Part 20 (2/2)
The work has not been without its vicissitudes. The wonderful revival of 1857, preeminently a laymen's movement, in many instances found its nidus in the rooms of the a.s.sociations; and their work was expanded and invigorated as a result of the revival. In 1861 came on the war. It broke up for the time the continental confederacy of a.s.sociations. Many of the local a.s.sociations were dissolved by the enlistment of their members. But out of the inspiring exigencies of the time grew up in the heart of the a.s.sociations the organization and work of the Christian Commission, cooperating with the Sanitary Commission for the bodily and spiritual comfort of the armies in the field. The two organizations expended upward of eleven millions of dollars, the free gift of the people at home. After the war the survivors of those who had enlisted from the a.s.sociations came back to their home duties, in most cases, better men for all good service in consequence of their experience of military discipline.
A natural sequel to the organization and success of the Young Men's Christian a.s.sociation is the inst.i.tution of the Young Women's Christian a.s.sociation, having like objects and methods in its proper sphere. This inst.i.tution, too, owes the reason of its existence to changed social conditions. The plausible arguments of some earnest reformers in favor of opening careers of independent self-support to women, and the unquestionable and pathetic instances by which these arguments are enforced, are liable to some most serious and weighty offsets. Doubtless many and many a case of hards.h.i.+p has been relieved by the general introduction of this reform. But the result has been the gathering in large towns of populations of unmarried, self-supporting young women, severed from home duties and influences, and, out of business hours, under no effective restraints of rule. There is a rush from the country into the city of applicants for employment, and wages sink to less than a living rate. We are confronted with an artificial and perilous condition for the church to deal with, especially in the largest cities.
And of the various instrumentalities to this end, the Young Women's Christian a.s.sociation is one of the most effective.
The development of organized activity among women has been a conspicuous characteristic of this period. From the beginning of our churches the charitable sewing-circle or ”Dorcas Society” has been known as a center both of prayer and of labor. But in this period the organization of women for charitable service has been on a continental scale.
In 1874, in an outburst of zeal, ”women's crusades” were undertaken, especially in some western towns, in which bands of singing and praying women went in person to tippling-houses and even worse resorts, to a.s.sail them, visibly and audibly, with these spiritual weapons. The crusades, so long as they were a novelty, were not without result.
Spectacular prayers, offered with one eye on the heavens and the other eye watching the impressions made on the human auditor, are not in vain; they have their reward. But the really important result of the ”crusades” was the organization of the ”Women's Christian Temperance Union,” which has extended in all directions to the utmost bounds of the country, and has accomplished work of undoubted value, while attempting other work the value of which is open to debate.
The separate organization of women for the support and management of missions began on an extensive scale, in 1868, with the Women's Board of Missions, inst.i.tuted in alliance with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions of the Congregationalist churches.
The example at once commended itself to the imitation of all, so that all the princ.i.p.al mission boards of the Protestant churches are in alliance with actively working women's boards.
The training acquired in these and other organizations by many women of exceptional taste and talent for the conduct of large affairs has tended still further to widen the field of their activity. The ends of the earth, as well as the dark places nearer home, have felt the salutary results of it.[367:1]
In this brief and most incomplete sketch of the origin of one of the distinguis.h.i.+ng features of contemporary Christianity--the application of the systematized activity of private Christians--no mention has been made of the corps of ”colporteurs,” or book-peddlers, employed by religious publication societies, nor of the vastly useful work of laymen employed as city missionaries, nor of the houses and orders of sisters wholly devoted to pious and charitable work. Such work, though the ceremony of ordination may have been omitted, is rather clerical or professional than laical. It is on this account the better suited to the genius of the Catholic Church, whose ages of experience in the conduct of such organizations, and whose fine examples of economy and efficiency in the use of them, have put all American Christendom under obligation.
Among Protestant sects the Lutherans, the Episcopalians, and the Methodists have (after the Moravians) shown themselves readiest to profit by the example. But a far more widely beneficent service than that of all the nursing ”orders” together, both Catholic and Protestant, and one not less Christian, while it is characteristically American in its method, is that of the annually increasing army of faithful women professionally educated to the work of nursing, at a hundred hospitals, and fulfilling their vocation individually and on business principles.
The education of nurses is a sequel of the war and one of the beneficent fruits of it.
Not the least important item in the organization of lay activity is the marvelously rapid growth of the ”Young People's Society of Christian Endeavor.” In February, 1881, a pastor in Portland, Me., the Rev.
Francis E. Clark, organized into an a.s.sociation within his church a number of young people pledged to certain rules of regular attendance and partic.i.p.ation in the a.s.sociation meetings and of cooperation in useful service. There seems to have been no particular originality in the plan, but through some felicity in arrangement and opportuneness in the time it caught like a forest fire, and in an amazingly short time ran through the country and around the world. One wise precaution was taken in the basis of the organization: it was provided that it should not interfere with any member's fidelity to his church or his sect, but rather promote it. Doubtless jealousy of its influence was thus in some measure forestalled and averted. But in the rapid spread of the Society those who were on guard for the interests of the several sects recognized a danger in too free affiliations outside of sectarian lines, and soon there were inst.i.tuted, in like forms of rule, ”Epworth Leagues”
for Methodists, ”Westminster Leagues” for Presbyterians, ”Luther Leagues” for Lutherans, ”St. Andrew's Brotherhoods” for Episcopalians, ”The Baptist Young People's Union,” and yet others for yet other sects.
