The Church and Modern Life Part 3

Those who would destroy political society on account of its abuses are, therefore, guilty of the same foolishness as that of the man who burned his house to get rid of the rats. Doubtless the rats all escaped and were ready to enter, with reinforcements, into the new house as soon as it was builded.

The same reasoning applies to ecclesiastical anarchism. Those who, because of the defects of church organizations, would abolish the churches, are equally unpractical. For it is not only true, as we saw in our first chapter, that religion is a primal fact of human nature, it is equally true that religion everywhere has a social manifestation. The same impulse which moves men to worship, draws them together in their worship.

Any deep or strong emotion makes human beings congregate. Just as a flock of sheep huddle together when they are frightened, so men, when deeply moved for any cause, seek one another. As the impulse of religion is one of those by which men are most deeply moved, it always brings them together.

So long as religion keeps the form of fear it produces this result; when fear is succeeded by more grateful emotions, and men begin to have some sense of the goodness of the Power they have been blindly worshiping, then their gladness and grat.i.tude bring them together. Religion, therefore, in all lands and ages, has been a social interest; indeed, it has been the strongest of the bonds uniting human beings. To demand a religion which should have no social expression is to fly in the face of nature, and forbid causes to bring forth their normal effects. Wherever there is religion men will be a.s.sociated, and their worship and their work will be carried on under forms of social organization. Anarchism is no more thinkable or workable in religion than in politics.

If this is true of religion in general, it is eminently true of the Christian religion. The characteristic note of Christianity is its emphasis on the social relations. In this it simply exhibits what we may call its scientific temper, its tendency to keep close to the facts of life, to give the right interpretation to nature and to human nature.

A modern sociologist[13] tells us that "the sole point of view, aim and goal of Jesus, in all his teaching and by implication of all his acts, was social. The divine Father whom he proclaimed was social--a Being whose one attribute was love." When we say that "G.o.d is love," this is what we mean. He delights in Companionship, and finds his happiness in the relations which unite him with his creatures. Since his own supreme good is in these reciprocal affections and services, we cannot imagine that he could expect us to find our good in any different way. If we share our Father's nature, we must seek our happiness where he finds his. The blessedness of life must therefore be in our social relations.

Such is the teaching of Jesus. Such is the essence of Christianity.

While, therefore, every religion by its very nature tends to bring men together, Christianity lifts the social impulse into the light and sanctifies and transfigures it, making it not merely a concomitant of religion but the heart of religion. The effect of this revelation was seen in all the ministry of Jesus. Whereever he went the people flocked together. "Great mult.i.tudes followed him." Into the wildernesses, up to the mountain tops, across the stormy lake, they made their way; it was a day of great congregations. It was because they wanted to be with him, of course; but when they came to him they came together, and one of the things he sought for them was that they should like to be together. That was surely a lesson that they learned of him; for as soon as he had gone they began to gravitate together. Every day they met, sometimes in the temple courts, sometimes in their own homes, for praise and prayer; every evening they partook together, in little groups, of a simple meal, in memory of him. Their religion, from the start, manifested a marked social tendency. Indeed, we might give it a stronger word, and say that, in the beginning, it was socialistic; it seemed to threaten a complete reconstruction of the industrial order. For "all that believed were together, and had all things common; and they sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all, as every man had need."[14]

Just how far this communistic experiment was carried it is difficult to say, but it is evident that the disciples felt that their religion ought to permeate and control their entire social life. And there has never since been a day when the social side of religion has not been recognized and provided for. The very impulse which is kindled in their hearts when they are brought into a.s.sociation with Christ, brings men together. Communion, fellowship, these are the first words they learn.

