Humanism and Christianity
McConnell, Francis John, 1871-1953
SS SSS SS NS SSSI AS SS : Sw S S SSS A SSS Ws es ee ee Wey is; ia) y i SST ~~ SS SSG : SS SASS SS NSSCEJKE SSS \ GGCA\#E__A oS < . ~~ SS : SSS SS“ WRANMRO CARRS SS SSeS Uf yy yj Uy, Uf Ys YY, SESSA SSSSGCGCGCOG§_X_ SSE : SSsSQo WSs SSSssgs < \ Vy YI Ey ty SS S WN : A SA Xi @ SSX SSS Ss SCR WSSVT SSS 8 SSSsn SECC RE SSsqQ_ SSS S SG . Rss SKK SS x7 aremont l 1326836 ies of Theology at C Wis l Schoo Theology Library SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY AT CLAREMONT California || | | oe SARI ery } {. “i | | _ f b) te care e ihe G y's rie | i, . L em Lan et Me mn ah al fi ; ; ‘ oN HUMANISM AND CHRISTIANITY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK - BOSTON - CHICAGO - DALLAS ATLANTA + SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., Luntep LONDON + BOMBAY + CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Lap. TORONTO HUMANISM AND CHRISTIANITY BY FRANCIS JOHN McCONNELL Bishop, Methodist Episcopal Church Rew PDork THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1928 All rights reserved wo RS e SS Sv. : nS Nog oe Copyricut, 1928, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published, October, 1928. Umiversity of Seurhern Calitornt, Printed in the United States of America by THE FHRRIS PRINTING COMPANY, NEW YORK TO PRESIDENT EVERETT C. HERRICK WHO AS PASTOR AND TEACHER i. FASHIONS CHRISTIAN INSTRUMENTS FOR THOSE HUMAN ENDS : i, WHICH ARE INCARNATED IN THE DIVINE LIFE PREFACE This book contains a series of lectures given on the Stephen Greene Foundation at the Newton Theological Institution, Newton Centre, Mass., in 1927. The fund was established in 1917 by the family of the late Stephen Greene, one of the great benefactors of Newton. It was their stipulation that “the income from the fund shall be used to secure from time to time the services of scholars prepared to deliver lectures on important subjects related to Christianity in recent history.” For the sake of the convenience of the reader I have divided all the lectures except one into two parts and have given them chapter headings different from the titles of the lectures. Aside from this the material here is substantially the same as that delivered at the Newton Theological Institution. Tue AUTHOR. Pittsburgh, Pa. May 15, 1928. CONTENTS PNT a ee OR Lr oe ae ke Ade Me ACEC PM doi tale Boon? A Ce ie NIT I. Inrropuctory: SCRIPTURAL RELIGION AND THE FleMeAN VALUES. .,/200) ns Sl 2 eee Ul. Tae Cuurch anp tHE Wortp. ... . Ii ME INGTRUMENTALISM  LIGION AND THE HUMAN VALUES It does not require any profound discernment in the ordinary reader to detect the convergence of various lines of thought to-day upon the exaltation of the human values. Mr. Bertrand Russell is re- ported as having recently said that he has slight patience with Kant as a philosopher. Surely there is difference enough between Kant’s philosophy and Bertrand Russell’s, but it is interesting to note that in a discussion of education Mr. Russell insists that the supreme consideration in education is the worth of the personality of the pupil on his own account, that personality being conceived of as the sacred value which the educational process should conserve and develop. As we read this from Rus- sell we cannot help recalling that it was Kant who spoke with more cogency than any other philoso- pher up to the beginning of the nineteenth century on the human being as an end-in-himself, never to be used as stuff or tool, never to be exploited for the benefit of anyone or anything else. This reference to Kant and Russell might be [1] HUMANISM AND CHRISTIANITY paralleled indefinitely by citing other thinkers of all types, economists, students of politics, experts in social study, masters in various professional activities who totally disagree on most points with others even of their own groups, and yet who prac- tically unite on the sacredness of the human being as an end-in-himself. We seldom pick up a maga- zine or a newspaper to-day without coming upon protests of labor groups, for example, who file objection to the laborer’s being considered as a “hand.” The least skilled of workers, the lowest- paid wage-earners maintain that they must be spoken of as men and women, and this claim passes as commonplace virtually everywhere, to be ac- cepted without question, though there is indeed much violation of the claim in practice. It is obvious to the student of Christianity that this emphasis on human worth is in one form or another integral in the Christian system, and was central to the Judaism out of which Christianity arose. ‘There can be little question that it would be possible to rewrite the history of Christian re- ligion, beginning with the origin of its basal con- ceptions among the Jews and continuing down to the present hour, with the development of human life toward the highest and best as the main theme. In fact the religion does not need any such rewrit- ing, for the story as told in the Scriptures