The New Christianity - or, The Religion of the New Age

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Title: The New Christianity - or, The Religion of the New Age
Author: Bland, Salem Goldworth
Language: English
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[Illustration: Cover]

The New Christianity

The Religion of the New Age

By
Salem Goldworth Bland

MCCLELLAND & STEWART
PUBLISHERS :: TORONTO

PRINTED IN CANADA

TO THE CANADIAN SOLDIERS,
SPEARHEAD OF THE
ARMY OF LIBERTY IN FRANCE,
SPEARHEAD OF THE
ARMY OF BROTHERHOOD IN CANADA

PREFACE

This little book is only a sketch. Some suggestions of the kind that is
too exclusively regarded as practical, I hope, may be found in it. On
the whole, its aim is, as from Mt. Nebo, to give a vision of the
Promised Land. It does not attempt to minutely describe the roads
leading thither. But then, probably, it is not given to any one as yet
to map out very precisely the journey before us, for we "have not passed
this way heretofore." It is my hope that these ideas which have
gradually grown clear to me may help to increase the number of those who
are willing fearlessly and resolutely to set out to find a way that may,
after all, not prove so hard to find as it has sometimes seemed. The
possible reproach of idealism is one to which Christianity itself lies
too open to be feared.

I have tried to write impersonally. May I, then, here gratify myself by
confessing how dear to me and how strong is the faith that my
convictions and my hopes are shared by multitudes of my
fellow-Canadians? I have lived in many parts of Canada. I have tried to
understand the Canadian temper. Canada, I believe, has not yet found
herself. The strain of the war has revealed her
weaknesses,--thoughtlessness, irresponsibility, divisive prejudice,
worst of all, selfishness, sometimes in the extreme. But it has
revealed, too, high devotion, quiet, unostentatious self-sacrifice, rare
energy and resourcefulness.

There is in every nation a Jekyll and a Hyde, but not in every nation
to-day is the struggle between the two so keen or the possibilities of
its settlement so dramatic. The turn that our church life, our business
life, our public life, may take in the next few years--which, indeed, I
think, it is already taking--may be decisive and glorious. Canada has
the faults of youth but also its energy, its courage, and its idealism.
I believe it is possible that she may be the first to find the new
social order and the new Christianity, and so become a pathfinder for
the nations.

This preface would be incomplete if I did not express my great
indebtedness to my friends, Professor W. G. Smith of the University of
Toronto, who gave me valuable criticisms and suggestions, and Miss Ruth
E. Spence, B.A., who kindly assisted me in reading the proofs.

SALEM GOLDWORTH BLAND.
Toronto,
_March_, 1920.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

PART I. THE NEW SOCIAL ORDER
CHAP. 1. THE OVERFLOW OF DEMOCRACY
CHAP. 2. THE OVERFLOW OF BROTHERHOOD

PART II. THE NEW CHRISTIANITY
CHAP. 1. A LABOR CHRISTIANITY
CHAP. 2. AN AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY
CHAP. 3. THE GREAT CHRISTIANITY

CONCLUSION

INTRODUCTION

THE WORLD-WELTER

INTRODUCTION

The Western nations to-day are like storm-tossed sailors who, after a
desperate voyage, have reached land only to find it heaving with
earthquakes. In almost every country involved in the great struggle,
the war without has been succeeded by a war within.

Of this turmoil, industrial or political as it may be, two things can be
said. One is, that no Western people is likely to escape it, and
certainly not the peoples of this Continent. The other is, that even in
its most confused and explosive forms it is a divine movement. Mistaken,
sordid, violent, even cruel forms it may assume. Strange agencies it
may utilize. None the less no student of history, no one, at least, who
has any faith in the divine government of the world, can doubt that
these great sweeping movements owe their power and prevalence to the
good in them, not to the evil that is always mingled, to us at least, so
perplexingly and distressingly with the good.

If this be so, no clearer duty can press upon all who wish to fight for
God and not against Him than to try to discern the good factors that are
at work and the direction in which they are moving. This duty is the
more urgent since no one can tell when the clamor and the dust may make
it very hard to discern either.

In Canada, particularly, is this duty of careful analysis especially
pressing. In no Western country, probably, has there been less
experience of internal turmoil, less anticipation of it, or less
preparedness against it. The attitude of Canada to life hitherto might
almost be described as the attitude of a healthy, well-cared-for boy of
fifteen, full of energy, full of ambition, with plenty of fight in him
but still more good nature, whose only problems are the problems of the
campus and of pocket money.

And yet it is conceivable that in no Western country may the turmoil of
the next few years take a more acute form than in Canada. The
youthfulness of the Dominion, the recency and frailty of the ties that
bind the scattered provinces, the deep divisions of race and language
and religion which criss-cross Canada in every direction, the high
percentage of the new Canadians that have come, and recently, from the
countries with which Canada has been at war, the large numbers of men
who have now returned from overseas and who for different reasons, some
of them unpreventable, are naturally and inevitably finding it difficult
to discover their places in the tasks of peace--these conditions bring
it about that Canada is not only not safeguarded, but is peculiarly full
of inflammable material.

It is true that Canada in population is only one of the small nations,
but it would seem as if none of the greater nations, since ramshackle
Austria-Hungary fell to pieces, faces so severe an internal strain.

But, after all, nations never find their soul except through hard tasks.
God educates peoples as He educates individuals, by putting them in
tight places. This little book is written in the faith that the task of
finding the right solution of Canadian national problems is so high and
hard that only the deepest and truest soul of the Canadian people can
achieve it, but, also, in the faith that Canadians, by the blessing of
God, will be found equal to the task; and the chief purpose of what
follows will be to show what are the good and beneficial elements in the
turmoil, and how, with the least of strife and confusion, all who have
other than selfish aims may co-operate in the divine movement.

There can be little fruitful constructive effort without hope, and,
perhaps, we shall find, when we try to analyze the situation, that it
has even more of hope in it than menace.

The aim of the following discussion is, as the title suggests, twofold:

First, to show that in the unrest and confusion of the civilized nations
two principles, above all others, are at work; that these two principles
are both of them right beyond question; and that the disturbance and
alarm so widely felt are both due to the fact that these principles are
finding their way into regions from which they have hitherto been
largely excluded--to show, in short, that the whole commotion of the
world, in the last analysis, is chiefly due to the overflow of the two
great Christian principles of democracy and brotherhood.

Second, to point out the only kind of Christianity which is adequate to
meet the situation, or in other words, to describe the Christianity
which, we may hope, is taking form.

PART I.

THE NEW SOCIAL ORDER

CHAPTER I.

THE OVERFLOW OF DEMOCRACY

The history of the last nine hundred years in one, at least, of its most
vital aspects is the history of the development of democracy. Perhaps in
no other way can one so accurately discuss and estimate the progress
achieved through this almost millennial period than in noting the
successive conquests made by that great principle.

The first conquest was in the field of education. Modern democracy
began with the rise of universities in the eleventh and twelfth
centuries. Education had been the monopoly of the clergy, not, indeed,
through any such design on the part of the clergy, but through the
ignorance of the Northern races which had overrun Southern Europe and
almost extinguished its culture, and through the unsettled and harassed
condition of Europe which had delayed the growth of a new culture. It
was only the clergy who felt that education was necessary.

It is one of the many inestimable services that the monasteries have
rendered the modern world, that they preserved from destruction some of
the precious flotsam and jetsam of that Greco-Roman literature which had
for the most part been submerged, and that in these quiet retreats there
grew up the schools which were to lay the foundations of yet nobler
literatures.

Eventually, when a measure of peace came at last to the lands so long in
distress and turmoil, the irrepressible impulses of the human soul for
knowledge asserted themselves. The youth of Europe, eager to know,
flocked in increasing numbers to the teachers who began to be famous,
and the university took its rise.

Education placed in the hands of the people the key to other doors. As
a natural consequence, democracy found its way into the jealously
guarded realm of religion. After innumerable abortive, but glorious and
not wasted, struggles for the right of the individual to find his own
religion and dispense with ecclesiastical guides and directors, Northern
Europe established the principle of democracy in religion in the great
revolt known as the Protestant Reformation. That uprising was a very
complex movement. Many motives mingled in it, but of these the desire
for a purer faith was, probably, on the whole not so influential as the
democratic passion for intellectual and religious freedom.

Concurrent with the overflow of democracy into the realm of religion was
its overflow into politics. The evolution of political democracy is the
distinctive glory of England. It is her contribution to world
civilization as that of the Hebrew was monotheism, that of the Greek
culture, and that of the Roman organization and law.

The barons, primarily in their own interest, wrested the Great Charter
from a King who more recklessly and oppressively than his predecessors
played the despot. In the provision of Magna Charta that the King
should levy no more taxes without consent of the taxed was found the
necessity of the coming together, first of the barons and the spiritual
lords, later of the knights of the shire, and finally of the burghers of
the towns--separate assemblies which soon coalesced and by their
unification formed the English Parliament. English constitutional
history from the reign of Henry III. to the Revolution of 1688 is the
history of the gradual supersession of the crown by Parliament, and of
the ascendancy of the elective House of Commons over the hereditary
House of Peers. The eighteenth century witnessed the development of
Cabinet government; the nineteenth completed the great fabric of
political democracy in those Franchise Acts which admitted to
participation in the government--

In 1832, the propertied classes of the manufacturing towns;

In 1867, the artisan;

In 1884, the farm labourers;

In 1918, the women.

With these must be mentioned the Act of 1911 which constitutionally and
decisively established the ascendancy of the popular House over the
Peers.

England broke the trail which all other peoples that have accepted
democracy have followed. The mobile and logical intelligence of France,
slower through historical conditions to snap the feudal bonds, when it
was at last aroused, at one bound outstripped England. Not content to
limit, it swept away both monarchy and the House of Peers. A still more
striking illustration of how the last may be first may yet be yielded by
that great half-European, half-Asiatic people, so long, apparently,
impenetrable to democracy, but now in the obscure throes of a revolution
which despite its initial disorders and excesses, may, it is perhaps
possible to hope, give to Russia the high honour of being the first
nation to achieve the last conquest of democracy--its triumph in the
economic realm. For it would seem impossible to doubt that that final
triumph of democracy can be long delayed. Autocracy and aristocracy
overthrown in politics cannot stand in economics.

He who will trace a river like the Mississippi from its source, and find
it growing in hundreds of miles from a stream that may be waded to a
great river a mile in width and a hundred feet in depth, does not need
to actually follow the river to its mouth to be assured that it must
reach the sea. Such a river cannot be diverted or dammed. Obstructions
will only serve to make its current more violent.

This, then, would seem to be clear, that by an action as cosmic and
irresistible as the movement of a great river, democracy is invading the
industrial world. The time has passed for all temporary and makeshift
expedients. A kindly spirit in the employer, improved hygienic
conditions, rest rooms, better pay and shorter hours, will not secure
equilibrium, though the spirit of good-will they tend to evoke may make
further struggle less bitter. Profit-sharing furnishes no permanent
resting place. It is merely a camping place on the journey. In the
papers of Feb. 12, 1919, appeared a significant despatch from London of
the same date, describing the acute labor situation.

"The labor situation reaches a crisis to-day in conferences between the
government and three great unions, representing nearly 1,500,000
workers, the result of whose demands is awaited with keen interest by
the entire labor world.

"The unions are the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, membership
800,000; National Union of Railway-men, membership 400,000; and the
National Transport Workers’ Federation, membership 250,000. The unions
are acting together, and it is believed they have agreed on joint action
if dissatisfied with the result of the conferences.

"The railwaymen’s demands include a 48-hour week and control of railways
by representatives of the managements and workers. This latter clause is
considered a step toward nationalization, but an alternative has been
prepared in the form of a commission of labor delegates and boards of
directors.

"William Adamson, leader of the Labor party in the House of Commons,
speaking on the industrial situation, said that it was almost as
menacing and dangerous as the war itself. He said that the principal
Labor amendment to the reply to the address from the throne would relate
to the causes of industrial unrest.

"’I hope,’ he continued, ’that no attempts will be made to disappoint
the legitimate expectations of the working people. All sections of the
people should understand that we have reached the stage when we have
laid the cards upon the table and when the working classes will refuse
longer to be treated as cogs in a machine or for mere profit-making
purposes.’"

In short, nothing will now satisfy the workers but a share in the
control. The most hopeful scheme of harmony would seem to be some such
arrangement as the Whitley scheme which has been officially endorsed by
the British Government. The essential features of the Whitley scheme
are the organization of all the workers in any industrial area, the
organization of all the employers, the creation of joint committees
representative of both groups to fix wages and determine conditions of
labor. And this is not the end but the beginning. The end, at least of
this phase of industrial evolution, would appear to promise to be the
disappearance of the capitalistic control of industry. So far as
industries are not owned and managed by the community, they will be
owned and managed by the workers that carry them on. The revolution
will be accomplished when the men of inventive and organizing and
directive ability recognize that their place is with the workers and not
with the owners. Capitalistic control must pass away. It has, no doubt,
played a necessary and useful part in the social evolution. It has
shown courage and enterprise. But it has been, on the whole, rapacious
and heartless, and its sense of moral responsibility has been often
rudimentary. When the managers on whom it depends desert to the side of
the workers, it will be patent how little capacity or service is in
capitalism, and how little it deserved the immense gains it wrung from
exploited labor and skill.

The process may be harder and slower than even the most sober-minded
would estimate, or it may be much easier and quicker; but the process
has begun, and there can be but one end. Feudalistic industry must
follow feudalistic land holding. Feudalistic landlordism went because
the feudal lords were enormously overpaid in proportion to their
services. When organizing and directive ability breaks the artificial
bond that has associated it with capital, it will be seen how slight is
the service capital has rendered and how enormously it has been
overpaid.

Management is, of course, entitled to its wages, and under present
conditions those wages must be relatively high, for managing ability is
not abundant. What might be called the wages of capital have been
unjustly high and are destined to fall until no man can afford to be a
mere capitalist. To gain a livelihood he will be obliged to develop
some productive function.

So long as industry must be maintained on a capitalistic basis, those
furnishing the capital are entitled to a fair return on their
investment, but the fashion of this capitalistic age passeth away. The
control of money and credit is destined to gradually become a function
of government.

A check must be placed on the fatal fashion money has of breeding money.
Wages of labor, wages of invention, wages of superintendence, are just;
profits of capital must grow less and less to the vanishing point. The
bitter conflict between capital and labor over the division of the
profits will never be settled. It probably never can be settled. It
will cease to be. Capital will cease to be a factor; only labor in the
broadly inclusive sense of the term will remain.

The onward march of democracy, then, cannot be staid. It ought not.
Democracy is nothing but the social expression of the fundamental
Christian doctrine of the worth of the human soul. Democracies had
found their way into human life before the revelation of the worth of
the human soul in the redemptive work of Jesus Christ, but at their
best, as in ancient Greece, they were restricted. Even that most
glorious of all non-Christian democracies and, in some respects, most
glorious as yet of all democracies non-Christian and Christian, the
democracy of Athens, rested on a slave basis and excluded the man not
possessing Athenian citizenship. But it was at least a noble
anticipation, a sublime, if inconsistent, partial, and evanescent
reaching-out after the democracy which Christianity can never be content
till it has achieved, a democracy of religion, of culture, of politics,
and of industry. The inherent dignity of every human soul must be
recognized in every sphere of life. Heirs of God, joint-heirs with
Christ--how is it possible to reconcile such august titles with
servitude or subjection? A share in the control of church, community,
industry is the Divine right of every normal man and woman.

CHAPTER II.

THE OVERFLOW OF BROTHERHOOD

The Church of Jesus Christ should not be alarmed at the inundating
progress of democracy. She, of all institutions, should not oppose it.
It is her child. But even democracy, with its majestic vindication of
the worth and dignity of the humblest and least-endowed human soul, is
not so distinctively and gloriously the offspring of Christianity as is
the principle of brotherhood. The movement towards brotherhood, the
great master-passion of our day, is just the overflow of Christianity
from the conventionally religious into the economic realm. One might
rest the divine claim of Christianity on this irrepressible impulse to
overflow.

The ancient heathen faiths, with a few possible exceptions, did not seek
to overflow. They asked only a strictly delimited area, definite times,
definite places, definite gifts, definite ceremonial, observances and
regulations. Outside that circumscribed area, life might go on as it
would.

