Gospel ^ Work 
 In Modern Life 
 
 ROBERT WHITAKER 
 
GIFT OF 
 
/ 
 
 ^ 
 
 
 
 
 
De 6<wl at Ulork 
 
 in 
 
 modern Cife 
 
Che Gospel at Klerk 
 
 in 
 
 modern Life 
 
 By 
 Robert ttfbitaker 
 
 Philadelphia 
 
 tbe Griffith $ Rowland Press 
 
 Boston Chicago 
 
 St. Louis 
 
Copyright 1910 by 
 A. J. ROWLAND, Secretary 
 
 Published August, 1910 
 
PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 THE social influence of Christianity is being recog- 
 nized to-day in a manner and to a degree that would 
 surprise Christian workers of a generation ago. In 
 keeping with this tendency, the Baptist Young 
 People's Union of America has arranged its courses 
 of study to provide for the needs of young people 
 in the direction of this new emphasis of Christian 
 thought. The purpose of this book is to serve as 
 studies in the Sacred Literature Course in young 
 people's societies. The subject has been chosen 
 because of its practical character, and the relation 
 of its parts to individual life. 
 
 It is a matter of gratification to the Committee to 
 be able to offer to young people's societies the course 
 of studies in this book, at the same time so practical, 
 so timely, and so deeply interesting. The author, 
 who has given much of his life to a consideration 
 of the questions discussed and has won for himself 
 a reputation for thoroughness and candor, has 
 herein given some of his best thoughts in a most 
 pleasing style. 
 
 The course has been shortened in respect to the 
 number of lessons, so that it now consists of twelve 
 instead of twenty or twenty-five as in former years. 
 
 GEORGE T. WEBB. 
 
 320255 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGB 
 
 I. THE MODERN CHRISTIAN'S PROBLEMS.. 9 
 
 II. THE GOSPEL THAT WORKS 20 
 
 III. DEVELOPMENT, A CHRISTIAN'S FIRST 
 
 DUTY 31 
 
 IV. THE GOSPEL AND WORSHIP 42 
 
 V. THE GOSPEL AND HOME CONDUCT 53 
 
 VI. THE GOSPEL WORKING IN THE CHURCH 64 
 
 VII. THE GOSPEL WORKING FOR SOCIAL BET- 
 TERMENT 75 
 
 VIII. THE GOSPEL WORKING FOR KINGDOM 
 
 EXPANSION 86 
 
 IX. THE GOSPEL'S MODERN MIRACLES 96 
 
 X. THE GOSPEL IN BUSINESS. 107 
 
 XI. THE GOSPEL AND RECREATIONS 118 
 
 XII. THE GOSPEL AND HOME MAKING 129 
 
THE GOSPEL AT WORK 
 IN MODERN LIFE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE MODERN CHRISTIANAS PROBLEMS 
 
 IN the large library room of the Leland Stanford, 
 Jr., University, at Palo Alto, Cal., at almost any 
 hour of the day, several score of students may be 
 found conning their lessons, making notes, or 
 browsing over some book just withdrawn from the 
 adjacent shelves. High above them, on the western 
 wall, is a large art-glass window, whence the light 
 falls upon the bowed heads of the students from 
 the benignant face of a medieval saint, Thomas a 
 Kempis, the reputed author of the best-known 
 book of devotional meditations which the Christian 
 centuries have produced. The garb and face alike 
 proclaim the monk, and the presence there of the 
 great ascetic's figure is sufficient reminder to those 
 at all familiar with the words of his confession, 
 printed under his picture in one of the galleries of 
 the Old World : " Everywhere I sought quiet, and 
 found it nowhere else than in solitude and amongst 
 books." 
 
 Could the old monk himself take the place for 
 an hour of that calm, illuminated face which, in 
 
 9 
 
io The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 immovable complacency, looks down upon the Stan- 
 ford students of this very modern world, after what 
 manner would his meditations move to-day? How 
 would he write now for the young men and young 
 women coming and going in the reading-room be- 
 low concerning his great theme, " The imitation of 
 Christ ? " Or what have all the changes that have 
 come to pass in the four hundred and forty years 
 since he died to do with the working of the gospel 
 in the lives of men? 
 
 It may be granted that it was no dull age in 
 which Thomas a Kempis lived, and that his was not 
 an average life. 'He was contemporary with John 
 Hus, and Jerome of Prague, and Savonarola, men 
 of very different temper from his, borne through a 
 far more tempestuous career. Gutenberg, to whom 
 the invention of the art of printing is generally 
 allowed, shared the century with a Kempis, and 
 printed his first Bible about twenty years before 
 a Kempis died. It was the age of the " Maid of 
 Orleans " in France, of " The Wars of the Roses " 
 in England, of the famous or infamous Medici 
 family in Italy, and the closing years of a Kempis 
 saw the fateful marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella 
 in Spain. With none of these things did a Kempis 
 concern himself, and they might have happened 
 upon another planet so far as the great mystic had 
 to do with them. But whether we think of the 
 monk, a Kempis, or of the martyr, Hus, or of the 
 soldier-saint, Joan of Arc, or of any other of the 
 
The Modern Christian's Problems II 
 
 remembered figures of four and more centuries ago, 
 as looking down from that sunset window upon the 
 youth of our time, we are thinking of men and 
 women almost as far away from the things that 
 interest and perplex us as we seem ourselves to the 
 sober minded among us from actual intercourse 
 and exchange of ideas with the hypothetical in- 
 habitants of Mars. 
 
 We are not seeking quiet now, and few of us are 
 seeking solitude. Our very books have become the 
 clamorous voices of the unrest of our day. Our 
 ideal of the saintly life has changed. We reverence 
 the mystics, in art glass, but our own heart's saints 
 are the men of strenuous life. We read the words 
 of a Kempis somewhat as we look upon the window 
 there, touched with the glory of the westering sun, 
 with a certain sensitive enjoyment of its rich color- 
 ing and artistic lines, feeling in a way the delicate 
 hues of his words and the fine tracery of his thought. 
 But we turn from it all to our tasks which are 
 lighted after all by the colder light that flows in 
 through unadorned windows, or perchance the 
 nearer glow of the electric light. And sometimes 
 the " imitation of Christ " seems itself as unreal as 
 the figures wrought in art glass yonder on the 
 walls, and as far removed from the conditions of 
 our ordinary life as the glowing electric bulb from 
 the shadowy cell of the medieval monk. 
 
