Part 4 (2/2)
”Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee”--
such was our cry and such was our salvation. If now we are socially minded, if we are concerned for economic and international righteousness, that is an enlargement of our Christian outlook which has grown out of and still is rooted back in our individual need and experience of G.o.d.
Some of us, however, did not come into fellows.h.i.+p with G.o.d by that route at all. We came in from the opposite direction. The character in the Old Testament who seems to me the worthiest exhibition of personal religion before Jesus is the prophet Jeremiah, but Jeremiah started his religious experience, not with a sense of individual need, but with a burning, patriotic, social pa.s.sion. He was concerned for Judah. Her iniquities, long acc.u.mulating, were bringing upon her an irretrievable disaster. He laid his soul upon her soul and sought to breathe into her the breath of life. Then, when he saw the country he adored, the civilization he cherished, cras.h.i.+ng into ruin, he was thrown back personally on G.o.d. He started with social pa.s.sion; he ended with social pa.s.sion plus personal religion. Some of G.o.d's greatest servants have come to know him so.
Henry Ward Beecher once said that a text is a small gate into a large field where one can wander about as he pleases, and that the trouble with most ministers is that they spend all their time swinging on the gate. That same figure applies to the entrance which many of us made into the Christian experience. Some of us came in by the gate of personal religion, and we have been swinging on it ever since; and some of us came in by the gate of social pa.s.sion for the regeneration of the world, and we have been swinging on that gate ever since. We both are wrong. These are two gates into the same city, and it is the city of our G.o.d. It would be one of the greatest blessings to the Christian church both at home and on the foreign field if we could come together on this question where separation is so needless and so foolish. If some of us started with emphasis upon personal religion, we have no business to stop until we understand the meaning of social Christianity. If some of us started with emphasis upon the social campaign, we have no business to rest until we learn the deep secrets of personal religion. The redemption of personality is the great aim of the Christian Gospel, and, therefore, to inspire the inner lives of men and to lift outward burdens which impede their spiritual growth are both alike Christian service to bring in the Kingdom.
[1] Leo M. Tolstoi: My Religion, Introduction, p. ix.
[2] D. Crawford: Thinking Black, pp. 444-445.
[3] L. C. F. Lactantius: The Divine Inst.i.tutes, Book V, Chap. xv, xvi.
[4] Gregory the Great: Moralium Libri, Pars quarta, Lib. XXI, Caput XV--”Omnes namque homines natura aequales sumus.”
LECTURE IV
PROGRESSIVE CHRISTIANITY
I
Hitherto in the development of our thought, we have been considering the Christian Gospel as an ent.i.ty set in the midst of a progressive world, and we have been studying the new Christian att.i.tudes which this influential environment has been eliciting. The Gospel has been in our thought like an individual who, finding himself in novel circ.u.mstances, reacts toward them in ways appropriate alike to them and to his own character. The influence of the idea of progress upon Christianity, however, is more penetrating than such a figure can adequately portray.
For no one can long ponder the significance of our generation's progressive ways of thinking without running straight upon this question: is not Christianity itself progressive? In the midst of a changing world does not it also change, so that, reacting upon the new ideas of progress, it not only a.s.similates and uses them, but is itself an ill.u.s.tration of them? Where everything else in man's life in its origin and growth is conceived, not in terms of static and final creation or revelation, but in terms of development, can religion be left out?
Instead of being a pond around which once for all a man can walk and take its measure, a final and completed whole, is not Christianity a river which, maintaining still reliance upon the historic springs from which it flows, gathers in new tributaries on its course and is itself a changing, growing and progressive movement? The question is inevitable in any study of the relations.h.i.+p between the Gospel and progress, and its implications are so far-reaching that it deserves our careful thought.
Certainly it is clear that already modern ideas of progress have had so penetrating an influence upon Christianity as to affect, not its external reactions and methods only, nor yet its intellectual formulations alone, but deeper still its very mood and inward temper. Whether or not Christianity ought to be a changing movement in a changing world, it certainly has been that and is so still, and the change can be seen going on now in the very atmosphere in which it lives and moves and has its being. For example, consider the att.i.tude of resignation to the will of G.o.d, which was characteristic of medieval Christianity. As we saw in our first lecture, the medieval age did not think of human life upon this earth in terms of progress. The hopes of men did not revolve about any Utopia to be expected here. History was not even a glacier, moving slowly toward the sunny meadows. It did not move at all; it was not intended to move; it was standing still. To be sure, the thirteenth century was one of the greatest in the annals of the race. In it the foremost European universities were founded, the sublimest Gothic cathedrals were built, some of the world's finest works of handicraft were made; in it Cimabue and Giotto painted, Dante wrote, St. Thomas Aquinas philosophized, and St. Francis of a.s.sisi lived. The motives, however, which originated and sustained this magnificent outburst of creative energy were otherworldly--they were not concerned with antic.i.p.ations of a happier lot for humankind upon this earth. The medieval age did not believe that man's estate upon the earth ever would be fundamentally improved, and in consequence took the only reasonable att.i.tude, resignation. When famines came, G.o.d sent them; they were punishment for sin; his will be done! When wars came, they were the flails of G.o.d to thresh his people; his will be done! Men were resigned to slavery on the ground that G.o.d had made men to be masters and slaves.
