is not true

to declare that all religious truth is contrary to scientific fact.

How can an age which is so devoid of poetic imagination as ours be

truly religious?

_1927_

Our city race commission has finally made its report after months of

investigation and further months of deliberation on our findings. It

has been a rare experience to meet with these white and colored leaders

and talk over our race problems. The situation which the colored people

of the city face is really a desperate one, and no one who does not

spend real time in gathering the facts can have any idea of the misery

and pain which exists among these people, recently migrated from the

south and unadjusted to our industrial civilization. Hampered both by

their own inadequacies and the hostility of a white world they have

a desperate fight to keep body and soul together, to say nothing of

developing those amenities which raise life above the brute level.

I wish that some of our romanticists and sentimentalists could sit

through a series of meetings where the real social problems of a city

are discussed. They would be cured of their optimism. A city which is

built around a productive process and which gives only casual thought

and incidental attention to its human problems is really a kind of

hell. Thousands in this town are really living in torment while the

rest of us eat, drink and make merry. What a civilization!

Incidentally I wish the good church people who hate our mayor so

much because he doesn’t conform to their rules and standards could

appreciate how superior his attitudes and viewpoints on race relations

are to those held by most church people. It seems to me rather

unfortunate that we must depend upon the “publicans” for our social

conscience to so great a degree while the “saints” develop their

private virtues and let the city as such fry in its iniquities.

_1927_

I think I have solved the Sunday night service problem for good. I

give a short address or sermon upon a more or less controversial moral

issue, or upon a perplexing religious question, and after closing the

service we have a half-hour to forty-five minutes of discussion. The

group attracted by this kind of program is not large. It is not the

usual forum crowd. But it is a group of unusually thoughtful people,

and the way they explore the fundamental themes and problems of life is

worth more than many sermons.

I am absolutely convinced that such discussions come to grips with

life’s real problems much more thoroughly than any ex cathedra

utterance from the pulpit. For one thing the people themselves make

the application of general principles to specific experiences. Then,

too, they inevitably explore the qualifications which life seems to

make upon every seemingly absolute principle. The real principles

of Christian living seem so much more real and also so much more

practicable when a group of thoughtful people make an honest effort to

fit them into the complexities of modern life.

Perhaps the most interesting point about such a discussion is the way

every type of experience can be used to illustrate a certain general

truth. Last Sunday night an advertising man made a most interesting

contribution to the question of marriage and divorce out of his

experience as advertising counsel. He said that he had learnt in

business that it is always well to regard relationships as permanent

even when they are not so absolutely in a legal sense. If the parties

to a contract assume that it can be broken easily they will not extend

themselves as they ought to make those adjustments which a permanent

relationship requires.--Thus we make the experience gained in one

field of activity serve the problem of another field. Again and again

thoughtful mothers have thrown light upon the problems of democracy,

the place of coercion in life and the efficacy of trust out of

experience gained in their work with their children.

If there were only more thoughtful people it would be worth while to

change every service into something like this evening discussion. But

discussion requires time and it doesn’t mean much to people who are

looking for “inspiration” rather than guidance. I suppose there is

still a place for inspirational addresses. But in a world in which so

many traditional moral ideas are in solution and so many others are

generally accepted and never applied, this kind of honest searching

with others, rather than for them, is particularly rewarding.

_1927_

I wonder if it is really possible to have an honest Thanksgiving

celebration in an industrial civilization. Harvest festivals were

natural enough in peasant communities. The agrarian feels himself

dependent upon nature’s beneficence and anxious about nature’s

caprices. When the autumnal harvest is finally safe in the barns there

arise, with the sigh of relief, natural emotions of gratitude that must

express themselves religiously, since the bounty is actually created

by the mysterious forces of nature which man may guide but never quite

control.

All that is different in an industrial civilization in which so much

wealth is piled up by the ingenuity of the machine, and, at least

seemingly, by the diligence of man. Thanksgiving becomes increasingly

the business of congratulating the Almighty upon his most excellent

coworkers, ourselves. I have had that feeling about the Thanksgiving

proclamations of our Presidents for some years. An individual, living

in an industrial community might still celebrate a Thanksgiving day

uncorrupted by pride, because he does benefit from processes and forces

which he does not create or even guide. But a national Thanksgiving,

particularly if it is meant to express gratitude for material bounty,

becomes increasingly a pharisaic rite.

The union Thanksgiving service we attended this morning was full of

the kind of self-righteous bunk which made it quite impossible for me

to worship. There was indeed a faint odor of contrition in one of the

prayers and in an aside of the sermon, but it did not spring from the

heart. The Lord who was worshiped was not the Lord of Hosts, but the

spirit of Uncle Sam, given a cosmic eminence for the moment which the

dear old gentleman does not deserve.

It is a bad thing when religion is used as a vehicle of pride. It would

be better to strut unashamedly down the boardwalk of nations than to

go through the business of bowing humbly before God while we say, “We

thank thee Lord that we are not as other men.”

_1927_

Mother and I visited at the home of ---- today where the husband is

sick and was out of employment before he became sick. The folks have

few connections in the city. They belong to no church. What a miserable

existence it is to be friendless in a large city. And to be dependent

upon a heartless industry. The man is about 55 or 57 I should judge,

and he is going to have a desperate time securing employment after he

gets well. These modern factories are not meant for old men. They want

young men and they use them up pretty quickly. Your modern worker, with

no skill but what is in the machine, is a sorry individual. After he

loses the stamina of youth, he has nothing to sell.