 It is fortunate for our faith that there is a greater 
 distance between Jesus and a Kempis than there is 
 
12 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 between a Kempis and us. At first the distance 
 seems to our disadvantage, for in point of time 
 Jesus is farther away yet. But not in point of con- 
 tact with our lives. Jesus was no ascetic. He lived 
 his life emphatically among men. He was with 
 them at the wedding feast, and dined familiarly 
 with them at the banquet table. The plowman, the 
 sower, and the harvester, the fisherman, and all the 
 common round of daily toil and ordinary interests 
 furnished him with the imagery of his speech. The 
 common people heard him gladly because he was 
 of their number and kept always his intimacy with 
 their lives. He was called " a wine-bibber and a 
 glutton " by reason of his easy and natural associ- 
 ations with the rich, and " a friend of publicans and 
 sinners " by reason of his democratic associations 
 with the poor. Jesus was preeminently a " mixer " 
 among men. This was more than half of his offen- 
 siveness to the professionally religious of his day. 
 It is increasingly his attractiveness to the men and 
 women of our time who have discernment enough 
 to pierce the thinner atmosphere of religious pro- 
 fessionalism now. 
 
 Yet, even Jesus is far away from the modern 
 Christian's problems if we do not guard ourselves 
 as to what we mean by the " imitation of Christ." 
 It is not enough that we do not mean an imitation 
 of a Kempis rather than Christ. It is easy enough 
 to see that the issue is not for us, How shall we 
 live the life of Thomas a Kempis to-day? There 
 
The Modern Christian s Problems 13 
 
 may have been much to excuse it and justify it in 
 the age in which a Kempis lived. But neither for 
 that age nor for any other age was it the life which 
 Jesus lived. It was radically different in principle. 
 The ideal of a Kempis was isolation. The ideal of 
 Jesus was incarnation. Thomas a Kempis did not 
 imitate Jesus. He did but imitate certain moods and 
 tenses of the Christian life. And there is danger 
 even in the imitation of Jesus himself if we mistake 
 the letter of his example for the lordship of his 
 spirit and his life. Jesus' teaching is just as vital 
 for us in substance as it was for the men and women 
 with whom he shared the fashions and customs of a 
 distant day. His was the timelessness of absolute 
 truth. It is part of his timelessness that he spoke 
 little of the " problems " of his own generation. But 
 his life was, nevertheless, of that generation. The 
 very humanness with which he lived, and the fact 
 that he spoke not according to the abstractions of 
 mystics or philosophers, but in the terms of every- 
 day life as he actually saw it, and shared it, compel 
 us to go behind the letter of his saying and doing 
 if we are to translate his truth into a like union with 
 the life of our day. He saved the life of his age by 
 entering into it and becoming part of it. We shall 
 not save the life of our generation by getting away 
 from it in the effort to realize closer fellowship with 
 him through an impossible union with conditions 
 which have long since passed away. His ideal for 
 us is neither the isolation of the medieval monk, nor 
 
14 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 the imitation of the forms of his own earthly min- 
 istry, but the transfusion of his life into us and 
 through us into the forms and customs and insti- 
 tutions of our day. Thomas a Kempis would make 
 candles of us all, burning in golden candlesticks of 
 secluded devotion before the altars of a dead Christ. 
 Jesus would make of every one of us a " live wire " 
 in our own generation, electric with the divine grace 
 and goodness which were in him, carrying the 
 might and mystery of the heavens to the humblest 
 hamlet in the land with a glow which the palaces 
 of the past could not command, and drawing from 
 every river and rivulet of the rushing life of our 
 time the power which men of old worshiped with 
 fearful faces afar off as it flashed and thundered in 
 the skies, that we may minister of and through that 
 power to the enlargement and enrichment of all the 
 life of the world. 
 
 Therefore, the foremost problem of the modern 
 Christian is the Christian's first problem in every 
 generation to translate the timeless truth of Jesus, 
 not the temporary forms of that truth, into the most 
 convincing and commanding terms of contemporary 
 life. And it is especially the problem of youth, be- 
 cause to youth especially belongs the life of to-day. 
 
 The problem has always been both one and many. 
 It was never so manifold and complex as it is to-day. 
 Life has always met youth and faith with the chal- 
 lenge of change and enlargement. But the change 
 was never so rapid and so varied, and the enlarge- 
 
The Modern Christian's Problems 15 
 
 ment never so trying to judgment and courage as 
 is the case in this century in which we live. Often 
 and again there has been need of intellectual re- 
 adjustment to meet the conditions of expanding 
 knowledge. It was even before the beginnings of 
 Christianity that one wrote the familiar complaint, 
 " Of making many books there is no end, and much 
 study is a weariness of the flesh." Yet, for every 
 student the world knew then, it knows a thousand 
 now, and we burn up more printed matter every 
 morning in starting our fires than all the laborious 
 copyists of that ancient day could write down from 
 year's end to year's end. If the discoveries of a 
 Galileo seemed to the men of the medieval world 
 to threaten the very foundations of the faith, what 
 of the vastly more disturbing upheavals which have 
 broken the crust of every province of education in 
 our time, and tumbled down great cities of pains- 
 takingly builded traditions wherein men have lived 
 and wrought for centuries? If the world of 
 thought was stirred to restlessness when the pio- 
 neers of research went forth a day's journey with 
 their ox-cart conveyances into the unexplored 
 regions beyond their Alleghanies what of convic- 
 tion and conjecture now when men pass from sea to 
 sea within a week and investigation goes with the 
 swiftness and force of a modern express train, or 
 challenges the lightness and celerity of the birds in 
 their own atmosphere? Never was the problem 
 so acute as it is to-day for those who would keep 
 
1 6 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 their faith and would keep also abreast of knowl- 
 edge. Never was it so easy to throw old truth 
 away by reason of the pressure of new opinioa 
 Never did the fellowship with Jesus require such 
 nice discrimination as it does now on the intellectual 
 side between the changing terms in which we think 
 of all externals from documents to doctrines and 
 the essential changelessness of all that pertains to 
 the inner life of truth. Yet, nowhere is the gospel 
 more triumphantly at work in modern life than in 
 demonstrating the difference between faith and in- 
 tellectual form. 
 
 Nor was ever the problem of poverty or plenty so 
 pressing as it is to-day. There is more in this 
 modern world to tempt the young Christian, espe- 
 cially, to forsake the " mind of Christ " for mam- 
 monism than even the ages of buccaneering knew. 
 For our necessities are more than the luxuries of 
 our fathers, and their affluence is less than compe- 
 tence for us. Not only are the manifest rewards im- 
 measurably greater for the successful now, but 
 the area of success has enlarged quite as much as 
 the area of education, and the common man has 
 access to the adventures of wealth beyond even the 
 degree of his access to the once exclusive fields of 
 knowledge. Mammonism is not only more demo- 
 cratic than it was of old, hobnobbing now with all 
 classes and conditions of men, and holding out an 
 inviting hand to the street urchin as well as to the 
 prince, but mammonism is more respectable and 
 
The Modern Christian's Problems 17 
 
 much more religious. Nowhere is the problem of 
 adjustment between a faithful following of the 
 Christ and participation in the life of this present 
 world more difficult to-day than it is with respect 
 to the Christian's attitude toward wealth. We have 
 taken the rich young ruler into the church, and are 
 holding him up as an example of achievement and 
 rare opportunity. Yet the gospel was never more 
 mightily at work for the overthrow of mammonism 
 than it is in the hearts of multitudes of Christians 
 to-day. 
 