It has been so from the beginning. One of the great Christians of the apostolic age admonished his converts against "forsaking the a.s.sembling of themselves together," and that admonition has always been heeded. No other religion has brought people together so constantly and in so many ways as Christianity has done. Christian people are always getting together, to pray together, to sing together, to partake together of the sacraments, to listen together to the teaching of the pulpit, to study the Bible together, to take counsel together about their work, to unite their efforts, in manifold cooperations, for the upbuilding of the Kingdom. They have even come to believe--and they are profoundly right about it--that it is a good thing for people to come together just for the sake of being together, even when no distinctly religious business a.s.sembles them. To establish and promote pleasant and amicable social relations between human beings is a Christian thing to do. It is a sign of the progress of the Kingdom, and a preparation for it, when men and women enjoy meeting one another for no other reason than that they like to be together. It is a condition of the manifestation of the love which is the fulfilling of all law. The stranger, as many languages testify, is apt to be the enemy. The chief reason why he is dreaded and hated is that he is not known. Acquaintance allays suspicion and promotes sympathy and kindness.

Not the least of the services which Christianity has rendered to the world may be seen in what it has accomplished in bringing human beings together socially. Setting aside its purely religious function, it has done, in Europe and America, more than all other agencies put together to promote acquaintances and neighborly relations among men. It has done, as we shall see by and by, far less than it ought to have done in this direction; its failures in this department of its work have been manifold and grievous; but after all this is admitted, it must still be affirmed that it has done most of what has been done to socialize mankind, and no other inst.i.tution or agency is ent.i.tled to throw stones at it because of its deficiencies.

When, therefore, those who read these chapters hear the criticisms and cavils to which I referred at the beginning, they will know how to reply to them.

When they hear an argument which a.s.sumes that the church is worse than useless because all social inst.i.tutions are worse than useless, they may answer that the reasoning is unsound, because it repudiates the deepest facts of human nature; that social inst.i.tutions, the church among them, are natural growths as truly as the cornfields and the forests.

When they hear any one maintaining that he believes in the principles of Christianity but not in the social organizations which embody these principles, they may well reply that the principles of Christianity naturally and inevitably embody themselves in forms of social organization; that you could no more prevent it than you could prevent light from breaking into color or spring from coming in May; that, as a matter of history, the growth of Christianity has been signalized by a marvelous development of the social sentiments and habitudes which must find expression in some kind of social cooperation; and that, as a matter of fact, after all necessary deductions have been made, the church has been a powerful agency in developing that temper of likemindedness which makes civilized society possible.

There is still another cavil to which it may be needful to refer. It is based on the notion that religion, after all, is a purely individual affair; that it concerns only the relations between the soul and its G.o.d; that therefore public worship is not only needless but unseemly.

Prayer is sometimes described as "the flight of one alone to the only One;" and it is sometimes contended that any other than private prayer is a violation of all the higher sanct.i.ties. If this were true, of course the church would be an anomaly or an imposition. And while there are not many who would urge this argument unfalteringly, some such notion as this may be found lying at the bottom of a good many minds.

The words of Jesus, in the sixth chapter of Matthew, are sometimes quoted in support of this criticism upon public worship: "And when ye pray, ye shall not be as the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thine inner chamber, and having shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret, and thy Father which seeth in secret shall recompense thee."[15]

But we must learn to interpret the words of Jesus as meeting the occasion on which they were spoken; and before we base any generalizations or rules of conduct upon them, we must bring together all that he said and did which bears upon the case in hand, and try to arrive at some meaning which shall include and explain it all. When we treat the utterances and acts of Jesus after this manner, we shall find that no such deduction as that which we are considering can be drawn from them.

We discover, in the first place, that he himself did not always pray in secret; for several of his prayers made in public places are reported for us. Moreover, he told his disciples that when even two or three of them were gathered together in his name, he would be in the midst of them. The implication is that they would be in the habit of gathering together in his name, and that there would generally be many more than two or three of them.

The only form of prayer which he has left us is manifestly intended primarily, not for secret worship, but for social worship. The p.r.o.nouns of the "Lord's Prayer" are all in the plural number: "_Our_ father who art in heaven;" "Give _us_ this day our daily bread." For solitary prayer these phrases are not suitable.

