Should Smith go to Church?
Should Smith go to Church?
I THINK he should. Moreover, I think I should set Smith an example by placing myself on Sunday morning in a pew from which he may observe me at my devotions. Smith and I attended the same Sunday school when we were boys, and remained for church afterwards as a matter of course. Smith now spends his Sunday mornings golfing, or pottering about his garden, or in his club or office, and after the midday meal he takes a nap and loads his family into a motor for a flight countryward. It must be understood that I do not offer myself as a pattern for Smith. While I resent being classified with the lost sheep, I am, nevertheless, a restless member of the flock, prone to leap the wall and wander. Smith is the best of fellows,—an average twentieth-century American, diligent in business, a kind husband and father, and in politics anxious to vote for what he believes to be the best interests of the country.
In the community where we were reared it was not respectable not to go to church. I remember distinctly that in my boyhood people who were not affiliated with some church were looked upon as lawless pariahs. An infidel was a marked man: one used to be visible in the streets I frequented, and I never passed him without a thrill of horror. Our city was long known as “a poor theatre town,” where only Booth inHamletand Jefferson inRipmight be patronized by church-going people who valued their reputations. Yet in the same community no reproach attaches to-day to the non-church-going citizen. A majority of the men I know best, in cities large and small, do not go to church. Most of them are in nowise antagonistic to religion; they are merely indifferent. Clearly, there must be some reason for this change. It is inconceivable that men would lightly put from them the faith of their fathers through which they are promised redemption from sin and everlasting life.
Now and then I hear it asserted that the church is not losing its hold upon the people. Many clergymen and laymen resent the oft-repeatedstatement that we Americans are not as deeply swayed by religion as in other times; but this seems to me a case of whistling through a graveyard on a dark night.
A recent essayist,[1]writing defensively of the church, cries, in effect, that it is moving toward the light; don’t shoot! He declares that no one who has not contributed something toward the solution of the church’s problem has earned the right to criticize. I am unable to sympathize with this reasoning. The church is either the repository of the Christian religion on earth, the divinely inspired and blessed tabernacle of the faith of Christ, or it is a stupendous fraud. There is no sound reason why the church should not be required to give an account of its stewardship. If it no longer attracts men and women in our strenuous and impatient America, then it is manifestly unjust to deny to outsiders the right of criticism. Smith is far from being a fool, and if by his test of “What’s in it for me?” he finds the church wanting, it is, as he would say, “up to the church” to expendsome of its energy in proving that there is a good deal in it for him. It is unfair to say to Smith, who has utterly lost touch with the church, that before he is qualified to criticize the ways and the manners of churches he must renew an allegiance which he was far too intelligent and conscientious to sever without cause.
Nor can I justly be denied the right of criticism because my own ardor is diminished, and I am frequently conscious of a distinct lukewarmness. I confess to a persistent need in my own life for the support, the stimulus, the hope, that is inherent in the teachings of Christianity; nevertheless the church—that is to say, the Protestantism with which I am familiar—has seemed to me increasingly a wholly inadequate medium for communicating to men such as Smith and myself the help and inspiration of the vision of Christ. There are far too many Smiths who do not care particularly whether the churches prosper or die. And I urge that Smith is worthy of the church’s best consideration. Even if the ninety-and-nine were snugly housed in the fold, Smith’s soul is still worth the saving.
“I don’t want to go no furderThan my Testyment fer that.”
“I don’t want to go no furderThan my Testyment fer that.”
“I don’t want to go no furder
Than my Testyment fer that.”
Yet Smith doesn’t care a farthing about the state of his soul. Nothing, in fact, interests him less. Smith’s wife had been “brought up in the church,” but after her marriage she displayed Smith to the eyes of the congregation for a few Easter Sundays and then gave him up. However, their children attend Sunday school of a denomination other than that in which the Smiths were reared, and Smith gives money to several churches; he declares that he believes churches are a good thing, and he will do almost anything for a church but attend its services. What he really means to say is that he thinks the church is a good thing for Jones and me, but that, as for himself, he gets on comfortably without it.
And the great danger both to the church and to Smith lies in the fact that he does apparently get on so comfortably without it!