Even some forms of Christianity have shown little disposition to
overflow. There has long been and still is a type of Christianity which
fixes its eye on heaven and abandons earth. It is indifferent and
acquiescent in regard to the affairs of this life, with no surge of
passion for their purification and ennoblement.

This attitude has found expression in a hymn of John Wesley’s which was
once sung in its entirety but which, where it still lingers in our
present collections, survives in a repeatedly and severely abridged
form.

How happy is the pilgrim’s lot!
How free from every anxious thought,
From worldly hope and fear!
Confined to neither court nor cell,
His soul disdains on earth to dwell,
He only sojourns here.

His happiness in part is mine,
Already saved from self-design,
From every creature-love;
Blest with the scorn of finite good,
My soul is lightened of its load,
And seeks the things above.

The things eternal I pursue,
A happiness beyond the view
Of those that basely pant
For things by nature felt and seen;
Their honors, wealth and pleasures mean
I neither have nor want.

I have no babes to hold me here,
But children more securely near
For mine I humbly claim;
Better than daughters or than sons,
Temples divine, of living stones
Inscribed with Jesus’ name.

No foot of land do I possess,
No cottage in this wilderness,
A poor, wayfaring man;
I lodge awhile in tents below,
Or gladly wander to and fro
Till I my Canaan gain.

Nothing on earth I call my own:
A stranger to the world unknown,
I all their goods despise;
I trample on their whole delight,
And seek a country out of sight,
A country in the skies.

There is my house and portion fair,
My treasure and my heart are there,
And my abiding home;
For me the elder brethren stay,
And angels beckon me away,
And Jesus bids me come.

I come,--thy servant, Lord, replies--
I come to meet Thee in the skies,
And claim my heavenly rest!
Now let the pilgrims’ journey end,
Now, O my Saviour, Brother, Friend,
Receive me to thy breast.

As expressed in this hymn and still more in that spiritual classic, the
"_De Contemptu Mundi_" of Bernard of Cluny, such a piety is not without
its pathos and beauty and lofty idealism, but it is not Christianity.

It is only the pale bloodless spectre of Christianity. Christianity is
a torrent. It is a fire. It is a passion for brotherhood, a raging
hatred of everything which denies or forbids brotherhood. It was a
brotherhood at the first. Twisted, bent, repressed for nearly twice a
thousand years, it will be a brotherhood at the last.

Does Christianity mean Socialism? It means infinitely more than
Socialism. It means Socialism plus a deeper, diviner brotherhood than
even Socialism seeks. It abhors inequality. It always has abhorred
inequality. It seems almost inexplicable that the censors in these days
of panicky attempts at suppression of incendiary ideas have not put
under the ban such words as these:

"My soul doth magnify the Lord,

And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.

* * * * *

He hath showed strength with his arm:

He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their heart.

He hath put down princes from their thrones, and hath exalted them of
low degree.

The hungry He hath filled with good things:

And the rich He hath sent empty away."--Luke 1:46-53.

or these:

"Let the brother of low degree rejoice in that he is exalted;

But the rich in that he is made low; because, as the flower of the grass
he shall pass away.

For the sun is no sooner risen with a burning heat but it withereth the
grass, and the flower thereof falleth, and the grace of the fashion of
it perisheth: so also shall the rich man fade away in his ways."--James
1:9-ll.

"Nothing is hid," was the word of Jesus, "that shall not be made
manifest, nor anything secret that shall not be known and come to
light." Many things have been hidden in that extraordinary amalgam that
we call historical Christianity. St. Paul hid in it his peculiar
idiosyncratic contempt of marriage and lack of reverence for women, and
these elements worked out in the millennial denial of woman’s rights and
the abnormalities and tragedies of asceticism. St. Paul, again, and the
unknown authors of the letter to the Hebrews and the fourth Gospel hid
in primitive Christianity the Greek passion for metaphysics, and there
emerged that perverse exaltation of dogma and orthodoxy which has, more
than any other thing, withered the heart of the Church, smothered its
fresh spontaneous life, kindled the infernal fires of heresy-trials and
autos-da-fé. But Jesus hid something in historic Christianity, too,
something deeper, diviner, mightier than any foreign ingredients added
by other hands. Those commingling elements the Christianity of Jesus
probably had to take up, test, and eventually reject. The only way,
perhaps, in which the real meaning of Christianity could be discovered
by men was in contrast with the innumerable and heterogeneous
adulterations of it. We come to truth, it has been profoundly said, by
the exhaustion of error. Humanity cannot apparently be sure of the
right road till it knows all the wrong roads as well. So it would
certainly have seemed to be with historic Christianity.

But deepest and most vital of all the elements that have found their way
into historic Christianity is what Christ hid there,--the equality of
brotherhood. That hidden element, too, must find its way to the light.
Early repressed, driven in, well nigh smothered, it has, nevertheless,
never been extinguished, for it is the secret force, the most deeply
vital essence of Christianity. As Bernard Shaw has said, it is not true
that Christianity has been tried and found wanting; it has been found
difficult and has never been tried. But in the profound words of
Martineau, "In the history of systems an inexorable logic rids them of
their halfness and hesitancies and drives them straight to their
appointed goal." Not always by a straight road but by a sure one.

Nothing is more certain than that the human intellect must refuse
eventually to acquiesce in that strange, illogical, and inconsistent
jumble we call our Christian civilization. Something drives it
irresistibly to consistency. The Christianity of Jesus means nothing if
it does not mean brotherhood. Brotherhood means nothing if it does not
mean a passion for equality. The story is told that when the Duke of
Wellington, who, like so many other great soldiers of other times and of
our own, was a devout man, was kneeling to receive the Communion in the
village Church near his estate, a humble neighbour found himself, to his
consternation, kneeling close beside the great Duke. He was rising at
once to move away when the Duke put out his hand and detained him,
saying, "We are all equal here." It was a fine spirit that the Duke
showed for the time and in a country such as England was then. But it
holds in it explosives of which probably the Duke did not dream. Equal
at the table of their Common Lord! Then equal everywhere! Equality
everywhere or equality nowhere! The soul of every man who has seen the
divine beauty of equality must forever war against all limitations and
impairments of it. Even human logic can not permanently tolerate such a
fundamental incompatibility and irrationality as religious equality and
social inequality sleeping in the same bed. Religious equality has
already worked itself out in political equality. Even in aristocratic
England the last vestige of political inequality has disappeared. The
accepted formula is now--one man, one vote. It may be a harder problem
to work out, but economic equality will be worked out to the same
conclusion--one man, one share of all the conditions of human dignity
and well being.

The keen satire of Charles Kingsley in _Alton Locke_ will not always be
justified.

"Faix, an’ ain’t we all brothers?" asked Kelly.

"Ay, and no," said Sandy, with an expression which would have been a
smile, but for its depths of bitter earnestness; "brethren in Christ, my
laddie."

"An’ ain’t that all over the same?"

"Ask the preachers. Gin they meant brothers, they’d say brothers, be
sure; but because they don’t mean brothers at a’, they say
brethren--ye’ll mind, brethren--to soun’ antiquate, an’ professional,
an’ perfunctory-like, for fear it should be ower real, an’ practical,
an’ startling, an’ a’ that; and then jist limit it down wi’ a ’in
Christ,’ for fear o’ owre wide applications, and a’ that. But

For a’ that, and a’ that,
It’s comin’ yet, for a’ that,
When man an’ man, the warld owre,
Shall brothers be, for a’ that--

An’ na brithren any mair at a’!"

Social inequality between human beings can never be a permanent
relation. Ordinarily between normal human beings it is a hateful and
demoralizing relation. It is twice cursed. It curses him who is down
and him who is up.

It powerfully tends to make the one who is down and knows he is down,
subservient, a truckler, a fawner. If a man is wise enough and strong
enough to withstand the influence, the probability is that the very
effort at resistance, unless he is very wise and very strong, will
develop an unlovely and ungracious spirit of defiance, sometimes of
hostility. In any case, human nature generally sours under it.

It is, perhaps, even worse in its effects on the one who is up. At the
best he becomes condescending, affable, gracious,
patronizing--intolerable attitudes every one. At the worst he becomes
arrogant and insolent. Always he tends to become suspicious and
cynical. He learns to distrust the forced respectfulness and
obligingness everywhere shown to himself, and so comes to distrust
courtesy and good-will in general.

H. G. Wells in his _The Future in America_ inserts a picture of "one of
the most impressive of these very rich Americans." "My friend beheld
him, gross and heavy, seated in an easy chair in the centre of his
private car, among men who stared and came and went. He clutched a long
cigar with a great clumsy hand. He turned on you a queer, coarse,
disconcerting bottle nose with a little hard, blue, wary, hostile eye
that watched out from the roots of it. He said nothing. He attempted
no civility, he looked pride and insults--you ceased to respect
yourself.... ’It was Roman,’ my friend said. ’There has been nothing
like it since the days of that republic. No living king would dare to
do it. And these other Americans! These people walked up to him and
talked to him--they tried to flatter him and get him to listen to
projects. Abjectly. And you knew, he _grunted_. He didn’t talk back.
It was beneath him. He just grunted at them!"

Just as clear as the incompatibility of Christianity with social
inequality is its incompatibility with business competition.

Competition for a livelihood, competition for bread and butter, is the
denial of brotherhood. It is the antithesis of the Golden Rule. It is
not the doing unto other men as we would that they should do to us. It
is obedience to David Harum’s parody of the Golden Rule, "Do unto the
other fellow as he wants to do to you, and do it fust." The essential
condition of competition is that always there shall be at least two men
after the one contract, two men after the one job, two men after the
custom, the patronage, the _clientèle_ only sufficient for one. As a
consequence, wherever competition exists, the success of one man always
involves the failure of another. The man who gets the position knows
that another man is suffering. The merchant who captures the trade
knows that another must fail. The rule for success, as given by a
highly successful business man of America, was, "So conduct your
business that your competitor will have to shut up shop." The method is
essentially disorderly and wasteful. Worse than that, it is inhuman.

It is difficult, indeed, to imagine how a more inhuman method of
business could be devised short of methods which no man who had not
ceased to be human would tolerate. Inhuman and dehumanizing. How deeply
dehumanizing is seen in the effort of Christian men to justify it--the
supreme illustration in our day of the morally blinding power of the
accustomed, the familiar, and, above all, the profitable, which has made
Christian men defenders of competition, of war, of the drink traffic, of
the opium traffic, and of slavery.

Business competition to-day is, conceivably, as great an evil as ever
intemperance was. Its working is more subtle, more wide-spread, more
deeply destructive.

It hardens men. It dries up their natural and almost inextinguishable
kindliness. It demoralizes them. It almost compels them to resort to
crooked methods. It subjects them to temptations sometimes virtually
irresistible. It presents them with the alternatives of failure and
starvation for themselves and their loved ones or the doing of
something, not right indeed, but which plenty of others do and which
seems imperative. The honorable man has to compete with the
dishonorable. The Hydrostatic Paradox of controversy, the Autocrat of
the Breakfast Table has told us, lies in this, that as water in two
connected tubes, however different their calibre, stands at the same
level in both, so if a wise man and a fool engage in controversy, they
tend to equality. The more demoralizing Hydrostatic Paradox of business
competition is its deadly tendency to bring the honorable man down to
the level of the dishonorable.

It is not always demoralizing. There are men strong enough to maintain
their integrity, even sometimes at great risk. But the strain of it,
the feverishness of it, the narrowing influences of it, still fewer men
escape.

Under the shade and fallen needles of the pine forest, no other
vegetation can grow. Under the absorption, the exhaustion, of the fierce
business competition of America, little else than business shrewdness,
business insight, business knowledge can grow. A thousand seeds of
culture, art, music, philanthrophy, religion, human fellowship, home
happiness die permanently or fail to germinate at all in the American
business man. The struggle, like a remorseless machine, seizes him as a
young man and works its way with him till it flings him off at the other
end of the process, a failure with a dreary old age of dependence and
uncertainty, or a successful man broken in health at fifty, to spend the
rest of his days in search of health, or with the leisure and the means
to develop the old tastes but the tastes themselves atrophied by long
and enforced neglect.

In the name of the brotherhood of Christianity, in the name of the
richness and variety of the human soul, the Church must declare a
truceless war upon this sterilizing and dehumanizing competition and
upon the source of it, an economic order based on profit-seeking.

With profits not merely as an inducement but as the absolutely essential
condition, the _sine qua non_ not merely of success but of a livelihood,
competition, even desperate competition, is inevitable. There is not
usually the direct personal clash, the bloody or deadly combat, though
these may be, but it is a life and death struggle none the less. In
business competition, men are fighting with halters around their necks.
They are fighting as wolves fight who know that the beaten one will be
devoured by the pack.

How unfair and how futile under such conditions to heap reproaches upon
the men who make what are called excessive profits! The risks are
great. Should not a man make provision for them when he can? When,
too, a man is immersed from boyhood in an atmosphere of profit-seeking,
when in the talk around the meal-table and the conversation of his
father with other men he gathers that profits are the measure of
success, when in business he finds the whole energy and ingenuity and
influence of men concentrated on profits, and men largely estimated by
the amount of their profits, what capacity will be left after twenty
years of such a life to distinguish between legitimate and excessive
profits?

A profit-seeking system will always breed profiteers. It cannot be
cleansed or sweetened or ennobled. There is only one way to
Christianize it, and that is, to abolish it. That is, it may well be
believed, the distinctive task of the age that is now beginning, as the
abolition of the liquor-traffic was of the age that is closing, and the
abolition of slavery of a still earlier age.

This whole present industrial and commercial world, ingenious, mighty,
majestic, barbaric, disorderly, brutal, must be lifted from its basis of
selfish, competitive profit-seeking and placed squarely on a basis of
co-operative production for human needs.

How this tremendous transformation will be eventually accomplished,
probably no one of this generation can foresee. All we can see is some
initial steps.

A hint, it may be, is given in the well-recognized tendency of competing
industries to escape competition by specialization. Thus they become
co-operative. The same tendency to co-operative specialization is at
work among professional men. Medical men specialize ever more narrowly.
Lawyers elect to become authorities in a very narrow field.

Another principle of transformation may be found in the union of
competing businesses under government regulation as to prices. Such
combinations, while often disadvantageous to the public unless
governmentally regulated, at least attest the increasing recoil from
competition.

The main line of development, however, it seems altogether probable,
will be the extension of public ownership, municipal, state or
provincial, and national.

There is no diviner movement at work in the modern world. It is
emancipating, educative, redemptive, regenerating. "Whatever says _I_
and _mine_," says one of the wisest and most Christ-like of Medieval
Mystics, "is Anti-Christ." The converse is equally true. "Whatever says
_we_ and _ours_ is Christian." Public ownership, more extensively and
powerfully than any other human agency, teaches men to say we and ours.
It teaches them to think socially.

To discredit and attack the principle of public ownership is to
discredit and attack Christianity. It would seem to be the special sin
against the Holy Ghost of our age. He who doubts the practicability of
public ownership is really doubting human nature and Christianity and
God.

What we are facing to-day is the issue between learning to do things
together and a struggle between competing individuals, competing
classes, and competing nations, so frantic and ferocious that in it our
civilization may go down.

In these two chapters there has been the effort to set forth two at
least of the dominating principles of the new social order. They are
both embodied in a significant report adopted by the General Conference
of the Methodist Church of Canada, October, 1918, in the city of
Hamilton, Ontario. This report presented by a Committee on the Church
in Relation to War and Patriotism was adopted, after a long and deeply
earnest debate, in a reduced but still large Conference, with but four
dissentient votes. It has awakened unusual interest as perhaps the
boldest and most outspoken deliverance on the social question which any
great Christian body up to that time had made.

REPORT NO. 3

II. CHURCH LEADERSHIP IN THE NATION

"Your Committee has had its attention directed to the work of the Church
in the problems of reconstruction by some pregnant passages in the
address of the General Superintendent, and by a Memorial from the
Alberta Conference.