I promised ---- I would try to find him a job. I did it to relieve the

despair of that family, but I will have a hard time making good on my

promise. According to the ethics of our modern industrialism men over

fifty, without special training, are so much junk. It is a pleasure

to see how such an ethic is qualified as soon as the industrial unit

is smaller and the owner has a personal interest in his men. I could

mention quite a few such instances. But unfortunately the units are

getting larger and larger and more inhuman.

I think I had better get in contact with more of these victims of our

modern industrialism and not leave that end of our work to mother

alone. A little such personal experience will help much to save you

from sentimentality.

_1927_

Have just returned from the student conference at ----. A smart young

professor told the students that all social customs are based upon

irrational taboos. Our generation is the first with the opportunity to

build a rational social order. The way to build a rational society,

according to this savant, is to regard every relationship, custom,

convention and law as irrational until it has proved itself rational by

experience.

A sample of the kind of society he would build by his reason was given

in his discussion of sex relations. He thinks the highest kind of

family life would result from the love of one woman for one man while

both indulged in promiscuous relations. Thus would the values of both

freedom and love be maintained. The smart young man seems never to have

heard that you cannot have your cake and eat it too.

If you want love and cooperation in any kind of society, and most of

all in the family, it is necessary to sacrifice some freedom for its

sake. What strange fanatics these moderns are! Imagining themselves

dispassionate in their evaluation of all values, they are really

bigoted protagonists of the one value of freedom. Every other value

must be subordinated to it.

It is true that every convention, custom, law and usage contains an

irrational element. Some were unreasonable from the beginning and

others have become so by shifting circumstance. It is necessary,

therefore, that we approach the facts of life experimentally and

scientifically, rather than traditionally. However, it seems to me

quite unreasonable to proceed upon the assumption that all traditions

are wholly unreasonable. Most of the moderns who think so are

significantly defective in the knowledge of history.

There is at the heart of almost every tradition an element of

reasonableness and around its circumference a whole series of

irrationalities. Our business must be to destroy the latter and

restore the former by fitting it to contemporaneous circumstances and

conditions.

I doubt whether it is wise for every person to be extremely critical

of all traditions in every field of thought and life. I imagine we

ought to specialize a little in this matter and let various people

experiment in various areas. This seems to me a wise policy for the

simple reason that it does not make for happiness for one person to do

the experimenting in every field. At any rate most of the intellectuals

I know who try to do it are miserable souls. I am always glad to escape

their company and consort with folks who take some things for granted.

There is an unnatural strain in their lives and, having made a virtue

of the critical temper, they usually discount virtue and achievement

even where it is indubitable.

Since there are many more traditionalists than experimentalists, all

this may be bad advice. But I doubt whether the lethargy of the many

justifies the few in spoiling their tempers and their judgment. Let

every reformer find at least one field of interest and life where he

can be happily conventional. If he is trying to remake the economic

order, let him accept family life and be happy in it without too many

scruples about its alleged imperfections. On second thought I don’t

like this advice. At any rate it is inconsistent with my scorn for the

liberal theologians who are so preoccupied with the task of reforming

religion that they have no interest in the iniquities of society which

ought to challenge their conscience.

Let us have reformers, then, who try to reform everything at the same

time! But I am going to keep my distance from them.

_1927_

The new Ford car is out. The town is full of talk about it. Newspaper

reports reveal that it is the topic of the day in all world centers.

Crowds storm every exhibit to get the first glimpse of this new

creation. Mr. Ford has given out an interview saying that the car has

cost him about a hundred million dollars and that after finishing it he

still has about a quarter of a billion dollars in the bank.

I have been doing a little arithmetic and have come to the conclusion

that the car cost Ford workers at least fifty million in lost wages

during the past year. No one knows how many hundreds lost their homes

in the period of unemployment, and how many children were taken out of

school to help fill the depleted family exchequer, and how many more

children lived on short rations during this period. Mr. Ford refuses to

concede that he made a mistake in bringing the car out so late. He has

a way of impressing the public even with his mistakes. We are now asked

to believe that the whole idea of waiting a year after the old car

stopped selling before bringing out a new one was a great advertising

scheme which reveals the perspicacity of this industrial genius. But no

one asks about the toll in human lives.

What a civilization this is! Naïve gentlemen with a genius for

mechanics suddenly become the arbiters over the lives and fortunes

of hundreds of thousands. Their moral pretensions are credulously

accepted at full value. No one bothers to ask whether an industry which

can maintain a cash reserve of a quarter of a billion ought not make

some provision for its unemployed. It is enough that the new car is

a good one. Here is a work of art in the only realm of art which we

can understand. We will therefore refrain from making undue ethical

demands upon the artist. Artists of all the ages have been notoriously

unamenable to moral discipline. The cry of the hungry is drowned in the

song, “Henry has made a lady out of Lizzy.”

_1927_

This prayer book controversy in the Church of England ought to give us

liberals who make so much of tolerance a pause. What are the limits of

tolerance? Does not tolerance of a theological position which one knows

or believes to be untrue become a betrayal of the truth? How can one

be tolerant of medievalism without playing traitor to the best in the

modern day?