My personal experiences of religion and of churches have been rather varied, and whilethey present nothing unusual, I shall refer to them as my justification for venturing to speak to my text at all. I was baptized in the Episcopal Church in infancy, but in about my tenth year I began to gain some knowledge of other Protestant churches. One of my grandfathers had been in turn Methodist and Presbyterian, and I “joined” the latter church in my youth. Becoming later a communicant of the Episcopal Church, I was at intervals a vestryman and a delegate to councils, and for twenty years attended services with a regularity that strikes me as rather admirable in the retrospect.
As a boy I was taken to many “revivals” under a variety of denominational auspices, and later, as a newspaper reporter, I was frequently assigned to conferences and evangelistic meetings. I made my first “hit” as a reporter by my vivacious accounts of the performances of a “trance” revivalist, who operated in a skating-rink in my town. There was something indescribably “woozy” in those cataleptic manifestations in the bare, ill-lighted hall. I even recall vividly the bump of the mourners’ heads as they struck the floor, while the evangelistmoved among the benches haranguing the crowd. Somewhat earlier I used to delight in the calisthenic performances of a “boy preacher” who ranged my part of the world. His physical activities were as astonishing as his volubility. At the high moment of his discourse he would take a flying leap from the platform to the covered marble baptismal font. He wore pumps for greater ease in these flights, and would run the length of the church with astonishing nimbleness, across the backs of the seats over the heads of the kneeling congregation. I often listened with delicious horripilations to the most startling of this evangelist’s perorations, in which he described the coming of the Pale Rider. It was a shuddersome thing. The horror of it, and the wailing and crying it evoked, come back to me after thirty years.
The visit of an evangelist used to be an important event in my town; converts were objects of awed attention, particularly in the case of notorious hardened sinners whose repentance awakened the greatest public interest and sympathy. Now that we have passed the quarter-millionmark, revivals cause less stir, for evangelists of the more militant, spectacular type seem to avoid the larger cities. Those who have never observed the effect of a religious revival upon a community not too large or too callous to be shaken by it have no idea of the power exerted by the popular evangelist. It is commonly said that these visits only temporarily arrest the march of sin; that after a brief experience of godly life the converts quickly relapse; but I believe that these strident trumpetings of the ram’s horn are not without their salutary effect. The saloons, for a time at least, find fewer customers; the forces of decency are strengthened, and the churches usually gain in membership. Most of us prefer our religion without taint of melodrama, but it is far from my purpose to asperse any method or agency that may win men to better ways of life.
At one time and another I seem to have read a good deal on various aspects of religion. Newman and the Tractarians interested me immensely. I purchased all of Newman’s writings, and made a collection of his photographs, several of which gaze at me, a little mournfully andrebukingly, as I write; for presently I took a cold plunge into Matthew Arnold, and Rome ceased to call me. Arnold’s writings on religious subjects have been obscured by the growing reputation of his poetry; but it was only yesterday that “Literature and Dogma” and “God and the Bible” enjoyed great vogue. He translated continental criticism into terms that made it accessible to laymen, and encouraged liberal thought. He undoubtedly helped many to a new orientation in matters of faith.
My reading in church history, dogma, and criticism has been about that of the average layman. I have enjoyed following the experiments of the psychical researchers, and have been a diligent student of the proceedings of heresy trials. The Andover case and the Briggs controversy once seemed important, and they doubtless were, but they established nothing of value. The churches are warier of heresy trials than they were; and in this connection I hold that a clergyman who entertains an honest doubt as to the virgin birth or the resurrection may still be a faithful servant of Jesus Christ. To unfrock him merely arouses controversy,and draws attention to questions that can never be absolutely determined by any additional evidence likely to be adduced. The continuance in the ministry of a doubter on such points becomes a question of taste which I admit to be debatable; but where, as has happened once in late years, the culprit was an earnest and sincere doer of Christianity’s appointed tasks, his conviction served no purpose beyond arousing a species of cynical enjoyment in the bosom of Smith, and of smug satisfaction in those who righteously flung a well-meaning man to the lions.
Far more serious are the difficulties of those ministers of every shade of faith who find themselves curbed and more or less openly threatened for courageously attacking evils they find at their own doors by those responsible for the conditions they assail. Only recently two or three cases have come to my attention of clergymen who had awakened hostility in their congregations by their zeal in social service. The loyal support of such men by their fellows seems to me far nobler than the pursuit of heretics. The Smiths of our country havelearned to admire courage in their politics, and there is no reason for believing that they will not rally to a religion that practices it undauntedly. Christ, of all things, was no coward.