"Even before the war it was widely foreseen that great social changes
were imminent in the western world. This gigantic convulsion has
precipitated the nations into the melting pot. Such an era summons the
prophetic gifts of the Church, first, to the task of interpretation--to
discern amid the turmoil and confusion the hand of God, and secondly, to
the task of inspiration--to breathe into the hearts of men the faith,
the courage, the patience, the brotherliness, by which alone the happy
harbor can be won. And no Church is under a deeper obligation to assist
in this two-fold task than our own. Methodism was born in a revolt
against sin and social extravagancies and corruption. It was content
with no aim lower than ’to spread scriptural holiness through the land.’
Insisting on personal regeneration and all the implications therein, it
transformed the face of England and saved that land from the excesses of
a French revolution. To it the ideal of the Christian life was simply
love made perfect. Without seeking at this time to commit the Church to
a definite programme of economic policy, we would present for the
consideration of our people the following statement which reflects our
point of view:

"1. The present economic system stands revealed as one of the roots of
the war. The insane pride of Germany, her passion for world-domination
found an occasion in the demand for colonies as markets and sources of
raw materials--the imperative need of competing groups of industries
carried on for profits.

"2. The war has made more clearly manifest the moral perils inherent in
the system of production for profits. Condemnation of special
individuals seems often unjust and always futile. The system, rather
than the individual, calls for change.

"3. The war is the coronation of democracy. No profounder
interpretation of the issue has been made than the great phrase of
President Wilson’s, that the Allies are fighting to ’make the world safe
for democracy.’ It is clearly impossible for the champions of democracy
to set limits to its recognition. The last century democratized
politics; the twentieth century has found that political democracy means
little without economic democracy. The democratic control of industry
is just and inevitable.

"4. Under the shock and strain of this tremendous struggle, accepted
commercial and industrial methods based on individualism and competition
have gone down like mud walls in a flood. National organization,
national control, extraordinary approximations to national equality,
have been found essential to efficiency.

"Despite the derangements and the sorrow of the war, the Motherland has
raised large masses of her people from the edge of starvation to a
higher plane of physical well-being and, in consequence, was never so
healthy, never so brotherly, nor ever actuated by so high a purpose, or
possessed by such exaltation of spirit as to-day--and the secret is that
all are fighting or working, and all are sacrificing.

"It is not conceivable that, when Germany ceases to be a menace, these
dearly bought discoveries will be forgotten. Relapse would mean
recurrence, the renewal of the agony.

"The conclusion seems irresistible. The war is a sterner teacher than
Jesus and uses far other methods, but it teaches the same lesson. The
social development which it has so unexpectedly accelerated has the same
goal as Christianity. That common goal is a nation of comrade workers,
such as now at the trenches fights so gloriously--a nation of comrade
fighters.

"With the earthquake shocks of the war thundering so tremendous a
re-affirmation to the principles of Jesus, it would be the most
inexcusable dereliction of duty on the part of the Church not to
re-state her programme in modern terms and re-define her
divinely-appointed goal.

"The triumph of democracy, the demand of the educated workers for human
conditions of life, the deep condemnation this war has passed on the
competitive struggle, the revelation of the superior efficiency of
national organization and co-operation, combine with the unfulfilled,
the often forgotten, but the undying ethics of Jesus, to demand nothing
less than a transference of the whole economic life from a basis of
competition and profits to one of co-operation and service.

"We recognize the magnificent effort of many great employers to make
their industrial organization a means of uplift and betterment to all
who participate, but the human spirit instinctively resents even the
most benevolent forms of government while self-government is denied.
The noblest humanitarian aims of employers, too, are often thwarted by
the very conditions under which their business must be carried on.

"That another system is practicable is shown by the recent statement of
the British Prime Minister, that every industry save one in Britain has
been made to serve the national interest by the elimination of the
incentive of private profit. That the present organization, based on
production and service for profits, can be superseded by a system of
production and service for human needs, is no longer a dream.

"We, therefore, look to our national government--and the factor is a
vital one--to enlist in the service of the nation those great leaders
and corporations which have shown magnificent capacity in the organizing
of life and resources for the profit of shareholders. Surely the same
capacity can find nobler and more deeply satisfying activity in the
service of the whole people rather than in the service of any particular
group.

"The British Government Commission has outlined a policy which, while
accepting as a present fact the separation of capital and labor,
definitely denies the right of sole control to the former and, insisting
on the full organization of workers and employers, vests the government
of every industry in a joint board of employers and workers, which board
shall determine the working conditions of that industry.

"This policy has been officially adopted by the British Government, and
nothing less can be regarded as tolerable even now in Canada.

"But we do not believe this separation of labor and capital can be
permanent. Its transcendence, whether through co-operation or public
ownership, seems to be the only constructive and radical reform.

"This is the policy set forth by the great Labor organizations and must
not be rejected because it presupposes, as Jesus did, that the normal
human spirit will respond more readily to the call to service than to
the lure of private gain.

"The acceptance of this report, it cannot be too clearly recognized,
commits this Church, as far as this representative body can commit it,
to nothing less than a complete social reconstruction. When it shall be
fully accomplished, and through what measures and processes, depend on
the thinking and the good-will of men and, above all, on the guiding
hand of God. But we think it is clear that nothing less than the goal
we have outlined will satisfy the aroused moral consciousness of Canada
or retain for the Churches any leadership in the testing period that is
upon them. And in such an heroic task as this, our citizen armies will
find it possible to preserve, under the conditions of peace, the high
idealism with which they have fought for democracy in France.

"Recognizing the greatness and complexity of the task before the
Christian people of Canada, and the imperative necessity of united
action by the Churches, we recommend that the suggestion of the memorial
from the Alberta Conference be adopted, and that this General Conference
invite the other Churches of Canada to a National Convention for the
consideration of the problems of reconstruction.

"Further, in order that our Church may give the most intelligent support
to the movement, we recommend that our Ministers and people should
acquaint themselves with such important documents as the Report of the
United States Commission on Industrial Relations, the Inter-Allied Labor
Party’s Memorandum on War Aims, the British Labor Party’s Programme of
the new social order, and the British Governmental Commission Reports on
Industrial Relations.

"Your Committee outlines this programme in the profound conviction that
it can be carried out only by men quickened and inspired by the spirit
of Christ, and that for that Divine Spirit, working in the hearts of
men, nothing that is good is too high or too hard."

PART II.

THE NEW CHRISTIANITY

CHAPTER I.

A LABOR CHRISTIANITY

A new social order is not more imperatively demanded than a new
Christianity. Nothing less than this will suffice, nor will anything
less be brought into being, in this crisis of transition. For while
there are unchanging elements in Christianity, there are, it is equally
certain, aspects that are constantly changing.

The devotion to the Lord Jesus Christ, which is the central and
determinative principle of Christianity, is the least variable element;
the institutions and dogmas by which that devotion is expressed and
seeks to act upon the world, are the most variable.

Institutional Christianity is even more variable than dogmatic
Christianity. It has varied greatly, is still changing, and its history
shows that it is subject to the same influences as fashion the changing
social order. This illuminating principle helps us to understand the
past and to forecast the future of the Church.

During the last twelve hundred years or more, the Christian Church and
the social order in Western lands have developed on parallel lines.
Each has passed through two great phases and is now entering on a third.

I. The aristocratic or feudalistic phase, A.D. 700-1500.

The three centuries (roughly reckoning) from, let us say, A.D. 400 to
A.D. 700 were, probably, the darkest in the history of
civilization--darker even than the struggle of the last five years.
They were the centuries of a struggle not so colossal in its apparatus
of destruction, but seeming, even more than this struggle in its darkest
hours, to threaten the extinction of civilization.

The Northern barbarians that had been pressing against the defences of
the Roman Empire, as the yellow tides of the North Sea against the dykes
of Holland, from the time of the inroads of the Cimbri and Teutons in
the last decade of the second century before Christ, at last found
entrance A.D. 378 when the Visigoths, who had been permitted to cross
the Danube to find an asylum from the Huns, defeated the Roman armies
and slew the Emperor in the great battle of Adrianople. From that year,
with varying intervals of quiet, armies, or rather hordes, of men from
the inexhaustible forests of Germany and Scandinavia, from the steppes
of Russia and Central Asia, swept over lands for centuries accustomed to
peace and weakened by bureaucratic despotism, inequitable and crippling
systems of taxation, and, most debilitating of all, the essentially
demoralizing influence of slavery. The mighty legions that had so long
kept the frontiers inviolate vanished like a dream. The superb Roman
roads and bridges fell into ruins. Fertile fields relapsed into
wilderness. Towns decayed. Laws were forgotten. Cultivated languages
with great literatures were replaced by barbarous jargons.

It was as when a country-side is devoured by a flood, and trees are
uprooted, houses and barns dissolved or swept away.

Only one institution of the old Greco-Roman world withstood the waves,
uprose above the yeasty flood in indestructible sovereignty--the Roman
Catholic Church.

Out of the welter of overrunning barbarism--no law, no government, no
protection except by superior force--the feudal system arose. The deep
instinct for order and peace asserted itself. The strong man found a
following. His tribe or clan, if he were a chieftain, his neighborhood,
in any case, gave him service and maintenance, and he on his part gave
the fullest measure of protection he was able to furnish. He became the
feudal lord of a district. Through those stormy centuries that
followed, when the savage people fought each other, and western Europe
as it slowly struggled into order again was assailed by the Viking
pirates on the North and West, by Hun-like Magyars on the East, and by
the Saracens on the South, the feudal system was the only method by
which over large areas any measure of security could be achieved. The
strong man with his fighting force lived in his castle, and huddled
under its walls lived the tillers of the soil, whom he at once in
varying ratio protected and oppressed.

Some kind of relationship established itself among these feudal lords.
One who by conquest or marriage had secured possession of specially
large territories might out of these allot subordinate holdings to
faithful followers, or by the same methods establish an overlordship
over other lords. Eventually the deep and irrepressible instinct for
unity and order lifted one of these families to the kingship of a group
of feudal districts.

The feudal system was a varying system, the theory of which was never
fully carried out, a system that had different origins in different
countries and underwent different developments. The chief characteristic
of it, as far as this reference to it is concerned, was its aristocratic
character. Those men only counted who had enough land to support
themselves and a body of fighting men. Whatever authority there was lay
in their hands. The men who tilled the soil and practised the rude
handicrafts of the age and carried on such beginnings of commerce as
were possible, could find such imperfect security as there was only in
accepting the despotic rule of one of these lords, knight or baron or
count or duke as it might be, or more happily for them, in some
respects, a bishop or monastery abbot. All sovereignty was in the mailed
hands of these men or in those of the king, who in most of the countries
slowly but surely established his control over his turbulent and
recalcitrant feudatories.

It was the lowest form of order, the smallest degree of security, that
feudalism provided. Legalized anarchy it has been happily called. But
the measure of order and security it secured was probably all that was
possible under such conditions, conditions under which an aristocratic
system was the best system and, probably, the only and the inevitable
one. Whatever judgment one may pass on the inadequacy and
unserviceableness of aristocratic and monarchical forms of Government
to-day, it ought never to be forgotten that we owe the beginnings of
modern civilization to aristocracy, and its farther development to that
outgrowth of aristocracy, monarchical government. Democracy in such a
stage of civilization would have meant nothing but anarchy.

As under such semi-savage conditions no other kind of social
organization could possibly arise than an aristocratic, so no other kind
of ecclesiastical organization could meet the religious needs than an
aristocratic. A democratically organized church could not have
fulfilled the mission of the Church, could not, indeed, have existed.
With great hordes of half-savage people precipitating themselves upon
the Empire and almost extinguishing the ancient civilization, the only
kind of Church that could grapple with the problem--the most formidable
and appalling that civilization and Christianity ever had to face--was a
Church organized on thoroughly aristocratic principles. Such a Church
had been providentially prepared in the Roman Empire before its
downfall. It has been already remarked that the one institution of the
old shattered and submerged Greco-Roman civilization which survived the
barbarian deluge was the Roman Catholic Church. We owe that Church,
which has laid mankind to the end of time under unforgettable
obligations, to the conditions which surrounded primitive Christianity
and to the organizing, governing genius of the Latin mind.

Primitive Christianity, the devotion to the supreme Jew, Jesus Christ,
we owe to the Hebrew mind. Transplanted among the Greeks, the simple,
ethical, comparatively untheological and unorganized faith developed its
latent philosophical implications. The Greeks gave it a creed.
Transplanted simultaneously among the Latins, it was given an
organization by that race whose superb and unexampled genius for
government had made it mistress of all the countries around the
Mediterranean.

The turmoil of erratic speculation within the infant churches with their
motley converts gathered in from all kinds of religious and philosophic
cults, and the ferocious persecutions from time to time launched at the
helpless followers of the Christ, with their terrific temptations to
apostasy or dangerous compromise, developed an aristocrat form of
government. War and danger always call for the strong command.
Christianity, threatened by erratic thinking and divisive controversy
within and by deadliest attacks on the constancy of its people from
without, found its salvation, as far as human agency was concerned, in
the episcopacy, in large powers intrusted to the man who in the judgment
of the individual Church was the wisest and ablest leader. The rule of
the bishop was as natural and inevitable under such conditions as the
rule of the captain on the ship at sea, the rule of the commanding
officer in a fighting unit, the authority of the man recognized as
leader in an unorganized group of farmers fighting a prairie fire. It
is not wonderful that the bishops came to be regarded with veneration
and their office as essential to the Christian Church. The episcopal
office has earned the regard which it has enjoyed. The more fully one
understands the historical conditions under which the belief in the
indispensableness of episcopal organization grew up, the more reasonable
one finds such a belief even if one is unable to admit its validity.

The same Roman genius for government which gave the principle of
episcopacy its great place in the Church gave the Church also the
papacy, and by a development as natural and, probably, as inevitable.
The same necessity in troublous and dangerous times for large powers of
command being held by the ablest man in the individual congregation or,
later, in the group of Churches which came to be known as the diocese,
developed the over-bishop, or archbishop, or metropolitan, or patriarch,
as over-bishops were variously known, and over these again the supreme
bishop, the bishop of bishops, the bishop of the great capital, Rome,
who came at last to monopolize the title of Papa, or Pope, which
originally had been given to every bishop.

The Papacy corresponds to the united command of the allied armies on the
western front, which so swiftly and irresistibly transformed the war in
that decisive area, and which will make illustrious till the Great War
is forgotten the names of the great war-minister, Lloyd George, who so
wisely and magnanimously brought it about, and the great general,
Marshal Foch, who so magnificently justified it.

The Roman Catholic Church is the sublimest achievement of the organizing
powers of mankind, and the unifying element in it, the capstone of that
mighty structure, the key stone of the arch, is the Papacy. The Roman
Catholic Church, or, as it might appropriately be designated, the Papal
Church, is a greater construction than even the Roman Empire, of which
it is the spiritual counterpart--vaster, more enduring, more
firmly-knit, and infinitely more beneficent. The Pope corresponded to
the Emperor; the bishops, to the provincial governors; the invincible
legions which carried the Roman eagles into the swamps of Germany and
the mountains of Caledonia, were surpassed in their daring and the
tenacity of their conquests by their spiritual counterpart, the
missionary monks.

It was this organization which had been providentially prepared for the
anarchic and desolating period of the barbarian invasions, as Noah’s ark
for the Deluge, and not only as a shelter for the precious salvage of
the submerged Greco-Roman civilization, but as a spiritual army which
should conquer the conquerors, and on the debris of the greatest
landslide of history fashion new gardens and habitations.

Latin Christianity, then, represents a distinctively aristocratic type
of Christianity, the priest dominating the congregation and not
controlled by them, the bishop dominating the priest, the Pope at the
summit responsible to none but God. Such fashioning that great Church
had received at the hands of men wise to give the Church such
organization as the conditions demanded. It was this Church which the
barbarian onset could neither shatter nor overpower. It was this Church
which met the barbarians with a force and a sovereignty beyond their
own. It asserted its moral and intellectual superiority. It overawed
the men who, with the passions of men, had often the heart and still
oftener the brain of the child. It put these turbulent warriors to
school and struck to their hearts the fear of God and of the devil and
of the Church.

No Church but an aristocratic one could have dominated such a situation.
The very qualities which the modern man most resents in the Roman
Catholic Church--its authority, its dogmatism, its spiritual powers of
intimidation--were the qualities which enabled it to evangelize the vast
heathen and barbarian masses. As in the state so in the Church, the
centuries from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Protestant
Reformation were centuries which called, though, it must be recognized,
with lessening emphasis and with sporadic but multiplying exceptions,
for the aristocratic principle. Feudalism and Roman Catholicism were
the only possible systems.