Here is the Episcopal church which many of us have counted blessed

because it was the one bridge over the chasm which separates

Catholicism and Protestantism. But the chasm is now revealed as too

wide for any bridge. Cooperation with the Catholic demands connivance

with religious practices which reduce religion to magic. No wonder the

Protestant laymen in Parliament threw the revised prayer book out. How

can anyone in the year of our Lord 1927 be seriously exercised over the

problem of the “real presence” in the Eucharist? Think of the spiritual

leaders of a torn and bleeding world debating learnedly on whether

and how God can be magically localized and salvation be confined in

a capsule. To read the arguments of the sacerdotalists is enough to

drive one into the arms of the unrepentent rationalists who regard all

religion as dangerous.

The weaknesses of Catholicism ought not prompt one to disregard all

the finer spiritual and moral values which still live in this ancient

church. But there can be no final unity between an institution which

reduces religion to magic and a fellowship of the spirit which tries to

subdue the chaos of life under the ideal of faith.

Magic is an enemy of all morality. It offers a short cut to all prizes

of the spirit which can be won only by heroic effort.

_1927_

After speaking at ---- University today Professor ---- said he objected

to my assumption that the family is the root of human societies. He

said he believed that most forms of human cooperation were formed by

men who had to resist the special interests of the family, as typified

particularly by the narrow loyalty of the mother to her own offspring,

before they could establish wider fellowships. That was a new idea to

me and one that seems to be not without merit. Of course it does not

invalidate the thesis that the family is the first unit of society; for

the first fighting unit was probably composed of a group of fathers and

sons and sons’ sons. That is, not the family in the narrowest but in

the widest sense, the family as it develops into the clan is the first

real society.

The idea that the family is frequently opposed to ventures in wider

fellowship is justified by more than one present fact. The family

is still essentially selfish, and many a man is beguiled from ideal

ventures by a false sense of obligation to his family. Think of the

number of men who sell their souls merely that their wives and children

may enjoy higher standards of living than other families. Think of the

number of mothers whose interest in life never goes beyond the ambition

to secure special advantages for their children. The mother of the

sons of Zebedee is a good example. In her you have motherhood in its

tragic limitations as well as in its sublime beauty.

The family is not inevitably selfish or invariably opposed to larger

ventures in fellowship, but it may easily become so. Jesus’ ruthless

words, “He who loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of

me, he who loveth son and daughter more than me is not worthy of me,”

have more meaning than most Christians have realized. Celibacy may

be wrong because it escapes rather than solves this problem. But the

invariable tendency of religious movements of great moral sensitiveness

to experiment with celibacy is significant. Thus speaks a bachelor.

Let the cynic make the most of the private prejudice which colors this

judgment.

_1928_

This conference on religious education seems to your humble servant the

last word in absurdity. We are told by a delightful “expert” that we

ought not really teach our children about God lest we rob them of the

opportunity of making their own discovery of God, and lest we corrupt

their young minds by our own superstitions. If we continue along these

lines the day will come when some expert will advise us not to teach

our children the English language, since we rob them thereby of the

possibility of choosing the German, French or Japanese languages as

possible alternatives. Don’t these good people realize that they are

reducing the principle of freedom to an absurdity?

Religion, like language, is a social product. The potentialities

for both are in the child, but their highest articulations are the

result of ages of cultural and spiritual experience, and in the right

kind of religious education the experience of the race is joined

with the inclinations of the individual. We do not get a higher type

of religious idealism from children merely by withholding our own

religious ideas from them (however they may be filled with error), any

more than we would get a higher type of civilization by letting some

group of youngsters shift for themselves upon a desert island.

A wise architect observed that you could break the laws of

architectural art provided you had mastered them first. That would

apply to religion as well as to art. Ignorance of the past does not

guarantee freedom from its imperfections. More probably it assures the

repetition of past errors. We ought of course to cultivate a wholesome

scepticism in our young people so that they will not accept the ideas

of the past too slavishly. But appreciation must come before criticism.

We do not teach a child the limitations of Beethoven before we have

helped it to appreciate him; nor do we withhold any appreciation of the

classics in order that the child might be free to prefer Stravinsky to

Beethoven. What some of these moderns are doing is simply to destroy

the organs of religious insight and the atmosphere in which religious

attitudes may flourish, ostensibly for the sake of freedom, but really

at its expense.

I have a dark suspicion that some of these modern religious educators

do not really know what religion is about. They want a completely

rational faith and do not realize that they are killing religion by

a complete rationalization. With all their pious phraseology and

supposedly modern pedagogy they really are decadent forces.

Life is a battle between faith and reason in which each feeds upon the

other, drawing sustenance from it and destroying it. Nature has wisely

ordained that faith shall have an early advantage in the life of the

child to compensate for its later difficulties. If we imagine that we

help the progress of the race by inoculating children with a premature

sophistication we are of all men most miserable. Reason, without the

balance of faith, destroys a civilization soon enough, without giving

it this advantage among the young. I wonder if any of these modern

religious pedagogues have ever read Unamuno’s “The Tragic Sense of

Life”?

Here I am talking like a fundamentalist. But why not? If we must choose

between types of fanaticism is there any particular reason why we

should prefer the fanatics who destroy a vital culture in the name of

freedom and reason to those who try to strangle a new culture at birth

in the name of authority and dogma? The latter type of fanaticism is

bound to end in futility. The growth of reason cannot be stopped by

dogma. But the former type is dangerous because it easily enervates a

rational culture with ennui and despair.

