The Social Principles of Jesus Part 23

The parable of the tares grew out of a personal experience. _Has our observation ever furnished anything similar?_

Sixth Day: The Irrepressible Conflict

Think not that I came to send peace on the earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law: and a man's foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he that doth not take his cross and follow after me, is not worthy of me. He that findeth his life shall lose it; and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.-Matt. 10:34-39.

Into a world controlled by sin was launched the life of Christ. The more completely he embodied the divine character and will, the more certain and intense would be the conflict between him and the powers dominating the old order. He accepted this fight, not only for himself but for his followers. It would follow them up into the intimacies of their homes. Any faith that takes the Kingdom of G.o.d seriously, has its fight cut out for it. Unless we accept our share of it, we are playing with our discipleship. But when the fight is for the Kingdom of G.o.d, those who dodge, lose; and those who lose, win.

Which involves more conflict, a life set on the Kingdom of G.o.d on earth, or a faith set on the life to come?

_Does the idea of a fighting faith attract us?_

_Would this serve as a __"__subst.i.tute for war__"__?_

Seventh Day: Militant Gentleness

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you; that ye may be sons of your Father who is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust.-Matt. 5:44, 45.

Render to no man evil for evil. Take thought for things honorable in the sight of all men. But if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him to drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head. Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.-Rom. 12:17, 20, 21.

Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence. Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end have I been born, and to this end am I come into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.-John 18:36, 37.

When we call out the militant spirit in religion, we summon a dangerous power. It has bred grimness and cruelty. Crusaders and inquisitors did their work in the name of Jesus, but not in his spirit. We must saturate ourselves with the spirit of our Master if our fighting is to further his Kingdom. Hate breeds hate; force challenges force. Only love disarms; only forgiveness kills an enemy and leaves a friend. Jesus blended gentleness and virility, forgiving love and uncompromising boldness. He offered it as a mark of his Kingdom that his followers used no force to defend him.

Wherever they have done so, the Kingdom of heaven has dropped to the level of the brutal empires. His attack is by the truth; whoever is won by that, is conquered for good. Force merely changes the form of evil. When we "overcome evil with good," we eliminate it.

What did Paul mean by saying that acts of kindness to an enemy heap coals of fire on his head?

How about moral crusades that aim to put joint-keepers and pimps in prison?

Study for the Week

All great religious teachers have had a deep sense of the power of evil in human life. Jesus apparently was not interested in the philosophical question of the origin of evil, but accepted the fact of evil in a pragmatic way, and saw his own life as a conflict with sin and wrong.

Some facts, as we have seen, were clearly written in his consciousness: the frailty of our will; the consolidation of evil in men of bad character and the automatic output of lies and distortions coming from such; the power of social pressure by which the weak are made to trip and fall; and the pervasive satanic power of evil which purposely neutralizes the efforts leading toward the Reign of G.o.d.

The fact that Jesus realized evil in individuals and society, that he reckoned with it practically, and that he set himself against it with singleness of purpose, const.i.tutes another of his social principles. Any view of life which blurs the fact of evil would have seemed to him an illusion. He would have foretold failure for any policy based on it. His great social problem was redemption from evil. Every step of approach toward the Kingdom of G.o.d must be won by conflict.

Modern science explains evil along totally different lines, but as to the main facts it agrees with the spiritual insight of Jesus. Psychology recognizes that the higher desires are usually sluggish and faint, while the animal appet.i.tes are strong and clamorous. Our will tires easily and readily yields to social pressure. In many individuals the raw material of character is terribly flawed by inheritance. So the young, with a maximum of desire and a minimum of self-restraint, slip into folly, and the aging backslide into shame. Human nature needs a strong reenforcement to rouse it from its inherited lethargy and put it on the toilsome upward track. It needs redemption, emanc.i.p.ation from slavery, a breaking of bonds.