II. The _bourgeois_ or plutocratic or capitalistic phase, A.D.
1500-1914.

Gradually, however, there arose in the aristocratically organized middle
age a new power. This was the trading and manufacturing classes. As
soon as the feudal nobility gave any measure of security, and much more
extensively when kings grew strong enough to stretch the royal power
over their turbulent feudatories, the irrepressible trading instinct
asserted itself. English wool found its way to Flanders, French wine to
England, the silks and spices and gems of the East to Europe. Busy and
wealthy cities sprang up in districts favorable for manufacture and
along the great trade routes between East and West. Kings, eager to
assert their sovereignty over the anarchic barons, allied themselves
with this new burgher class, which was on its part glad to support a
power that promised it deliverance from such very imperfect and costly
protectors as the feudal lords had shown themselves to be.

The Crusades, especially, stimulated trade and in the nearly two
centuries (A.D. 1096-1270) during which the crusading spirit was active,
the most notable feature of the social evolution of Europe was the rise
of the towns.

The rise of the towns meant the liberation of the people. No buildings
in Europe have more sacred associations than the old city halls of the
medieval cities of the Low Countries, France, and Germany. They were
the birth place of modern freedom.

Trade loves freedom and abhors all restrictions except such as are
sometimes short-sightedly imposed by itself. The towns, wearied of the
exactions of their castellated tyrants, won their freedom by purchase or
by fighting, or co-operated with the king in reducing the barons to some
measure of good behavior.

During the last five hundred years, and especially since the Industrial
Revolution effected by the use of machinery, the merchant and
manufacturing classes have been steadily climbing into power. They have
superseded or absorbed the pre-existing aristocracy. The old families
have died out or been transformed by a profitable and strengthening
admixture of rich plebeians. The bulk of even such an imposing
aristocracy as that of Britain is composed of creations of the last two
or three generations, and these so largely from the ranks of wealthy
brewers that there is truth as well as wit in the saying that the
British peerage is the British beerage. The sale of titles at the price
of large contributions to political funds is admitted and defended.
Even in Great Britain, with its impressive array of ancient names,
aristrocracy has been largely converted into plutocracy.

In a constitutionally democratic nation like the United States there is
no other aristocracy.

Now, if Church and State undergo a parallel development and re-act in
the same way to conditions governing them both alike, what we might
expect to find would be that, with the growing ascendancy in the social
structure of the trading and manufacturing class (or to use a single
term, though unfortunately one with a flavor of resentment about it,
_bourgeoisie_), there would be a parallel ascendancy of the same class
in the Church.

This is exactly what we do find. The aristocratic form of Christianity,
which fitted into the feudalistic age, which was called for by the
social conditions of that age, which was, indeed, probably, the only
kind of Christianity that could have existed in that age, did not suit
the freedom-loving, self-reliant, self-asserting, ambitious burghers.
They resented the control which the clergy exercised over them, alike
when it was well-meant and when it was selfish and tyrannical.
Especially they resented the enormous sums which were extracted from
them by the fees and taxes of priests, bishops, and the Papal Court at
Rome. They resented, too, the Church’s prohibition of interest. This
condemnation, based on the Mosaic prohibition of interest, had not been
found so unfair or vexatious prior to the sixteenth century when money
was borrowed mainly for unproductive consumption, as for example, for
war and for extravagance. Now when, in the great commercial development
of that century, money was being borrowed for business with the
prospect, almost the certainty, of profit, and interest became merely
the sharing of profits, the Church’s refusal of absolution to those
guilty of taking interest was a serious factor in the growing hostility
between the cities and the Church.

The Church, moreover, favoured sumptuary laws,--the minute regulation of
purchases and prices. As this well-meant legislation tended to restrict
trade, it was disliked by the traders.

The immense capital locked up in vast ecclesiastical buildings and
estates was naturally, also, the object of envy. Clerical immunities
from municipal taxation, and episcopal jurisdiction over otherwise free
towns added to the general irritation.

It might possibly have been foreseen that, sooner or later, a revolt
would come and a new sort of Church would take form. That revolt came
under Luther. Many motives conspired in it. With Luther himself and
many of his followers the motive was a genuinely religious one. It was
a revolt against the legalistic interpretation of Christianity and
against the moral failure of the Roman Catholic Church. But with the
mass of the city people, who were the main support of Luther, the motive
was mainly a passion for freedom and only subordinately and sporadically
a passion for a purer faith or a holier life.

In the new Church that was fashioned in varying forms in the northern
races where the revolt was most general and thorough-going, one feature
naturally predominated--the ascendancy of the _bourgeoisie_. That
Church, or rather group of Churches which by seeming accident, but,
perhaps, by that deeper philosophy which moves even through the seeming
accidents of history, came to be known as the protesting or Protestant
Church, was the Church which suited a predominately middle class society
as Roman Catholicism suited a feudal society.[#] Protestantism, in a
word, is _bourgeois_ Christianity. It is the Christianity of the
middle, or trading, classes. It was born where these classes were
strongest--in Germany, Holland, Switzerland, England, France. It has
exalted the middle classes and the middle classes have exalted it. It
has been with them in their struggle and has shared their triumph. It
sanctions their ethical standards, falls in with their tastes,
emphasizes their virtues, is indulgent toward their faults, condemns
their aversions.

[#] "The ’true inwardness’ of the change of which the Protestant
Reformation represented the ideological side, meant the transformation
of society from a basis mainly corporative and co-operative to one
individualistic in its essential character. The whole polity of the
middle ages, industrial, social, political, ecclesiastical, was based on
the principle of the group or the community--ranging in hierarchical
order from the trade-guild to the town-corporation; from the town
corporation through the feudal orders to the imperial throne itself;
from the single monastery to the order as a whole; and from the order as
a whole to the complete hierarchy of the Church as represented by the
papal chair. The principle of this social organization was now breaking
down. The modern and _bourgeois_ conception of the autonomy of the
individual in all spheres of life was beginning to affirm
itself."--Belfort Bax: The Peasants’ War, p. 19.

It would almost seem that it was a consciousness of its specific class
limitations which led the new movement promptly and decisively to turn
away from the claims of the lowest class, though the distinct refusal of
German Protestantism to champion the cause of the oppressed peasants in
1524 may be credited to the imperfect sympathies of Luther and his
jealousy for the reputation of the new movement. Luther was a peasant’s
son, but his attitude to other peasants was one almost of contempt,
mingled later with fear.[#]

[#] "The wise man saith: food, a burden, and a rod for the ass; to a
peasant belongs oat straw. They hear not the word and are mad; then
must they hear the rod and the gun and they get their due. Let us pray
for them that they obey; otherwise there need be no pity for them. Let
only the bullets whistle around them. Otherwise they are a hundred fold
more evil."--Letter to Rühel. De Wette. Vol. II., p. 619.

Luther’s glorification of the liberty of a Christian man, his stirring
appeals to the German nobility to shake off the rapacious tyranny of
Rome found response in other hearts than those he was addressing. His
impassioned words, like hot coals kindling a fire whereever they fell,
helped to bring to a head the discomfort which had been growing among
the peasants. This was due, in part, to the increased cost of living, a
fifty per cent. advance, it has been estimated, from 1400 to 1415, for
which the increased output of silver from the mines in the Tyrol and
elsewhere was chiefly responsible. But the chief cause was the
increased exactions of the German princes, sustained in their oppressive
claims by the growing recognition of the Roman law, which found no place
for the peasants except as slaves. Eventually, in 1524 the peasants
drew up twelve demands which they submitted to Luther with an appeal for
his support. Luther found the demands mainly just and urged the princes
to make concessions, but strongly condemned any effort, in case the
reforms were not granted, to secure them by violence. The demands were
refused and the peasants rose. They were successful at the outset, as
most of the professional soldiers of the princes were in Italy with the
Emperor, Charles V., then at war with the Pope. On their return, these
trained forces scattered the undisciplined bodies of peasants, already
demoralized by wine and plunder and lack of leadership. The princes
took a ferocious revenge. It is estimated that from one hundred to one
hundred and fifty thousand peasants were slaughtered; many more were
blinded and maimed.

Luther, angered and terrified by the uprising, had urged the princes on
to the slaughter in words that are an ineffaceable blot on his memory.

"First, they [the peasants] have sworn to their true and gracious [!]
rulers to be submissive and obedient, in accord with God’s command
(Matt. 22:21), ’Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,’ and
(Rom. 13:1), ’Let every soul be subject to the higher powers.’ But
since they have deliberately and with outrage abandoned obedience, and
in addition have opposed their lords, they have thereby forfeited body
and soul, as perfidious, perjured, mendacious, disobedient rascals and
villains are wont to do."

[Later, Luther approved and justified the revolt of the Protestant
princes against the Emperor to whom they had sworn obedience--so early
had Protestantism one standard for the lowly and another for the high.]

* * * * *

"It is right and lawful to slay at the first opportunity a rebellious
person, known as such, already under God and the Emperor’s ban. [Luther
himself was certainly under the latter ban and, in the judgment of Roman
Catholics, under the former.] For of a public rebel, every man is both
judge and executioner.

"Therefore, whosoever can should smite, strangle, and stab, secretly or
publicly, and should remember that there is nothing more poisonous,
pernicious, and devilish than a rebellious man [much more devilish in
Luther’s judgment than an oppressive prince!] Just as when one must
slay a mad dog; fight him not and he will fight you, and a whole country
with you.

* * * * *

"If the civil government thinks proper to smite and punish those
peasants without previous consideration of right or fairness, I do not
condemn such action, though it is not in harmony with the Gospel, for it
has good right to do this.

* * * * *

"Therefore let him [a prince or lord] not sleep, nor shew mercy and
compassion. Nay, this is the time of sword and wrath, not the time of
mercy.

* * * * *

"Such wonderful times are these that a prince can more easily win heaven
by shedding blood than others with prayers."

He even makes the extraordinary statement, "In 1525 the elector John of
Saxony asked me whether he should grant the peasants their twelve
articles. I told him, not one," (Michelet, p. 448)--revealing a
callousness which can only be characterized as brutal.[#]

[#] "The Lutheran Reformation, from its inception in 1517 down to the
Peasants’ war of 1525, at once absorbed, and was absorbed by, all the
revolutionary elements of the time. Up to the last-mentioned date it
gathered revolutionary force year by year. But this was the
turning-point. With the crushing of the Peasants’ revolt and the
decisively anti-popular attitude taken up by Luther, the religious
movement associated with him ceased any longer to have a revolutionary
character. It henceforth became definitely subservient to the new
interests of the wealthy and privileged classes, and as such completely
severed itself from the more extreme popular reforming sects."--Bax;
Peasants’ War, pp. 28, 29.

Luther completed the severance of the new faith from the proletariat
when he deliberately handed over his new Church to the control of the
princes. In his complete distrust of the common people, it seemed to
him that there was no other authority that could replace that of the
bishops. So, despite the remonstrances of Melanchthon, a more
oppressive tyranny was imposed on the Lutheran Church in Germany than
had been exercised by the bishops, and the foundation was laid for that
estrangement of the proletariat from the Church which has had such fatal
results on both proletariat and Church in our time. On Luther rests the
responsibility of converting the German Church into a branch of an
autocratic government, as such distrusted and detested by the laborer in
the country and the worker in the town, and of thus bringing about a
condition of things which has earned for Protestant Prussia the reproach
of being the least religious country of Europe.

Protestantism, then, by its very origin is Christianity shaped to suit
the trading and manufacturing class. Now, what are the characteristics
of members of this class? They are keenly but, in general,
superficially intelligent, alert, watchful, ambitious, pushful,
courageous, energetic, industrious, self-reliant, independent,
freedom-loving, intensely individualistic. They are honorable according
to the standards of their class, often generous when the business
struggle is not involved, but in the struggle itself they tend, almost
of necessity, to become hard and selfish. Their great aim has been to
"get on," to make money, to rise to as high a social position as
possible, amid the vast opportunities of modern business to win and
retain great power.

Protestantism fits a people of such characteristics like a glove. It
exalts the rich man. It consults him and honors him, puts him forward on
every possible occasion, suitable or scarcely suitable. Knowing his
sensitiveness, it deals with him tactfully and deferentially.

It emphasizes the virtues conducive to business success,--industry,
thrift, sobriety, self-control, honesty, at least as far as the law
commands or as far as dishonesty would be plainly imprudent.

It disapproves the sins that hinder success or impair
respectability,--such as indolence, profanity, intemperance,
licentiousness, and all overt transgressions of the law.

What would be the sensations of an audience to which a millionaire
manufacturer or broker or promoter was unfolding the secret of his
success, if he were to say, "I owe my success and any distinction I have
been able to achieve to my honest effort to carry out the Sermon on the
Mount!"

For good and for evil, at the outset doubtless more for good than for
evil, now more for evil than for good, Protestantism is intensely
individualistic.

Christianity has its individualistic aspect. Protestantism has
emphasized this. Christianity has also its social aspect.
Protestantism has largely ignored this.

Above all, Protestantism has lacked humility and pity. Naturally so.
They are the two virtues least called for in the business struggle, the
two virtues, indeed, most liable to prove embarrassing.

Here is where, probably, Protestantism most sharply differs from
Primitive Christianity and from the Christianity which was in the mind
of Jesus.

Protestantism is a fighting faith. It trains men to be self-reliant and
hard. Fair play is its substitute for brotherliness, and it often finds
it difficult to get as high as that.

The divine note of love is faint. Protestantism has never caught the
passion for brotherhood. So it is not strange that, where the reviving
spirit of brotherhood, which is the divinest movement in modern life, is
strongest, there is the least drawing to Protestantism.

It is in the proletariat to-day that the sense of brotherhood is
keenest. It is the proletariat which is the increasing despair of the
Protestant Churches. Perhaps it is not too bold a generalization that,
on this Continent at least,--it does not seem so widely true in
England--the working man who is most interested in the Church is least
interested in labor organizations. He is the ambitious, individualistic
workingman who is bent on emerging from his class. He is least
class-conscious. He hopes to become affiliated with the master class.

The workingman who is most class-conscious, whose heart is set on the
betterment of his class, is usually very slightly affiliated with the
Church, if at all, and that affiliation is due, generally, to the appeal
the Church and Sunday School make to his wife and children. Very
frequently his attitude to the Church is one, not of indifference, but
of resentment and distrust. He feels, though perhaps subconsciously,
that the prevailing temper of the Church is one of self-advancement.
The leading men in the Church are mostly those who have been most
successful in strenuous self-advancement. Any man whose heart has been
stirred with the passion for the common good is liable to be
disappointed in seeking in the Church for the encouragement and sympathy
that he craves.

Neither the Protestant nor the Roman Catholic Churches can claim to have
inspired the Labor movement. At best it can only be said that, when the
movement had struggled through the early days of conflict and
persecution, the Churches reached out hesitatingly and half-heartedly a
hand of fellowship in a spirit, partly of genuine desire to make amends
for past dereliction, partly of condescension, and partly of fear.

But during the severity of Labor’s early struggle, Protestantism, except
in isolated and unofficial representatives, gave no assistance, not even
its blessing, to what was the most profoundly Christian movement of the
nineteenth century.

When it did not frankly sympathize with the masters in their
difficulties with their unreasonable and discontented employees, it
maintained a cautious neutrality. The first step to right relations
between the Churches and Labor would be a frank confession that they
failed to give Labor their help when Labor deserved and needed it most.

But perhaps this sympathetic attitude to Labor was too much to expect of
a form of Christianity which had such an origin and such associations as
Protestantism. Like the form of Christianity which it largely displaced
in the freedom-loving northern races of Europe and America, it has
rendered great services. Like that again, it was, perhaps, the only
sort of Christianity possible under the conditions under which it took
its form. It has helped to train an energetic, daring, self-reliant,
and relatively honorable people. It has been the Christianity of a
_bourgeois_ epoch, and with the passing of that epoch it, too, will pass
away or undergo a profound metamorphosis. It is a very different sort of
Christianity that will meet the religious needs of the new epoch that
the world is entering.

III. The Labor phase, A.D. 1914--

We have seen how the trading and manufacturing towns pushed their way up
during the later period of the medieval age and eventually overthrew
aristocracy in state and Church, substituting a social and political
order and a Church dominated by the business class. Similarly, since the
middle of the last century, a new force has been pushing up in the
_bourgeois_ regime, destined, it now seems clear, to effect a similar
transformation. This is organized Labor.