 The problem of pleasure, like the problem of 
 profit, is vastly increased and intensified. The field 
 of knowledge has not more enlarged than the field 
 of what is popularly called fun. There is no 
 more serious obstacle to the growth of the king- 
 dom of God among us than the levity of the age. 
 Religion has profited by the growth of cheerfulness. 
 But counterfeit cheerfulness is more costly to a 
 people than counterfeit currency. A vast amount 
 of our humor is not humor at all, but vicious vul- 
 garity, as witness our Sunday supplements. Recre- 
 ation is the next neighbor to regeneration, as the 
 very form of the word implies, but to confound it 
 with dissipation is as dangerous as to mistake a 
 reef for the entrance to a harbor. One of the 
 largest problems of the Christian life of the day, 
 and preeminently of the young Christian life of 
 this generation, is the redemption of the vast new 
 provinces which have been added within recent 
 
i8 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 times to the once comparatively meager and barren 
 domain of diversion and delight. 
 
 And how is the whole field of conscience ex- 
 panded to-day! What problems the growth of 
 modern industrialism presents to the man who 
 would determine his ways by the spirit of Christ. 
 How easy is it to be individually honest, and kind, 
 and even generous, and to be socially void of 
 Christian conscience and as fractionally irrespon- 
 sible as was the savage in his primitive individual 
 way. What bigger problem has any age had than 
 this of developing a co-operative Christian con- 
 science? And let it not be thought that this prob- 
 lem concerns the employer more than it does the 
 employee, the man who sells his brains for big div- 
 idends more than the man who sells his body for a 
 " full dinner pail." This is peculiarly the problem 
 of our time. The effective working of the gospel 
 in almost any of us to-day is conditioned to a 
 degree the world has never known before upon the 
 development of a social conscience that shall be 
 purely and profoundly Christian. 
 
 These are the larger lines of the problem of in- 
 terpreting the gospel in the terms of our times. In 
 one sense all these problems are old; they were al- 
 ways part of the main problem. Yet are they each 
 of them as different from what they were yesterday 
 as Europe is different from the Europe of Thomas 
 a Kempis' day. And all our problems, however old 
 in substance, are so new in emphasis that they are 
 
The Modern Christian's Problems 19 
 
 practically new worlds to conquer for the Christ. 
 If his gospel is to win them through us, we must 
 be very sure that we know what his gospel is. 
 
 *** 
 Quiz 
 
 i. Who was Thomas a Kempis? 2. In what re- 
 spect does the monastic attitude toward life differ 
 from the method of Jesus' ministry? 3. What is 
 the fundamental problem of every generation with 
 reference to Christian living? 4. How does the en- 
 larging field of knowledge and research affect 
 Christian living to-day? 5. What are the forces 
 which make most for mammonism now? 6. How 
 is the problem of pleasure affected by modern de- 
 velopments? 7. What do you understand by a 
 social conscience? 
 
 Topics for Further Study 
 
 i. What are the dangers of pietism? 2. Is the 
 cheerfulness of present-day Christian living as 
 compared with the somberness of the past wholly 
 an advantage? 3. If you perceive points of danger 
 and disadvantage in the present attitude, indicate 
 what they are. 4. Do you consider the present age 
 as on the whole more favorable to Christian living 
 than the past? 5. If so, state what its advantages 
 are. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE GOSPEL THAT WORKS 
 
 IN a quiet Christian home, not long ago, I found 
 this bit of verse from a well-known woman writer 
 of to-day: 
 
 " So many gods, so many creeds, 
 So many paths that wind and wind, 
 When just the art of being kind 
 Is all the sad world needs." 
 
 The " sad world " was no idle phrase with that 
 family just then, for under the modestly framed 
 motto was an open coffin, and in the coffin lay the 
 youngest daughter of the house, one of the fairest 
 girls of thirteen brief summers I have ever seen. 
 There was certainly need of the gospel of kindness 
 in that house that day. And there was need of 
 more. 
 
 There is need of the gospel of kindness in every 
 home and every age. The " art of being kind " is 
 not so common that we can afford to despise any 
 wise emphasis upon it. Nor is it so small a part 
 of the gospel of Jesus Christ as some suppose. 
 Love may be the larger word, but there is some- 
 20 
 
The Gospel that Works 21 
 
 thing of the warmth and glow of the open fireside 
 about that word kindness, and it does one's heart 
 good to sit before it and take in the brightness and 
 comfort of it. 
 
 But the word kindness will have to be exceed- 
 ingly enlarged beyond all its ordinary meanings if 
 we are going to make it cover all the height and 
 depth and length and breadth of religion. This is 
 putting a strain upon the word which our differ- 
 ences concerning " gods " and " creeds " will hardly 
 justify. Nor would these differences disappear if 
 we called our " gods " and " creeds " by some other 
 name, whether that name were kindness or some 
 more pretentious word. 
 
 Our age will not be satisfied with sectarianism 
 for religion, but neither will it be satisfied with 
 sentiment. There is nothing in " gods " and 
 " creeds " except as our idea of " being's source and 
 end" is an inspiration to godly, that is godlike, 
 living. In the last analysis the value of a man's 
 " god " is the " good " which follows. So also the 
 value of a man's creed, that is of his belief, is its 
 product in character. What he lives is his actual 
 faith. But it is foolish to suppose that kindness 
 cannot be counterfeited quite as easily as any other 
 god or creed when kindness is substituted for these, 
 and there is no reason whatever for the notion that 
 men would all think alike as to kindness if that 
 were suddenly made the universal religious formula. 
 There would be as many kinds of kindness in that 
 
22 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 case as there are kinds of " gods " and " creeds " 
 now. 
 
 The popular disparagement of " gods " and 
 " creeds " which finds expression everywhere to- 
 day is chiefly due to the fact that our contentions 
 about these things so often obscure the real thing, 
 and that is that the end of all religion is moral and 
 not metaphysical, spiritual and not intellectual, a 
 present salvation from " the sin that doth so easily 
 beset us " and not a hypothetical " beatification " 
 in some " blessed land " beyond the grave. It is 
 better to be kind here and now, if the kindness is 
 real and not merely superficial, than it is to hide 
 harshness and selfishness under the borrowed 
 plumage of empty talk about God, even though our 
 kindness lack something of conscious inspiration 
 through faith in him who is nevertheless the source 
 of all the goodness and kindness that is in the 
 world. It is better to be negative as to one's be- 
 liefs, to confess a kind of a vague agnosticism as to 
 the beginning and end of things if one can still be 
 positive on the side of righteousness and truth- 
 fulness and kindness between man and man than to 
 have " the plan of the ages " at one's tongue's end, 
 and at the same time be narrow and intolerant and 
 void of any effective social consciousness. " God is 
 not mocked," and as between the man who worships 
 a shibboleth in the name of God and the man who 
 serves righteousness and misses the definition of 
 the divine, there is no reason to think that he will 
 
The Gospel that Works 23 
 
 prefer the label on an empty package to the goods 
 themselves, though the label has been obscured. 
 The " foundation of God " which " nevertheless 
 standeth sure " is very significantly defined in the 
 ancient Scripture in two great affirmations, " the 
 Lord knoweth them that are his," and " let every 
 one that nameth the name of the Lord depart from 
 unrighteousness." Only as our dogmatic and 
 creedal packages are the guarantee of genuineness 
 and uncontamination will they count for anything 
 with God. 
 