_1928_

This Federal Council meeting is an interesting study in the geography

of morals. The race commission presented a report today in which it

tried to place the council on record as favoring the enforcement of

the fifteenth amendment as well as the eighteenth. It was obviously

an effort to exploit the strong prohibition sentiment of the churches

for the sake of committing them to the espousal of the interests of

the disfranchised Negroes in the south. That is not a bad political

strategy. But it did not quite work.

A good brother from the southern Presbyterian church warned that to

interfere with this “political issue” would “soil the garments of the

bride of Christ.” To him the eighteenth amendment represented a “moral”

issue but the fifteenth was a “political” one. I have a sneaking

suspicion that the fifteenth amendment expresses more of the genius of

the gospel than the eighteenth, but that is neither here nor there.

What was interesting was the way in which various church leaders tried

to rescue us from the embarrassment into which the council was brought

by this proposal.

A good brother who was raised in the south and now lives in the north

tried to act as mediator. He introduced his remarks with the usual

nice story about how much he loved his negro mammy. Some day he ought

to have a lesson in ethics and learn how much easier it is to love

those who acknowledge their inferiority than those who challenge our

superiority. It is indeed a virtuous woman who can love her social

competitor as sincerely as she loves her faithful maid.

Another mediator was a southern bishop who has many northern

connections. He made much of the fact that the south disregards only

the spirit and not the letter of the enfranchising amendments to the

constitution. The bishop is really a man of some courage who has

spoken out bravely on the industrial conditions in the south. But he

was evidently afraid in this instance either to accept or to reject

a Christian view of race relations. So he stuck to casuistry about

the letter of the law. He has probably preached many a sermon on the

text about the letter killing and the spirit making alive. At any rate

everyone who spoke revealed how geographic and historical circumstance

had qualified Christian conviction.

That was as true of those of us who took an uncompromising position

as the southern equivocators and the semi-southern mediators. To

the southerners we are not Christian idealists but merely “Yankee”

meddlers. And perhaps we are. At any rate it was easy to see from the

debate that the north cannot help the south much in solving its race

problem. If it is solved the solution must come out of the conscience

and heart of the south.

After all, the problem, as every moral problem, is not merely

conditioned by geography but by mathematics. Contact between races when

the one race is almost as numerous as the other is quite a different

story from a relationship in which the subject race is numerically very

much weaker than the dominant group. Therefore let us not judge, lest

we be judged. It is so easy to repent of other people’s sins.

Nevertheless it does not make one feel very comfortable to have a great

church body seek some politic solution for a problem in which the ideal

of Christian brotherhood leaves little room for equivocation.

_1928_

There is a discouraging pettiness about human nature which makes

me hate myself each time I make an analysis of my inner motives

and springs of action. Here I am prodding and criticizing people

continually because they have made too many compromises with the

necessities of life and adjusted the Christian ideal until it has

completely lost its original meaning. Yet I make my own compromises all

the time.

It is Christian to trust people, and my trust is carefully qualified by

mistrust and caution.

It is Christian to love, and to trust in the potency of love rather

than in physical coercion. Logically that means non-resistance. Yet I

believe that a minimum of coercion is necessary in all social tasks, or

in most of them.

It is Christian to forgive rather than to punish; yet I do little by

way of experimenting in the redemptive power of forgiveness.

I am not really a Christian. In me, as in many others, “the native hue

of resolution is sicklied o’er by a pale cast of thought.” I am too

cautious to be a Christian. I can justify my caution, but so can the

other fellow who is more cautious than I am.

The whole Christian adventure is frustrated continually not so much

by malice as by cowardice and reasonableness. Of course everyone must

decide for himself just where he is going to put his peg; where he is

going to arrive at some stable equilibrium between moral adventure

and necessary caution. And perhaps everyone is justified if he tries

to prove that there is a particular reasonableness about the type

of compromise which he has reached. But he might well learn, better

than I have learned, to be charitable with those who have made their

adjustments to the right and to the left of his position. If I do

not watch myself I will regard all who make their adjustments to my

right as fanatics and all who make them to the left as cowards. There

is a silly egotism about such an attitude. But it is difficult to be

pedagogically effective if you do not hold pretty resolutely to some

position.

A reasonable person adjusts his moral goal somewhere between Christ and

Aristotle, between an ethic of love and an ethic of moderation. I hope

there is more of Christ than of Aristotle in my position. But I would

not be too sure of it.

_1928_

Jack Hyde came up today for a chat. These newspaper men are always

interesting company. As religious editor of the Daily ----, he has been

following the preachers of the town pretty closely. Of course he is a

cynic, though a gentle one. He tells many an interesting story on how

the preachers try to get free publicity.

I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists

could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with

the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to

the truth. The interesting part of the contrast is that the newspaper

is officially as optimistic about contemporary life as the pulpit. The

difference between the two is that the preacher is ensnared by his own

sentimentality and optimism while the newspaper man has two views, one

for official and one for private consumption.

_1928_

My good friend ---- has sent me his church calendar. Among other things

he reports “Last Sunday almost as many strangers as members were

present. The weather was a bit cold. Was your loyalty chilly too? You

cannot fight battles with half the soldiers in their tents. Lent is

here. Give your church the right of way. Do your duty next Sunday.”