The most significant feature in the social development of the last
hundred years has been the patient, persistent, oft-defeated, yet
insuppressible struggle of the proletariat of the western world for
human rights. The dead weight of the bygone ages was upon it. When had
the men and the women who did the rough and necessary work of the world,
smoothed the highways, dug the drains, built the houses and the bridges,
carried the burdens over the mountains and across the seas, tilled the
fields and cared for the herds and the flocks--when had they been other
than the despised, ill-paid, ill-housed servants of the classes who
through their fighting-power or their money-power could command the
services of the toilers? What right had they to overturn the ancient
order, an order which history recognized and the Church was willing to
consecrate? Against the established order, against religious sanctions,
against the combined authority of wealth and rank, against the
legislative and military powers of governments, the workers had to carry
on their new, uncharted, and desperate struggle unaided and alone. The
Universities from their academic heights looked down on it with calm
scientific interest. If any feeling was stirred, it was oftener
contempt than pity. Even the Church of Christ was, with a few
illustrious exceptions, unfriendly or timidly neutral. Nevertheless, in
spite of calamitous setbacks, the movement made way against the public
opinion of the dominant classes, against hostile legislation, against
anarchic injunctions, against police and soldiers, and to-day Labor is
the mightiest organized force in the world.

It is enthroned despotically in Petrograd and Moscow above the shattered
ruins of the most imposing monarchy of the modern world. It is the
strongest element in that welter of confusion and uncertainty to which
the most powerful and compactly organized nation of modern times has
been reduced by its insane ambition, the indignation of mankind, and the
justice of God.

Labor is the uncrowned king of Great Britain. Wisely led, there seems
no reasonable aim it cannot realize.

In the United States in the Summer of 1916, in a straight issue between
Labor and one of the most powerful capitalistic groups, the President
and Congress of the United States wisely and justly capitulated to
Labor.

The futility of trying to "smash the Labor unions" or to arrest the
progress of the Labor movement is now sufficiently clear. As well try
to smash a forty mile wide Alaskan glacier or arrest its onward march to
the sea. Old precedents have lost their authority, old calculations and
presuppositions fail or mislead. It is a new age the world is entering.
As the determining factor in the social structure of Europe from 800
A.D. to 1500 was feudalism, and from A.D. 1500 to 1900 capitalism, so
from 1900 onwards to the dawn, it may be, of still vaster changes as yet
undescried, the dominant factor will be organized Labor.

If Labor, then, is to be the dominating factor in the age just opening,
it becomes a question of deepest interest to discover the principles of
the Labor movement.

A full answer to this question would be lengthy and might have elements
of uncertainty, but the essential outstanding principles of the Labor
movement are neither doubtful nor difficult to determine. They are
three:

1. Every man and every woman a worker.

The Labor movement has no place except for workers. Its essential
demand is that every man and woman shall, during the normal working
years, make a just contribution to the welfare of the social organism.
It is determined that there shall be no place in society for idlers or
exploiters. It is the deadly enemy of parasitism in all its Protean
forms.

2. The right of every worker to a living wage.

This is nothing other than the assertion, in the only form that makes it
more than iridescent froth, of the great Christian principle of the
worth of the soul. It is a very modest and restricted assertion of that
great principle, but it is a more substantial and significant assertion
than has been made anywhere else. The Christian doctrine of the
infinite worth of the human soul becomes claptrap where this principle
is not admitted.

3. Union.

The Labor movement is based on the solidarity of the workers. It abhors
competition. It represents the triumph of the we-consciousness over the
I-consciousness. It organizes in unions. There have been few things in
history that had more of the morally sublime in them than the way in
which the individual has been called upon by the Labor movement to risk,
not his comfort merely or his advancement, but his livelihood, in
defence of some one whom he would never know but with whom he was linked
in the sacred cause of Labor.

And these principles of the Labor movement are at the same time the
characteristics of the corresponding Christianity of the new age. For,
as we found an aristocratic type of Christianity in the aristocratic
medieval period, the social conditions demanding the aristocratic
organization in Church and State and permitting no other, and as, in the
age which succeeded the feudal, a freedom-loving, competitive,
individualistic class imposed its character on the social and the
ecclesiastical organization, so institutional Christianity will undergo
a third transformation and, in a society dominated by Labor
organizations, will become democratic and brotherly.

Protestantism must pass away. It is too rootedly individualistic, too
sectarian, to be the prevailing religion of a collectivist age. It is
passing away before our eyes. Everywhere it reveals the marks of decay
or of transformation. It must change or die.

Not to Protestantism, not to Roman Catholicism, belongs the age now
dawning, but to a new Christianity which will, indeed, have affinities
with them both but still more deeply with the Christianity of Jesus.

This Christianity, indeed, is already here. Like its Master when He
came, it is in the world and the world knows it not. It is still
immature, undeveloped, unconscious even of its own nature and destiny.
It will receive large and valuable contributions from both the great
historic forms of Christianity, not improbably from the Eastern, or
Greek Christianity, as well. But in promise and potency the coming
Christianity is more fully and truly here in the Labor movement than in
any of the great historic organizations. Perhaps a more accurate
statement would be, that the Labor movement needs less radical change
than the great Church organizations to become the fitting and efficient
Christianity for the new age.

It needs, in the main, but two great changes.

1. It must broaden.

It must open its doors, as the British and Canadian Labor Parties are
now doing, to include all kinds of productive work, of hand or brain.
It must make room for all who contribute to the feeding, clothing,
housing, educating, delighting of the children of men. It must include
the inventor, the research scientist, the manager, as well as the manual
worker; the men who grow things or who distribute them as well as those
who make them; the professional class, who, on their part, must cease to
regard themselves as other than men and women of labor. Labor must
become, in short, the category to which all belong who really earn their
living and do not seek to "make" more than they earn.

2. Labor must recognize the Christianness of its own principles.

I do not say Labor must become Christian. It is profoundly and vitally
Christian in its insistence on the right of the humblest man or woman to
human conditions of life, in its corresponding denial of the right of
any human being to live on the labor of others without rendering his own
equivalent of service, in its devotion to the fundamental Christian
principle of brotherhood.

The Draft Report on Reconstruction, for example, prepared near the close
of 1917 for the Labor party of Britain, is not only the ablest and most
comprehensive programme of social reconstruction so far drawn up, but in
its aims and methods and spirit it is profoundly Christian, a thousand
times more Christian than the ordinary ecclesiastical pronouncement,
though the name of Christ does not occur in it. The need is not so much
that Labor become Christian, as that it become clearly conscious that it
is Christian and can realize itself and win its triumph only on
Christian lines.

It is not strange, after all, that among working men should arise the
Church which is to give the truest interpretation of Christianity. The
Lord Jesus was Himself a working man and brought up in a working man’s
home; His chief friends and chosen apostles were mostly working men.
How can He be fully understood except through a working man’s
consciousness? The high, the served, the rich, the mere scholars, as
such, are not fitted to understand Christianity. Individuals of
exceptional character and insight may escape the limitations of their
environment and education, but in any large community interpretation the
working man’s consciousness would seem to be essential. And, on any
large scale, Christianity has never found such an expression as the
Labor movement promises to give it--so essentially and predominately
democratic and brotherly.

Labor and Christianity, then, are bound up together. Together they
stand or fall. They come into their kingdom together or not at all. It
is the supreme mission of the prophetic spirit at this fateful hour to
interpret Labor to itself, that it may not in this hour of consummation
miss the path. To turn away from Christianity now would be for Labor to
turn away from the throne. But it will not. Mankind is in the grasp of
divine currents too strong to be resisted.

CHAPTER II.

AN AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY

It will help us, perhaps, to understand still more clearly the religious
revolution which is going on to-day concurrently with the social
revolution if we survey the evolution of Christianity from another
standpoint,--the racial. In the preceding chapter the effort has been to
show that Christianity in its organization and even in its spirit has
been profoundly affected by its social environment and has changed as
that has changed. The most superficial study of the history of
Christianity reveals, moreover, that Christianity has been, also, deeply
affected by the characteristics of each race among which it has made its
home.

1. Jewish Christianity.

The earliest form of Christianity was that which sprang up in Jerusalem
immediately after the Resurrection and the ingathering at Pentecost. It
was the Christianity of the apostles and of the first disciples.
Perhaps it might be called a Christianized Judaism rather than a Jewish
Christianity, for it was the old Judaism unchanged except by the
acceptance of Jesus of Nazareth as the fulfilment of the national hope.
The apostles remained good Jews, even stricter than before in their
discharge of the duties of the old faith, and commanding through their
strictness the respect of the Jews, James the brother of Jesus, in
particular, being held in high esteem for his devoutness.

The chief characteristic of Jewish Christianity, it might almost be
said, was its lack of almost all the features which have since been
counted essential to a Church.

The ancient Jew, as has often been noted, markedly resembled the modern
Englishman in many things, notably in an indifference to theological or
philosophical speculation and in a strong sense of the value of the
ethical and practical. These earliest Jewish Christians, accordingly,
did not seek to analyze and systematize their faith. They did not seek
to draw out its philosophical implications. They were interested in the
construction neither of a creed nor of a theological system. They were
content to hold their faith in Jesus as a vital loyalty and a great
hope. Jesus was to them the long desired Messiah who would redeem
Israel and establish the Kingdom of God upon the earth. That glorious
consummation would take place when He returned, as they confidently
expected He would, in the immediate future. Meanwhile, the door into
the Kingdom of God stood open to all Jews who would accept Jesus as the
Christ, and to such Gentiles as were willing to receive circumcision and
identify themselves with Israel.

Overshadowed with the imminence of the Parousia, this Jewish Church of
the first years had no interest in a reflective interpretation of its
faith or in the elaboration of its organization. The apostles preached;
alms were distributed to those of the disciples who were in need. No
programme was drawn up for the future; no propaganda among the Gentiles
was even dreamed of. The whole attitude was one of almost passive
expectancy that clung to the ancient capital, the holy city, where the
long-expected Hope of Israel would shortly, descending from the heavens,
establish His throne.

Jewish Christianity had only the rudiments of a creed, only the simplest
organization, and the most unelaborated and democratic form of worship.
It was a seed with the germinating impulse unawakened, a bark launched
and rigged but that had no thought of venturing out of the harbour.

This simple, undeveloped, undogmatic, unorganized, and Judaistic
character of primitive Jewish Christianity is strikingly displayed in
the early chapters of the book of the Acts and in the Epistle of James,
which on most, at any rate, of the different hypotheses as to date and
authorship is, at least, a witness to early Jewish Christianity.[#]

[#] A later form of Jewish Christianity, the obscure Ebionitism of the
second century, does not fall within the limits of this sketch. It was,
probably, not so much a development of Christianity as a perversion of
it.

2. Greek Christianity.

But the expansive forces residing in this undeveloped Christianity could
not long remain inactive.

An important element in the population of Jerusalem in the time of our
Lord was the Hellenist. This name was applied to the Jews who for
various reasons, mainly for trade, had made their home in the commercial
cities of the Levant. Here they had learned to speak the prevailing
language of the countries around the Eastern Mediterranean, Greek, and
had been, to a varying extent, intellectually broadened and quickened by
contact with the Greek world. Large numbers of them returned to
Jerusalem for educational purposes or to gratify their devout feelings,
but they were regarded by the Palestinean Jews with something
approaching contempt for their willingness to live away from the sacred
soil of Palestine.

It was in the Hellenist mind, thus stimulated and developed by the Greek
spirit, that the first development of Christianity occurred. To the
Hellenist Stephen, the first thinker, the first controversialist, and
the first martyr of Christianity, belongs the honor of first discovering
the universal principle of Christianity, and his interpretation of
Christianity brought about his own death and kindled a persecution which
scattered the Christians of Jerusalem up and down the Syrian coast of
the Mediterranean.

To some of these fugitive Hellenist Christians, partakers of the thought
of the martyred Stephen, belongs the not less lofty honor of being the
first to overleap the jealously guarded barriers of Judaism and to open
the door of Christianity to the Gentiles. "They therefore that were
scattered abroad upon the persecution that arose about Stephen travelled
as far as Phoenicia and Cyprus and Antioch, speaking the word to none
save only to Jews. But there were some of them, men of Cyprus and
Cyrene [and therefore Hellenists] who, when they were come to Antioch,
spake unto the Greeks also, preaching the Lord Jesus." Acts 11:19-20.

It is to be noted that it was, probably, this influx of Greeks into the
Church hitherto composed only of Jews which made necessary a new name
applicable to the composite body, and so it came about that "the
disciples were called Christians first at Antioch."

A Church, in part Jewish but, probably, in still larger part Gentile,
thus sprang up in Antioch, which became the mother city of Gentile, or
world-wide, Christianity. From this centre the greatest of all
Hellenist Jews, Saul of Tarsus, fired by that very universalism which
had at first aroused the hatred of his bitter Jewish particularism,
carried Christianity westward through Asia Minor, Greece, Italy and,
possibly, even to Spain.

Thus transplanted from the deeply and exclusively religious and ethical
Hebrew mind to the predominantly speculative mind of the Greek,
Christianity began to undergo an immediate transformation. The Greek
mind, probably never equalled for its curiosity, its acuteness, its
subtlety, could never be content to ask, what? It must also ask, why,
and how? To it we owe science, philosophy, all our ordered thinking.
Christianity, as a mere affection felt for Jesus Christ or purely as a
code of conduct, could not satisfy the Greek mind. The Greek mind, at
first contemptuous of it as a mere vulgar superstition, fascinated at
length by its rational monotheism, its lofty ethics, and, above all by
the charm of its central figure, flung itself with ardor on the task of
adapting this naive and untutored but fascinating religion to its own
tastes and habits of thought.

A place was found for the Jewish Messiah in the philosophical world of
the Greeks as the Logos, or Reason, of God, a familiar philosophical
conception. Plato and Zeno were made His forerunners. The principles
of His teaching were dissected out of the traditions of His ministry and
organized into a coherent body of doctrine. The acutest minds of Greek
Christianity disengaged the great problems which were involved in the
worship paid to Christ and, after centuries of speculation and of strife
(not always intellectual only), achieved those great solutions which,
whether in every respect permanently satisfactory or not, must forever
be recognized as among the sublimest constructions of the philosophic
intellect,--the creeds of Nicaea and Chalcedon.

For good and for ill the simple, almost creedless Christianity of the
Sermon on the Mount and of the Epistle of James had become through Paul,
the author of the Fourth Gospel, the still more mysterious author of the
Epistle to the Hebrews, and countless Greek dialecticians and
theologians, the elaborately and authoritatively dogmatic system which
has, almost till to-day, treated unorthodox opinion as the deadliest of
sins.

The undue emphasis on the intellectual element in Christianity, the
tyrannical control of human thought we to-day must deplore, but he who
repudiates Greek Christianity must also deny that Christianity had any
mission to the Greek mind, and that men have any right to think out
their religious beliefs and adjust them to the rest of their thinking.

3. Latin Christianity.

Latin Christianity cannot altogether be classed as a later stage than
Greek Christianity. It was to a large extent a concurrent development.
As far as its theological features were concerned, it was little more
than the uncritical acceptance of dogmas worked out by the Greeks. But,
eventually, the distinctive gifts of the Latin race asserted themselves
and those races which had built up the Roman Empire, or as subjects of
it had become embued with its spirit, applied their organizing genius to
the Christian Church and moulded the Church of the West into a replica
of the Empire, and in such closely-knit fashion that, when under its own
inherent weaknesses and through the irruption of the northern
barbarians, that mightiest of all organizations of antiquity collapsed,
the Church that came eventually and fittingly to know itself as Roman
took its place and proved itself an even mightier organization, subduing
restless and fierce peoples on which Imperial Rome had never been able
to impose her yoke.

The Latin mind, then, with its reverence for order and law, its genius
for government, its detestation of lawless individualism, discerned the
possibilities of the Christian Church as an organization, and out of the
simple piety of Jesus and the reasoned theology of the Greeks fashioned
the mightiest instrument of discipline and order the world has ever
seen.

Here, again, there may be a protest. This Latinization, or
imperialization, of Christianity may be indignantly termed a perversion
rather than a development. This only need be said in reply, that it
would be difficult for anyone who has studied, without prejudice, the
period between the overthrow of the Western Empire and the Protestant
Reformation to deny the providential character of Latin Christianity.
No other form of Christianity has as yet rendered so great a service to
the race. It is questionable whether any other form of Christianity,
even if it had been in existence, could at that stage have rendered so
great a service. It was precisely those features in the attitude of the
Roman Catholic Church towards her people which are most uncongenial to
the Protestant temper which were the disciplinary agencies needed by the
lawless, seething Europe of the Dark Ages to qualify it for the personal
liberty the vindication of which has been the faith and service of
Protestantism.