 All this is granted with the heartiest welcome to 
 any thoughtful and earnest protest against mere 
 creedalism as a substitute for helpful, faithful, 
 kindly living. By all means let us beware of 
 " gods " and " creeds " which tend to get between 
 us and godly character. The demand for life as 
 against mere lip service is good. The insistence 
 upon kindness as much nearer the heart of religion 
 than contention over definitions is sensible and 
 sound. " Sound doctrine " means first of all sound 
 living, and when it means less the clamor for it is 
 a false cry. The world's need to-day, the panacea 
 for present problems, is not the success of this or 
 that dogma in itself considered, nor the triumph of 
 any mere definition of the gospel ; the world's need 
 is the gospel itself, and nothing less than this will 
 work salvation for the men and women of our time. 
 And whatever else the gospel may include or im- 
 ply, the gospel itself is first and last and always a 
 
24 The Gospel at Work In Modern Life 
 
 life, of which kindness is no inconsiderable part. 
 Jesus came " that men might have life," not logic, 
 and that " they might have it more abundantly," 
 not that they might increase their creeds, of which 
 the world had already a plenty even then. Certainly 
 he did not die to save a definition ; he died as he 
 lived, to save men. Neither is there any definition 
 by which men are always and everywhere saved. 
 Men are saved as they live in him, and in no other 
 way. The value of a man's creed is simply as a 
 viaduct through which the water of life finds its 
 way to his inmost life. It is the water that saves, 
 not the waterway. Yet, how shall a man drink 
 without a " cup," even the " blood " ; that is, the life 
 of Christ? Why find fault that some waterways 
 are of wood, and some of clay, and some of lead or 
 iron or stone, unless they are so clogged that the 
 water cannot flow through them at all, or unless they 
 dangerously contaminate the water itself? Grant 
 that the water is the all in all, and that here and 
 there men are found strong enough to go back to 
 its hidden sources in the hills and drink from their 
 own hands. Still is it not true that for the vast ma- 
 jority of those who " labor and are heavy laden " 
 the water must be carried to their lips in cups and 
 vessels which other men have made and filled, and 
 by waterways which are not always perfect in serv- 
 ice? Even the poorest of this service is generally 
 better than no service at all. And, unfortunately, 
 if I may carry the figure a little farther, the tend- 
 
The Gospel that Works 25 
 
 ency in modern life is to favor less of private mon- 
 opoly in these waterways which serve the multitude, 
 and to make the service both cheaper and better ; in 
 a word, to give every man more of immediate con- 
 trol over his own supplies. 
 
 The fact is that what we need is not fewer 
 " gods " and " creeds." What we need is more. 
 We need that every man shall have his own thought 
 about God, and that every man shall have his own 
 individual faith toward the divine. There would be 
 more of goodness and kindness if there were more 
 thoughtfulness about religious things. The gospel 
 will work best as it works most individually, as 
 every man insists upon it for himself that he has a 
 pure and a plenteous supply. We may not all pre- 
 fer the same kind of a cup, and we may not all be 
 supplied through the same particular pipe next to 
 our own door. But we are all getting to the point 
 where we feel the common need of getting the 
 water as nearly as possible as it falls out of the same 
 generous skies or springs in purity from the depths 
 of the ground. And for our religion we are all 
 getting back more and more to the mountain 
 heights of the Scriptures and the skies under which 
 we stand face to face with God. 
 
 Let the young Christian beware both of overmuch 
 dependence upon creeds and of overmuch dispar- 
 agement of creeds. He can neither get along with 
 them nor without them of themselves. Their value 
 for him is their mediation of life to him. If the 
 
26 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 divine life flows free and strong through them, 
 they are of value to him, otherwise they are worse 
 than vain. But let him not suppose that he can sub- 
 stitute for them some vague sentiment which has 
 no sense of God and no imperative of divine origin 
 and destiny within it. This will prove but a mir- 
 age in the desert. No gospel will work very long 
 or very far in our own age or any other which is 
 not first of all a gospel of God. " Well, what do 
 you believe in ? " I asked an irate infidel, who 
 gloried in the name, and who was raging against 
 the idea of God. And he thundered at me with tre- 
 mendous inconsistency, " What do I believe in ? I 
 believe in LOVE ! " Yet, long centuries ago, one 
 said to have been that disciple who leaned on Jesus' 
 bosom, and who learned from the Master himself the 
 immortal and incomparable definition, gave this as 
 the synonym of God, " God is LOVE/' So that either 
 the infidel was himself a hypocrite, or else he was not 
 an infidel, since his faith was in God. A man may 
 look up, and in fellowship with Jesus say, " Abba," 
 that is, " Father," or he may talk learnedly of his 
 confidence in " the integrity of the cosmic proc- 
 ess," but if he thinks truly at all, he will hardly 
 get away from the idea of God. No other gospel 
 works life in men. It is no accident that the 
 record is made concerning Moses, whose kindness 
 to Israel was no mere personal sentiment, but an 
 all-consuming social passion, " He endured as see- 
 ing him who is invisible." No kindness bigger than 
 
The Gospel that Works 27 
 
 a bit of simple good nature or passing sentiment 
 will long " endure " without spiritual vision. The 
 gospel that works is the gospel of God. 
 
 And it is the gospel of God in a person, in " the 
 man Christ Jesus." " You think that you do not be- 
 lieve in the divinity of Jesus Christ," I said in sub- 
 stance to a friend of ultra-Unitarian views, but of 
 very beautiful and Christlike life. " Are you sure 
 of it? Is not the God and Father in whom you 
 believe really Jesus Christ, whom you have given 
 another name? Are not all your thoughts of the 
 divine actually in terms of Jesus Christ? Neither 
 you nor any one else can be saved from false think- 
 ing and false living, except as you do really think 
 and live in him, whether you recognize him as the 
 source of your living and thinking or not." He 
 could not deny the affirmation, though he was slow 
 to allow what it implied to me. 
 