There is, I believe, nowhere manifest at this time, within the larger Protestant bodies at least, any disposition to defend the inerrancy of the Bible, and this is fortunate in that it leaves the churches free to deal with more vital matters. It seems fair to assume that criticism has spent its force, and done its worst. The spirit of the Bible has not been harmed by it. The reliance of the Hebrews on the beneficence of Jehovah, the testimony of Jesus to the enduring worth of charity, mercy, and love, have in nowise been injured by textual criticism. The Old Testament, fancifully imagined as the Word of God given by dictation to specially chosen amanuenses, appeals to me no more strongly than a Bible recognized as the vision of brooding spirits, who, in a time when the world was young, and earth was nearer heaven than now, were conscious of longings and dreams that were wonderfully realized in their own hearts and lives. And the essentials ofChrist’s teachings have lost nothing by criticism.
The Smiths who have drifted away from the churches will hardly be brought back to the pews by even the most scholarly discussion of doubtful texts. Smith is not interested in the authenticity of lines or chapters, nor do nice points of dogma touch the affairs of his life or the needs of his soul. The fact that certain gentlemen in session at Nicæa inA.D.325 issued a statement of faith for his guidance strikes him as negligible; it does not square with any need of which he is conscious in his own breast.
A church that would regain the lost Smiths will do well to satisfy that large company of the estranged and the indifferent that one need not believe all that is contained between the lids of the Bible to be a Christian. Much of the Bible is vulnerable, but Jesus explained himself in terms whose clarity has in nowise been clouded by criticism. Smith has no time, even if he had the scholarship, to pass upon the merits of the Book of Daniel; but give him Christ’s own words without elucidation and he is at once on secure ground. There only lately came into myhands a New Testament in which every utterance of Jesus is given the emphasis of black-face type, with the effect of throwing his sayings into high relief; and no one reading his precepts thus presented can fail to be impressed by the exactness with which He formulated his “secret” into a working platform for the guidance of men. Verily there could be no greater testimony to the divine authority of the Carpenter of Nazareth than the persistence with which his ideal flowers upon the ever-mounting mass of literature produced to explain Him.
Smith will not be won back to the church through appeals to theology, or stubborn reaffirmations of creeds and dogmas. I believe it may safely be said that the great body of ministers individually recognize this. A few cling to a superstition that there is inherent in religion itself a power which by some sort of magic, independently of man, will make the faith of Christ triumphant in the world. I do not believe so; Smith could not be made to think so. And Smith’s trouble is, if I understand him, notwith faith after all, but with works. The church does not impress him as being an efficient machine that yields adequate returns upon the investment. If Smith can be brought to works through faith, well enough; but he is far more critical of works than of faith. Works are within the range of his experience; he admires achievement: show him a foundation of works and interest him in strengthening that foundation and in building upon it, and his faith will take care of itself.
The word we encounter oftenest in the business world nowadays is “efficiency”; the thing of which Smith must first be convinced is that the church may be made efficient. And on that ground he must be met honestly, for Smith is a practical being, who surveys religion, as everything else, with an eye of calculation. At a time when the ethical spirit in America is more healthy and vigorous than ever before, Smith does not connect the movements of which he is aware in business and politics with religion. Religion seems to him to be a poor starved side issue, not a source and guiding spirit in the phenomena he observes and respects.
The economic waste represented in church investment and administration does not impress Smith favorably, nor does it awaken admiration in Jones or in me. Smith knows that two groceries on opposite sides of the street are usually one too many. We used to be told that denominational rivalry aroused zeal, but this cannot longer be more than an absurd pretense. This idea that competition is essential to the successful extension of Christianity continues to bring into being many crippled and dying churches, as Smith well knows. And he has witnessed, too, a deterioration of the church’s power through its abandonment of philanthropic work to secular agencies, while churches of the familiar type, locked up tight all the week save for a prayer-meeting and choir-practice, have nothing to do. What strikes Smith is their utter wastefulness and futility.