4. Teutonic Christianity.

The Greek mind moulded Christianity into a reasoned and systematized
theology; the Latin, into an organization closely knit and marvellously
efficient for the end to which Latin Christianity was largely and,
perhaps, inevitably content to aim,--external control. Now, at least, we
can see how inevitable it was that a third development of Christianity
should take place after it had been transplanted among the Teutonic
peoples. That development was slower in taking place than either the
Greek or Latin forms. Those northern races which, until their
conversion to Christianity, had stood almost completely outside the
circle of ancient civilization, coming under the spell of a powerful
religion and a civilization, even in its decay, majestic, were brought
so thoroughly under the yoke that for centuries they were content to be
ruled by a spiritual imperialism enthroned at Rome.

But that authority never ceased to be regarded by the northern races as
a foreign one. The Teutonic peoples whose home lay outside the limits of
the old Roman Empire were never Latinized in spirit. When they attained
intellectual maturity and sought the free development of their own
nature, they shook off the authority of Rome and brought to light those
free and individualistic and spiritual germs in Christianity which,
hitherto, in the luxuriant and stately growth of Greco-Roman Catholicism
had remained almost dormant.

The Protestant Reformation, as has been noted, was a complex movement.
It involved many factors. But fundamentally it was the outcome of the
determination, not always clearly conscious, of the Teutonic peoples to
discover a Christianity which should be consonant with that passion for
freedom and that high sense of personal dignity which from the beginning
had characterized the men of the Teutonic stock.

It is an interesting illustration of this that the movement of reform,
or, rather, of revolt, which swept like a prairie fire over all Teutonic
Europe that had never been permanently subdued by the Empire, flickered
and died as soon as it crossed what had been the boundary of the old
Empire, and that that boundary is still the dividing line between those
countries of Western Europe which are preponderatingly Protestant and
those which are preponderatingly Roman Catholic. The Roman Church held
only what the Roman Empire had won. Only where the old Teutonic love of
liberty had been subdued by centuries of the masterful and, on the
whole, beneficent rule of old Rome did it cease to feel the spiritual
rule of the new Rome alien and irksome.

Another illustration of how essentially Teutonic is the spirit of
Protestantism is in the slight influence Protestantism has had on the
Celtic peoples islanded in the Teutonic populations. Celtic Brittany is
the most fervidly Catholic part of France to-day. Celtic Ireland
remains solidly and deeply Catholic. Celtic Scotland, despite
overwhelming Protestant influences, is still largely Catholic. Celtic
Wales has become wholly Protestant, but it has seized and developed the
least prominent and least Protestant of all the elements embraced in
Protestantism,--the emotional and the mystical.

The rule of Rome under the Emperors and under the Popes had been the
rule of the machine--a superb machine, ingeniously contrived for what
were conceived as the best ends, and operated with indomitable
pertinacity and boundless devotion, but still a machine; and Protestant,
or Teutonic, Christianity, in the last analysis, was the overthrow of
the machine. To the Teutonic race belongs the honor of being the first
on a racial scale to establish a religion without ceremonial or a
priesthood or any privileged class whatever. Hebrew prophetism with its
magnificent protest against ritual, and its culmination in the
democratic simplicity of Jesus, now for the first time found recognition
on a national scale.

Teutonic Christianity is the exaltation of the individual. It was born
of individualism and glorifies individualism. It affirms the right and
duty of individual judgment, the supremacy of the individual conscience,
the privilege of the individual access to God. It finds the authority
and proof of the Christian religion in its consonance with, and its
satisfaction of, the capacities and needs of the individual soul.

The distance between the spirit of Latin and that of Teutonic
Christianity, and, also, it should be noted, the distance between the
twelfth century and the sixteenth may be seen in the two appeals of
Abelard and Luther. Peter Abelard, a great and pathetic and only a
little less than a heroic figure, was a Protestant, and in the best
sense of the term, a free thinker, three hundred years before the
Renaissance and four hundred years before Luther. Accused of heresy by
the saintly but censorious and bigoted Bernard, and brought to trial
before a tribunal carefully packed by his relentless and unscrupulous
adversary, Abelard, despairing of a fair hearing, refused to defend
himself and appealed to the Pope. Another monk charged with heresy four
hundred years later, inferior to Abelard in clearness and energy of
thought but of more heroic moral fibre, before the most august
assemblage Europe could gather, closed his defence with the undying
words, "It is not safe for a man to do aught against his conscience.
Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me, Amen."

Abelard appeals to the Pope, Luther to his conscience. That is the
supreme contrast between Latin and Teutonic Christianity.

5. American Christianity.

Since the revolt of the Teutonic peoples, the most remarkable phenomenon
of Christian history has been the growth of a branch of Teutonic
Christianity under the novel political and social conditions of the new
world.

This has been a transplantation of Christianity quite as significant as
any of its transplantations in the past, and the new soil has produced
just as unmistakably new a growth.

Doubtless none of the great phases of Christianity in the past knew
themselves to be new. Neither Greek nor Latin Christianity was conscious
of any departure from primitive Christianity. Indeed, to this day, in
their conception of the history of the Church, they persist in
impressing their own type on that primitive and undeveloped type.

Teutonic Christianity took centuries to come to clear consciousness of
itself and of its irreconcilability with Latin Christianity. It is not
wonderful, therefore, that hitherto, as far as I am aware, American
Christianity has been, if at all, very dimly and imperfectly conscious
of the difference between its spirit and that of the Teutonic
Christianity of the old world.

American Christianity has not yet arrived. It is only on the way. It
has not yet found itself. It is not yet conscious of its own
individuality, not yet self-reliant, independent. It is a youth, but a
youth rapidly approaching manhood. Perhaps the characteristics that are
unfolding themselves can be most clearly brought out by an attempt to
show wherein it resembles, and wherein it differs from, each of the four
great phases of Christianity which have just been under consideration.

_a_. American Christianity compared with Jewish.

Compared with Jewish Christianity, American Christianity resembles the
latter in its simplicity of creed, its emphasis on the practical and
ethical, and (to a distinct and growing degree) in its brotherliness and
democratic equality.

But its creedal simplicity is not the same as that of the primitive
Jewish Church. That Church was wise in the brevity and simplicity of
its creed, but it did not know its own wisdom. American Christianity is
wise and knows its wisdom. It will not, like the Jewish Church, allow
itself to be seduced into interminable theological controversies and
into the superstition of orthodoxy. Seventeen hundred years of bitter
wrangling and bloody conflict and cruel persecutions have taught it
something. It has a short and a simple creed, not because it knows so
little, but because it knows so much.

It differs, again, in its extensive and manifold organization, in the
variety and elaborateness of its forms of worship, and, most markedly of
all, in its attitude toward the present life. Primitive Jewish
Christianity had no interest in the present social order. Intoxicated
with apocalyptic visions, it stood on tiptoe awaiting with outstretched
arms the return of the Saviour and the overthrow of this whole order by
supernatural power. Its primary interest was eschatological. Its
deepest feeling was expressed by St. Paul when he relegated all social
relations and arrangements to the region of unimportance. "But this, I
say, brethren, the time has been cut short, that henceforth both those
that have wives may be as though they had none; and those that weep, as
though they wept not; and those that rejoice, as though they rejoiced
not; and those that buy, as though they possessed not; and those that
use the world, as not using it to the full: for the fashion of this
world is passing away." Cor. 7:29-31.

In this respect American Christianity is at the opposite pole. It does
not look for the end of the world. It has largely ceased to believe in
such a future and, where it still professes the apocalyptic faith, for
the most part, it allows that faith little or no influence in actual
life. American Christianity believes in the progressive and aggressive
amelioration of things. It believes in this life and its glorious
possibilities. It is bent on attaining them as no other sort of
Christianity ever was before. It is steeped in optimism. It believes
that the leaven of Christianity possesses the power to leaven all the
relations and institutions of civilization. It believes that the
fulfilment of our Lord’s prayer, that God’s Kingdom may come and His
will be done on earth as it is in heaven, rests with the Church. Its
real and, to an ever-increasing extent, its conscious and avowed faith
is expressed by Dr. Henry Burton in the fine hymn:

There’s a light upon the mountains and the day is at the spring,
When our eyes shall see the beauty and the glory of the King:
Weary was our heart with waiting, and the night-watch seemed so
long,
But His triumph-day is breaking and we hail it with a song.

In the fading of the starlight we may see the coming morn;
And the lights of men are paling in the splendours of the dawn:
For the eastern skies are glowing as with light of hidden fire,
And the hearts of men are stirring with the throbs of deep
desire.

He is breaking down the barriers, He is casting up the way;
He is calling for His angels to build up the gates of day:
But His angels here are human, not the shining hosts above;
For the drum-beats of His army are the heart-beats of our love.

_b_. American Christianity compared with Greek.

Of all the great historic forms of Christianity, it is the Greek from
which American Christianity might seem, at first sight, farthest
removed. The punctilious orthodoxy of the former, its bitter doctrinal
polemic are utterly abhorrent to American Christianity. American
Christianity is more and more indifferent to theological agreement, more
and more tolerant of wide doctrinal differences. And it has little
interest in the great historic creeds.

Yet it is not so far away from the Greek spirit after all. It is
inquisitive and speculative and as interested as the Gnostics in great
sweeping theories of the universe. America is of all Christendom, past
and present, the most tolerant country, yet it is, at the same time, a
hotbed of religious speculation, even of religious vagaries. But, at
last, there has been born a kind of Christianity which can think and let
think, which is interested in thinking, but does not believe that
opinions determine a man’s character here or his destiny beyond.

It should not be overlooked in comparing Greek and American Christianity
that American Christianity in its most thoughtful form would have felt a
great sympathy with the bold and free and comprehensive thought of the
great Alexandrians, Clement and Origen. It is the later and narrower and
bigoted Greek Christianity, which fittingly chose for itself the
designation, the Orthodox Church, that I have been contrasting with
American Christianity.

_c_. American Christianity compared with Latin.

The comparison of American and Latin Christianity is much more complex.

No two kinds of Christianity could well be more sharply opposed than
these two in regard to the exalted claims of the clergy in the Latin
Church. American Christianity is deeply and intensely democratic.
Sacerdotalism in any form it instinctively rejects. The very idea of
priest is passing out of its thought. The preacher it can appreciate.
The competent ecclesiastical manager has its respect. The religious
leader and pastor it can thoroughly understand and cordially recognize
where genuine. But that any class of men should occupy a mediating
position between God and man or possess a monopoly of any spiritual
gifts is foreign to the American consciousness. "Kings and priests unto
God and the Father." Those who are taught from childhood that they are
kings are quite as conscious that they are also priests. The essential
democracy of primitive Christianity has never established itself in any
land before. This is the gift--and a great one--of American democracy to
the Church.

What has been said of sacerdotalism holds true, to a still greater
degree, of that thin, shadowy form of sacerdotalism, clericalism. The
way in which the garb and badges of clericalism are disappearing in
America is symbolical of the disappearance of the idea.

Latin Christianity, as we have seen, on account of the conditions of its
origin and early history intensely autocratic, has always given a very
humble place to the laity. Obedience and money were all that was
required of them. The High Church theory, indeed, of the Roman Catholic
Church and of the so-called High Church section of the Church of England
is not a High Church theory at all. It is a High Clerical theory. The
Church has been virtually identified with the clergy. Against the
over-weening claims of Boniface VIII., Philip of France protested that
"Holy Church, the spouse of Christ, is made up not of clergy only but of
laymen." But that is not the working theory of Latin Christianity. A
quaint medieval preacher suppressed what he thought was an undue
bumptiousness on the part of his people by a sermon from the text Job
1:14, "The oxen were plowing and the asses feeding beside them," which,
he showed his too forward hearers, clearly indicated the functions of
the clergy, who were typified by the oxen, while the duty of the laymen
was set forth by the feeding asses.

Luther’s flight to the monastery when he became alarmed about his
salvation was partly prompted by a picture which made a profound
impression on him as a boy and haunted him for years. It was "an
altar-piece in a Church, the picture of a ship in which was no layman,
not even a King or a Prince; in it were the Pope with his Cardinals and
Bishops, and the Holy Ghost hovered over them, directing their course,
while priests and monks managed the oars and the sails, and thus they
went sailing heavenwards. The laymen were swimming in the water beside
the ship; some were drowning, others were holding on by ropes which the
monks and priests cast out to them to aid them. No layman was in the
ship and no priest was in the water." (Cambridge Mod. Hist. II.,
109-110.)

American Christianity is bent on an ever larger place for the laity in
the Church and an ever-growing activity. The Y.M.C.A. and Y.W.C.A., the
Young People’s Society of Christian Endeavor and the Epworth League, the
Laymen’s Missionary Movement, the Men and Religion Movement, all
illustrate the increasingly practical and lay aspect of American
Christianity.

The Papacy, too, is another feature of Latin Christianity peculiarly out
of harmony with characteristic American thought. The remoteness of the
United States from the cradle of that institution, the hostility with
which Washington inspired the young republic in regard to entangling
alliances with European nations, its intensely American and democratic
consciousness, all conspire to make the idea of a foreign ruler
uncongenial to the American mind. The national consciousness of the
United States is as exacting as religion. Its first commandment is,
Thou shalt have no other country and no other ruler than the United
States.

The authority of the Pope in the United States is maintained by being
carefully withheld from all danger of challenge. The American Catholic
is not conscious of any restraint in the tie that binds him to Rome
because the rope is always paid out as freely as his movements require.

Again, it would seem that the Roman Catholic exaltation of the
contemplative life over the active can never be accepted by American
Christianity. There are no Catholics to whom the monastic life makes so
faint an appeal as the Catholics of the United States. Perhaps a
stronger admixture of the spirit of Mary might be beneficial, but
American Christianity is emphatically a child of Martha.

On the other hand, however, there is much in Latin Christianity that
appeals strongly to the American. His extraordinary genius for
organization, in which he probably surpasses even the modern German
whose great organizing capabilities have less of individual initiative,
and the ancient Roman with whom, again, it was the characteristic of a
class rather than of a people, dispose him to appreciate the great
organizing skill that has always been shown by the Roman Catholic
Church.

Further, the catholicity of that Church, its wonderful power to
assimilate and build up within itself all races and languages and
classes, cannot but appeal to a people engaged in solving a parallel
problem. Modern American Christianity, moreover, is more and more
unsectarian, even anti-sectarian. It does not glory in division and
isolation. There is in it a growing passion for unity, a growing
yearning for a strong, commanding, national type of Christianity that is
much more akin to the imperialism of the great Popes, like Gregory VII.
and Innocent III., than to the parochialism and sectarianism that have
generally and naturally been associated with Protestantism. American
Christianity is fast losing all interest in denominationalism. All this
is bringing it nearer to the temper of Latin Christianity.

_d_. American Christianity compared with Teutonic.

It may seem absurd to try to compare Protestantism and American
Christianity, since the American Christianity that is here being
discussed is mainly the Protestantism of America. But it is not
exclusively the Protestantism of America. The Roman Catholicism of the
United States shows, though less markedly, the same traits. And within
the Protestant Churches of America another kind of Christianity is
growing up as the butterfly develops within the chrysalis. And,
moreover, it is not wholly within the organized Protestantism of America
that the new Christianity is developing. There is an unknown but vast
amount of the new American Christianity outside the organized Churches
of America. A part of this was once in the organized Churches but has
lost interest in their spirit and aims. A part of it has never been
attracted by the organized Churches. Another great--probably the
greatest--element in the coming American Christianity is the Labor
movement which, as it has been suggested, needs only to be broadened and
more consciously spiritualized to be identical with the coming true and
indigenous Church of America. It is, indeed, a grave question whether
the coming American Christianity will gradually capture and transform
the present Churches or whether, as in the Protestant Reformation, the
new wine will have to be poured into new bottles, and a new Church arise
distinct from, and even in conflict with, the present Churches.

One thing, at least, is clear.

Protestantism in its present form will not survive. The very name is
inadequate. It is not self-explanatory. It can only be understood by
reference to another and earlier Church. It is negative. It has no
positive or vital content. It carries with it the unhappiness and
partialness of division. It is essentially and incurably sectarian.
The more extensive and comprehensive the body becomes, the less
intelligible becomes the name. If Protestantism should become really
catholic, that is, universal, the name would become a complete misnomer.

