Some Christian Convictions Part 6

The life of Jesus is the irrefutable argument that the Lord's song may be sung in a strange land. It is always possible to be a Christian under the most unfavorable conditions, provided the Christian does not s.h.i.+rk the inevitable cross. But the social order under which men live shapes their characters. Ibsen calls it "the moral water supply," and religion is intensely interested in the reservoirs whence men draw their ideals.

A glance over a few typical forms of social order will ill.u.s.trate its influence on character:

Perhaps the n.o.blest society of antiquity was the Greek city state. It expected its citizens to be all of them warriors, statesmen, legislators, judges. It set a premium upon the virtues of courage, self-control, justice and public spirit. It delivered its citizens from that "greasy domesticity" which Byron loathed in the typical Englishman of the Georgian epoch, and made them civic minded. But its ideal was within the attainment of but a fraction of the population. The slaves had no incentive to these virtues; and it is estimated that in Athens in the Fourth Century B.C. there were 400,000 slaves and 100,000 citizens.

The many did the hard work, debarred from the highest inspirations, in order that the privileged few might have freedom to achieve their lofty ideals. And outside the state, or the Greek world, the rest of mankind were cla.s.sed as "barbarians," to whom no Greek ever thought of carrying his ideals.

Nominally Christian Europe in the Middle Ages presented in the Feudal System a different type of society. A vast hierarchy in Church and State, with the pope and emperor at the top, ran down through many gradations to the serf at the bottom. It was an improvement on the little Greek state in that it embraced many more in a single order and bound them together with common faith and standards. It prized not the civic virtues, but the militarist qualities of loyalty, obedience, honor, chivalry. Its typical hero is the Chevalier Bayard, the good knight without fear and without reproach. But a career like his is manifestly possible only to a few. The agricultural laborer chained to the soil, and the trader--often the despised Jew confined to the Ghetto--had no part in the life of chivalry. Outside of Christendom the Saracen was to be converted or slain, and he was far oftener slain than converted.

Under the revival of cla.s.sical ideals at the Renaissance, in the new emphasis upon individual rights born of the Reformation, in the rebellion of the Puritan English and Scotch against the divine right of kings and bishops to rule them against their conscience and will, in the Revolution of 1789 and the Napoleonic wars, the Feudal System pa.s.sed, and the commercial order took its place. Its cherished virtues are initiative, industry, push, thrift, independence. As its _beau ideal_ it subst.i.tutes for the Chevalier Bayard the successful business man. It sincerely tries to open its privileges to everyone; and under favorable circ.u.mstances, in Revolutionary America for instance, its ideals were accessible to practically every white inhabitant. The Comte de Segur, one of the young French officers who came to take part in our War of Independence, wrote: "An observer fresh from our magnificent cities, and the airs of our young men of fas.h.i.+on--who has compared the luxury of our upper cla.s.ses with the coa.r.s.e dress of our peasants and the rags of our innumerable poor,--is surprised on reaching the United States, by the entire absence of the extremes both of opulence and of misery. All Americans whom we met wore clothes of good material. Their free and frank and familiar address, equally removed from uncouth discourtesy and from artificial politeness, betokened men who were proud of their own rights and respected those of others." But under other conditions its ethical incentives are often without appeal to the man who lacks capital, or to the man with so large an a.s.sured income that he desires no more. It can do little for the dregs or the froth of society--those so oppressed that they cannot rise to its social responsibilities, and those so lightened that they do not feel them. It looks upon the so-called backward peoples as markets where it can secure raw materials needed for its factories--its rubber, ivory, jute,--or engage cheap labor, and as a profitable dumping-ground for its surplus products. It has done much for the less developed sections of the race by its missionaries, educators and physicians; but all their efforts have been almost offset by the evils of exploiting traders or grasping government agents, and the exported vices of civilization.

Christianity has a social order of its own--the Kingdom of G.o.d. It is not an economic system, nor a plan of government, but a religious ideal--society organized under the love of G.o.d revealed in Christ. This ideal it holds up in contrast with the existing social order in any age as a protest, a program and a promise.