When he went away from his disciples he left them a great promise of the manifestation to them of that Spirit which had been given without measure to him; and he bade them tarry in Jerusalem until that promise should be fulfilled. Accordingly they a.s.sembled, about one hundred and twenty of them, in an upper room in Jerusalem, and "continued steadfastly" in prayer together for many days. The response to this prayer was that outpouring of the Spirit by which the apostolic church was inspired, and equipped for its work. Saint Peter told the disciples that this was the gift of the ascended Christ,--the fulfillment of his promise to them. If this was true, it can hardly be conceived that he disapproved of the common prayer in answer to which this gift had come.

Nor can any reasonable interpreter of his words and deeds imagine that he intended his admonition in the sixth chapter of Matthew to be taken as a prohibition of public worship or of social prayer. Those words were simply a reproof of ostentation in worship. The Pharisees, whose conduct he is castigating, "loved to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they might be seen of men." It was a private and personal prayer, offered in a public place, to advertise the devotion of the worshiper. With our private and personal prayers the public has no concern; it is a manifest indelicacy to thrust them before the public; the place for them is the secret chamber. Individual sins and sorrows and needs we all have, and when we talk with our Father about them we ought to be alone with him; but we have also common sins and sorrows and needs, and it is well for us to be together when we talk with him about them. It is therefore a gross perversion of these words of Jesus to quote them in condemnation of acts of public worship. His entire life and the example of all those who were nearest to him, as well as the testimony of the best Christians in all the ages, unite to render such a notion incredible.

If I have succeeded in answering the cavils which seek to discredit the church as a social organization, and especially as an agency for the maintenance of social worship, let me go on to suggest some positive reasons for the existence of such an agency.

Such an opportunity as the church offers for social worship is essential to the maintenance of religion. Religious feeling the expression of which was confined to the relations between the individual and his G.o.d, would become self-centred, egoistic, and morbid. If there were no praying but secret praying, if the social element were eliminated from prayer and praise, faith would take on ascetic forms, devotion would become rancid, sympathy would be smothered, and the character of the worshiper would be hardened and belittled. There is a place and a time, as we have seen, for private devotion; probably many of us make far less use of it than would be good for us; but any attempt to shut our religion into the closet would be suicidal. It would mould there. To keep it fresh and wholesome it must be taken out into the light and air; the winds of heaven must blow through it; our desires must mingle with the desires of others; our voices must join with their voices; we must learn to think of the needs, the struggles, the sorrows, the hopes that are common to us all, to put ourselves in other people's places when we pray, to feel that our religion is a bond that binds us to our kind.

There is a kind of prayer which we could only use in the closet,--intimate, personal, dealing with matters of which no one else has any right to know. But there is another kind of prayer for which there is no other place than the great congregation; a prayer in which many pleading hearts unite; in which the sympathies and hopes and aspirations of a thousand worshipers are blended. Such a prayer, if some one can give it voice, is something far higher and diviner than ever ascended from any secret shrine.

It is true that the prayer of the great a.s.sembly does not always find a fitting voice. It is sometimes arid and formal; it is sometimes palpably insincere and perfunctory, alas for our human disabilities and infirmities! The power of the leader to forget himself, to gather up into his heart the common needs of those who are listening, and pour them out before G.o.d, is sometimes wanting. Not seldom we may find ourselves wishing for those forms of prayer, sanctified by centuries of use, in which the Christian church, in all the lands of earth, has made known its requests to G.o.d. These are always dignified and reverent; every truly devout heart may find utterance for some of its deepest needs in the pet.i.tions of the Book of Common Prayer. But most of us have heard prayers in the sanctuary which lifted and kindled us as no written prayers could ever do. If the leader of the devotions could be "in the Spirit on the Lord's day;" if he could forget himself; if the simplicity which is in Christ could take possession of his thought, if he could look over the company round about him before he closed his eyes, and with a swift glance could glean out of that field of human experience some inkling of the trials, the perplexities, the griefs, the struggles, the tragedies of the lives there before him, and with a great, fervent, energizing[16] prayer could carry them all up to G.o.d, there would be something in that which would convince all who were listening that the highest form of prayer is not secret prayer, but social prayer. Nor is it an uncommon thing to hear, even in humble pulpits, prayer which effectually meets this great demand.