 The gospel that works is always and everywhere 
 the gospel of Jesus Christ. It always was. Even 
 before Jesus was revealed? Certainly so. This is 
 the meaning of that word, " Before Abraham was I 
 am"; and that other word said to those who felt 
 themselves at a disadvantage because the generation 
 of those who had seen and known the Lord in the 
 flesh was rapidly failing from among men, " Jesus 
 Christ the same yesterday, and to-day, and for- 
 ever." The only gospel that ever saved anybody 
 was the gospel of Jesus Christ. " That was the 
 true light which lighteth every man that cometh 
 
28 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 into the world." Something of the light which 
 shone in all perfectness in him has filtered through 
 to all men, and they have been saved from present 
 sinning and for the future mercy of God just in 
 the measure that they have believed and lived the 
 doctrine which he made incarnate, the word which 
 he " made flesh." There is truth in the old doc- 
 trine of " total depravity " to this extent at least 
 that every man is wholly bad except as he catches 
 here and there something of the spirit of Jesus and 
 is touched with something of his life. Men are only 
 saved even here and now as they are saved in him, 
 by getting for the moment or for this or that phase 
 of character into oneness with him. 
 
 It is true enough that religion is not fundamen- 
 tally and finally a matter of " gods " and " creeds." 
 Neither is it a matter of " the art of being kind " 
 alone. It is a matter of getting into touch with 
 God through essential union with Jesus Christ in 
 the life which he lived among men. A man's defi- 
 nition of God may be faulty and his creed at many 
 points quite incredible to any intelligent mind, and 
 yet he may have much of the spirit of Christ, and the 
 gospel of Christ may be working in him mightily 
 for the salvation of the world. But whatever of 
 good there is in him, and whatever of good he is 
 actually doing in the world, is of Christ; not of 
 his beliefs about Christ, which may be very much 
 awry, but of his substantial agreement with Christ 
 in spirit and in word and deed. There is a vast 
 
The Gospel that Works 29 
 
 amount of believing about Jesus, and some of it 
 quite correct believing, which does not work. 
 Whatever does work and stand the test of time, 
 needs only to be truly known to be proven as be- 
 longing to the revelation of Christ. Nothing will 
 work that is not fundamentally of him. Nothing 
 that is actually of him will ultimately fail to work. 
 What the age needs is Christ. Not the name only, 
 nor this or that creed about him. None of our 
 creeds about him have any importance worth while 
 except as they mediate his life to us and to the 
 world. When we make them final we make them 
 mischievous, sometimes more mischievous than no 
 creed at all. Creeds only work good as they work 
 Christ into human lives. He who has Christ will 
 need no other master to teach him kindness. But 
 Christ will teach him vastly more. He will teach 
 him love in all its largeness, and with this love, faith 
 toward God and toward man, without which love 
 is as sad as Buddhism; and with this faith, hope, 
 both for the future of this present world and for 
 his own and humanity's hereafter. Nothing that 
 the world needs is out of Christ, and nothing of 
 good that the world has. If there is any superior 
 efficiency in the gospel of our day, and I think there 
 is, it is the superior efficiency of a gospel which is 
 more perfectly than the faith of yesterday the gos- 
 pel which Jesus lived and taught. If there is any 
 deficiency, and there is much beyond question, it 
 is deficiency in understanding or applying the truth 
 
3O The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 as it is in him. Whether for yourself or for the 
 world, if you would find the gospel that works you 
 must find him. 
 
 *** 
 fail 
 
 I. In what sense can we properly speak of 
 " gods " to-day? 2. What is the end and object of 
 religion as here set forth? 3. What value have 
 creeds? 4. What is believing in God? 5. What do 
 you understand by thinking of God " in terms of 
 Jesus Christ "? 6. Can a man believe in Christ and 
 not believe properly about him? 7. What is the 
 gospel that works ? 
 
 Topics for Further Study 
 
 I. What is kindness? 2. What are the indica- 
 tions in modern life that men are moving toward 
 democracy in religion and away from monopoly? 
 3. What varieties of practical polytheism have we 
 still with us to-day? 4. In what sense could men 
 be actually saved through Christ before Christ 
 came? 5. In what sense is Christ the working gospel 
 of all ages ? 6. What do you understand by finding 
 Christ for yourself? 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 DEVELOPMENT, A CHRISTIANAS FIRST DUTY 
 
 IT is said of the great Russian thinker and writer, 
 Count Lyoff Tolstoy, now past eighty years of age, 
 that he recently confessed a consciousness of three 
 periods in his life. During the first period, which 
 is far away from him now in point of time and 
 much farther in any interest or regard he has 
 toward it, he lived for himself and for the pleas- 
 ures of the flesh. The second period, which was the 
 period of his conversion and his first religious 
 writings, and also largely of his philanthropic ef- 
 forts, he was chiefly anxious to do good, and to dis- 
 seminate his ideas for the benefit of mankind. Dur- 
 ing the third period even his anxiety to do good 
 has largely ceased, and his interest is in being good ; 
 or as he would put it, he is content to seek for him- 
 self fellowship with God and that perfection of 
 character which he realizes now as the highest end 
 and aim of life. 
 
 Thomas Carlyle, the great Scotch philosopher, 
 who in his own way was perhaps as profoundly re- 
 ligious as Tolstoy himself, made a somewhat similar 
 confession in his old age. Speaking of Darwin and 
 Darwinism, he once said : " The older I grow, and 
 
32 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 now I stand upon the brink of eternity, the more 
 there comes back to me the words which I learned 
 from the old church catechism when a child : ' What 
 is the chief aim and end of man ? ' and the answer : 
 ' To glorify God, and enjoy him forever.' No 
 gospel of dirt, teaching that men are descended 
 from frogs through monkeys, can ever set that 
 aside." 
 
 Carlyle's fling at evolution, which was a con- 
 siderably different matter then from what it is 
 now, we can afford to pass by, for it does not con- 
 cern us 'here. But the testimony of these two 
 mighty minds to the primary importance of 
 spiritual growth and culture as the end of supreme 
 significance in itself is testimony not to be lightly 
 ignored. Whatever allowance we may make for 
 the lessening interest of men in what are called 
 practical affairs as earth recedes and the other 
 world draws nearer, these men cannot be accused 
 of ever having lost their sense of fellowship with 
 humanity or their intense and self-sacrificing spirit 
 toward the betterment of this present world. It 
 might be said of them in a sense, as it was said of 
 Jesus, " Having loved his own, he loved them unto 
 the end." Carlyle, and Tolstoy at eighty belong to 
 the world, and have no less hearty interest in it 
 than fifty years before. But they understand better 
 what life's first great concern really is. 
 
 The best gift that any man can give to the world 
 is himself. And a man never gives himself to the 
 
Development, a Christian's First Duty 33 
 
 world until he has first of all given himself to God. 
 This is no formal religious phrase; it is supreme 
 spiritual fact. That old story in Genesis is capable 
 of many a concealed meaning. It is not good for 
 man " to be " alone. Doing is as necessary to be- 
 ing as the woman is to the man. " And what God 
 hath joined together let not man put asunder." 
 But being is first. And not until being is formed 
 at the hand of God, and gets its life from the very 
 breath of God, can doing proceed by the same di- 
 vine will out of its side. And then they two are 
 indeed one flesh. 
 