The Kingdom _protests_ against any features in prevailing conditions that do not disclose Christlike love. It scans the industrial world of today, and finds three fundamental evils in it: compet.i.tion as a motive, arraying man against man, group against group, nation against nation, in unbrotherly strife; gain-seeking as the stimulus to effort, inducing men to invest capital, or to labor, primarily for the sake of the returns to themselves; and selfish owners.h.i.+p as the reward of success, letting men feel that they can do as they please with their own. Certain callings, upon which the Christian Spirit has exerted a stronger influence, have already been raised above the level of the commercial world. It is not good form professionally for physicians, or ministers, or college professors to compete with each other and seek to draw away patients, paris.h.i.+oners or pupils; to exercise their callings mainly for the sake of financial gains; nor to regard as their own their skill, or inspiration, or learning. But as yet the butcher, the baker, the grocer, the banker, the manufacturer, the promoter, are not supposed to be on this plane. They are urged to compete, even to the extent of putting their rivals out of business, in defiance of an old Jewish maxim, "He that taketh away his neighbor's living slayeth him," and in face of the Lord's Prayer in which we ask not for "my daily cake," but for "_our_ daily bread." They are expected to consider profits, dividends, wages, as the chief end in their callings; and if out of their gains they devote a portion to public uses, that is charity on their part. A few individuals are undoubtedly superior to the ideal set before them, and are as truly dedicated servants of the community as any physician or minister of the gospel, but they are a small minority; and the false ideal ruins characters, and renders the commercial world a battlefield, instead of a household of co-working children of G.o.d.

It scans international relations, and finds patriotism still a pagan virtue. Mr. Lecky calls it "in relation to foreigners a spirit of constant and jealous self-a.s.sertion." When a tariff is under discussion, high, low or no duties are advocated as beneficial for the industries of one's own country, regardless of the welfare of those of other lands.

The scramble for colonies with their advantages to trade, the imperialistic spirit that seizes possessions without respect to the wishes of their inhabitants, the endeavor to secure in other countries special concessions or large business orders at an extraordinary profit, are all sanctified under the name of patriotism. The peace of the world is supposed to be maintained by keeping nations armed to the teeth, so that rival powers will be afraid to fight, and huge armies and navies are labelled insurance against war. A sentence in a letter of Erasmus has a singularly modern sound: "There is a project to have a congress of kings at Cambrai, to enter into mutual engagements to preserve peace with each other and through Europe. But certain persons, who get nothing by peace and a great deal by war, throw obstacles in the way."

The armament argument for peace has been given its _reductio ad absurdum;_ but it is by no means clear that the world-wide war will free the nations from the burdensome folly of keeping enormous armies and navies. As Christians we must protest without ceasing that international relations, based on mutual fear and maintained by the use of brute force, can never furnish the peace of Christ.

It scans the system of justice in its treatment of the wrong-doer, and declares that the crude attempt to fit the punishment to the crime, and to protect society by deterrent penalties, is not the justice of Him who is "faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." Divine justice is redemptive; and society, if it wishes to be Christian, must pay the heavy cost of making all its contacts with the imperfect transforming.

It scans the educational inst.i.tutions of our land, and sees many students viewing learning only with reference to its immediate commercial availability, spurning all studies as "unpractical" which do not supply knowledge that can be coined into financial returns; and it sees many others without intellectual interest, prizing schools and colleges merely for their social pleasures, lazily choosing courses which require a minimum of labor, and disesteeming the great opportunities of culture and enrichment provided by the sacrificial studies and labors of the past. It insists that a moral revival is needed for an intellectual renaissance. All students must be baptized with a pa.s.sion for social service, before studies that enrich the mind and enlarge the character will be pursued with eager devotion. The blight of irresponsibility is almost universal upon the students in the higher educational inst.i.tutions of our country.

So the Christian social order contrasts itself with every phase and aspect of our present life, and exposes the impoveris.h.i.+ng absence of the Spirit of G.o.d. Its protest is reinforced by widespread social restlessness and the feeling that the existing state of things has gone into moral bankruptcy.