It goes without saying that, for the highest forms of praise, we must have the conspiring voices of the great congregation. We cannot let loose the hallelujahs in the closet; that would be almost as unseemly as to pray on the street corner. If the Bible is any guide as to the forms which our worship should take, praise must const.i.tute a large part of it. And praise is mainly a social act.

Even the preaching gathers much of its impressiveness from the congregation. The message which stirs the hearts of five hundred worshipers would make much less impression upon any one of them if he heard it alone. It could not be given to him alone, as it is given to the five hundred; that is a psychological impossibility. There is something in it when the five hundred hear it that is not in it when the single auditor hears it, and that something is, far and away, the best thing that it contains.

All these considerations show that public worship is essential to the vigorous maintenance of true religion. The elements which it supplies to religion are vital elements. Let no man imagine that by reading the Bible and good books at home, and by worshiping in his closet, or, as some are fond of saying, "in G.o.d's first temples," the life of religion can be successfully maintained. It never has been maintained in that way, and it never will be. When men forsake the a.s.sembling of themselves together for worship, there is no more reading the Bible and good books at home, and no more praying in the closet, much less in the woods.

Single individuals might, if the religious atmosphere of the community were kept vital round about them, continue to enjoy religion. Invalids are often forced to deprive themselves of social worship; but if they are there in spirit, something of the benefit finds them. But a community which deliberately abandoned social worship would be a community in which no private worship would long be maintained.

If, then, we agree that religion is an essential element in the life of mankind, we must see that it is necessary that some inst.i.tution should exist which shall make provision for social and public worship. The Christian church undertakes primarily to fulfill this function. It has other large and important relations to society, of which we shall speak further on. But this is its first concern. I hope that it has been made evident in this discussion that it is a very important function. I hope that those who read these pages may be able to see that if we are to have any religion in our land, the kind of work which the church undertakes to do cannot be neglected. That the church is not doing this work as well as it ought to be done is true enough; we shall have all that before us presently; but the vital necessity of the work is not therefore disproved. The work would be better done if those who now hold aloof, because they see its defects, would put their lives into the business of mending them.

There are very few men and women, after all, in our modern society, who do not say, without hesitation, that we must have churches; that it would not do to let them die; that they are essential to the social welfare; that, imperfect as they are, they supply a need which every one can recognize. They have no hesitation, either, in admitting that if there are to be churches, somebody must belong to them, and share the responsibility for their maintenance. But when the question is asked, "If somebody must, why must not you?" a good many of them are not able to give a very clear answer. Very often the excuse that is set up is some form of theological dissent. But that is not, in many cases, a serious barrier. It might shut some men out of some churches; but there are great varieties of creeds, and the conditions of membership in some churches are so simple that no really earnest man is likely to feel himself excluded. If it is essential that the work of the church be done, and if the reader of these pages has not convinced himself that he is exempt from the common human obligations, then he can find, if he is in earnest, some church with which he can conscientiously ally himself, and in whose work he can bear a part.

IV

The Business of the Church

We have seen that religion is a social fact; that religious feeling creates social organizations, and is preserved and promoted by them. G.o.d is love, and love is social attraction; the children of G.o.d, who are made in his image, must find in their hearts a tendency to get together and worship and work together.

We find here a reciprocating action. An apple seed produces a tree which in its turn produces apples with seeds. So the religious impulse organizes the church, and the church cultivates and propagates religious impulses. The point to be emphasized is that religion, and especially the Christian religion, is inseparable from social forms; that its natural result is to bring human beings together in cooperative groups.