 Christian living to-day cannot be separated from 
 the life of to-day. If we are to follow Jesus' 
 method of mingling with men, and interpenetrating 
 the human with the divine, we must be men and 
 women of our time, in touch with its expanding 
 knowledge, participating in its enlarging material de- 
 velopment, responsive to its humor and happiness, 
 and co-operating in its co-operative spirit. We must 
 be able to distinguish the gospel from the incidents 
 and accidents of present-day religious expression in 
 gospel lands, and must know how to apply the sub- 
 stance of hope and faith and love so that the very 
 essence of the Christian revelation shall be applied to 
 the everyday aspects of life as it actually is in the 
 world around us to-day. But to understand our 
 times is even less important than to understand our- 
 selves, and the good we give will be limited always 
 and everywhere by the good we get. 
 c 
 
34 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 Moral philosophers have discussed a great deal 
 the question, What is the smmmum bonum, " the 
 greatest good " ? Much may be said for happiness as 
 the end toward which all things move. But per- 
 fection of character, which includes happiness as a 
 consequent, is on the whole the more satisfactory 
 definition of life's aim and end. " Be ye therefore 
 perfect," said Jesus, " even as your Father in heaven 
 is perfect." He did not say, " Be ye therefore 
 happy," though he indicated in his beatitudes that 
 blessedness, or happiness, is the resultant of right 
 character. The words that we run off so often in 
 glib fashion, " Be good and you'll be happy," have 
 a large measure of substantial sense in them. 
 Yet the more modern version of the saying, half 
 facetiously said, " Be good and you'll be lone- 
 some," voices a great deal of very serious experi- 
 ence. One of our common Christian hymns has 
 for its chorus in part, " And now I am happy all 
 the day." But the words are not true of most of 
 us, and they are not true of the best of us in the 
 light fashion in which we run them off our tongues. 
 Jesus was " a man of sorrows, and acquainted with 
 grief," notwithstanding the " joy " and " peace " 
 which were his priceless bequest to the world. And 
 every man who follows him will know something 
 of "the fellowship of his suffering" before he 
 tastes of " the power of his resurrection." Not 
 mirth, but manhood; not pleasure, but personality; 
 not happiness, but wholeness the Christian must 
 
Development, a Christian s First Duty 35 
 
 make the greatest good of his effort and his 
 thought. 
 
 There is danger in any lower ideal. Happiness 
 so easily becomes mere luxuriousness, or some form 
 of mischievous self-indulgence. Hedonism, the 
 philosophy of pleasure, may, indeed, become highly 
 moral if carefully reasoned out and held under the 
 dominion of serious thought; but the whole tend- 
 ency of it is to degenerate easily into this or that 
 form of sensuous delight. Even a great deal of 
 what passes for Christian happiness is very far re- 
 moved from that blessedness which Jesus set forth 
 as the fruit of the humble, gentle, pure, and peace- 
 able mind. Much of it is the contagious enthusiasm 
 of an emotional crowd, wherein half the charm and 
 a large part of the danger of our great meetings 
 will be found. Much of it is the half-unconscious 
 gratification of personal ambitions, and the deep 
 desire for prominence which more or less actuates 
 us all. Sometimes it is a kind of self-induced hyp- 
 notic state wherein we abide in dangerous self- 
 complacency because we have lost the sense of our 
 relations to the actual life around us for a time. 
 A great deal of so-called " holiness " is of this last- 
 named type, and does not really consist in whole- 
 someness of character so much as it does in a de- 
 fective consciousness of self and the living world 
 about us. There are as many forms of deceitful 
 happiness as there are kinds of intoxicating drink, 
 and there is more pertinence than appears to many 
 
36 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 of us in the old-fashioned warning of the Scrip- 
 tures, "And be not drunk with wine wherein is 
 excess ; but be filled with the Spirit." All forms of 
 happiness tend to excess, even what is sometimes 
 called spiritual happiness. The spirit of wholeness, 
 of perfectness, is our only safe guide. 
 
 There is need of caution, even with reference to 
 perfection as an ideal, lest we think of self-develop- 
 ment too much from the standpoint of self alone, 
 and with regard to an ideal which is not the ideal 
 of the gospel. All that has been said about the 
 modern Christian's problems, and all that has been 
 said concerning the substance of the gospel that 
 works, needs to be kept in mind if we are to seek 
 such development as will make us both Christian 
 and Christian in relation to the age in which we 
 live. 
 
 A witty young minister, who was attending a 
 banquet of Christian workers, and had his newly 
 wedded bride with him, got off this clever witticism 
 at her expense : " Some women," he said, " marry 
 shoemakers that they may be shod for nothing; 
 some women marry doctors that they may be doc- 
 tored for nothing." Then, looking fondly and 
 roguishly at his wife, he added slowly, " And some 
 women marry ministers that they may be good 
 for nothing." 
 
 Neither women nor men are good unless they are 
 good for something. A great deal of perfectionism 
 is altogether in the air; it amounts to nothing in 
 
Development, a Christian's First Duty 37 
 
 practical Christian living. It is not really self- 
 development so much as it is self-excitation and 
 self-illusionment. The man does not actually know 
 any more than he knew before. Most perfectionists 
 are wholly out of sympathy and understanding of 
 modern knowledge. The man is not a better work- 
 man, nor a better master. The Eighth Psalm is a 
 wonderful picture of man as the viceroy of God 
 upon earth, entering into his lordship over nature 
 as he enters more and more into his sonship with 
 God. But a great deal of what is mistaken for 
 Christian culture is wholly apart from man's 
 sovereignty over the world around him; it has 
 nothing to do with the world's work. Especially is 
 a great deal of what is reckoned effort toward 
 Christian perfection morbid and melancholy and 
 wholly out of touch with wholesome laughter and 
 life's good cheer. This is not perfection, for there 
 can be no perfection of any part which does not 
 adapt it for its place in the whole. No piece of a 
 watch is perfect unless it will work with the rest. 
 Perfection means participation, not abstraction. To 
 develop one feature of a man's face out of all har- 
 monious relation to his other features is to make a 
 caricature of the man. And a good deal of " re- 
 ligiousness " is a caricature of righteousness, not 
 the less so that it is sincere and serious enough. 
 