But the Kingdom of G.o.d is no mere protest; it is a _program_ of social redemption. Some thinkers flatly deny that Christianity can provide a constructive plan for society. Mr. Lowes d.i.c.kinson makes his imaginary Chinese official write of the social teachings of Jesus: "Enunciated centuries ago, by a mild Oriental enthusiast, unlettered, untravelled, inexperienced, they are remarkable not more for their tender and touching appeal to brotherly love, than for their aversion or indifference to all other elements of human excellence. The subject of Augustus and Tiberius lived and died unaware of the history and destinies of imperial Rome; the contemporary of Virgil and of Livy could not read the language in which they wrote. Provincial by birth, mechanic by trade, by temperament a poet and a mystic, he enjoyed in the course of his brief life few opportunities, and he evinced little inclination, to become acquainted with the rudiments of the science whose end is the prosperity of the state. The production and distribution of wealth, the disposition of power, the laws that regulate labor, property, trade, these were matters as remote from his interests, as they were beyond his comprehension. Never was man better equipped to inspire a religious sect; never one worse to found and direct a commonwealth."

Jesus' teaching concerning the Kingdom of G.o.d is contained in a handful of parables and picturesque sayings. It attempts no detailed account of a Utopia; it lays down no laws; it offers the world a spirit, which in every age must find a body of its own. But this indefiniteness does not fit it the less, but the better, as the inspiration to social reconstruction. It affords scope for variety and endless progress. It can take up the social ideals of other ages and of other civilizations, and incorporate whatever in them is congruous with the Christian social order. The ideals of Greece and Medieval Europe and of our present commercialism, and the ideals of China, India and j.a.pan, are not to be thrown aside as rubbish, but reshaped and "fulfilled" by Christlike love. It does not stultify human development by establis.h.i.+ng a rigid system; but entrusts to thoughtful and conscientious children of G.o.d the duty of constantly readjusting social relations, so that they are adequate expressions of their Father's Spirit. In every age Christians are compelled not only to voice their protest against the existing order, but to point out precisely what the Spirit of Christ demands, and try practically to embody it. The fact that our directions are not explicit is proof that G.o.d deals with us not as little children but as sons and daughters, not as servants but as friends. We have to think out for ourselves the economic system, the policies of government, the disciplinary methods, the educational ideals, that will incarnate the Spirit of our Father. The all-sufficient answer to the charge of the inadequacy of Jesus as a guide to social welfare is the fact, that only in so far as we are able to express His mind in our social relations, do they satisfy us. The advances made in our generation are conspicuous instances of progress not away from, but up to Him. The crash of our present commercial order in industrial strife, now scarcely heard in the greater confusion of a world at war, gives us the chance to come forward with the principles of Jesus, and ask that they be given a trial in business enterprises that are based on cooperation, the joy of service as the incentive to toil, responsible trustees.h.i.+p of that which each controls for the benefit of all the rest; in international relations where every nation comes not to be ministered unto but to minister, and loves its neighbors as itself--to ask that we seriously try the social order of love. John Bright, unveiling the statue to Cobden in the Bradford Exchange, said, "We tried to put Holy Writ into an act of Parliament." We want the mind of Christ put into commerce, laws, pleasures and the whole of human life.

And we come forward with confidence, because the Kingdom we advocate is not merely a protest and a program, but also a divine _promise_. The ideal of the Kingdom of heaven to which our consciences respond is for us a religious inspiration, and has behind it a faithful G.o.d who would not deceitfully lure us to follow an illusive phantom. "According to His promise we look for new heavens and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness." The city of our hope has not been designed by us, but has been already thought out in G.o.d's mind and comes down out of heaven.

In our attack upon existing injustices and follies we raise again the believing watchword of the Crusaders, "_Deus vult_" In our attempt to rear the order of love, which cynics p.r.o.nounce unpractical, we fortify ourselves in the a.s.surance that it is G.o.d's plan for His world, and that we shall discover a preestablished harmony between the Kingdom of heaven and the earth which we with Him must conform to it. We encourage ourselves by recalling that, in the hearts of men everywhere and in the very fabric and structure of things, we have countless confederates.