carries [2] SCRIPTURAL RELIGION AND THE HUMAN VALUES that message on its face. The Scriptures are the record of a movement that proceeded with a double aim, that of the seizure of increasingly moral con- ceptions of God for the sake of the better moraliza- tion of human life, and that of the grasp of better ideas of morality for man for the sake of the morali- zation of the idea of God. Perhaps I should not speak as if this double aim were conscious and in- tentional. It would probably be closer to historic exactness to say that the life of Israel did move in this twofold direction, whether the movement was deliberately planned by Israelitish leaders or not. Without any attempt fully to trace the course of Israel as to this tendency let us pick out a few in- structive illustrations. We look first at the develop- ment of Israelitish law. Now the laws of Israel are consolidated out of various elements, some of ‘these heathen in their origin, vestiges of paganism which because of their fancied importance or their own interestingness clung fast to Israelitish cus- toms through the centuries. Other factors mani- festly have, or were supposed to have, survival value, as the rules governing ceremonial cleanli- ness. Others are the manifestation of a growing awareness of human worth as such. These latter came somewhat from the simple rudimentary understandings of the worth of the free-handed in‘ dividual as that worth was revealed and developed [3] ———————————— —— HUMANISM AND CHRISTIANITY in the existence in the desert, and somewhat from the words of the moral prophets whose insights after a time became codified in the law. It may be noteworthy that the prophets of the larger and better morality did not lay much stress on argu- ment based on what we should call practical con- sequences. Nor did they make as much use of arbitrarily conceived divine decree as we should have expected. They counted rather upon the creation in Israel of the direct power to discern moral considerations as if they were obvious. Micah puts the whole case for a human and humane religion in the query: What doth the Lord require of thee? Doth he require thy first-born for trans- gression? The prophet assumed that there was in Israel enough of direct moral perception to reject human sacrifice as soon as the question as to the nature of such sacrifice was openly put. The coming of Israel to Canaan, we are often reminded, was like a countryman’s moving into town to make his residence there. The land of Canaan flowed with milk and honey. To speak in our modern terms, there were in this diet more calories than the children of Israel were accustomed to, and naturally they tended to wax fat. We are told that Jeshurun, which I believe is another name for Israel, waxed fat and kicked. We do not usually think of fat people as prone to much kick- [4] YR SS A EET ESS SE ETE RE SCRIPTURAL RELIGION AND THE HUMAN VALUES ing, but what Jeshurun probably kicked about was the prophetic suggestion that he should cut down on the milk and honey that made him fat. In a word, the fuller material life into which Israel came brought with it a hazard to those moral quali- ties which suggest a type of lean and strenuous moral fervor, that fervor itself being a noble human quality. So Elijah appears to start the long war- fare against a religion which deified the animal im- pulses in man, a deification which was then result- ing in the steady degradation of human character and the disregard for human rights. We have only to read passages here and there from the Old Tes- tament prophets to discern the cruelty and aberra- tions which flowed from Israel’s too complete ac- ceptance of the Canaanitish teaching concerning the sanctity of natural activities. Sexual irregu- . larities of the most abominable order, and even the sacrificial slaughter of the first-born, time and again got foothold in Israel through the preaching of the religion of the baals, the gods of fertile fields and flocks. Now, whenever a moral prophet appears in Israel he speaks always as one testing the life of the time by a human ideal which has back of it a sanction of the Lord. In Amos’s figure we see a plummet line which symbolizes that straightness which men were to keep before them as they ap- [5] HUMANISM AND CHRISTIANITY proached the duties of just dealing one with an- other. I remember once hearing a distinguished artist discussing the decay of a fellow craftsman whose artistic excellence had fallen off after years of dishonesty and perfidy in daily conduct. 