They were resigned to feudalism and absolute monarchy on the ground that G.o.d had made men to be rulers and ruled. Whatever was had been ordained by the Divine or had been allowed by him in punishment for man's iniquity. To rebel was sin; to doubt was heresy; to submit was piety.
The Hebrew prophets had not been resigned, nor Jesus Christ, nor Paul.
The whole New Testament blazes with the hope of the kingdom of righteousness coming upon earth. But the medieval age was resigned. Its real expectations were post-mortem hopes. So far as this earth was concerned, men must submit.
To be sure, in those inner experiences where we must endure what we cannot help, resignation will always characterize a deeply religious life. All life is not under our control, to be freely mastered by our thought and toil. There are areas where scientific knowledge gives us power to do amazing things, but all around them are other areas which our hands cannot regulate. Orion and the Pleiades were not made for our fingers to swing, and our engineering does not change sunrise or sunset nor make the planets one whit less or more. So, in the experiences of our inward life, around the realm which we can control is that other realm where move the mysterious providences of G.o.d, beyond our power to understand and as uncontrollable by us as the tides are by the fish that live in them. Captain Scott found the South Pole, only to discover that another man had been there first. When, on his return from the disappointing quest, the pitiless cold, the endless blizzards, the failing food, had worn down the strength of the little company and in their tent amid the boundless desolation they waited for the end while the life flames burned low, Captain Scott wrote: ”I do not regret this journey. . . . We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last.” [1]
That is resignation at its n.o.blest.
When, however, a modern Christian tries to do what the medieval Christians did--make this att.i.tude of resignation cover the whole field of life, make it the dominant element in their religion, the proof of their trust and the test of their piety--he finds himself separated from the most characteristic and stirring elements in his generation. We are not resigned anywhere else. Everywhere else we count it our pride and glory to be unresigned. We are not resigned even to a th.o.r.n.y cactus, whose spiky exterior seems a convincing argument against its use for food. When we see a barren plain we do not say as our fathers did: G.o.d made plains so in his inscrutable wisdom; his will be done! We call for irrigation and, when the fructifying waters flow, we say, Thy will be done! in the way we think G.o.d wishes to have it said. We do not pa.s.sively submit to G.o.d's will; we actively a.s.sert it. The scientific control of life at this point has deeply changed our religious mood. We are not resigned to pestilences and already have plans drawn up to make the yellow fever germ ”as extinct as the woolly rhinoceros.” We are not even resigned to the absence of wireless telephony when once we have imagined its presence, or to the inconvenience of slow methods of travel when once we have invented swift ones. Not to illiteracy nor to child labour nor to the white plague nor to commercialized vice nor to recurrent unemployment are we, at our best, resigned.
This change of mood did not come easily. So strongly did the medieval spirit of resignation, submissive in a static world, keep its grip upon the Church that the Church often defiantly withstood the growth of this unresigned att.i.tude of which we have been speaking and in which we glory.
Lightning rods were vehemently denounced by many ministers as an unwarranted interference with G.o.d's use of lightning. When G.o.d hit a house he meant to hit it; his will be done! This att.i.tude, thus absurdly applied, had in more important realms a lamentable consequence. The campaign of Christian missions to foreign lands was bitterly fought in wide areas of the Christian Church because if G.o.d intended to d.a.m.n the heathen he should be allowed to do so without interference from us; his will be done! As for slavery, the last defense which it had in this country was on religious grounds: that G.o.d had ordained it and that it was blasphemous to oppose his ordination. In a word, this spirit of pa.s.sive resignation has been so deeply ingrained in religious thinking that it has become oftentimes a serious reproach to Christian people.
Now, however, the mood of modern Christianity is decisively in contrast with that medieval spirit. Moreover, we think that we are close to the Master in this att.i.tude, for whatever difference in outward form of expectation there may be between his day and ours, when he said: ”Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth,” that was not pa.s.sive submission to G.o.d's will but an aggressive prayer for the victory of G.o.d and righteousness; it was not lying down under the will of G.o.d as something to be endured, but active loyalty to the will of G.o.d as something to be achieved. To be resigned to evil conditions on this earth is in our eyes close to essential sin. If any one who calls himself a conservative Christian doubts his share in this anti-medieval spirit, let him test himself and see. In 1836 the Rev. Leonard Wood, D.
D., wrote down this interesting statement: ”I remember when I could reckon up among my acquaintances forty ministers, and none of them at a great distance, who were either drunkards or far addicted to drinking. I could mention an ordination which took place about twenty years ago at which I myself was ashamed and grieved to see two aged ministers literally drunk, and a third indecently excited.” [2] Our forefathers were resigned to that, but we are not. The most conservative of us so hates the colossal abomination of the liquor traffic, that we do not propose to cease our fight until victory has been won. We are belligerently unresigned. Or when militarism proves itself an intolerable curse, we do not count it a divine punishment and prepare ourselves to make the best of its continuance. We propose to end it.
Militarism, which in days of peace cries, Build me vast armaments, spend enough upon a single dreadnaught to remake the educational system of a whole state; militarism, which in the days of war cries, Give me your best youth to slay, leave the crippled and defective to propagate the race, give me your best to slay; militarism, which lays its avaricious hand on every new invention to make gregarious death more swift and terrible, and when war is over makes the starved bodies of innumerable children walk in its train for pageantry,--we are not resigned to that.
We count it our Christian duty to be tirelessly unresigned.
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