On one of Motley's most glowing pages, we are told how, after the frightful siege and fall of Haarlem, and with Alkmaar closely invested by the Duke of Alva, when the cause of the Netherlands seemed in direst straits, Diedrich Sonoy, the lieutenant governor of North Holland, wrote the Prince of Orange, inquiring whether he had arranged some foreign alliance, and received the reply: "You ask if I have entered into a firm treaty with any great king or potentate; to which I answer, that before I ever took up the cause of the oppressed Christians in these provinces, I had entered into a close alliance with the King of kings; and I am firmly convinced that all who put their trust in Him shall be saved by His almighty hand. The G.o.d of armies will raise up armies for us to do battle with our enemies and His own." And the opening of the d.y.k.es brought the very sea itself to the a.s.sistance of the brave contestants for truth and liberty.

The prayer on our lips, "Thy Kingdom come," we believe to be of G.o.d's own inspiring. The social order which we seek is His eternal purpose; and it has sworn confederates in sun and moon and stars of light, and in every human heart. We wait patiently and we work confidently, in the a.s.surance that the G.o.d and Father of Jesus Christ, the Lord of heaven and earth, will not fail nor be discouraged, until He has set His loving justice in the earth, and His will is done among all the children of men, as it was once done by His well-beloved Son.

CHAPTER VII

THE CHURCH

No man's spiritual life starts with himself; there is no Melchizedek soul--without father or mother. As our bodies are born of the bodies of others, as our minds are formed from the mental heritage of the race, our faith is the offspring of the faith of others; and we owe a filial debt to the Christian society from which we derive our life with G.o.d.

Nor is any man's spiritual experience self-sustaining. Our mental vitality diminishes if we do not keep in touch with thinking people; and brilliant men often lose their l.u.s.tre for want of intellectual companions.h.i.+p. "Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend." A Christian's religious experience requires fellows.h.i.+p for its enrichment, and no large soul was ever grown or maintained in isolation. We are enlarged by sharing the wealthier spiritual life of the whole believing community.

Nor can a religious man contribute his spiritual endowment to the world without joining with kindred souls in an organized effort. Edward Rowland Sill, speaking of his spiritual isolation, wrote to a friend: "For my part I long to 'fall in' with somebody. This picket duty is monotonous. I hanker after a shoulder on this side and the other." The intellectual life of the community organizes itself in schools and colleges, in newspapers and publis.h.i.+ng-houses and campaigns of lectures.

A learned man may do something by himself for his children or his friends; but he can do incomparably more for a larger public if he is a.s.sociated with other learned men in a faculty, a.s.sisted by the publications of the press, and receives pupils already prepared by other teachers to appreciate his particular contribution. An earnest believer can accomplish something by himself for the immediate circle of lives about him; but he is immeasurably more influential when he invests his inspired personality in the Church, where he finds his efforts for the Kingdom supplemented by the work of countless fellow toilers, where the missionary enterprise bears the impetus of his consecration to thousands he can never see face to face, and where a lasting inst.i.tution carries on his life-work and conserves its results long after he has pa.s.sed from earth.

The Christian is dependent upon the Church for his birth, his growth, his usefulness; and this Christian community, or Church, like the intellectual community, instinctively organizes itself to spread its life. There is an unorganized Church, in the sense of the spiritual community, which shares the life of Christ with G.o.d and man, as there is an unorganized intellectual community of more or less educated persons who possess the mental acquisitions of the race. But this intellectual community would lose its vitality without its educational agencies; and the spiritual community would all but die were it not for its inst.i.tutions. The spiritual community is the Church; it is organized in the churches.

As Christians we look back to discover Jesus' conception of the Church.