Here we see how easily even the Protestant minister gravitates to the

viewpoint of the priest. He thinks people ought to regard it as a duty

to hear him preach. What is still worse is that he identifies church

attendance with moral heroism. Does he not realize that faithful church

attendance develops and reveals the virtue of patience much more than

the virtue of courage?

I must admit that I have urged people to come to church myself as

a matter of duty. But I can do so no longer. The church service is

not an end in itself. Not even religion is an end in itself. If the

church service does not attract people by the comfort and challenge it

brings to them, we only postpone the evil day if we compel attendance

by appealing to their sense of duty. It may not be wrong to appeal to

their sense of loyalty to the institution and tell them that if they

have identified themselves with the institution as members they owe it

to the strangers to be there. But even that is dangerous. The church is

already too much an end in itself.

These appeals make it appear that we regard religious devotion as a

service to God, a very dangerous idea. Of course a modern preacher

doesn’t really believe that. What is really in his mind, consciously or

unconsciously, is that the people owe him the duty to hear him preach.

That is perhaps a natural glorification of his own function but it

cannot be denied that there is something pathetic about it.

I can see, of course, that all good things depend in part upon right

habits. Customs, attitudes and actions which are desirable cannot

always depend upon impulse and will. It may be a good thing that people

attend church as a matter of habit and because of a general sense of

obligation to the institution. If churches depended only upon people

who must make up their minds each Sunday whether or no they will attend

church, our attendance would be even smaller than it is.

Yet habitual actions easily become meaningless, and institutions which

depend upon them lose their vitality. If habitual actions are not

continually revitalized by the compulsion of ideals and the attraction

of the values involved in them, they may easily become useless.

_1928_

Detroit observed Good Friday today as never before. Sixteen theatres

and many churches besides were filled to capacity during the three-hour

period. I wonder how one is to understand this tremendous devotion

of this pagan city. How little place the real spirit of Christ has

in the industrial drive of this city. And yet men and women flock by

the thousands to meditate upon the cross. Perhaps we are all like the

centurian who helped to crucify Jesus and then was so impressed by the

whole drama of the cross that the confession was forced from his lips

“Surely this was the son of God.”

Before going to the theatre service I passed a Methodist church with a

message on its bulletin board that explains many chapters in American

church history. It was: “Good Friday service this afternoon. Snappy

song service.” So we combine the somber notes of religion with the jazz

of the age.

I wonder if anyone who needs a snappy song service can really

appreciate the meaning of the cross. But perhaps that is just a

Lutheran prejudice of mine.

_1928_

A very sophisticated young man assured me in our discussion today

(student discussion at a middle western university) that no intelligent

person would enter the ministry today. He was sure that the ministry

was impossible as a vocation not only because too many irrationalities

were still enmeshed with religion but also because there was no real

opportunity for usefulness in the church. I tried to enlighten this

sophomoric wise man.

Granted all the weaknesses of the church and the limitations of the

ministry as a profession, where can one invest one’s life where it can

be made more effective in as many directions?

You can deal with children and young people and help them to set their

life goals and organize their personalities around just and reasonable

values.

You can help the imperiled family shape the standards and the values by

which the institution of family life may be saved and adjusted to the

new conditions of an industrial civilization.

You can awaken a complacent civilization to the injustices which

modern industrialism is developing. While ministers fail most at this

point there is nothing to prevent a courageous man from making a real

contribution to his society in this field.

You can soften the asperities of racial conflict and aid the various

groups of a polyglot city to understand one another and themselves.

You can direct the thoughts and the hopes of men to those facts and

those truths which mitigate the cruelty of the natural world and give

men the opportunity to assert the dignity of human life in the face of

the contempt of nature.

You can help them to shape and to direct their hopes and aspirations

until their lives are determined and molded by the ideal objects of

their devotion. While it is true that magic and superstition are

still entwined, seemingly inextricably intertwined, with the highest

hopes and assurances of mankind, you may find real joy as a skillful

craftsman in separating hopes from illusions so that the one need not

perish with the other.

Here is a task which requires the knowledge of a social scientist

and the insight and imagination of a poet, the executive talents of

a business man and the mental discipline of a philosopher. Of course

none of us meets all the demands made upon us. It is not easy to be

all things to all men. Perhaps that is why people are so critical of

us. Our task is not specific enough to make a high degree of skill

possible or to result in tangible and easily measured results. People

can find fault with us easily enough and we have no statistics to

overawe them and to negate their criticisms.

_1928_

I spoke today at the “Victory dinner” of one of our civic organizations

which had been conducting a financial campaign in the interest of its

worthy objects. Not being well prepared I animadverted disconnectedly

upon the lack of culture in Detroit and expressed the hope that the

dawn of a new day was breaking.

Mr. ---- who sat close to me was so angry about what I said that he

confessed that he had been tempted to interrupt me in the middle of

my address. He cited a large benefaction of his in the interest of a

religious organization as proof of Detroit’s culture and insisted that

the “old families,” to which he belonged, had real culture, whatever

might be said about the newer crowd. I told him his contribution was in

the interest of righteousness rather than culture. Inasmuch as it is

generally known that he made a fortune by rigging the stock market, he

was a little nonplussed by my answer. We finally came to an amicable

agreement upon the proposition that the streets of Detroit are cleaner

than those of Chicago.