I

Evangelism is the attack of redemptive energy in the sphere of personal life. It comes to a man shamed by the sense of guilt and baffled by moral failure, and rouses him to a consciousness of his high worth and eternal destiny. It transmits the faith of the Christian Church in a loving and gracious G.o.d who is willing to forgive and powerful to save. It teaches a man to pray, curing his soul by affirming over and over a triumphant faith, and throwing it open to mysterious spiritual powers which bring joy, peace, and strength beyond himself. It sets before him a code of moral duty to quicken and guide his conscience. It puts him inside of a group of like-minded people who exercise social restraint and urge him on.

When all this is wisely combined, it const.i.tutes a spiritual reenforcement of incomparable energy. It acts like an emanc.i.p.ation. It gives a sense of freedom and newness. The untrained observer sees it mainly in those cases where the turn has come in some dramatic form and where the contrast between the old and new life is most demonstrable. But the saving force is at work even when it seeps in through home influences so quietly that the beneficiary of it does not realize what a great thing has been done for him.

The saving force has to attack the powers in possession. Only those who have helped in wresting men free from sin can tell what a stiff fight it often is. Here is an intellectual professional man who goes off for a secret spree about once in sixty days; a respectable woman who has come under the opium habit; a boy who is both a cigarette fiend and s.e.xually weak; a man who domineers and cows his wife and family; a woman who has reduced her husband to slavery to supply her expensive tastes; a girl who shirks all work and throws the burden of her selfish life on a hard-worked mother; a college man whose parents are straining all their resources and using up their security for old age to keep him at college, and who gambles-complete the catalogue for yourself. To make these individuals over into true citizens of the Kingdom of G.o.d and loyal fellow-workers of their fellow-men means constructive conflict of a high order. It has been done.(4)

II

The problem of evil becomes far more complicated when evil is socialized.

The simplest and most familiar form of that is the boys' gang. Here is a group of young humans who get their fun and adventure by pulling the whiskers of the law. They idealize vice and crime. Leadership in their group is won by proficiency in profanity, gambling, obscenity, and slugging. The gang a.s.similates its members; there is regimentation of evil. It acts as a channel of tradition; the boy of fifteen teaches the boy of twelve what he has learned from the boy of eighteen.

How is the problem of evil affected when the powers of human society, which usually restrain the individual from vice and rebellion, are used to urge him into it? Should the strategy of the Kingdom of G.o.d be adjusted to that situation? It is not enough to win individuals away from the gangs.

Can the gang spirit itself be christianized and used to restrain and stimulate the young for good? Has this been done, and where, and how? Is Christian inst.i.tutional work sufficient to cope with the problem? What readjustments in the recreational and educational outfit of our American communities are needed to give a wholesome outlet to the spirit of play and adventure, and to train the young for their life work? Would such an outfit do the work without personal leadership inspired by religion?

Christian evangelism in the past has not had an adequate understanding of the power of the group. In what connections has the Church shown a true valuation of the social factor in sin and redemption? At what points has its strategy been ineffective in dealing with socialized evil? What contributions can social science make to the efficiency of evangelism?

Would a correct scientific a.n.a.lysis of the constructive and disintegrating forces in society be enough to do saving work?

III

The bad gangs of the young are usually held together by a misdirected love of play and adventure. The dangerous combinations of adults are consolidated by "the cohesive power of plunder." That makes them a far more difficult proposition.

Any local attack on saloons and vice resorts furnishes a laboratory demonstration of socialized evil. The object of both kinds of inst.i.tutions is to make big profit by catering to desires which induce men to spend freely. Music and sociability are used as a bait. The people who profit by this trade are held together by the fear of a common danger. Since the community uses political means of curbing or suppressing the vice business, the vice group goes into politics to prevent it. It seeks to control the police, the courts, the political machines by sharing part of its profits. Lawyers, officials, newspaper proprietors, and real estate men are linked up and summoned like a feudal levy in case of danger.