We find it implicit in His life rather than explicit in His teaching. He was born into the Jewish Church which in His day was organized with its Temple and priesthood at Jerusalem, with its Sanhedrin settling its law and doctrine, with its synagogues with their wors.h.i.+p and instruction in every town and a ministry of trained scribes, and with a wider missionary undertaking that was spreading the Jewish faith through the Roman world. It was a community with its sectarian divisions of Sadducees, Pharisees and the like, but unified by a common devotion to the one G.o.d of Israel and His law. Jesus' personal faith was born of this Church, grew and kept vigorous by continuous contact with it, and sought to work through its organization, for He taught in the synagogues and the Temple.

Jesus does not seem to have been primarily interested either in the const.i.tution, or the wors.h.i.+p, or the doctrine of the Jewish Church. He criticised the spirit of its leaders, but did not discuss their official positions. He must have felt that much of the Temple ritual was obsolete, and that many parts of the synagogue services were crude and dull, but He entered into their wors.h.i.+p that He might share with fellow believers His expression of trust in His and their G.o.d. He did not invent a new theology, but used the old terms to voice His fuller life with G.o.d. He was primarily interested in the religious experience that lay back of government, wors.h.i.+p and creed; and gave Himself to develop it, apparently trusting a vigorous life with G.o.d to find forms of its own. So He never broke formally with the Jewish Church; and even after it had crucified their Master, His disciples are found wors.h.i.+pping in its Temple, keeping its festivals, and observing its law.

But within this Church Jesus had gathered a group about Himself, to whom He imparted His faith and purpose, and into whom He breathed His Spirit.

He taught them to think of themselves as salt and light to season and illumine the community about them. As leaders, He bade them become like Himself servants of all. One was their Master, they all were brethren.

Soon they developed a corporate feeling that separated them from their fellow Jews, a corporate feeling Jesus had to rebuke because of its exclusiveness: "Master, we saw one casting out demons in Thy name; and we forbade him because he followed not us. But Jesus said, Forbid him not, for he that is not against us is for us." On the eve of His death He kept a Supper with them, which pictured to them His sustaining fellows.h.i.+p with them and their comrades.h.i.+p with one another in Him. And He left them with the consciousness that they were to carry forward His work, were possessed of His inspiring Spirit and had His presence with them always. Not by Jesus' prescribed plans, but by His spiritual prompting the Church came to be. "Like some tall palm the noiseless fabric sprang."

It was not, then, organization, or ritual, or creed, that made the Christian Church, but oneness of purpose with Christ. In the picture of its earliest days we see it maintaining Jesus' intercourse with G.o.d by prayer; continuing to learn of Him through those who had been closest to Him; breaking the bread of fellows.h.i.+p with Him and one another; expressing that fellows.h.i.+p in a mutually helpful community life; and all of its members trying to bear witness to others of the supreme worth of Jesus. We get at what they think of themselves by the names they use: they are "disciples," pupils of the Divine Teacher; "believers,"

trusting His G.o.d; "brethren," embodying His spirit toward each other; "saints," men and women set apart to the one purpose of forwarding the Kingdom; "of the Way," with a distinctive mode of life in the unseen and the seen, following Jesus, _the_ Way. They called themselves the Ecclesia--the called out for G.o.d's service; the Household of Faith--insiders in G.o.d's family, sharers of His plans; the Temple of G.o.d--those in whose life with each other and the world G.o.d's Spirit can be seen and felt; the Body of Christ--the organism alive with His faith and hope and love, through which He still works in the earth; the Israel of G.o.d, the holy nation continuing the spiritual life and mission of G.o.d's people of old--no new Church but the reformed and reborn Church of G.o.d.

The main point for them was that in this new community the Spirit of G.o.d was alive and at work, producing in its members Christlike characters and equipping them for Christlike usefulness. A body without life is a corpse; and the Church fairly throbbed with vitality. It naturally organized itself for work, but in organizing it was not conscious of conforming to some fixed plan already laid down, but of allowing the Spirit freely to lead from day to day. Christians found among themselves specially gifted men--apostles (of whom there were many beside the Twelve), with talents for leaders.h.i.+p and missionary enterprise--prophets, teachers; and they instinctively held these men highly in love for their works' sake. One thinks of a figure like Paul, who claimed no human appointment or ordination, but whose divine authority was recognized by those who owed their spiritual lives to him.