_1928_

I believe every preacher ought to take several radical journals,

preferably the ones which are extremely inimical to religion. The

ethical ideals of Christianity are so high and the compromises which

the average church and the average minister has made between these

ideals and the economic necessities of society are so great, and

self-deception is so easy, that we need the corrective of a critical

and perhaps cynical evaluation of religion in modern life.

I should like to recommend this kind of reading particularly to

successful ministers who are so easily obsessed by a messianic complex

because of the compliments they receive. Let them remind themselves

that there are astute observers who think that all their preaching

is superficial and never touches the fundamental defects of modern

society, and that these critics are at least as near the truth as their

too generous devotees.

_1928_

I think I ought to repent of the many unkind things I have said about

various ministers. We liberal preachers (I am thinking of social

liberalism now) are too ready to attribute conventional opinions

to cowardice. What we don’t realize is that the great majority of

parsons simply don’t share our radical convictions. If they get along

very handsomely in the kind of a civilization in which we live, that

is simply because they are in sincere general agreement with the

prevailing ideas of our day. Of course I think we have a right to

wonder a little how one can claim discipleship to one who disturbed

history so much and yet be such a thorough conformist. Yet it is

usually not cowardice but mental inertia which creates the conformity;

and sometimes the conformity is the honest fruit of a finely poised

rather than a daring mind. After all most of us are conformists in some

sense, and it is rather presumptuous on our part to condemn every type

of conformity except our own.

I am moved to this reflection by the insistence of such men as the

editor of the Christian Register that every liberal who remains in

an evangelical communion and does not immediately join the Unitarian

church must be prompted by cowardice. When it is theological rather

than social liberalism that is made the test of conformity or

radicalism, it is my ox that is gored, and I begin to recant my

previous harsh opinions. If the editor of the Register can go so far

wrong in gauging the motives of evangelical liberals we social radicals

may be wrong in explaining why parsons fail to be thoroughgoing

pacifists. Great achievement! I learn how to be tolerant when I become

the victim of somebody else’s spiritual pride.

_1928_

Had a profitable talk with a Jewish friend in the east. He said the

only Christian church that he could ever join would be that of the

Quakers. Of course he would not join the Quakers in the kind of a world

in which we are living, where Christians practice social ostracism

against Jews and thereby force every Jew to regard such a transfer of

religious loyalty in the light of treason to his racial community. He

felt that if he were free to choose his religious group he would choose

the Quakers because they have no professional ministry. He dabbles in

psychiatry and thinks he has looked through the professional minister.

I would like to have him talk to a group of preachers sometime. Like

all realists he barely escapes the kind of cynicism which destroys

wholesome human relations. But he does escape it and is not at all

bitter in his analysis of human nature. That is why his reaction to the

ministry disquiets me. He has his hands on considerable truth.

There is something very artificial about the professional ministry.

When religion deals with magic the professional priests can dispense

the magic and be quite happy. But when religion becomes a search for

all of life’s highest values there is something incongruous about

making your living in the business of helping people to discover and

develop these values. I don’t think this consideration invalidates the

ministry as a profession. In a day of specialists and experts there

ought to be room for a specialist in moral and spiritual values. But

think of commanding a large salary because you are a better preacher

than someone else! Isn’t that putting a market value on the ability of

a man to help people find God? Fortunately it is the rhetorical rather

than the spiritual gift that usually creates the different prices in

the preacher market.

_1928_

Passing one of our big churches today I ran across this significant

slogan, calculated to impress the passing wayfarer: “We Will Go Out

of Business. When? When Every Man in Detroit Has Been Won to Christ.”

Of course it is just a slogan and not to be taken too seriously, but

the whole weakness of Protestantism is in it. Here we are living in a

complex world in which thousands who have been “won to Christ” haven’t

the slightest notion how to live a happy life or how to live together

with other people without making each other miserable.

Yet the church goes about the business of winning people to

Christ--that is, pulling them through some kind of emotional or social

experience in which they are made to commit themselves, or in which

they really do commit themselves, to the good life as it is symbolized

in Christ, and imagining that this is the end of the task. I do not say

that such commitments do not have their value. But surely one must be

very blind to live under the illusion that the desire or even the will

to live a Christ-life is automatically fulfilled in present-day society

or in any society.

The church which conceived that slogan is really better than the silly

advertisement might lead one to suppose. I think people receive some

light and leading there. Nevertheless, most of its energies go into

the business of “winning others.” The saddest part about these highly

evangelistic churches who put everything into the recruiting task

is that they generally tempt those who are already “won” to imagine

themselves perfect, or at least “saved.” I know one lawyer in that

church, and not a bad man either, who needs to be “won” to several

ideas in the gospel of Christ about which he hasn’t the faintest

glimmer of light. But he is too sure of himself to get a new idea.

_1928_

Here is a minister making a confession in his weekly paper: “Last

Sunday night,” he writes, “I was at my worst and unfortunately there

were many strangers in the audience. I tried, but I could not get the

ball over the plate. I had taught a Sunday-school class, preached over

the radio, gone out to dinner, entertained a guest at supper, met the

---- committee and failed to get rest after Easter. I will try to do

better next Sunday, so come then.”