'The critic summed it all up in a sentence or two. “After a decade of dishonesty our friend lost his power to use the straight line. His work became tawdry, full of over-elaborate curves, suggestive of jim- cracks and gewgaws. The simplicity of the straight line was no longer his.” Every time we listen to a Hebrew prophet we feel that he is calling for the straight line, and straight lines are only possible, in thought and feeling and conduct, to the morally disciplined. Think of one or two statesmen in the course of Israel’s history. Isaiah gazes out upon the ap- proaching armies of Assyria and is confident that Assyria cannot capture Jerusalem. Now we may pore over the speeches of Isaiah with the closest scrutiny and we cannot find any indication that Isaiah conceived of Jerusalem as sacred in itself, or that he fancied that the Lord of Israel was in- dulgently showing favor to Jerusalem. He thought in moral terms. The moral and spiritual values for whose preservation Jerusalem was at the given hour an indispensable instrument were uppermost with Isaiah. Hurrying on to a little later period [6] nS LE TE LT EE SCRIPTURAL RELIGION AND THE HUMAN VALUES we find Jeremiah advocating a policy which ‘in our current terminology would be called defeatist. Jeremiah was badly treated by his patriotic con- temporaries, but probably not as badly as if he could have lived at the time of our Great War and have preached a message to any one of the warring nations similar to that which he proclaimed in the sixth century before Christ. Jeremiah, speaking with his characteristic directness to any one of the belligerent nations between 1914 and 1918, would have been fortunate to escape being stood against a wall and shot. He had so firmly grasped the worth of the individual as capable of receiving divine truth that he was willing to see Jerusalem destroyed and the inhabitants thereof carried away to Babylon for the sake of the better grasp on the moral and spiritual ideals which he perceived as the final glory of Israel. Glance now at one or two books of Israelitish origin which we to-day characterize as almost purely literary. Turn for a moment the pages of Job. What is most remarkable about this astound- ing drama? The theme is indeed the weightiest which up to the time of the author had engaged human reflection, namely, the undeserved suffering of innocent men at the hands of God. Job made a long advance beyond contemporaneous Jewish the- ology in forcing religious teachers to recognize that a HUMANISM AND CHRISTIANITY their explanation of human suffering as punish- ment for transgression was inadequate and even perverse. In spite of the self-sufficient wisdom of his advisers who sought to apply to him the cus- tomary orthodoxy, Job swept the advisers and their advice to one side, with the sarcastic comment that surely wisdom would die with them but that their counsel was wrong. Job had walked in his integrity and he knew it. The book does not give any answer to its own question, but it does repre- sent the hero of the drama as persisting until he compels God Himself to appear and plead the divine case. In a word, an outstanding feature of this wonderful book is the assumption that Job as a human being is important enough in his own human right and on his own human account to force the Almighty not merely to listen to a human complaint but to make reply. Job seems to be satisfied when the Almighty himself appears in court. If he can believe that God hears and will answer he is willing to forego his demand for an understandable explanation. The assumption in Job that God has something which he must explain to men, and that men can call God to a reckoning, is one of the mightiest revelations of Israel’s hold on the worth of men. Permit one other illustration from the Old Tes- tament. ‘The Book of Jonah is likewise noteworthy [8] Oe —————————————————— SCRIPTURAL RELIGION AND THE HUMAN VALUES for its assumption that a man has a right to file complaint against God himself, and to argue out his case with God. Of course Jonah’s argument is pitifully weak, but the weakness itself lends point to the story. Any modern judge would rule out such pleading as an almost contemptible whining. Jonah, though belonging to the chosen people, ap- pears in bad light as over against the heathen sailors at the time of storm, and as contrasted with the eagerly repentant pagans who hearkened to the preaching at Nineveh. It almost seems as if the Book of Jonah were trying to teach that a man can say anything to God with impunity. The argu- ment of Jonah is so flimsy as to constitute it a veritable contempt of the Divine Court. Against this spiritual smallness however as a foil, is set the divine regard for the Ninevites as human beings. There is a suggestion almost whimsical in the final touch as to the care of God for men—God having regard also for the “much cattle”—as if the goods which men held as valuable for their daily existence had on that account also value in the sight of God. It would be futile to attempt the task of ade- quately stating the significance of Jesus for the human ideal. Suffice it to say that the Church has always acted upon a sound instinct when insisting upon the full humanity in our Lord, that humanity being conceived of as a channel through which the [9] HUMANISM AND CHRISTIANITY deepest truth about God can be poured upon men. The power of the Incarnation lies just in that it is an incarnation, a