American Christianity, so far as it still calls itself Protestant, only
continues to bear the name through unthinking habit. As soon as it
reflects upon the name, it must disown it. American Christianity is too
essentially catholic and comprehensive, too little concerned with the
past, too impatient of the old outworn disputes, to be content with a
name that must always convey a flavor of division and controversy.

Protestantism, sectarian in its nature as in its name, is inadequate to
express the genius of American Christianity. The dominating principle
of Protestantism has been individualism, and the dominant note of
American Christianity is fraternity. America is the chosen home of
fraternal societies. It is Rudyard Kipling, I think, who has said that
of the famous revolutionary motto, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, the
Frenchman cares only for equality, the Englishman is resolute for
liberty and despises both equality and fraternity, while the American
who knows neither liberty nor equality will forgive a man for anything
if only he is a good fellow. The American loves a "good mixer." A
shrewd French observer nearly twenty years ago in "La Réligion dans la
Société aux Etats-Unis" caught the spirit of this nascent American
Christianity.

He found it, first, a social religion, and, as such, concerning itself
more with society than with individuals; secondly, a positive religion,
in its interest in what is human rather than in what is supernatural.
It stands chiefly, he thought, for the idea of morality. It encourages
a strong recognition of the fact that good people, without professing
the same faith, are governed by the same rules of conduct, and that, if
dogma divides, morality unites.

"The Americans," he said, "make fraternity, the actual form of which is
social solidarity, the essence of Christianity. The moral unity for
which they strive under the name of Christian unity is only the
co-operation of all for the increased establishment of fraternity and
solidarity. High above sects whose diversity seems a matter of
indifference to them, they organize a religion which pervades society
throughout its length and breadth, and tends towards being only a social
spirit touched by the evangelical feeling.

* * * * *

"This moral unity is indeed a religious unity and a Christian unity;
this positivism is a Christian positivism. American humanism has
received from Christianity all the traditional, sentimental, and
poetical elements which distinguish a religion from a philosophy.
American positivism is only a Christianity which has evolved.... The
American religion may be called a Christian positivism or a positive
Christianity. It has received from the past the traditional and the
evangelical spirit. Traditional, it preserves the names and the forms
of the Churches even when it changes their customs; it develops them
from the interior. Evangelical, it keeps the figure of Jesus Christ
before all, even when it does not recognize his divinity.

* * * * *

"Therefore it is not Protestantism.... The title of Christianity is the
only one broad enough to designate it; yet this must be taken in its
evangelical sense.... The American religion is living and fruitful
because it is national."

To discern a distinct American Christianity in 1902 showed much more
insight than its recognition indicates to-day. American Christianity
has developed greatly since then and is now developing still more
rapidly under the forcing conditions of the war and the great
reconstruction. The work of reconstruction will not have been carried
very far before the incongruity of this new type of Christianity with
the hard, individualistic, militant spirit of Teutonic Christianity will
become apparent to all.

When American Christianity comes to full and clear self-consciousness,
when it, so to speak, finds itself, it will be found to have a very
simple and brief and intelligible creed. Not a shallow creed, however,
but a deep and vital one. It will put, probably, no other question to
candidates for membership than the Apostolic Church put, Dost thou
believe in the Lord Jesus Christ?

Its emphasis will be where Jesus placed it, not on opinions, but on
spirit, the spirit of brotherhood.

Democratic it will, therefore, be as well, for democracy is bound up
with brotherhood.

Finally, with a little creed it will have a big programme. It will live
to establish the Kingdom of God on the earth. Its helpful, healing,
redeeming, Christ-like activities will be infinite in the Christian and
in the heathen lands.

And as pre-eminently practical, clericalism will die out of it.
Preachers, teachers, missionaries there will be, but the gulf that has
divided these from the laity will be closed. Sacerdotalism, even in its
most attenuated and vestigial forms, will disappear.

Throughout this chapter, it is, perhaps, hardly necessary to add, the
word, American, is used in its proper continental sense. By American
Christianity is meant the new and distinct type of Christianity which is
developing in the Protestant churches of the United States and Canada
and also, though less markedly, in the Roman Catholic. Politically
distinct as these countries are likely to remain, socially and
religiously they cannot escape the influences of neighborhood.

In some respects, as has been noted, the United States, on account of
its republican constitution, its political rupture with the old world,
and its more strongly developed self-consciousness, has been more
favorable than Canada to the growth of that new form of Christianity,
yet signs are not wanting, especially in that western section in which
the coming Canada seems to be most clearly discernible, that the younger
and smaller and so, perhaps, the more mobile country may outstrip her
older and greater neighbor in the formation, out of, at least, the
Protestant denominations, of a national Christianity, simple, yet free
and varied, practical, democratic, brotherly, in a word, truly catholic.
Institutions which have outlived their usefulness usually retain an
appearance of strength until the hour of collapse. Denominationalism in
Canada is still a stately tree, but the heart is dust.

CHAPTER III.

THE GREAT CHRISTIANITY

But American Christianity is not final Christianity, nor even the
highest and richest form of Christianity in sight, unless it blossom
into a yet richer and more varied loveliness than it at present gives
promise of. Of all actual forms of Christianity it seems to have the
fairest promise, but it will probably prove to be only a tributary,
though a great one, of a still mightier river.

Is it possible for us at this stage to discern at least the outline of
the Great Christianity that is to be?

Certainly, every great historic form of Christianity has been tried by
history and found wanting. As much of primitive Jewish Christianity as
refused to merge in the large Catholic Christianity of the Greco-Roman
world dried up into an unfruitful, bigoted, and eccentric heresy and
perished.

Greek Christianity emphasized doctrine and tore itself by doctrinal
disputes into a shattered, helpless welter of vituperative sects,
powerless to spread the Gospel, powerless to withstand the
Mohammedan,--the shame and tragedy of Christian history.

Latin Christianity emphasized the organization and became the enemy of
freedom and progress which, with few exceptions, every Roman Catholic
people has had to fight and dethrone to escape intellectual and moral
decay and death.

Teutonic Christianity has emphasized freedom and the rights of the
individual. Like Islam, it has been a fighting faith. And judgment has
fallen on it in its loss of unity, its bitter and wasteful sectarian
wrangles, and the ferocious strife between labor and capital, the
outcome of which may be one of the great tragedies of history.

[#] It is, perhaps, scarcely necessary to remark that Protestantism is
here being compared, not with Roman Catholicism, but with ideal
Christianity. Roman Catholicism, too, has been a fighting faith, and in
the appalling century and a half of religious wars that set in with the
Protestant Reformation it was the older faith that first resorted to
force. [Transcriber’s note: there was no reference to this footnote in
the source book.]

Protestantism has taught her people to fight for their rights and now is
helpless before the selfish conflict of her own children that have
learned too well her spirit.

In the great industrial conflict now reaching its height, one may safely
prophesy Protestantism will perish--or be transformed.

She has taught her children to think; she has taught them to cherish
freedom; she has not taught them to love.

Since by far the most of any readers this little book may be fortunate
enough to find will be Protestant, it may be fitting and useful to point
out more specifically the defects of Protestantism than the defects of
other forms of Christianity among whose adherents, probably, the writer
can scarcely hope to find many readers.

The Protestant Reformation, so far as it was not a struggle for liberty,
national and intellectual and religious, was a doctrinal reformation.
There was not much more of the spirit of Jesus, His gentleness,
meekness, love, on one side than on the other. Erasmus understood
Christianity on the whole better than Luther. Sir Thomas More was more
Christian than John Calvin.

The Protestant Reformation was in its successful forms marked by little
sympathy with the poor and the oppressed. It declined to recognize any
duties to the serf except that of giving him the Gospel. Luther washed
his hands of the peasants and calmly abandoned them to the savage
vengeance of the princes when they refused to be satisfied with the
liberty of Gospel preaching.

Protestantism has been, except in a few despised sects, militant,
dogmatic, self-reliant, in a word, masculine. The gentler feminine
characteristics of Christianity it has very slightly recognized.

When we think of the genius of Protestantism, we think of a humble monk,
in the majesty of a conscientious conviction defying the two most
powerful rulers of Europe, the Pope and the Emperor; we think of the
indomitable sea-beggars of Holland and the heroic defence of Leyden; of
the white-plumed Henry of Navarre and the battles of the League; of the
splendidly audacious execution of Charles I., of Jenny Geddes’ stool,
the solemn League and Covenant and the bloody field of Drumclog; of the
soldiers of Gustavus Adolphus, the Lion of the North, singing Luther’s
great hymn, _Ein’feste Burg ist unser Gott_, as they moved on to the
glorious but dear-bought victory of Lützen; we think of the massacre of
Drogheda and the undying defence of Derry; and of that typical
Protestant and superb fighter, the rugged, dour, and unconquerable
Ulster man whose unrelenting opposition and deep-rooted passion for
domination have been so great an obstacle to Irish peace and the unity
of the English-speaking world. Protestantism has had a great and a
beneficent and a heroic history, but it has reproduced only imperfectly
the Christianity of Jesus.

Meekness and long-suffering were outstanding characteristics of Jesus
and of His early followers; they have rarely been outstanding
characteristics of Protestantism. Perhaps Protestantism has been of
necessity a man of war from its youth. Yet primitive Christianity
encountered fiercer persecution and did not take the sword.
Protestantism did not suffer long before she grasped the sword. She
has, on the whole, followed Christ’s precepts of non-resistance never
when she had a fighting chance.

Primitive Christianity by patience and love conquered and Christianized
the Roman Empire in three hundred years. Protestantism in more than
three hundred years has gained not a foot beyond the territory won in
the first rush of evangelical enthusiasm, and has lost territories she
at first held. It is the demonstration of the futility of a fighting
Christianity. Nowhere has the interaction of the two religions been
associated with more fighting than in Ireland, and nowhere has
Protestantism as an evangelical missionary force been more of a failure.

Gentleness, patience, humility have not been the strong points of
Protestantism. She has been proud, vigorous, masterful, impatient of
control, and to her have been given the kingdoms of the world. But not
to her has been given the Kingdom Jesus promised to the meek.

In short, in Protestantism there is much of Christianity but there is
also much simply of the old Teutonic spirit. Protestantism is not pure
or primitive or ultimate Christianity. It is Teutonic Christianity, no
more fitted to prevail than Greek or Latin Christianity. It is the
faith of the fighter, the wrestler, the individualist.

Perhaps no community calling itself Christian suggests so remotely the
tender name Jesus gave His disciples, "my sheep." Who, looking on a
prosperous Protestant congregation in town or country, with shrewdness,
vigilance, self-reliance written on almost every face, would think of
saying, "Fear not, little flock"? Freedom is what Protestantism has
demanded and fought for, freedom to think for herself and take her own
course and fight her own battles, every kind of freedom but one, the
only freedom that need not be fought for, that can never be fought
for,--freedom to love and to serve.

Protestantism in its original form is passing away; it has run its
course; its day is nearing its close. Where it has not caught the
vision of the new and the Great Christianity, its churches are being
deserted, its preachers are being seized with stammering lips and
despondent heart,[#] Its spirit cannot solve the problems of the new
age. It must become meek and lowly in heart. It must learn to love.
Rich man and poor man must stand in its churches as they stand in the
sight of God. Like medieval Christianity, it calls for a new
Reformation--not a new creed but a new heart, the heart of a little
child, humble, self-distrustful, not quick to resent, or even to see a
slight, eager to love, delighting to serve.

[#] These words are written with reverent recognition of the innumerable
forms of ministry to the bodies and souls of men that are being carried
on by devoted men and women in the Protestant Churches, but, also, with
the full conviction that these are slight and partial compared with the
outburst of devotion and service which will be aroused when the vision
of the new Christianity seizes great masses of men and women as the
passion for freedom seized Germany in the years 1517 to 1524 or France
in 1789.

Never were the young men and women of Protestant lands so ready for a
great task, but that task must be broadly Christian and broadly human.
It must be a spiritual task but of a spirituality interwoven
inextricably with politics, business, and sport.

Luther cannot help us here with his callousness to the wrongs and
miseries of the peasants, nor Knox with his harshness and his militancy,
nor Calvin with his hatred of those whom he thought God’s enemies, nor
the Puritans nor the Covenanters with their bigotry and their blow for
blow and curse for curse.

Another deep lack is in Protestantism. In Isaiah’s vision of the
seraphim above the throne of God, "each one had six wings; with twain he
covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he
did fly." Two wings for service and four for worship! A Roman Catholic,
meeting a friend who had become a Protestant, asked him how he liked his
new faith. "I like it well," answered the other, "but one thing I miss,
and that is the spirit of adoration."

How strange to us in Roman Catholic pictures are the faces of the saints
upturned in adoration to the Mother and the holy Child! Protestantism
does not produce faces like those. Shrewd, intelligent, alert, at best
reliable, frank, kindly, they often are; humble, not often; reverent,
adoring, still more rarely. Yet Goethe has said, "The highest thing in
life is the thrill of awe." And Carlyle, too, "Thought without
reverence is barren and poisonous."

Protestantism tends to be shallow, with the thinness and hardness and
tinniness of mere intellectualism. It needs to tap great fountains of
tenderness, humility, adoration, to be deepened, mellowed, enriched. Of
the two ultra types of worship--the bright church, comfortable with
plush cushions and glittering with brass work, where the people sit with
wide-open eyes and curiously watch the preacher while he prays, and
where the preacher with conscious cleverness clears up all the mysteries
of life and _coloratura_ quartettes display their technique (an ultra
type, confessedly, and not common, but actual), and the dim church with
the drooping Christ on the cross and pictured saints gazing in adoration
and the congregation on their knees before the divine Presence in the
Sacrament, one may be a convinced Protestant and yet believe the latter
form of worship the more fruitful of the two.

American Protestantism needs new inspiration. So far as the past can
yield this, it would seem that it should look particularly to three
great leaders and saints--St. Francis of Assisi, St. John of England (to
use W. T. Stead’s deserved designation of John Wesley), and General
Booth.

Perhaps the most winsome and Christ-like figure that Roman Catholicism
presents, the loveliest flower in her rich garden of sainthood, is the
poverty-loving, utterly lowly and loving, care-free and joyous Francis
of Assisi, and perhaps, too, it may be said that no Christian character
better deserves the study of Protestants. St. Francis is not an ideal
figure; he lacks the balance and sanity of Jesus. Yet, perhaps, of all
who have passionately set themselves to reproduce the life of Jesus, St.
Francis in his utter humility, his complete unworldliness, and his
overflowing tenderness can best bring home to Protestantism its hardness
and shrewdness, its worldly-wisdom and its self-complacency. What a
far-distant world is the world of the man who renounced all possessions,
went about to preach and serve in coarsest, meagrest garb, who despised
money and loved poverty, whose sympathies went out to birds and fishes,
to Brother Fire and Sister Water, who could captivate robbers and even,
it was believed, wild creatures of the woods, and at whose coming the
Umbrian cities rang their bells and poured out with branches and flags
to greet the mean little man with the shabby grey gown and the rapt,
pale, worn face.

Let it be granted Protestant countries are more wealthy than Roman
Catholic, more progressive, more successful in trade and manufacture,
St. Francis gives us a glimpse into the simplicity and childlikeness,
humility and romance, that may sometimes find a Roman Catholic
atmosphere more genial than a Protestant.

Associated with the Franciscan order of tonsured monks and cloistered
nuns, there grew up a great society of men and women taking a middle
path between the world and the cloister--plainer in dress, abstaining
from the dance and the theatre, eschewing all quarrels, praying and
fasting more regularly, practising a more systematic beneficence than
ordinary Christians. And it is noteworthy that, in 1882 on the seven
hundredth anniversary of the birth of Francis, Pope Leo XIII. in an
encyclical declared that the institution of these Franciscan Tertiaries
was alone fitted to save humanity from the social and political dangers
which threatened it.

Wesley and Francis are not far removed. The Saint of Epworth was almost
as ardent a devotee of poverty as the Saint of Assisi. If he did not
absolutely strip himself, he gave away immensely more. He, too, had a
passion for the souls of men, all of St. Francis’ pity for the poor, and
he won a wealth of reverence and love. He was a far wiser man, living
in a more rational age. But he was not only extraordinarily competent.
He knew, too, his own competence. There is a wildflower grace of the
childlike in St. Francis that we miss in the far more intelligent and
commanding figure of Wesley.