It is all very nice and humble, but there is an implication of

professionalism in the whole thing that is appalling. The idea is that

he didn’t put on a good performance, “didn’t get the ball over the

plate.” There you have the whole weakness of a professional ministry,

striving each Sunday to make an interesting speech. It simply can’t be

denied that the business of furnishing inspiration twice each week,

on a regular schedule, by a person who is paid to do just that and

whose success is judged by the amount of “pep” he can concentrate

in his homilies, is full of moral and spiritual dangers. To follow

such a program without running into spiritual bankruptcy requires the

resources of a saint.

_1928_

Arriving at ---- today, I was put up at the luxurious home of a very

charming potentate of the local pulpit. I was driven to my meeting in

a big Packard car (a gift of the congregation, my host informed me)

with a liveried chauffeur at the wheel. I don’t think I would have

reacted so strongly against this kind of life if I hadn’t been reading

Savotorelli’s Life of St. Francis on the way down and was inclined to

look at the world through the little brother’s rather than my own eyes.

To object to this kind of luxury for ministers, and not voice the same

objection in regard to the standards of living among laymen, may seem

to involve us in a moral dualism. But I am no longer afraid of dualism.

We might well have more of it. It will be long while before we can

convince laymen of the spiritual implications in standards of living

in a civilization which knows of no other way to give a man a sense of

achievement than to let him advertise it by outward show. But ministers

ought to know better.

Furthermore there is a moral peril in accepting the largess of men

to whom you are trying to minister. It is not that they try to

take conscious advantage of your sense of gratitude, but that such

dependence upon their generosity creates a psychological hazard

against honest presentation of the truth. Of course it is probably

true that men who receive these excessive benefactions are usually

too tame to need taming. Innocuous virtue is always more charming and

more liable to prompt a generous affection than the kind which raises

disquieting questions.

Then too, ministers who can preach the gospel of Jesus in our kind of

civilization without making anyone uncomfortable deserve an automobile

for the difficult feat. And they need one to compensate them for that

lack of spiritual vitality which makes the performance of the feat

possible. Most of these modern appurtenances are toys which appeal to

childlike people. When we sacrifice the adventure of trying to maintain

an inner moral integrity, we are bound to seek for compensating thrills

and to find them in our mechanical toys.

But all this may be the voice of jealousy. I love nothing so much in

the realm of physical pleasures as the sense of power which comes from

“stepping on the gas” when ensconsed in a big car.

_1928_

Spoke today at the Jewish temple in ----. The more I make contact

with the Jews the more I am impressed with the superior sensitiveness

of the Jewish conscience in social problems. I have yet to find a

Christian men’s group that can surpass and few to equal the intelligent

interest of a Hebrew group in the economic and social issues of the

day. I do not say that there is not in privileged Jewish groups more

moral complacency than is compatible with their avowed devotion to the

Hebrew prophets, but there is at least a considerable appreciation of

the genius of prophetic religion and some honest effort to apply the

prophetic ideal to life.

I am afraid that the individualistic traditions of Protestantism, and

perhaps also the strong Pauline strain in Protestant theology, have

obscured the social implications of Jesus’ gospel much more than is the

case in Jewish religion. I am not sure that the religious life in the

Jewish temple is always as obviously vital as it is in many Christian

churches, but what there is of it seems to me to be directed much more

astutely, at least from the social viewpoint, than in our groups.

The Jews are after all a messianic people, and they have never escaped

the influence of their messianic, or if you will, their utopian

dreams. The glory of their religion is that they are really not

thinking so much of “salvation” as of a saved society.

_1928_

The way Mrs. ---- bears her pains and awaits her ultimate and certain

dissolution with childlike faith and inner serenity is an achievement

which philosophers might well envy. I declare that there is a quality

in the lives of unschooled people, if they have made good use of the

school of life and pain, which wins my admiration much more than

anything you can find in effete circles. There is less of that whining

rebellion against life’s fortunes, less morbid introspection and more

faith in the goodness of God. And that faith is, whatever the little

cynics may say, really ultimate wisdom.

Mrs. ---- has had a hard life, raised a large family under great

difficulties, is revered by her children, respected by her friends,

and she has learned to view the difficult future with quiet courage as

she surveys the painful and yet happy past with sincere gratitude. She

thanks me for praying with her and imagines that I am doing her a favor

to come to see her. But I really come for selfish reasons--because I

leave that home with a more radiant faith of my own. My confidence in

both man and God is strengthened.

It is the quality in that woman’s life that seems to me to be

dissipated in the modern day, for all our progress. Perhaps we will

work out something comparable to it some day in a highly disciplined

culture. But as we lose the moral fibre of the generation of pioneers

and wait for the discipline of a generation of moral aristocracy, it is

ordained that we should wander through this present world where life is

too comfortable to have the tragic nobility which our fathers had and

too chaotic to disclose the charms which come from a great cultural and

moral tradition.

_1928_

Here is a pastor singing himself to sleep. He writes: “Business men

who attend church have sense enough to go out and run their business

as Christians without the minister interfering with the technique.

Many of the most spiritual and influential ministers I know never deal

directly with politics, industry or reform.” It is true of course that

a minister can’t offer expert advice on the detailed application of

Christian principles to specific fields. But neither can he assume

that principles get themselves automatically applied in the world’s

complexities.