The lack of harmony in individual churches—and there is a good deal of it—is not reassuring to the outsider. The cynical attitude of a good many non-church-going Smiths is due to the strifes, often contemptibly petty, prevailing within church walls. It seems difficult forChristians to dwell together in peace and concord. In almost every congregation there appears to be a party favorable to the minister and one antagonistic to him. A minister who seemed to me to fill more fully the Christian ideal than any man I have known was harassed in the most brutal fashion by a congregation incapable of appreciating the fidelity and self-sacrifice that marked his ministry. I recall with delight the fighting qualities of another clergyman who was an exceptionally brilliant pulpit orator. He was a Methodist who had fallen to the lot of a church that had not lately been distinguished for able preaching. This man filled his church twice every Sunday, and it was the one sought oftenest by strangers within the city’s gates; yet about half his own membership hated him cordially. Though I was never of his flock, I enjoyed his sermons; and knowing something of his relations with the opposition party in his congregation, I recall with keenest pleasure how he fought back. Now and then an arrow grazed his ear; but he was unheedful of warnings that he would be pilloried for heresy. He landed finally in his old age inan obscure church, where he died, still fighting with his back to the wall. Though the shepherd’s crook as a weapon is going out of style, I have an idea that clergymen who stand sturdily for their own ideals receive far kindlier consideration than those who meekly bow to vestries, trustees, deacons, elders, and bishops.
Music has long been notoriously a provoker of discord. Once in my news-hunting days I suffered the ignominy of a “scoop” on a choir-rumpus, and I thereupon formed the habit of lending an anxious ear to rumors of trouble in choir-lofts. The average ladder-likeTe Deum, built up for the display of the soprano’s vocal prowess, has always struck me as an unholy thing. I even believe that the horrors of highly embellished offertories have done much to tighten purse-strings and deaden generous impulses. The presence behind the pulpit of a languid quartette praising God on behalf of the bored sinners in the pews has always seemed to me the profanest of anomalies. Nor has long contemplation of vested choirs in Episcopal churches shaken my belief that church music should be an affair of the congregation.
There seems to exist inevitably, even in the smallest congregation, “a certain rich man” whose opinions must be respected by the pulpit. The minister of a large congregation confessed to me despairingly, not long ago, that the courage had been taken out of him by the protests evoked whenever he touched even remotely upon social topics like child labor, or shorter hours for workingmen. There were manufacturers in that church who would not “stand for it.” Ministers are warned that they must attend to their own business, which is preaching the Word of God not so concretely or practically as to offend the “pillars.”
Just what is it, I wonder, that a minister may preach without hazarding his job? It is said persistently that the trouble with the church at the present day is that the ministers no longer preach the Word of God; that if Christian Truth were again taught with the old vigor, people would hear it gladly. This is, I believe, an enormous fallacy. I know churches where strict orthodoxy has been preached uninterruptedly for years, and which have steadily declined in spite of it—or because of it. Notlong ago, in a great assembly of one of the strongest denominations, when that cry for a return to the “Old Bible Truth” was raised, one minister rose and attacked the plea, declaring that he had never faltered in his devotion to ancient dogma, and yet his church was dying. And even so, many churches whose walls echo uninterruptedly an absolutely impeccable orthodoxy are failing. We shall not easily persuade Smith to forego the golf-links on Sunday morning to hear the “Old Gospel Truth” preached in out-worn, meaningless phrases. Those old coins have the gold in them, but they must be recast in new moulds if they are again to pass current.
The difficulties of the clergy are greatly multiplied in these days. The pulpit has lost its old authority. It no longer necessarily follows that the ministers are the men of greatest cultivation in their community. The Monday morning newspapers formerly printed, in my town, pretty full excerpts of sermons. I recall the case of one popular minister whose sermonscontinued to be printed long after he had removed to another city. Nowadays nothing from the pulpit that is not sensational is considered worth printing. And the parson has lost his social importance, moving back slowly toward his old place below the salt. He used to be “asked,” even if he was not sincerely “expected” at the functions given by his parishioners; but this has changed now that fewer families have any parson to invite.
A minister’s is indubitably the hardest imaginable lot. Every one criticizes him. He is abused for illiberality, or, seeking to be all things to all men, he is abused for consorting with sinners. His door-bell tinkles hourly, and he must answer the behest of people he does not know, to marry or bury people he never heard of. He is expected to preach eloquently, to augment his flock, to keep a hand on the Sunday school, to sit on platforms in the interest of all good causes, and to bear himself with discretion amid the tortuous mazes of church and secular politics. There seem to be, in churches of all kinds, ambitious pontiffs—lay popes—possessed of an ambition to hold both their fellowlaymen and their meek, long-suffering minister in subjection. Why anyone should wish to be a church boss I do not know; and yet the supremacy is sometimes won after a struggle that has afforded the keenest delight to the cynical Smiths on the outside. One must view these internecine wars more in sorrow than in anger. They certainly contribute not a little to popular distrust of the church as a conservator of love and peace.