According to the latest reports, the total pledged members.h.i.+p of this order of a.s.sociated young disciples, in these various ramifications, is about 4,500,000[369:1]--this in the United States alone. Of the Christian Endeavor Societies still adhering to the old name and const.i.tution, there are in all the world 47,009, of which 11,119 are ”Junior Endeavor Societies.” The total members.h.i.+p is 2,820,540.[369:2]
Contemporary currents of theological thought, setting away from the excessive individualism which has characterized the churches of the Great Awakening, confirm the tendency of the Christian life toward a vigorous and even absorbing external activity. The duty of the church to human society is made a part of the required curriculum of study in preparation for the ministry, in fully equipped theological seminaries.
If ever it has been a just reproach of the church that its frequenters were so absorbed in the saving of their own souls that they forgot the mult.i.tude about them, that reproach is fast pa.s.sing away. ”The Inst.i.tutional Church,” as the clumsy phrase goes, cares for soul and body, for family and munic.i.p.al and national life. Its saving sacraments are neither two nor seven, but seventy times seven. They include the bath-tub as well as the font; the coffee-house and cook-shop as well as the Holy Supper; the gymnasium as well as the prayer-meeting. The ”college settlement” plants colonies of the best life of the church in regions which men of little faith are tempted to speak of as ”G.o.d-forsaken.” The Salvation Army, with its noisy and eccentric ways, and its effective discipline, and its most Christian principle of setting every rescued man at work to aid in the rescue of others, is welcomed by all orders of the church, and honored according to the measure of its usefulness, and even of its faithful effort to be useful.
It is not to be supposed that this immense, unprecedented growth of outward activity can have been gained without some corresponding loss.
The time is not long gone by, when the sustained contemplation of the deep things of the cross, and the lofty things in the divine nature, and the subtile and elusive facts concerning the human const.i.tution and character and the working of the human will, were eminently characteristic of the religious life of the American church. In the times when that life was stirred to its most strenuous activity, it was marked by the vicissitude of prolonged pa.s.sions of painful sensibility at the consciousness of sin, and ecstasies of delight in the contemplation of the infinity of G.o.d and the glory of the Saviour and his salvation. Every one who is conversant with the religious biography of the generations before our own, knows of the still hours and days set apart for the severe inward scrutiny of motives and ”frames” and the grounds of one's hope. However truly the church of to-day may judge that the piety of their fathers was disproportioned and morbidly introspective and unduly concerned about one's own salvation, it is none the less true that the reaction from its excesses is violent, and is providing for itself a new reaction. ”The contemplative orders,” whether among Catholics or Protestants, do not find the soil and climate of America congenial. And yet there is a mission-field here for the mystic and the quietist; and when the stir-about activity of our generation suffers their calm voices to be heard, there are not a few to give ear.
An event of great historical importance, which cannot be determined to a precise date, but which belongs more to this period than to any other, is the loss of the Scotch and Puritan Sabbath, or, as many like to call it, the American Sabbath. The law of the Westminster divines on this subject, it may be affirmed without fear of contradiction from any quarter, does not coincide in its language with the law of G.o.d as expressed either in the Old Testament or in the New. The Westminster rule requires, as if with a ”Thus saith the Lord,” that on the first day of the week, instead of the seventh, men shall desist not only from labor but from recreation, and ”spend the whole time in the public and private exercises of G.o.d's wors.h.i.+p, except so much as is to be taken up in the works of necessity and mercy.”[371:1] This interpretation and expansion of the Fourth Commandment has never attained to more than a sectarian and provincial authority; but the overmastering Puritan influence, both of Virginia and of New England, combined with the Scotch-Irish influence, made it for a long time dominant in America.
Even those who quite declined to admit the divine authority of the glosses upon the commandment felt constrained to ”submit to the ordinances of man for the Lord's sake.” But it was inevitable that with the vast increase of the travel and sojourn of American Christians in other lands of Christendom, and the mult.i.tudinous immigration into America from other lands than Great Britain, the tradition from the Westminster elders should come to be openly disputed within the church, and should be disregarded even when not denied. It was not only inevitable; it was a Christian duty distinctly enjoined by apostolic authority.[372:1] The five years of war, during which Christians of various lands and creeds intermingled as never before, and the Sunday laws were dumb ”_inter arma_” not only in the field but among the home churches, did perhaps even more to break the force of the tradition, and to lead in a perilous and demoralizing reaction. Some reaction was inevitable. The church must needs suffer the evil consequence of overstraining the law of G.o.d. From the Sunday of ascetic self-denial--”a day for a man to afflict his soul”--there was a ready rush into utter recklessness of the law and privilege of rest. In the church there was wrought sore damage to weak consciences; men acted, not from intelligent conviction, but from lack of conviction, and allowing themselves in self-indulgences of the rightfulness of which they were dubious, they ”condemned themselves in that which they allowed.” The consequence in civil society was alike disastrous. Early legislation had not steered clear of the error of attempting to enforce Sabbath-keeping as a religious duty by civil penalties; and some relics of that mistake remained, and still remain, on some of the statute-books. The just protest against this wrong was, of course, undiscriminating, tending to defeat the righteous and most salutary laws that aimed simply to secure for the citizen the privilege of a weekly day of rest and to secure the holiday thus ordained by law from being perverted into a nuisance. The social change which is still in progress along these lines no wise Christian patriot can contemplate with complacency. It threatens, when complete, to deprive us of that universal quiet Sabbath rest which has been one of the glories of American social life, and an important element in its economic prosperity, and to give in place of it, to some, no a.s.surance of a Sabbath rest at all, to others, a Sabbath of revelry and debauch.
FOOTNOTES:
[354:1] Thompson, ”The Presbyterians,” chap. xiii.; Johnson, ”The Southern Presbyterians,” chap. v.
[357:1] The immigration is thus given by decades, with an ill.u.s.trative diagram, by Dr. Dorchester, ”Christianity in the United States,” p. 759:
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