The New Christianity Part 1

THE NEW CHRISTIANITY.

by Salem Goldworth Bland.

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 pa.s.sed 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 mult.i.tudes 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 a.s.sisted me in reading the proofs.

SALEM GOLDWORTH BLAND.

Toronto, _March_, 1920.

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 a.s.sume. 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 G.o.d 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 a.n.a.lysis especially pressing. In no Western country, probably, has there been less experience of internal turmoil, less antic.i.p.ation of it, or less preparedness against it. The att.i.tude of Canada to life hitherto might almost be described as the att.i.tude 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.

G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 a.n.a.lyze the situation, that it has even more of hope in it than menace.

The aim of the following discussion is, as the t.i.tle 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 a.n.a.lysis, 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 hara.s.sed 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 n.o.bler 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 a.s.serted 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 pa.s.sion 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 s.h.i.+re, and finally of the burghers of the towns--separate a.s.semblies which soon coalesced and by their unification formed the English Parliament. English const.i.tutional 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 partic.i.p.ation in the government--

In 1832, the propertied cla.s.ses 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 const.i.tutionally 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sed for all temporary and makes.h.i.+ft 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, members.h.i.+p 800,000; National Union of Railway-men, members.h.i.+p 400,000; and the National Transport Workers' Federation, members.h.i.+p 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.