utilization of human nature and human existence for the essential revelation of the Divine. The Apostles’ Creed, which we now recite to confirm our belief in the Divinity of Jesus, originally sought to establish his humanity. The framers of the creed strove to give lasting expres- sion to the facts that Jesus was born, and that he did suffer, and did die—three experiences which no human being can escape—all the experiences sig- nificant enough to be royal avenues through which divine life moves into human life. If I may be pardoned something of sketchiness of treatment, may I in the next chapter attempt to show that the intent of the Church of Christ, in three or four of her perennially recurring attitudes toward the world in which Christianity exists, has always been to safeguard human values which the religious intuition of the Scriptures has seized as indispensable. If I may, I will look at these atti- tudes in some of their present-day manifestations. [ 10] Cuapter II THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD We are living in a day when the fundamental Christian aim is fairly well agreed upon. We now hear from all sides that the distinctiveness of Chris- tianity lies in its approach to the problems of man and the universe from the ethical point of view. Christendom is not more widely religious, or more intensively pious, than are some of the so-called non-Christian lands. The peculiarity of Chris- tianity is in emphasis on ethical obligation, and on the ideal which it takes as the goal of moral effort— that ideal being human life at its highest and best. Christianity is not to be called moral as devoted to a code of abstract ethical requirements, but as feel- ing an ethical obligation to set before the world the highest and best life for men. This life for men is conceived of as revealed, or suggested, or implied in Christ, the revelation of that Revelation con- stantly expanding as men take it upon themselves to live in the spirit of Christ. The question, then, as to what is humanly highest and best becomes a standard by which the Church is to judge its course at any given period. [11] LL HUMANISM AND CHRISTIANITY Over against the Church is set what has from the beginning been called the “World.” It would be folly for me to attempt to define this constantly used term. We have often linked together the World, the Flesh and the Devil, practically making the expressions synonymous and interchangeable. At other times we have spoken of the world as the realm of the natural, or of the secular. For our purposes we may think of the world as the sum of those natural forces, and those secular activities, which it is the duty of the Church to attempt to redeem. We have long talked of the world as the subject of redemption, but our age is insisting as never before that this redemption be taken seri- ously by the Church. It will be remembered that in the last generation religious teachers of the type of Mr. Moody conceived of the world as a sinking ship from which it was the duty of the Church to rescue as many individuals as possible. Now we conceive of the world as a ship to be saved, the total of institutional forces being redeemed throughout. Reinhold Niebuhr has cogently shown us that the Church has from the beginning of its history taken various attitudes toward this huge problem. As we read through Mr. Niebuhr’s statement we are struck by the consideration that each of these diverse attitudes has had back of it at the time a sound human instinct, namely, the conservation of [12] THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD the highest moral and spiritual interests of man- kind. The range of such attitudes is not large. Without confining ourselves to Mr. Niebuhr’s scheme of treatment let us look at the conscious or unconscious proneness of the Church to test its ever-recurring attitudes toward the world by the moral ideals of Christianity. The question is simply as to how these attitudes appear when judged by their effect on the largest and finest life of the men and women and children whose spiritual welfare is the concern of Christianity. First of all there have been times when the Church has preached, or inculcated by its own ex- ample, the duty of men to take the world just about as they find it and make of it the best possible use. Human beings live in this world and living itself means adaptation and adjustment. Men must find some scheme of practical conduct, and some method of intellectual adjustment which will make it pos- sible for them, if not to attain to the peace that passeth understanding, at least to win a measure of peace that can be understood. It has always been an obligation upon the Church to help in such ad- justment. Men feel that instincts, or impulses, or stimuli, or whatever the psychologist chooses to call the life forces, have at least to a degree, right of way. To a degree they must be accepted, We cannot help yielding ourselves to them. [13] HUMANISM AND CHRISTIANITY