Primitive Methodism had much of the enthusiasm and devotion and
joyousness of the Franciscan brotherhood. Francis’ friars and Wesley’s
helpers had a common unworldliness, joyousness, and passion for the
souls of men. But even as the Franciscan movement diverged from the
ideals of St. Francis, so Methodism soon developed on lines of its own.
It has preserved much of the evangelical fervor and the practical
helpfulness of its original inspiration. Considered in its direct and
indirect effects, its union of evangelicalism, mysticism, and practical
kindliness, there has been no other Christian movement which has
combined such a measure of purity with such vastness of influence. In
genuine Christian influence it has surpassed even the Reformation.
Modern Christianity (and there is a distinguishable modern Christianity)
is of all forms that Christianity has assumed the nearest to the
Christianity of Jesus, and in its fashioning the Methodist Revival has
been the chief agency. Yet Methodism has not realized the ideals of its
human founder. It did not perpetuate his unworldliness. It failed, as
R. W. Dale pointed out, to the great loss of Christendom, to develop the
ethical implications of his great doctrine of perfect love. It
cherished his memory and his organization, but it refused to inherit his
dread and hatred of riches. Its very thrift and industry and morality
have been its undoing. It became, in great measure, like Protestantism
in general, a _bourgeois_ religion, eminently suited for people who want
to get on in the world. Its chief abhorrence has never been of social
inequality and injustice but of the wasteful frivolities and vices,
dancing, card-playing, theatre-going, and, pre-eminently, intemperance.
The Report already cited shows, however, a new spirit at work in the
Methodism of Canada, a spirit in which Wesley would rejoice, and it is
not in Canadian Methodism only that it is at work.

A still closer resemblance obtains between the Franciscan order and the
Salvation Army than between the former and Methodism. No two movements,
perhaps, so widely apart in time and methods are so closely akin.
Poverty, humility, obedience, love are the dominant features of them
both.

Francis is a more winsome figure than General Booth but incomparably
less intelligent and efficient. Francis awakened a great religious
revival but probably wrought little improvement on the face of
Europe--on its ferocity, chronic warfare, sensuality, oppression of the
poor. The Salvation Army has redeemed countless victims of poverty and
vice. It has probably proved itself the most effective agency in all
history for the salvation of the down and out.

The Order and the Army have the same limitations.

1. Both are too exclusively inward and individualistic. They do not
deal adequately with conditions and causes, the Franciscan movement not
at all, the Salvation Army very timidly. The weakest element in the
latter is its willingness to accept gifts from even those who have made
their wealth out of the degradation of men and women, and its seeming
reluctance to engage in any drastic social reforms which might dry up
such bounty. It is content with ambulance work, and even the most
devoted and heroic ambulance work will never stop the war.

2. Both, too, are sectional; fitted only for the few, the enthusiasts.
Each has cared for the saint; neither has made provision for the
ordinary man. Christian perfection, in the thought of Francis and of
General Booth, is for the man who withdraws from the ordinary work of
the world, turns away from its culture, crucifies a thousand human
instincts, breaks all the strings of the human lute but one. Both
movements organized by these great saints are eccentric, abnormal.
Neither is workable on a catholic, or universal, scale. Both
sectionalize the holy life.

What is needed to-day is another leader, a leader for the ordinary man.
The ordinary man is neither saint nor fanatic, neither preacher nor
monk; he would be bored to death if he had to sing or pray or meditate
all day; his joy is in building bridges and planning railways and
ripping up the matted prairie sod with gasoline engines; he likes his
wife and children and does not feel called upon to become a missionary
to China or Central Africa. The need is for the leader who can show
this ordinary man how to bring the truest love and the deepest piety
into the ordinary, commonplace, work-a-day life, revealing the glory of
God, not alone as gilding the cold snows of Alpine peaks or bathing the
distant desert with unearthly beauty, but transfiguring the city street,
the cozy home, the quiet fields where lovers walk at even.

Francis, Wesley, Booth--the time has come for each section of the
Christian Church to remember that "all things are hers: whether Paul or
Apollos or Cephas." We Protestants may think the Roman Catholic Church
less likely to appropriate our saints than we theirs. This judgment of
ours may be right or wrong, but we have no right to pass it until we
ourselves have recognized the limitations of Protestantism and set
ourselves heartily to appropriate the great elements of the Christian
life that are the distinctive glories of Latin Christianity.
Protestantism, too, has its own peculiar glories. Neither great
division of Christendom is adequate to meet the religious needs of
to-day. The hour has struck for the great Christianity.

The future belongs neither to Roman Catholicism nor to Protestantism.
Roman Catholicism is too aristocratic and distrustful of freedom. The
modern man will no more go back to medieval Christianity than to
medieval feudalism. There is a drift from Protestantism to-day, but the
drift from Roman Catholicism has been far greater. To fulfil its
destiny, Roman Catholicism must accept freedom of thought; magnificently
democratic as it has been from the beginning in some respects--the chair
of St. Peter being accessible to the humblest peasant’s son--it must
accept a deeper and wider democracy.

Protestantism, on the other hand, must become heart-broken over its
divisions, religious and social. It must become more brotherly, more
lowly, more worshipful, in a word, more childlike.

It is unthinkable that either of these great forms of Christianity will
pass away. They will change. They are already changing, and each, as
it changes, moves toward the other.

Thought and life move through conflict to unity.
Thesis--antithesis--synthesis--that is the great law. The great and,
perhaps, inevitable stage of antithesis that has divided Christendom for
four centuries is drawing to a close. Latin Christianity needed
Protestantism. It was the Protestant Reformation that inspired the
counter-reformation. Roman Catholicism owes to Luther and Calvin a
purer faith and a new lease of life. To-day the noblest and most
energetic types of Roman Catholicism are found in Protestant lands, and
the service of Protestantism to Roman Catholicism is not yet finished.

Just as certainly, Protestantism needs Roman Catholicism. Some
exposition of this has already been attempted. It is hard to see how
any one who believes Roman Catholicism to be a tissue of errors can
account for its extraordinary tenacity of life. Why should God preserve
it unless because its mission is not yet accomplished?

Far apart and deeply antagonistic these two great forms of Christianity
may seem, but, after all, it is an inescapable law on this earth that
two people who try to get as far away from each other as possible must
meet at last; and hatred is nearer love than is indifference. Human
nature wearies of antagonism, and the longer it lasts the warmer the
welcome for its passing.

Like denominationalism, this four hundred year old antagonism seems a
mighty tree but, like denominationalism, it is hollow within. Some day
the great winds of God will arise, and when they begin to blow, this
tree, too, will fall.

The thirteenth century was one of the great centuries of Christian
history. In it feudalism reached its height, and chivalry its fullest
flower. In it Gothic architecture and medieval philosophy reared their
noblest monuments. It was the century of the greatest of medieval, or,
perhaps, of distinctively Christian, poets, Dante, the greatest of
Christian theologians, Aquinas, the greatest of Popes, Innocent III.,
the two most winsome of saints, St. Francis and St. Louis of France. In
all its greatness, the thirteenth century is distinctively Roman
Catholic. The nineteenth century, also, is another of the less than
half a dozen of the greatest of Christian centuries, and it is
distinctively a Protestant century. Its great achievements in
geographical and astronomical discovery, scientific investigation,
increase of human comfort and wealth, and above all its unparalleled
extension of liberty--bear all of them the Protestant stamp.

These two centuries have thus established beyond dispute the right of
those two great historic forms of Christianity to the lasting reverence
and gratitude of mankind.

Roman Catholicism has cherished the divine principle of unity. At great
cost it has preserved unity. It has not been equally careful of the
divine principle of liberty.

Protestantism has gloriously fought and suffered and died for liberty.
It has never highly valued unity. It has even gloried in division. But
unity is a diviner thing than even liberty. Liberty is precious only as
the indispensable condition and pre-requisite of true unity.

It is a lovely and thrilling hope that the twentieth century may prove
to be the century of the Great Christianity, the Christianity which will
extinguish neither Latin nor Teutonic Christianity but comprehend and
blend them, the simple, yet free and varied, democratic, passionate
Christianity of all who love the Lord Jesus Christ and seek His Kingdom
on the earth, the Christianity which was the first and will be the last.

This, at least, can be said, that the unparalleled problems of social
and political reconstruction facing the world to-day can be rightly
solved only by a great religious devotion, and it is difficult to see
how that devotion can be secured except by a unification of the great
Churches of Christendom and their common baptism into the spirit of
primitive Christianity.

And let no one say the Great Christianity is only a beautiful dream.

Already, in that forever holy strip of land where towns were reduced to
heaps of dust and trees to splintered trunks, where earth was gashed and
torn as men never gashed and tore the kindly bosom of mother earth
before, and where beautiful human bodies were mutilated and destroyed
with a fury unknown in history, there the Great Christianity has
disclosed itself. There at the mouth of hell unfolded the sweetest
flowers that ever bloomed on earth. There in the brotherhood of the
trenches became visible the Great Christianity. There Anglicans,
Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Salvationists,
and every other kind of Protestants, aye, and Roman Catholics, kneeled
together to commemorate the suffering and love of their Common Redeemer,
the Soldier-King.

"Father," wrote a Manitoba boy to his father from the trenches, in the
spring of 1917, "we have a religion here but, father, it is not the same
as yours. You don’t like the Catholics or the Church of England, but,
father, we love everybody here. We are all one. And, father," the boy
went on, "when we come back, our religion is going to blow yours
sky-high."

A prophecy not as yet fulfilled but not, perhaps, beyond fulfillment.
Certain it is that our soldier boys will never crowd into our churches
as they crowded to the colors till those churches are the home of a
Christianity that has the breadth and the brotherliness and something,
at least, of the heroism of the Christianity of the trenches.

But something more must be said about the Great Christianity.

It may be that Latin Christianity and Teutonic combined do not represent
the full splendor and power of Christianity, and that the drastic social
changes which must be carried out in the next quarter of a century, or
even in a briefer period, call for the re-inforcement of another race
and another sort of Christianity.

The distinctive Greek Christianity of the first five or six centuries
made its contribution and passed away with the vanishing of the original
and pure Hellenic race. But there is a Greek Christianity which has
found a new lease of life and a new home in that race which has largely
replaced the Greek in his own home and has diffused itself over most of
eastern Europe, the Slavonic. There is a great Christianity which is
still called Greek, but which is rather Slavonic Christianity, and which
might more narrowly and specifically be called Russian Christianity,
after that people who constitute the largest section of Greek
Christianity and promise to be the most influential.

It may well be that the Great Christianity which the world so
desperately needs will be neither Latin nor Teutonic Christianity nor
both in combination, but a blend of Latin and Teutonic and American and
Russian Christianity, and it does not seem unlikely that the
contribution of the last of the four may be the most precious and vital
of them all. Perhaps in the part Russia is destined to play in the next
fifty years will be found the most striking example in all history of
how it is God’s way to choose the foolish things of the world that He
may put to shame them that are wise; and the weak things of the world
that He may put to shame the things that are strong; and the base things
of the world and the things that are despised that He may bring to
nought the things that are.

The Slav has been the Cinderella of the European sisterhood. Perhaps we
might say, the ugly duckling. From a military point of view he has been
no match for the Teuton. In the long struggle of the last thousand
years between the Teuton and the Slav, the Teuton has nearly always
showed himself the stronger. For centuries he has ruled over the Slav.
In the industrial arts, in all that pertains to the utilization of
natural resources for the material well-being of men, in agriculture and
mining and manufacturing and trading, the Slav has been immeasurably
more backward.

Mastered and oppressed by the Teuton on the West, subjugated for
centuries by the Tartar on the East, the Slav has remained until
yesterday a people forgotten and despised, shrouded in poverty,
ignorance, mystery. And now out of that twilight he has stepped,
ignorant, fanatical, and in his ignorance or superstition capable of
ferocity, yet essentially the most child-like, the most religious, the
most brotherly, the most idealistic of European peoples. What other
people call their country, what the Russian calls his--_holy_ Russia?

The peoples of the West, especially the Teutonic or the Anglo-Saxon, are
weak where they are strong. It is their practicalness that has given
them their high place; it is their practicalness which keeps them from
the highest. It is hard for them to believe in a Holy City. If they do
believe in it, they do not care to seek it till they are sure of a
practicable road. But the Slav instinctively believes in a Holy City,
and only needs to be told where it is to be found to set out forthwith
over rivers, bogs, and rugged mountain ranges.

And it is just these things the Western world needs in this crisis--the
spirit of the little child, the spirit of brotherhood, the sense of the
pre-eminence of religion, the idealism that will risk everything for a
dream.

The first movements of the awakened Russian may be unsteady. His new
found freedom may act on him with intoxicating, almost deranging power.
But they know little of the real Russian soul who dread the liberation
of that long-prisoned soul and its free play on the Western world.

In the material ground-work of our civilization, its farming, its
mining, its building of steamships, of railroads, of modern cities, the
Teutonic races have taken the lead. They have builded the house. Now,
it may be, when the finer problems arise of living in the home in
harmony and helpfulness and in a high and holy spirit, it is the Slav
who, in his turn, will take the lead. The Greek, the Italian, the
Frank, the Spaniard, the Anglo-Saxon have successively held the premier
place. The day of the Slav may now be dawning.

Nor yet is our forecast of the Great Christianity complete. It may be
that there awaits us, though in a more distant future, a still more
striking illustration of how God chooses for honor the despised things
of the world. Of all races the most despised, the most oppressed, has
been the African, and that not for generations or centuries but for
millenniums. Europe, Asia, and America have all made Africa their
servant. The dark Continent stands pre-eminent in suffering and in
service. But it is in suffering and in service that He, too, the Coming
King, has been pre-eminent. One reason why Africa has been the hunting
ground of the slaver from immemorial times is because in the African
nature immemorially and inextinguishably is the readiness to serve. All
other races love to rule; some of them, like the Latin and the Teutonic,
have been intensely proud, greedy of power, and averse from service.
The African race is the one race which has by nature the spirit of Him
who came not to be ministered unto but to minister. The African race,
too, is of all races the most child-like, the most care-free, the one
most ready to delight in simple things and the things of to-day. The
white races, in comparison, are old, vigilant, suspicious, anxious,
care-worn. There is no question which, in these respects, is nearest the
ideal of Jesus. The greedy, ambitious spirit of the Western nations,
never contented, their delight in to-day always poisoned by the fear or
the fascination of to-morrow, is far from the spirit of Jesus. It may
be that the white man will yet have to sit at the feet of the black, and
that, when Christ is glorified, it will be that race that has, beyond
all other races, trodden Christ’s path of suffering and service which,
beyond all others, will be glorified with Him.

The re-action of the uncounted millions of Asia on Christianity--the
contributions of the ancient and deeply experienced brown and yellow
races to that religion in which alone they can find their fullest
development--is another fascinating subject for enquiry and speculation;
but these influences, potent and inescapable as they promise to be, fall
outside the limits of the period considered by this book.

CONCLUSION

The task before Western civilization to-day, it is probable, is the
greatest civilization has ever faced. It is a complete reconstruction
that is demanded. It must be accomplished with speed. All the Western
nations are involved. There have been other reconstructions as drastic,
but either they have been permitted a much longer period of development,
or they have been confined to much smaller areas.

The struggle will not be over religious opinions, or political theories,
though both are involved. It will be over what touch men ordinarily
much more deeply, their livelihood and their profits, and the war has
seemed to show that men will sacrifice their lives more readily than
their profits. It will be a struggle no class can escape.

The readjustments would be difficult enough in themselves if men engaged
in them in the calmest and kindliest spirit. But many who will be
foremost in the task of reconstruction bring to the problems the
bitterness and distrust engendered by centuries of cruel wrong.

Nothing but Christianity can carry the Western peoples through this
unparallelled crisis. But it must be Christianity in its purity and its
fulness, not a Christianity wasting its energy on doctrinal controversy,
broken by denominational divisions, or absorbed in taking care of its
machinery. It must, in short, be a Christianity neither
intellectualized nor sectarianized nor institutionalized.

It must be a Christianity, born as at the first in the hearts of the
common people, simple, democratic, brotherly; like a tree, its top in
the sky but its roots deep in common earth; treating institutions, even
the most venerable, as the mere temporary contrivances that they are;
with the faith of Jesus in the human heart and in the ultimate triumph
of love, and a willingness, like His, to find a throne in a cross.

Warwick Bro’s & Rutter, Limited,
Printers and Bookbinders, Toronto, Canada.

*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The New Christianity - or, The Religion of the New Age" ***

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