It is the business of life to organize matter; there is no life without organization; the inorganic is the lifeless. These are facts which should be borne in mind by those who approve of the religious life but object to religious organizations. If religion is life, it will create organic forms.

In our last chapter we showed how worship, in its highest expression, is essentially social, and how impossible it would be to maintain it without the aid of inst.i.tutions having the same essential purpose as the Christian church. Let us turn our thought now to the other great function of the church, the regeneration of human society.

Religion cannot be kept alive without alliance with the social forces; the social forces cannot be kept in healthful operation without the aid of religion. Neither blade of a pair of shears will cut without the other. You cannot raise corn without seed, and you can only get seed from corn.

Religion is not an ultimate fact. When men are religious just for the sake of being religious, their religion is good for nothing. Religion is for character. Its end is gained when it has made us good men and women.

Religion is for service. It finds its justification in the work that it can do in making a better world of this. Jesus gave us the truth about it when he said, "The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath." And he carried the truth forward to a larger application when he said, "I came not to judge the world, but to save the world."

"_To save the world._" That was the errand of the Christ; that is the business of his church. It is not merely to save a certain number of people out of the world, and to get them safely away to another world; it is to save the world.

There is no danger of giving to this phrase too wide an application. We are ent.i.tled to the expectation that this salvation is to have a large scope; that it is to include the earth and all its tribes of life. When we speak of making a better world of this, we ought to mean the physical world as well as the social world and the moral world. It is a true insight of faith which makes the poet say:--

"The world we live in wholly is redeemed; Not man alone, but all that man holds dear: His orchards and his maize: forget me not And heartsease in his garden, and the wild Aerial blossoms of the untamed wood, That make its savagery so homelike; all Have felt Christ's sweet love watering their roots: His sacrifice has won both earth and heaven.

Nature in all its fullness is the Lord's.

There are no Gentile oaks, no Pagan pines; The gra.s.s beneath oar feet is Christian gra.s.s; The wayside weed is sacred unto him.

Have we not groaned together, herbs and men, Struggling through stifling earth-weights unto light, Earnestly longing to be clothed upon With one high possibility of bloom?

And He, He is the Light, He is the Sun That draws us out of darkness, and transmits The noisome earth-damp into Heaven's own breath, And shapes our matted roots, we know not how, Into fresh leaves, and strong, fruit-bearing stems; Yea, makes us stand, on some consummate day, Abloom in white transfiguration robes."

This vital sympathy between man and his environment is never lost sight of by the great prophets. The redemption of man must mean, as they clearly see, the redemption of the world in which man lives. When the drunkard is reformed, the house which he inhabits puts on a new face and there are flowers instead of weeds in his garden. Isaiah knew that when his people were redeemed from their captivity, the wilderness and the parched land would be glad and the desert would rejoice and blossom as the rose.

That wonderful pa.s.sage in the eighth chapter of the Romans shows how strongly Paul had grasped the old prophetic idea; he beholds the whole creation humiliated and disfigured by its share in man's degeneration, and waiting to be delivered with man from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of G.o.d. That expectation is yet to be realized. It is an essential part of the Christian expectation. It is part of what redemption means.

True, it is that by the selfishness and thoughtlessness of man large portions of the earth's surface have been despoiled; mountains have been denuded of their forests; fertile lands have been worn out, and fruitful fields have become wildernesses. But we are beginning to reverse this tendency, and now many a wilderness is being reclaimed, arid plains are green with corn, and the forests are creeping back upon the hillsides.

As men become socialized, as they learn to cooperate for the common good, as some sense of their social responsibility gets possession of their minds, we shall see this process extending; the waste of the common resources of the earth will cease; deserts will be visited by the life-giving water; swamps and jungles will be subdued; the earth, in many regions now uninhabited and desolate, will be made to bring forth and bud that it may give seed to the sower and bread to the eater.