Christianity has always taken this actual world as one of the many mansions of the Father’s house, and has sought to adorn the house with some meas- ure of spiritual beauty. We have it on high author- ity that that was not first which was spiritual, but that which was natural, and afterwards that which was spiritual. The body of natural and even secular forces, into the midst of which we are born, constitutes the material on the basis of which the highest and best life is to be built up. Practically nobody denies this to-day. Our attempts through child-nurture and the control of the yeasty spiritual ferment in the period of adolescence, to say noth- ing of our efforts at education of lives in later stages, show how thoroughly we have accepted the life that now is as a basis for redemptive effort. It has become a commonplace with us that natural laws reach far over into spiritual realms. Quite likely a good deal of current restlessness over miracle springs not from an irreligious but from a religious temper; it is the desire to find and com- mune with the Divine in the ordinary orderliness of the forces of everyday life. We have gone far, at least in our speech, to wipe out the distinction between secular and sacred. A wise adage tells us however that wearing our Sunday clothes every day comes at last to wearing our everyday clothes on Sunday. It is not possible [ 14] Pe ene THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD to sanctify the secular without to an extent secular- izing the sacred. So after seasons of adjustment in the world in all ages the Church sees that the entirely legitimate recognition of the function of the world in human life militates against some of those higher and better goods for men for which Christianity stands. We need only a glance at the history of our religion to see that the service ren- dered by the prophets of all eras has been in the rebuke of such pressure of this world against the higher human interests. Just at present we are hearing a deal about let- ting ourselves go in self-expression for the purpose of self-realization. This advice seems to move in the direction of something very fine for humanity. The self-expression movement is not new. We have about reached the place where Christianity will call attention again to a few elementary human considerations. It ought to be fairly obvious that self-expression is a bit futile until there is a self to express, and to attain a self to express requires at least a minimum of vigorous discipline. Much of this futile self-expression is not in itself morally wrong, but it is a nuisance to those who have to put up with the expression. I do not feel any tendency to check any of the self-expression of to-day except when the self-expressionists insist that I must stop. my work to look at them, or when they keep bawl- [15] HUMANISM AND CHRISTIANITY ing out their self-expressions where I have to hear them. Freedom of speech on the part of a speaker has to be balanced in any democratic community by the freedom of the listeners not to listen, and the exercise of the freedom not to listen is hotly re- sented by the free speakers. My personal incon- venience to one side however, we may well surmise that the time is about ripe for the Church again to utter a prophetic voice to the effect that self-reali- zation of the kind we hear so much about does not realize much. To glance at the realm of intellect alone, for illustration, we all have to admit that the conceptions which give us our stupendous control of nature are mathematical. The table of loga- rithms is one of the most effective time-saving de- vices ever contrived. The control of physical forces has been made possible in chief part by mathe- matical inventions like the calculus. If we were summoned to name the half dozen most important intellectual achievements of the human race in its mastery of the natural world we should have to confine our list almost wholly to fundamentally mathematical conquests. Now I do not know how the mathematical genius works, but his published formulas do not seem to me to hint that in his seizure of them he had riotously let himself go. In other words the highest human achievements, as achievements, are possible only as we continue to [ 16] THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD put check on the lower impulses in the name of the higher. When Christianity has realized time and again the danger of yielding to the forces of this world even in what has seemed at the beginning innocent adjustment, Christian leaders have cried out that the Church always must be militant, that the cor- rect attitude of the Church to the world is that of resistance. The world must be looked upon as the inevitable foe of the Church, if we are to save out of our experiences the moral values good on their own account. There are reasons why this militancy must always be an attitude of the Church. There is no discharge in the war of a church against the forces of evil. Still, we