 Herein is the mischief of mysticism of every type. 
 It lacks where Jesus was complete in his identifica- 
 tion of himself with life. " Jesus grew in wisdom 
 
38 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 and in stature, and in favor with God and man." 
 But he grew within his environment, and he grew 
 into all the life of his time. He did not grow apart 
 from men, but he grew among men. Doubtless he 
 studied in such schools as Nazareth had. There is 
 an easily believable tradition that he worked at the 
 carpenter's bench with his father. He wore no 
 such exceptional clothes as John the Baptist wore, 
 nor did he live upon a peculiar diet, or assume in 
 anywise peculiar ways. This is Christian develop- 
 ment, in harmonious adjustment with actual every- 
 day life. It is not being good, either " for noth- 
 ing," or in some far-off abstract, emotional way. 
 It is emphatically " being good for something." Yet 
 it is more than mere activity. Jesus was no insti- 
 tutionalist. He was as far from identifying char- 
 acter with outward circumstance and conditions as 
 he was from divorcing the two. Development with 
 him was never separate from life, but neither was 
 it identical with any outward show. He was both 
 the practical man of affairs and the idealist, both of 
 his own century emphatically, and of eternity. His 
 perfection was both timely and timeless. 
 
 One gets this development only by holding fast to 
 these two things : the " time-spirit " of his own age, 
 and the timelessness of the essential gospel. To 
 know the age in which we live, to feel its problems 
 and enter sympathetically into their solution, to 
 have what may be called a contemporary conscious- 
 ness; and then to know the heart of the gospel, to 
 
Development, a Christian's First Duty 39 
 
 get beneath its own time-forms to its everlasting 
 and never-changing spirit, and to bring these two 
 together in one's self so that the seed of the time- 
 less truth shall grow in the newly turned soil of 
 the present and shall have every advantage of the 
 latest instruments and methods of cultivation, this 
 is what Christian development means when rightly 
 understood. 
 
 " After that he had served his own generation ac- 
 cording to the will of God he fell on sleep," is the 
 great epitaph of Israel's great shepherd-king. And 
 that is still the Christian ideal, to live " according 
 to the will of God " and in that will to serve one's 
 " own generation." Only the gospel of Christ has 
 given us a clearer manifestation of God, and of 
 what it is to live " according to his will." And it 
 has given us also a " generation " of our own whose 
 conditions are very different from those which con- 
 fronted the son of Jesse and the successor of Saul. 
 But David was more Christian than many Chris- 
 tians are, because he combined communion with the 
 divine and the companionship of men in all that 
 made for the larger life of his times in a measure 
 altogether too uncommon in the world yet. 
 
 This is the Christian's first business, perfection. 
 Not abstraction from the wickedness of the world, 
 nor activity in the religiousness of the world, but 
 the development of himself in faith, and hope, and 
 love. In this development he will find retirement 
 sometimes necessary to enlargement of life. In this 
 
4O The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 development he will find religious activity often 
 helpful to him. But he will choose them not as 
 ends in themselves, but as means to the one great 
 end, the realization of the divine life in himself. 
 And he will study to perfect himself not in some 
 peculiar type of ecstatic experience, but in the serv- 
 ice of men through being himself among men, and 
 in relation to like experiences with their own the 
 embodiment of the truth which alone can make men 
 free. 
 
 To honor God, to benefit mankind, 
 To serve with lowly gifts the lowly needs 
 Of the poor race for which the God- 
 man died, 
 
 And do it all for love ! Oh, this is great, 
 And he who does this will achieve a name 
 Not only great, but good. 
 
 /. G. Holland. 
 
 *** 
 
 Quiz 
 
 I. What is the chief aim and end of man as sug- 
 gested by Tolstoy and Carlyle, and other like philos- 
 ophers? 2. What do you understand by perfection, 
 and what is the chief defect of most so-called " per- 
 fectionism"? 3. What is " Hedonism "? 4. Can a 
 Christian reasonably expect to be always happy? 5. 
 If not, why not? 6. What is the mischief of mys- 
 ticism? 7, What do you understand by the " time- 
 
Development, a Christian's First Duty 41 
 
 spirit " and the " timelessness of the essential 
 gospel" as applied to practical Christian living? 
 
 Topics for Further Study 
 
 i. Are the present aspects of the doctrine of evo- 
 lution more or less favorable to the religious life 
 than the earlier definitions of it? 2. Do you dis- 
 cover any likeness between the monastic attitude 
 toward the Christian life and modern " holiness " ? 
 3. What may be said for the great mystics and for 
 mysticism in general? 4. Is religious activity ever 
 a menace to the religious life? 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE GOSPEL AND WORSHIP 
 
 ON the face of the returns, the enlargement of 
 modern life has not made for worship. There is an 
 old and often quoted sentiment, given on the au- 
 thority of more than one great name, that " igno- 
 rance is the mother of devotion." However this 
 may be, the remarkable increase of knowledge in our 
 times, and the apparent decline of public worship, 
 seem sometimes to justify the proverb. There are a 
 great many people who unfortunately have been 
 educated away from the churches, and many of the 
 keenest minds of the day confess both in speech 
 and conduct their indifference to all the forms of 
 religious devotion. 
 
 The growth of wealth has also made against 
 worship. Mammonism has never been on the side 
 of spiritual sensibility, and spiritual sensibility is at 
 the root of worship. Here and there a millionaire 
 may be sincerely religious, and a great many people 
 of moderate fortune, especially if that fortune is 
 inherited, are undoubtedly so. But the multitude of 
 those who are possessed with the money mania are 
 not genuinely interested in prayer and praise and 
 the quest after the values that are unseen. All 
 42 
 
The Gospel and Worship 43 
 
 who give themselves passionately to the pursuit of 
 wealth are thereby drawn away from following after 
 Christ, according to the discipleship which he him- 
 self required when he walked among men. The in- 
 creasing clamor of the market-place does not make 
 for growth in the spirit of meditation, and the larger 
 material prizes which our age offers to the man who 
 succeeds after the world's methods and the world's 
 measures do not serve as an inducement to worship 
 God alone. 
 
 The intenser pleasure life of our period is also 
 unfavorable to worship. The bicycle, the auto- 
 mobile, the Sunday excursion, the Sunday theater 
 and nickelodeon, and all the multiplied devices for 
 attracting the people away from Sunday rest and 
 the house of God on the one day in seven when 
 they are otherwise unemployed, have tremendously 
 increased the temptation to forget God and live in 
 the sensations of the present hour. This pleasure 
 life of the many in its more unhealthful phases is 
 stimulated by the money mania of those who cater 
 to them. The street railway manager may himself 
 be the devout and orthodox Sunday-school teacher 
 in an evangelical Sunday-school, yet the railway of 
 which he has charge may be one of the most mis- 
 chievous promoters of Sabbath desecration and all- 
 around Sunday dissipation which the city or State 
 can show. The big breweries have not more un- 
 conscionably contributed to the extension of the re- 
 tail liquor shop and the stimulation by every evil 
 
44 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 device of the demoralizing appetite for strong drink 
 to the end that they might increase their own divi- 
 dends at whatever cost to the public welfare than 
 have the venders of transportation and the pro- 
 moters of amusements forced forth their dividends 
 with unrighteous disregard for those great interests 
 of society which are bound up in a right use of the 
 weekly rest day, and in the preservation of the 
 spirit of worship. 
 