There are men in the ministry who can have had no clear vocation to the clerical life; but there are misfits and failures in all professions. Some of these, through bigotry or stupidity, do much to justify Smith’s favorite dictum that there is as much Christianity outside the church as within it. Now and then I find a Smith whose distrust of religion is based upon some disagreeable adventure with a clergyman, and I can’t deny that my own experiences with the cloth have been, on one or two occasions, disturbing. As to the more serious of these I may not speak, but I shall mention two incidents, for the reason that they are such trifles as affect Smith with joy. Once in a parish-meeting I sawa bishop grossly humiliated for having undertaken to rebuke a young minister for wearing a chasuble, or not wearing it, or for removing it in the pulpit, or the other way round,—at any rate, it was some such momentous point in ecclesiastical millinery that had loosened a frightful fury of recrimination. The very sight or suggestion of chasubles has ever since awakened in me the most unchristian resentment. While we fought over the chasuble I suppose people actually died within bow-shot of the church without knowing that “if any man sin we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous.”
And speaking of bishops, I venture the interpolation that that office, believed by many to be the softest berth in Zion as it exists in the Episcopal Church, is in fact the most vexatious and thankless to which any man can aspire; nor have I in mind the laborious lives of adventurous spirits like Whipple, Hare, and Rowe, but others who carry the burdens of established dioceses, where the troubles of one minister are multiplied upon the apostolic head by the number of parishes in his jurisdiction.
Again, at a summer resort on our North Atlantic Coast once familiar to me, there stood, within reach of fierce seas, one of the most charming of churches. It was sought daily by visitors, and many women, walking the shore, used to pause there to rest, for prayer, or out of sheer curiosity. And yet it appeared that no woman might venture into this edifice hatless. Thelocum tenens, recalling St. Paul’s question whether it is “comely that a woman pray unto God uncovered,” was so outraged by the visits of hatless women to the church that he tacked a notice on the door setting forth in severe terms that, whereas men should enter the church bareheaded, women should not desecrate the temple by entering uncovered. I remember that when I had read that warning, duly signed with the clergyman’s name, I sat down on the rocks and looked at the ocean for a long time, marveling that a sworn servant of God, consecrated in his service by the apostles’ successors, able to spend a couple of months at one of the pleasantest summer resorts in America, should have been horror-struck at the unholy intrusion of a hatless girl in his church, when people inthe hot city he had fled suffered and died, ignorant of the very name of Christ.
“My church home” is an old phrase one still hears in communities whose social life is not yet wholly divorced from the church. There is something pleasant and reassuring in the sound of it; and I do not believe we shall ever have in America an adequate substitute for that tranquility and peace which are still observable in towns where the church retains its hold upon the larger part of the community, and where it exercises a degree of compulsion upon men and women who find in its life a faith and hope that have proved not the least strong of the bulwarks of democracy. In wholly strange towns I have experienced the sense of this in a way I am reluctant to think wholly sentimental. Where, on crisp winter evenings, the young people come trooping happily in from the meetings of their own auxiliary societies, where vim and energy are apparent in the gathering congregation, and where one sees with half an eye that the pastor is a true leader and shepherd of hisflock—in such a picture there must be, for many of us, something that lays deep hold upon the heart. They are not concerned in such gatherings with higher criticism, but with cleanness and wholesomeness of life, and with that faith, never to be too closely scrutinized or analyzed, that “singeth low in every heart.”
One might weep to think how rare those pictures must become—one might weep if there were not the great problems now forced upon us, of chance and change, that drive home to all thinking men and women the great need of infusing the life of the spirit into our industrial and political struggles. If, in the end, our great experiment in self-government fail, it will be through the loss of those spiritual forces which from the beginning have guided and ruled us. It is only lately that we have begun to hear of Christian socialism, and a plausible phrase it is; but true democracy seems to me essentially Christian. When we shall have thoroughly christianized our democracy, and democratized our Christianity, we shall not longer yield to moods of despair, or hearken to prophets of woe.