need the prophet’s voice to remind us that when we start out to fight the world the danger is that we shall use the world’s own weapons, and that using those weapons we become worldly at the expense of the highest and best in our souls. One curse of any warfare is that it has a downhill tendency in the use of weapons. In a life-and-death fistic encounter for his own self- preservation a high-minded gentleman might find himself reduced to biting and gouging because his [17] pues EE TS ST a HUMANISM AND CHRISTIANITY blackguard opponent bit and gouged. The meaner fighter too often chooses the weapon. I knew the late William Jennings Bryan to make once a happy retort to a heckler on this very point. Mr. Bryan was pleading for higher and nobler political methods in American public life. An impatient realist in the audience finally found it impossible to restrain himself, and called out asking if we ought not to fight the devil with fire. With the utmost good humor Mr. Bryan walked to the edge of the platform and replied: “My friend, I don’t believe Id try to fight the devil with fire if I were you. In the first place the devil knows more about fire than you do, and in the next place it costs him less for fuel.” Mr. Bryan might have added that the only way a man can become as effective as the devil in fighting with fire is to attain to a devilish skill in such methods and by that time the humanity of the fire-user is considerably singed. Christianity’s fighting the world is wholly legiti- mate so long as the methods are Christian. I think - we can all agree upon some essentially Christian methods,—the unflinching proclamation in pro- phetic speech of the Christian ideal, the attempt to train minds to quick discernment of moral truth, the effort to persuade men to follow the best. Sid- ney and Beatrice Webb have said that Measure- ment and Publicity are the best weapons for social [ 18] SS —————————————— THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD redemption, precise estimate according to a stand- ard and the publication of the results. The Webbs were thinking of statistical measurements, but the Church has standards which it can use with increas- ing precision—and it has organs of publicity. Any- thing beyond this, lobbying, propaganda, political maneuvers, may well be subjected to prophetic scrutiny. When however the Church has relied upon political methods, as ordinarily understood, and upon propaganda, she has had to keep her eyes wide open as to what she has been doing. Through- - out all the ages the Church has made the sorriest messes of things, and the worst exhibitions of her- self, when she has tried to use the world’s weapons against the world. The weapons of the world can seldom be used effectively except in the world’s spirit, and that spirit at least points away from all ideals which can be characterized by the name of Christ. There is always pressing duty of the scrutiny of the methods by which Christianity seeks to conquer the world. The immediate effectiveness of the methods is not the first consideration. ‘The crucial test is the effect of the world’s weapons upon the church that uses them. Developing moral life shows itself in increasing fineness of moral feeling, a feeling which simply evaporates when coarseness marks ecclesiastical method. Once more the Church, discouraged in its at- [19] HUMANISM AND CHRISTIANITY tempts to make legitimate use of the world on the one hand, or to conquer the world by ecclesiastic militancy on the other, has again and again sought relief by preaching the doctrine of withdrawal from the world altogether, and the establishment of a society which, while in the world, is not of the world. We see in monasticism the most logical manifestations of this withdrawal spirit. Many times we forget the transcendent human goods held fast by monasticism because of the more absurd lengths to which some monastics went. 'The mood which leads to withdrawal is ever recurring. A year or two ago some leaders of what was once the established church in Germany were plunged into despair as to the possibility of the accomplishment by the Church of any world-redeeming success. These leaders felt that, after a war such as the World War and after the kind of peace that fol- lowed that war, all the Church could do was to step to one side and let the world go by, the Church itself retiring to the inward contemplation of divine truth. This mood ever and again comes upon men, and there was enough in the world situation which called forth Monasticism in the olden times and in the German conditions after the World War to justify the mood. Apart from such despair of the world, however, we must always encourage the willingness on the [ 20 ] SS THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD part of at least a few to let the world go by, in the name of the higher goods. Something akin to this is recognized as of sound educational policy in the conduct of universities and other centers of