Drugstores, doctors, chauffeurs, messenger boys, and all kinds of people are used to bring in trade and make it secure. The exploded fictions of alcoholism are kept circulating. Like a tape-worm in the intestines, these articulated and many-jointed parasitic organizations of vice make our communities sick, dirty, and decadent.

We have learned to read the sordid trail of the drink and vice traffic in American communities. There is another kind of organized evil, even more ancient, pervasive, and deadly, which few understand, though it has left a trail sufficiently terrible.

Wherever we look in the history of the older nations, we see an alignment of two fundamental cla.s.ses. The one is born to toil, stunted by toil, and gets its cla.s.s characteristics by toil. The other is characterized by the pleasures and arts of leisure, is physically and mentally developed by leisure, and proud and jealous of its leisure. This cla.s.s is always cla.s.s-conscious; its groups, however antagonistic, always stand together against the cla.s.s of toil. Its combination of leisure and wealth is conditioned on the power of taking tribute from the labor of many. In order to do this with safety, it must control political power, the military outfit, the power of making, interpreting and executing the laws, and the forces forming public opinion.

Before the advent of industrialism and political democracy, it secured its income by controlling the land and the government of nations; and the effects of its control can be read in the condition of the rural population of Russia, Austria, Eastern Germany, Italy, France before the Revolution, England, and especially Ireland. The development of industry has changed the problem of economic and political control; but the essentials remain, as we can see in the condition of industrial communities and the history of labor legislation.

The fundamental sin of all dominant cla.s.ses has been the taking of unearned incomes. Political oppression has always been a corollary of economic parasitism, a means to an end. The combination of the two const.i.tutes the largest and most continuous form of organized evil in human history.

Jesus used the ill.u.s.tration of pegs maliciously driven into the path to make men stumble and fall. It would require some ill.u.s.tration drawn from modern machinery to express the wholesale prostration of bodies and souls where covetousness has secured continuous power and has been able to get in its full work. Anyone who has ever looked with human understanding at the undersized and stupid peasants of countries ruled by their landlord cla.s.s, or at the sordid homes and pleasures of miners or industrial workers where some corporation feared neither G.o.d nor the law, ought to get a comprehension of the power of evil that has rested like an iron yoke on humanity.

We think most readily of the children of the poor as a product of exploitation; underfed and overstimulated, cut off from the clean pleasures of nature, often tainted with vice before knowledge has come, and urged along by the appet.i.tes and cruel selfishness of older persons, they are a standing accusation against society itself.(5) Jesus would have felt that the children of the rich are an even worse product of exploitation than the poor. When "society" plays, it burns up the labor of thousands like fireworks. The only possible justification for the aggregations of wealth is that the rich are to act as the trustees and directors of the wealth of society; but their children-except in conspicuous and fine exceptions-are put out of contact with the people whom they must know if they are to serve them, so that it takes heroic effort on the part of n.o.ble exceptions to get in contact with the people once more, and to discover how they live. In all nations the atmosphere of the aristocratic groups drugs the sense of obligation, and possesses the mind with the notion that the life and labor of men are made to play tennis with. The existence of great permanent groups, feeding but not producing, dominating and directing the life of whole nations according to their own needs, may well seem a supreme proof of the power of evil in humanity.

IV

If evil is socialized, salvation must be socialized. The organization of the Christian Church is a recognition of the social factor in salvation.

It is not enough to have G.o.d, and Christ, and the Bible. A group is needed, organized on Christian principles, and expressing the Christian spirit, which will a.s.similate the individual and gradually make him over into a citizen of the Kingdom of G.o.d. Salvation will rarely come to anyone without the mediation of some individual or group which already has salvation. It may be very small and simple. "Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them." That saying recognizes that an additional force is given to religion by its embodiment in a group of believers. Professor Royce has recently rea.s.serted in modern terms the old doctrine that "there is no salvation outside of the Church,"