The Smith for whom I presume to speak is not indifferent to the call of revitalized democracy. He has confessed to me his belief that the world is a kindlier place, and that more agencies of helpfulness are at work, than ever before; and to restore the recalcitrant Smith to the church it is necessary first of all to convince him that the church honestly seeks to be the chief of such agencies. The Young Men’s Christian Association, the Charity Organization Society, and the Settlement House all afford outlets for Smith’s generous benevolences. And it was a dark day for the church when she allowed these multiplying philanthropies to slip away from her. Smith points to them with a flourish, and says that he prefers to give his money where it is put to practical use. To him the church is an economic parasite, doing business on one day of the week, immune from taxation, and the last of his neighbors to scrape the snow from her sidewalks! The fact that there are within fifteen minutes’ walk of his house half a dozen churches, all struggling to maintain themselves, and making no appreciable impression upon the community, is notlost upon Smith,—the practical, unemotional, busy Smith. Smith speaks to me with sincere admiration of his friend, the Salvation Army major, to whom he opens his purse ungrudgingly; but the church over the way—that grim expensive pile of stone, closed for all but five or six hours of the week!—Smith shakes his head ruefully when you suggest it. It is to him a bad investment that ought to be turned over to a receiver for liquidation.
Smith’s wife has derived bodily and spiritual help from Christian Science, and Smith speaks with respect of that cult. He is half persuaded that there must be something in it. A great many of the Smiths who never had a church tie, or who gave up church-going, have allied themselves with Christian Science,—what many of Mrs. Eddy’s followers in familiar talk abbreviate as “Science,” as though Science were the more important half of it. This proves at least that the Smiths are not averse to some sort of spiritual food, or quite clearly demonstrates a dissatisfaction with the food they had formerly received. It proves also that the old childlike faith in miracles is still possible even in ourgeneration. Christian Science struts in robes of prosperity in my bailiwick, and its followers pain and annoy me only by their cheerful assumption that they have just discovered God.
Smith’s plight becomes, then, more serious the more we ponder his case; but the plight of the church is not less grave to those who, feeling that Christianity has still its greatest work to do, are anxious for its rejuvenation. As to whether the church should go to Smith, or Smith should seek the church, there can be no debate. Smith will not seek the church; it must be on the church’s initiative that he is restored to it. The Layman’s Forward Movement testifies to the awakened interest of the churches in Smith. As I pen these pages I pick up a New York newspaper and find on the pages devoted to sports an advertisement signed by the Men and Religion Forward Movement, calling attention to the eight hundred and eighty churches, Protestant and Catholic, and the one hundred and seven synagogues in the metropolis,—the beginning, I believe, of a campaign of advertising on sporting pages. I repeat, that I wish to belittle no honest effort in any quarter or underany auspices to interest men in the spiritual life; but I cannot forbear mentioning that Smith has already smiled disagreeably at this effort to catch his attention. Still, if Smith, looking for the baseball score, is reminded that the church is interested in his welfare, I am not one to sit in the scorner’s seat.
A panacea for the ills of the church is something no one expects to find; and those who are satisfied with the church as it stands, and believe it to be unmenaced by danger,—who see the Will of God manifested even in Smith’s disaffection, will not be interested in my opinion that, of all the suggestions that have been made for the renewal of the church’s life, church union, upon the broadest lines, directed to the increase of the church’s efficiency in spiritual and social service, is the one most likely to bring Smith back to the fold. Moreover, I believe that Smith’s aid should be invoked in the business of unification, for the reason that on patriotic grounds, if no other, he is vitally concerned in the welding of Christianity and democracymore firmly together. Church union has long been the despair and the hope of many sincere, able, and devoted men, who have at heart the best interests of Christendom, and it is impossible that any great number of Protestants except the most bigoted reactionaries can distrust the results of union.
The present crisis—for it is not less than that—calls for more immediate action by all concerned than seems imminent. We have heard for many years that “in God’s own time” union would be effected; and yet union is far from being realized. The difficulty of operating through councils and conventions is manifest. These bodies move necessarily and properly with great deliberation. Before the great branches of Protestantism have reconciled their differences, and agreed upon amodus vivendi, it is quite possible that another ten or twenty years may pass; and in the present state of the churches, time is of the essence of preservation and security.
While we await action by the proposed World Conference for the consideration of questions touching “faith and order,” much can be donetoward crystallizing sentiment favorable to union. A letter has been issued to its clergy by the Episcopal Church, urging such profitable use of the interval of waiting; and I dare say the same spirit prevails in other communions. A purely sentimental union will not suffice, nor is the question primarily one for theologians or denominational partisans, but for those who believe that there is inherent in the method and secret of Jesus something very precious that is now seriously jeopardized, and that the time is at hand for saving it, and broadening and deepening the channel through which it reaches mankind.