learn- ing. Scholars of unusual ability are encouraged to seek truth for its own sake, without any regard to the practical results which may follow from dis- covery. Such scholars themselves often seem totally blind to what is going forward in the work- a-day world. To such scholars life often becomes solitary, as bare of luxuries as a monk’s cell. To be sure such absorbed pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge itself is likely to be followed by the most far-reaching practical consequences, but the scholar is not thinking of the consequences, but only of the knowledge. He finds his delight in the thrill of learning itself, and of course achieves in himself extraordinarily rare character, a char- acter which the world simply cannot afford to lose or ignore. If the realm of learning is thus dependent upon the production of such unusual incarnations of the scholarly spirit, the world of moral endeavor in the strictest sense must likewise have those who seek the good life for its own sake and on its own ac- count. That was an acute remark recently uttered by Professor A. E. Taylor, of Scotland, when he declared that modern civilization owes an incal- [ 21 ] HUMANISM AND CHRISTIANITY culable debt to a man who cared nothing at all for civilization, namely, Saint Francis of Assisi. Here was one who defied the world outright in utter con- tempt for what the world called good. Yet this impractical saint realized in himself and set on high for all ages an ideal which has influenced the course of civilization ever since. Saint Francis lived al- most a thousand years ago, and yet books drop from the press almost every year telling of what he was, and what he has meant to the world. The Church is indeed fortunate when a man of the Saint Francis stamp appears, and when increasing numbers of adherents enter in, if only for brief period, to the spirit of Saint Francis. Here again however the victory over the world is seldom complete. One ideal for enlarging human character is to hold the natural forces so easily and yet so effectively in hand that they do not thrust themselves into consciousness for larger place than they deserve. The world has a way of taking deep revenge on him who seeks to ignore it altogether. It is as if one should seek to protest against glut- tony by declaring a fast for himself, or by resolv- ing to take only enough food to keep soul and body together. The outcome of such heroism would be that pictures of food-laden tables would haunt the imagination of the ascetic more inescapably than that of the glutton. So that there must be preached [ 22] ee Se ee THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD such an absorption in the higher goods that sec- ondary matters take only secondary place. The danger in the withdrawal from the world is in losing sight of healthy-mindedness as a condition of the deeper spiritual insights. Walliam James did not rank healthy-mindedness high in the scale as a prerequisite of religious discernment, but James was using the term for an almost physical state, or for a temper in which the maxims of com- mon sense appeared to be the sum of wisdom. Healthy-mindedness in the intellectual realm is what Matthew Arnold called power to see truth steadily and to see it whole. In artistic endeavor it shows itself in such fundamentals as an appre- ciation of the basic design of a creation. Artistic freakishness shows itself in lack of symmetry, or in defiance of principles which govern each detail of painting or sculpture as surely as the law of gravi- tation rules the curve of the ribs in the roof of a Gothic cathedral. So too in those central problems which we call moral, healthy-mindedness reveals itself in an awareness of the essential around which minor details arrange themselves in satisfactory perspective. The duty of the Church has always been more or less conceived to be to encourage the brooding contemplation in which the various as- pects of life arrange themselves around that center which we know as the Spirit of Christ. In her [ 23] re) HUMANISM AND CHRISTIANITY search for moral truth the Church has sought to make provision for the thoroughly human way of arriving at truth. A year or two ago Graham Wallas wrote a suggestive book entitled The Art of Thought, in which he pulled out into sharp focus the necessity of what he called the period of incu- bation for any genuine thinking. By incubation he meant this brooding of which I am now speaking. If it is necessary for schools to seek to create the conditions in which intellectual incubation takes place, how much more sound has it been for Chris- tianity to insist upon opportunity for a like process in the development of any saintliness which is at all human. The Church has always insisted that there must be seasons of withdrawal from the world for pur- poses of worship. It is well that we hear to-day so much about the imperative necessity of worship. Our theological students are being told that wor- ship must be made the