And beside this informal leaders.h.i.+p of gifted individuals, a more formal chosen leaders.h.i.+p came into existence. G.o.d's Spirit used the materials at hand; and Christians in various parts of the Roman world had been accustomed to different types of organization in their respective localities, and these types suggested similar offices in the Church.

Some had been accustomed to the town government of a Palestinian village by seven village elders; and this may have suggested "the Seven" chosen in Jerusalem to care for the poor. Some were brought up with the Oriental idea of succession through the next oldest brother, and this may account for the position of eminence held by James, "the brother of the Lord." Some in Gentile cities had been members of artisan societies, guilds with benefits in case of sickness or death, not unlike lodges among ourselves; and many hints, and perhaps offices (the overseer or bishop, for instance) were taken from them. Some had been familiar with the Roman relations.h.i.+p of patron and client, and when the little groups of converts were gathered together in a wealthier Christian's house, he would be given something of the position of the Roman _patronus_. Still others had been trained in the synagogue, either as Jews or as proselytes, and would naturally follow its organization in their Christian synagogues. There seems to have been variety of form, and along with this variety a felt and expressed unity, with freest intercommunion and hearty cooperation for the evangelization of the world. Throughout there was democracy, so that even a leader so conscious of divine authority as Paul appeals to the rank and file, "I speak as to wise men; judge ye what I say."

In wors.h.i.+p, the Church from its early days had the two fixed rites of Baptism and the Lord's Supper; but beside them were most informal meetings for mutual inspiration. "What is it then, brethren: When ye come together, each one hath a psalm, hath a teaching, hath a revelation, hath a tongue, hath an interpretation. Let all things be done unto edifying." Here was room for variety to suit the needs of many temperaments.

And in doctrine there is a similar freedom. One can see in all the Christian speakers and writers in the New Testament an underlying unity in great convictions:--the G.o.d and Father of Jesus Christ is their one G.o.d; Jesus is their one Lord; they are possessed and controlled by the one Spirit of love; they are confident in a victorious hope; they draw inspiration from the historic facts of Jesus' birth, life, death and resurrection. But they interpret their inspirations in forms that fit in with their mental habits. The fisherman Peter does not think with the mind of the theologically trained Paul, nor does the unspeculative James phrase his beliefs in terms identical with those of the writer to the Hebrews.

Jesus left His Spirit in a group of men; that group gradually was forced out of the national Jewish Church, and became the Church of Christ, dominated by His living Spirit and organizing itself for work, wors.h.i.+p and teaching, out of the materials at hand among the peoples where it spread.

We have taken this brief retrospect over the origin of the Church not because it is important for us to discover the precise forms the Church took at the start and reproduce them. It is nowhere hinted in the New Testament that the leaders of these little communities are laying down methods to be followed for all time. Indeed, they had no such thought, for they expected Jesus to return in their lifetime and set up His Kingdom; and they gave scant attention to forms of organization and doctrine that would last but a few years. Nor is it reasonable to suppose that forms which were suited to little groups of people meeting in somebody's house, waiting for their Lord's return, will answer for great bodies of Christians organizing themselves to Christianize the world. No inst.i.tution can remain changeless in a changing world. "The one immutable factor in inst.i.tutions," writes Professor Pollard, "is their infinite mutability." Almost all the divisive factors in Christendom are taken out of the past, by those who claim that a certain polity or creed or practice is that authoritatively prescribed for all time, by Christ Himself, or by His Spirit through His personally appointed apostles. The chief question for the Church to decide, when it considers its organization, is--What must we carry on from the past, and what can we profitably leave behind?