In the end, unity, if it ever take practical form, must become a local question. This is certainly true in so far as the urban field is concerned, and I may say in parenthesis that, in my own state, the country churches are already practicing a kind of unification, in regions where the automobile and the interurban railway make it possible for farm and village folk to run into town to church. Many rural churches have been abandoned and boarded up, their congregationsin this way forming new religious and social units. I suggest that in towns and cities where the weaknesses resulting from denominational rivalry are most apparent, the problems of unification be taken up in a purely local way. I propose the appointment of local commissions, representative of all Protestant bodies, to study the question and devise plans for increasing the efficiency of existing churches, and to consider ways and means of bringing the church into vital touch with the particular community under scrutiny. This should be done in a spirit of absolute honesty, without envy, hatred, or malice. The test of service should be applied relentlessly, and every religious society should make an honest showing of its conditions and needs.
Upon the trial-balance thus struck there should be, wherever needed, an entirely new redistribution of church property, based wholly upon local and neighborhood needs. For example, the familiar, badly housed, struggling mission in an industrial centre would be able at once to anticipate the fruits of years of labor, through the elimination of unnecessarychurches in quarters already over-supplied. Not only should body and soul be cared for in the vigorous institutional church, the church of the future, but there is no reason why the programme should not include theatrical entertainments, concerts, and dances. Many signs encourage the belief that the drama has a great future in America, and the reorganized, redistributed churches might well seize upon it as a powerful auxiliary and ally. Scores of motion-picture shows in every city testify to the growing demand for amusement, and they conceal much mischief; and the public dance-house is a notorious breeder of vice.
Let us consider that millions of dollars are invested in American churches, which are, in the main, open only once or twice a week, and that fear of defiling the temple is hardly justification for the small amount of actual service performed by the greater number of churches of the old type. By introducing amusements, the institutional church—the “department church,” if you like—would not only meet a need, but it would thus eliminate many elements of competition. The people living abouta strong institutional church would find it, in a new sense, “a church home.” The doors should stand open seven days in the week to “all such as have erred and are deceived”; and men and women should be waiting at the portals “to comfort and help the weak-hearted; and to raise up those who fall.”
If in a dozen American cities having from fifty thousand to two or three hundred thousand inhabitants, this practical local approach toward union should be begun in the way indicated, the data adduced would at least be of importance to the convocations that must ultimately pass upon the question. Just such facts and figures as could be collected by local commissions would naturally be required, finally, in any event; and much time would be saved by anticipating the call for such reports.
I am familiar with the argument that many sorts of social service are better performed by non-sectarian societies, and we have all witnessed the splendid increase of secular effort in lines feebly attacked and relinquished, as though with a grateful sigh, by the churches. When the Salvation Army’s trumpet and drumfirst sounded in the market-place, we were told that that valiant organization could do a work impossible for the churches; when the Settlement House began to appear in American cities, that, too, was undertaking something better left to the sociologist. Those prosperous organizations of Christian young men and women, whose investment in property in our American cities is now very great, are, also, we are assured, performing a service which the church could not properly have undertaken. Charity long ago moved out of the churches, and established headquarters in an office with typewriter and telephone.
If it is true that the service here indicated is better performed by secular organizations, why is it that the power of the church has steadily waned ever since these losses began? Certainly there is little in the present state of American Protestantism to afford comfort to those who believe that a one-day-a-week church, whose apparatus is limited to a pulpit in the auditorium, and a map of the Holy Land in the Sunday-school room, is presenting a veritable, living Christ to the hearts and imaginations of men.
And on the bright side of the picture it should be said that nothing in the whole field of Christian endeavor is more encouraging or inspiring than an examination of the immense social service performed under the auspices of various religious organizations in New York City. This has been particularly marked in the Episcopal Church. The late Bishop Potter, and his successor in the metropolitan diocese, early gave great impetus to social work, and those who contend that the church’s sole business is to preach the Word of God will find a new revelation of the significance of that Word by a study of the labors of half a dozen parishes that exemplify every hour of every day the possibilities of efficient Christian democracy.