One of the most fruitful sources of self-deception in the ministry is

the proclamation of great ideals and principles without any clue to

their relation to the controversial issues of the day. The minister

feels very heroic in uttering the ideals because he knows that

some rather dangerous immediate consequences are involved in their

application. But he doesn’t make the application clear, and those who

hear his words are either unable to see the immediate issue involved or

they are unconsciously grateful to the preacher for not belaboring a

contemporaneous issue which they know to be involved but would rather

not face.

I have myself too frequently avoided the specific application of

general principles to controversial situations to be able to deny what

really goes on in the mind of the preacher when he is doing this.

I don’t think I have always avoided it, and when I haven’t I have

invariably gotten into some difficulty. Nobody challenges principles.

Like the diplomats, the average man always accepts the gospel

“in principle,” and then proceeds to emasculate it by a thousand

reservations. I know we can’t be expert on every technical problem

involved in modern industrial and national civilization. But the

ministers who make a virtue of their pious generalities are either

self-deceived or conscious deceivers.

_1928_

I am glad to hear of the new honors which have come to Bishop M----.

He seems to me to be the most glorious figure in American church life.

To have a philosopher, prophet and statesman all rolled into one, and

to have that one achieve a peculiar eminence in our religious life is

a clear illustration of how the richest character is achieved when

various, seemingly incompatible, tendencies and functions are fused in

one personality.

Philosophers are not usually prophets. They are too reasonable and

circumspect to create or preserve the prophetic vision. The wise man is

too capable of balancing the truth, to which he ought to be loyal, with

some other truth with which it is in conflict. Thus he involves himself

in the endless antinomies of intellectualism.

This philosopher is enough of a Christian to escape this fate. But he

has another hazard to overcome; for he is a statesman. For years he has

carried heavy responsibilities as a church leader; and it is always

more difficult for a responsible leader, tied to an organization, to

speak bravely than an irresponsible prophet. Yet he has accomplished

it. Here is a vindication of the power of the Christian life. Here

is a Thomas Aquinas and an Innocent III and something of a Francis

all under one hat. He is not as much of an absolutist as Francis, of

course; and his power is not as great as that of Innocent. But his

learning would compare favorably with that of Aquinas, and like the

great medieval philosopher, he has combined the study of metaphysics

with that of social economy.

Strange that while I am so critical of bishops my greatest hero should

be a bishop and that, while I call myself an anti-puritan, that hero

should be a Methodist bishop. So life defies our prejudices and

generalizations.

_1928_

I always thought I was a fairly brutal realist, but I am beginning

to suspect that the whole thing is a pose to hide the sentimental

preacher. At any rate now that the time has come to sever my

connections with the church I find it almost impossible to take the

step. There is nothing quite like the pastoral relationship. I would

almost be willing to sacrifice the future for the sake of staying here

and watching the lovely little kiddies grow up, and see the young boys

and girls that I have confirmed blossoming into manhood and womanhood.

There must be something bogus about me. Here I have been preaching the

gospel for thirteen years and crying, “Woe unto you if all men speak

well of you,” and yet I leave without a serious controversy in the

whole thirteen years.

It is almost impossible to be sane and Christian at the same time,

and on the whole I have been more sane than Christian. I have said

what I believe, but in my creed the divine madness of a gospel of

love is qualified by considerations of moderation which I have called

Aristotelian, but which an unfriendly critic might call opportunistic.

I have made these qualifications because it seems to me that without

them the Christian ethic degenerates into asceticism and becomes

useless for any direction of the affairs of a larger society.

I do not say that some one ought not to undertake an ascetic revolt

against civilization. Certainly there would be a peace in it which

no one can find who tries to adapt the principles of love to a

civilization built upon the drive of power and greed. Those of us who

make adjustments between the absolute ideal of our devotion and the

necessities of the immediate situation lack peace, because we can never

be sure that we have our adjustment at the right place.

Every moral position which has left the absolute basis is in danger

of becoming a rationalization of some selfish purpose. I am not

unconscious of the fact that my tendency to criticise others so

severely for their alleged rationalizations and hypocrisies springs

from my own sense of insecurity.

I persevere in the effort to combine the ethic of Jesus with what

might be called Greek caution because I see no great gain in ascetic

experiments. I might claim for such a strategy the full authority of

the gospel except that it seems to me more likely to avoid dishonesty

if one admits that the principle of love is not qualified in the gospel

and that it must be qualified in other than the most intimate human

associations. When one deals with the affairs of a civilization, one

is trying to make the principle of love effective as far as possible,

but one cannot escape the conclusion that society as such is brutal,

and that the Christian principle may never be more than a leaven in it.

There has never been a time when I have not been really happy in

the relationships of the parish ministry. The church can really be

a community of love and can give one new confidence in the efficacy

of the principles of brotherhood outside of the family relation. The

questions and qualms of conscience arise when one measures the church

in its relationships to society, particularly to the facts of modern

industry. It is at this point where it seems to me that we had better

admit failure than to claim any victory. The admission of failure may

yet lead to some kind of triumph, while any premature confidence in the

victory of a Christian ethic will merely obfuscate the conscience.

Modern industry, particularly American industry, is not Christian. The

economic forces which move it are hardly qualified at a single point

by really ethical considerations. If, while it is in the flush of its

early triumphs, it may seem impossible to bring it under the restraint

of moral law, it may strengthen faith to know that life without

law destroys itself. If the church can do nothing else, it can bear

witness to the truth until such a day as bitter experience will force a

recalcitrant civilization to a humility which it does not now possess.