The New Christianity Part 3

"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 G.o.d. 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 leaders.h.i.+p 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 doc.u.ments 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 inst.i.tutions and dogmas by which that devotion is expressed and seeks to act upon the world, are the most variable.

Inst.i.tutional 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 pa.s.sed 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 d.y.k.es 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 inst.i.tution 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 a.s.serted 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 a.s.sailed 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 overlords.h.i.+p over other lords. Eventually the deep and irrepressible instinct for unity and order lifted one of these families to the kings.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.s 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 extinguis.h.i.+ng 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 inst.i.tution 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 s.h.i.+p 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 t.i.tle 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 ill.u.s.trious 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 surpa.s.sed 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 G.o.d. Such fas.h.i.+oning 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 a.s.serted its moral and intellectual superiority. It overawed the men who, with the pa.s.sions 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 G.o.d 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 ma.s.ses. 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 cla.s.ses. As soon as the feudal n.o.bility 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 a.s.serted 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 a.s.sert their sovereignty over the anarchic barons, allied themselves with this new burgher cla.s.s, 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 a.s.sociations 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 cla.s.ses 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 t.i.tles 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 const.i.tutionally 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 cla.s.s (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 cla.s.s 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-a.s.serting, 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 munic.i.p.al taxation, and episcopal jurisdiction over otherwise free towns added to the general irritation.