The church has lost ground that perhaps never can be recovered. Those who have established secular settlements for the poor, or those who have created homes for homeless young men and women, can hardly be asked to “pool” and divide their property with the churches. But, verily, even with all the many agencies now at work to ameliorate distress and uplift the fallen, the fields continue white already tothe harvest, and the laborers are few. With the church revitalized, and imbued with the spirit of utility and efficiency so potent in our time, it may plant its wavering banner securely on new heights. It may show that all these organizations that have sapped its strength, and diminished the force of its testimony before men, have derived their inspiration from Him who came out of Nazareth to lighten all the world.
The reorganization of the churches along the line I have indicated would work hardship on many ministers. It would not only mean that many clergymen would find themselves seriously disturbed in positions long held under the old order, but that preparation for the ministry would necessarily be conducted along new lines. The training that now fits a student to be the pastor of a one-day-a-week church would be worthless in a unified and socialized church.
“There are diversities of gifts”; but “it is the same God which worketh all in all.” In the departmental church, with its chapel or temple fitly adorned, the preaching of Christ’s messagewould not be done by a weary minister worn by the thousand vexatious demands upon a minister’s time, but by one specially endowed with the preaching gift. In this way the prosperous congregation would not enjoy a monopoly of good preaching. Men gifted in pastoral work would specialize in that, and the relationship between the church and the home, which has lost its old fineness and sweetness, would be restored. Men trained in that field would direct the undertakings frankly devised to provide recreation and amusement. Already the school-house in our cities is being put to social use; in the branch libraries given by Mr. Carnegie to my city, assembly-rooms and kitchens are provided to encourage social gatherings; and here is another opportunity still open to the church if it hearken to the call of the hour.
In this unified and rehabilitated church of which I speak,—the every-day-in-the-week church, open to all sorts and conditions of men,—what would become of the creeds and the old theology? I answer this first of all by saying that coalition in itself would be a supreme demonstration of the enduring power and glory ofChristianity. Those who are jealous for the integrity of the ancient faith would manifestly have less to defend, for the church would be speaking for herself in terms understood of all men. The seven-day church, being built upon efficiency and aiming at definite results, could afford to suffer men to think as they liked on the virgin birth, the miracles, and the resurrection of the body, if they faithfully practiced the precepts of Jesus.
This busy, helpful, institutional church, welcoming under one roof men of all degrees, to broaden, sweeten, and enlighten their lives, need ask no more of those who accept its service than that they believe in a God who ever lives and loves, and in Christ, who appeared on earth in His name to preach justice, mercy, charity, and kindness. I should not debate metaphysics through a barred wicket with men who needed the spiritual or physical help of the church, any more than my neighbor, Smith, that prince of good fellows, would ask a hungry tramp to saw a cord of wood before he gave him his breakfast.
Questions of liturgy can hardly be a bar, nor can the validity of Christian orders in one bodyor another weigh heavily with any who are sincerely concerned for the life of the church and the widening of its influence. “And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and they shall become one flock, one shepherd.” I have watched ministers in practically every Christian church take bread and break it, and bless the cup, and offer it in the name of Jesus, and I have never been able to feel that the sacrament was not as efficacious when received reverently from one as from another.
If wisdom and goodness are God, then foolish, indeed, is he who would “misdefine these till God knows them no more.” The unified seven-day church would neglect none of “the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith,” in the collecting of tithe of mint and anise and cummin. It would not deny its benefits to those of us who are unblest with deep spiritual perception, for it is by the grace of God that we are what we are. “I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the understanding also: I will sing with the spirit and I will sing with the understanding also. Else if thoubless with the spirit, how shall he that filleth the place of the unlearned say the Amen at thy giving of thanks, seeing he knoweth not what thou sayest?”
“Hath man no second life?—Pitch this one high!Sits there no judge in Heaven our sins to see?—More strictly, then, the inward judge obey!Was Christ a man like us?Ah, let us tryIf we, then, too, can be such men as he!”
“Hath man no second life?—Pitch this one high!Sits there no judge in Heaven our sins to see?—More strictly, then, the inward judge obey!Was Christ a man like us?Ah, let us tryIf we, then, too, can be such men as he!”
“Hath man no second life?—Pitch this one high!
Sits there no judge in Heaven our sins to see?—
More strictly, then, the inward judge obey!
Was Christ a man like us?Ah, let us try
If we, then, too, can be such men as he!”
Somewhere there is a poem that relates the experience of a certain humble priest, who climbed the steeple of his church to commune more nearly with God. And, as he prayed, he heard the Voice answering, and asked, “Where art thou, Lord?” and the Lord replied, “Down here, among my people!”