The Church of Christ has always been and is one undivided living organism, composed of those who are so vitally joined to Jesus Christ that they share His life with G.o.d and men. Our bodies are continually changing in their const.i.tuent elements, but remain the same bodies; the spirit of life a.s.similates and builds into its living structure that which enters the body. The Church of Christ in the world is constantly changing its components as the generations come and go; each new generation is in some respects unlike its predecessor in thought, in usage, in feeling; but the continuity of the Spirit maintains the ident.i.ty of the Body of Christ. We must carry forward the Spirit of Christ, and keep unbroken the apostolic succession of spiritual men and women, all of whom are divinely appointed priests unto G.o.d. We must realize that, as members in the Body of Christ, each of us must fulfil some function for the Kingdom, or we are not living members, but paralyzed or atrophied. There is a continuity of life in the Church that cannot be interrupted; we must inherit this life from the past, and we must pa.s.s it on to those who come after us. Just as the first Christians felt themselves the Israel of G.o.d, so today we are conscious of being the heirs of patriarchs and prophets, apostles and martyrs, churchmen and scholars and missionaries, leaders of spiritual awakenings like Francis of a.s.sisi, Luther and Wesley, theologians like Clement, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards, and of countless humble and devoted believers who have been ruled by the Spirit of the Master. They have bequeathed to us a solemn trust; they have enriched us with a priceless heritage; they have transmitted to us their life with Christ in G.o.d. The Church comes to us saying:

I am like a stream that flows, Full of the cold springs that arose In morning lands, in distant hills; And down the plain my channel fills, With melting of forgotten snows.

But the historic succession of Christians through the centuries is not our sole connection with Christ; we not only look _back_ to Him, we also look _up_ and look _in_ to Him, for He lives above and in us. The Church is not a widow, but a bride; and shares its Lord's life in the world today. The same Spirit who lived and ruled in the Church of the first days has been breathed on us, through the long line of apostolic-spirited men and women who reach back to Jesus, and lives and rules in us. We must keep the unity of the Spirit with the believers of the past, and with all who are Spirit-led in the world today; and we must remember that "where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."

We are not bound by the precedents of bygone centuries in our organization; we are free to take from the past what is of worth to us, and we are free to let the rest go. Is not the Spirit of G.o.d as able to take materials at hand in our own age, and to use them for the government, the wors.h.i.+p, the creed, the methods of the living Church of Christ?

We cannot, of course, be content with an unrealized unity of the Church.

Every little group of Christians, in the first age, felt itself the embodiment in its locality of the whole Church, and it was at one in effort with followers of Jesus everywhere. It exercised hospitality towards every Christian who came within its neighborhood, welcoming him to its fellows.h.i.+p and expecting him to use his gifts in its communion.

We want the whole Body of Christ organized, so that it is vividly conscious of its unity, so that it does not waste its energy in maintaining needlessly separate churches, so that followers of Christ feel themselves welcome at every Table of the Lord, and every gifted leader, accredited in any part of the Church, is accepted as accredited in every other where he can be profitably used. The practical problem in Church reorganization is identical with that which confronts society in politics and in industry--how to secure efficient administration while safeguarding liberty, how to combine the solidarity of the group with the full expression of its members' individualities. To be effective the Church must work as a compactly ordered whole. Individuals must surrender personal preferences in order that the Church may have collective force. Teamwork often demands the suppression of individuality. There will have to be sufficient authority lodged in those who exercise oversight to enable them to lead the Christian forces and administer their resources. But we dare not curtail the freedom of conscience, or impede liberty of prophesying, or turn flexibility of organization into rigidity, lest we hamper the Spirit, who divideth to every man severally even as He will. We do not want "metallic beliefs and regimental devotions," but the personal convictions of thinking sons and daughters of the living G.o.d, the spontaneous and congenial fellows.h.i.+p of children with their Father in heaven, and methods sufficiently flexible to be adaptable to all needs. We look for an organization of the Church of Christ that shall exclude no one who shares His Spirit, and that shall provide an outlet for every gift the Spirit bestows, that shall bind all followers of Christ together in effort for the one purpose--the Kingdom of G.o.d--enabling them to feel their corporate oneness, and that shall give them liberty to think, to wors.h.i.+p, to labor, as they are led by the Spirit of G.o.d.