essential in our modern church services. Even in much of our church building we are putting the pulpit off to one side that the altar may come to its due prominence. But the Church has always asked: How are we to con- ceive of all this in fundamentally human terms? How much of the genuinely ethical is there in it? A. distinguished religious teacher has recently told us that there need not be anything especially ethical _ [ 24] | pn 5 SE os | THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD in worship at all. This leads us to surmise that if we drop the strenuously moral out of our Christian service we may go a long distance toward Pagan- ism. Paganism is worshipful enough. To be sure it is unreasonable to ask a worshiper to define with any strictness the object, or the method, or the spirit of his worship, but if worship is to be the Christian essential we have a right to press for an answer as to how we are to conceive of it in moral terms. I once knew a worshiper to leave a cathe- dral with his face alight with an ecstatic glow. The ecstasy proved to be esthetic delight over the beauty of the tints in a stained glass window. I knew another worshiper almost to be carried out of himself by the glorious peals of a magnificent organ. Certainly I should be churlish if I entered objection to any of this. The world is richer be- cause of such sensitive spirits, but this kind of worship is compatible with utter indifference to many of the Christian ethical essentials, though my saying so will seem like esthetic blasphemy to many a beauty-loving soul. Still, the development and exercise in the worshiper of the appreciation of beauty is, as far as it goes, clear gain as compared with the vacuous mooning about which some fre- quenters of churches have seemed to conceive of as worship. As a last field for illustration we look at the pur- pose of the Church throughout the centuries in her converting, missionary zeal. Here we find indeed that the Church has not always been animated by the highest goal in her attempt to extend her borders. There has at times been more apprecia- tion of the need of extending the borders of the Church as an institution than of lifting men to a higher life. Nevertheless, the demand that the converted men, or the converted agencies, be larger and better after conversion than before has always [ 26 ] ! i 5 Dene ee THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD been implied in the Church’s efforts to save the world. It is a peculiarity of Christian experience in any realm that the experience leaves the man larger after a crisis than before. Our Master’s term new “birth” suggests inevitably the entrance into a world of larger life. A birth into a smaller sphere than that from which one came could hardly be looked upon as a birth at all. Perhaps conversion is, when all is said, the most Christian of words, especially if we can guard against the narrowing tendencies that sometimes gather around it. If we take our Christianity seri- ously all our phrases have to be loaded with the implications which reach out toward increasing life. What is the mark of a genuinely Christian inspira- tion, what but the increased vitality and energy and quality of the inspired life? The old-time mistake as to the inspiration of the Scriptures, for example, had for its chief shortcoming that it tended to make men less instead of more. The more seriously one took the dogma of literal mechanical transmission in Scriptural revelations the meaner became our conceptions of the men to whom such revelation had to be made. No play was left for spiritual experiment, for testing out religious truth in life. The revelation was there and men could take it or leave it, and the most of them left it. A legitimate [ 27] SE TLE EL EP TG HUMANISM AND CHRISTIANITY instinctive resentment marks the attitude of men toward such alleged infallibilities. In one fashion or another the Church has always found a way to hold that rare and fine human qualities must some- how root in the Divine. It is instructive to con- template the lengths to which the Church will go to save goodness, wherever found, for the kingdom of heaven. Even in the periods when the Church insisted upon sharp lines of division between the saved and the unsaved, she usually found a way of claiming all the good men as citizens of the kingdom of heaven. Of course there is no denying that in her formal utterances the Church has not abated a jot nor a tittle of her insistence upon the definiteness of the separating line, but nevertheless the representatives of the Church have always drawn back from the assertion that a humanly good man is doomed to perdition. How often has the Church marked the close of the career of a humanly helpful self-sacrificing “outsider” with expressions of willingness to leave such cases in the “hands of God,” which of course has meant that in the last analysis God would use some other standard of classification than that which the Church had set up. 