Meanwhile there are some immediate personal obligations which rest upon us. We cannot be factors in the organized Church of Christ, save as we are members of one of the existing churches. A Christian should enroll himself either in that communion in which he was born and to which he owes his spiritual vitality, or else in that with which he finds he can work most helpfully. A Christian who is not a Church member is like a citizen who is not a voter--he is s.h.i.+rking his responsibility.

We must free our minds from prejudice against those whose ways of stating their beliefs, whose modes of wors.h.i.+p, whose methods of working, differ from our own. We are not to argue with them which of us is nearer the customs of the New Testament; that is not to the point. Wherever we see the Spirit of Christ, there we are to recognize fellow churchmen in the one Church of G.o.d. We do not wish uniformity, but variety in unity; for only a Church with a most varied ministry can bring the life of G.o.d to the endlessly diverse temperaments of men and women. We are not seeking for the maximum common denominator, and insisting that every communion shall give up all its distinctive doctrines, ritual, customs and activities. We do not want any communion to be "unclothed," but "clothed upon," that what is partial may be swallowed up of fuller life.

Dogmatists, be they radicals or conservatives, who insist on a particular interpretation of Christianity, ecclesiastics who arrogantly consider their "orders" superior to those of other servants of Christ as spiritually gifted and as publicly accredited, sectarians so satisfied with the life of their particular segment of the Church that they do not covet a wider enriching fellows.h.i.+p, and churchmen whose conception of the task of the Church is so petty that they fail to feel the imperative necessity of articulating all its forces in one harmoniously functioning organization, are the chief postponers of the effective unity of the Body of Christ.

We have to consider the particular communion to which we ourselves belong, and ask whether there are any barriers in it that exclude from its members.h.i.+p or from its working force those who possess the Spirit of Christ, and so are divinely called into the Church and divinely endowed for service. We must make our own communion as inclusive as we believe the Church to be, or we are not attempting to organize the Church of Christ, but to create some exclusive club or sect of Christians of a particular variety.

We must study sympathetically the ways of other communions, and be prepared to borrow freely from them whatever approves itself as inspiring to Christian character and work. A Presbyterian will often refuse to avail himself of the great historic prayers, simply because he thinks he would be copying Lutherans or Episcopalians, forgetting that he is heir of the whole inheritance of the Church, and that his own direct ecclesiastical forbears freely used a liturgy, and even composed some of the most beautiful parts of the Book of Common Prayer; and an Episcopalian will not cultivate the gift of expressing himself in prayer in words of his own because this is the practice of other communions.

As every communion employs in its hymnal the compositions of men and women who in life were members of almost every branch of the Church of Christ, so each should as freely use methods of propaganda, or wors.h.i.+p, or education, that have been found valuable in any communion. The more freely we borrow from one another, the more highly we shall prize one another, and the more completely we share the same life, the more quickly will our corporate oneness be felt.

We must set our faces against allowing congregations to embrace but one social cla.s.s, or several easily combined social strata in the community.

In our American towns the Protestant communions are separated more by social caste than by religious conviction. People attend the church where they find "their kind." Poor people do not feel themselves at home, even spiritually, among the well-to-do, and the children of comfortable homes are not permitted to go to the same Sunday School with the children of the tenements. Cla.s.s lines are as apparent, and almost as divisive, in our churches as anywhere else. The Church of Christ under such circ.u.mstances ceases to be a unifying factor in society; its teaching of brotherhood becomes a mockery. In every community there will be found some entirely unchurched social group; and the churches themselves will be impoverished by the absence of the spiritual appreciations to be found most developed in persons of that stratum. Our denominational divisions tend to accentuate our social divisions. Church unity, lessening the number of congregations in a locality, would help to make the churches that remained more socially inclusive. Meanwhile the "one cla.s.s church," in any but the very rare h.o.m.ogeneous community, ought to realize that, whatever Christian service it may render, it is all the while doing the cause of Christ a great disservice, and is in need of a radical reorganization and an equally radical spiritual renewal into its Lord's wider sympathies.