 The forces that work against worship as to the 
 observance of its outward forms, at least, are not 
 wholly evil in themselves. Quite aside from that 
 type of knowledge which leads men away from the 
 church and the religious life, and far removed from 
 the materialistic mammonism and thoughtless pleas- 
 ure-seeking which work the same result in even 
 more destructive ways, there are other forces at 
 work which are good in themselves, and in the main, 
 wholesome in their influence which are, nevertheless, 
 not on the side of crowded churches, the swelling 
 anthem, and the voice of public prayer. 
 
 The increase of real religion sometimes makes 
 for an apparent decline of worship. Men who think 
 of churchgoing as the sum and substance of 
 religious obligation, are frequently more attentive to 
 it than are those who appreciate more truly what 
 religion is. The comparison often lightly made be- 
 tween Roman Catholics and Protestants in the 
 matter of faithful and self-sacrificing attendance 
 upon public worship, is generally faulty at this point. 
 
The Gospel and Worship 45 
 
 The average Roman Catholic thinks of religion 
 much more in terms of ritual and formal devotion 
 than does the average Protestant. Worship with 
 the one is the first fact in religion ; with the other the 
 first fact is spiritual attitude. The church is religion 
 to the one; it is only an expression of religion 
 to the other. Therefore, as men grow in appreci- 
 ation of what the gospel is in fact, they are, super- 
 ficially, at least, more indifferent to this or that 
 particular form. The woman with whom Jesus 
 talked at the well of Samaria was apparently more 
 concerned than was Jesus himself in regard to the 
 proprieties of public worship. " Our fathers wor- 
 shipped in this mountain, and ye say that in Jeru- 
 salem is the place where men ought to worship," is 
 her plaint. Jesus sets all the externals of religion 
 aside for the moment that he may emphasize the 
 spiritual character of any real approach to God. If 
 the church is conceived of as some divinely ap- 
 pointed place of worship, and worship itself as a 
 certain set manner of approach to God, then did 
 Jesus make less of worship than the Samaritan wo- 
 man. But he made a great deal more of the inner 
 life of worship than she had ever known. 
 
 The gospel that works does not always work most 
 for a life of devotional form. Perfection of char- 
 acter as an ideal tends to emphasize the doing of 
 what Jesus said, and identity of spirit with his 
 spirit, rather than any ritualistic recitation of 
 "Lord! Lord!" There is a great deal of cant 
 
46 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 and insincerity on the part of many who excuse 
 their neglect of the church and public worship for 
 a pretended fellowship with God in nature, though 
 with some, "the groves are God's first temples" still. 
 
 Likewise, many gloss over their mammonism with 
 dishonest deceit as to the pressure of business life 
 upon them, and their need of rest on the Lord's Day, 
 and many others justify a false " recreation " with 
 a mere subterfuge of words. But when all this is 
 said, it is still true that the better side of modern 
 religious life, the growing appreciation of the sim- 
 plicity of the gospel, and the increasing demand for 
 a Christian life as against mere lip service, play an 
 important part to-day in determining the definition 
 of worship which everywhere more and more pre- 
 vails. And this new definition of worship, which is 
 more Christian at heart, is part of the reason why 
 our age seems less worshipful than the ages which 
 have gone before. 
 
 Jesus made few references to public worship, and 
 when he did refer to worship, his references were 
 not always of a complimentary kind. He spoke de- 
 preciatingly of the long prayers of the Pharisees, 
 and all the ostentation of their pretended service of 
 God. He warned men against sacrifice itself when 
 the worshiper was not at peace with his fellows, 
 and put reconciliation with man before the offering 
 of any kind of homage to God. Even the devotion 
 of almsgiving was offensive to him if it lacked the 
 spirit of self-effacing love. He laid no requirement 
 
The Gospel and Worship 47 
 
 upon his disciples of regular attendance upon public 
 worship, nor did he prescribe any forms or seasons 
 for their approach to the Father. The one prayer 
 that he gave was prefaced with a distinct and em- 
 phatic approval of private rather than public prayer. 
 Moreover, ages of religious decadence have al- 
 ways made relatively more of religious worship and 
 less of the actually religious life. Revivals may 
 increase church attendance, and may open the 
 mouths of many in public testimony and prayer 
 who were silent before, and may re-establish many a 
 family altar; but the deeper and more abiding they 
 are, the more they draw men away from mere de- 
 pendence upon churches and forms, and the more 
 they emphasize spirit and life. Whenever the 
 churchgoing and the testimony and the singing and 
 praying become an end in themselves, the cause of 
 religion is more injured than helped. Formal wor- 
 ship is worse than useless when it becomes a sub- 
 stitute for the life which is " hid with Christ in 
 God," that is, for spiritual fellowship with the 
 divine. To appreciate the worth of worship, one 
 must first of all recognize its subordinate place. 
 To withstand those influences in our time which 
 make against worship " in spirit and in truth," the 
 Christian of to-day must see clearly how much more 
 there is in worship than time and place and form, 
 and must be ready to admit that here especially 
 " The letter killeth," and only the spirit " giveth 
 life." 
 
48 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 Our word worship means originally and essen- 
 tially not form, but moral attitude. Worship is a 
 modification of " worth-ship." Wherever there is 
 a sense of worthiness there is worship. The greater 
 the sense of worthiness the more profound is the 
 worship. The worship that is not based upon a 
 deep sense of worthiness is really no worship at all. 
 It may be nothing more than a kind of religious 
 sensuousness. Such is often the effect of " a dim, 
 religious light," of the music which " hath charms 
 to soothe the savage breast," yet leaves him no less 
 a savage than before, of soporific incense and into- 
 nation, of all the circumstance of showy ceremonial 
 and pretentious rite. This is primarily an appeal to 
 the senses, and not to the spirit. There may be life 
 in it, but it is life girt about and all but smothered 
 with unnecessary clothes. Such worship has all the 
 danger and disadvantage of the fashionable woman's 
 extreme devotion to dress it dwarfs and shrivels 
 the soul. On the whole, we are dressing more 
 simply and more sensibly than our forebears did. 
 And we are also learning more of the simplicity 
 of that worship which the gospel of Christ inspires. 
 
 When a man lifts his hat to a woman, he rec- 
 ognizes the worth of womanhood, otherwise the 
 courtesy is an empty form. The act is good in 
 itself, but it is chiefly good as indicating what ought 
 to be the habitual attitude of mind and heart on the 
 part of every man toward every woman. He who 
 does not reverence woman in his life, does not truly 
 
The Gospel and Worship 49 
 
 show her deference at all. Likewise, when a man 
 salutes the flag, he does it first of all in his heart, 
 and justifies it with his life, or else his pretended 
 patriotism is like unto that which Samuel Johnson 
 declared " the last refuge of a scoundrel." The 
 lifting of the hat to a woman and the salutation of 
 the flag are not forms to be despised, but they are 
 forms which need very much to be guarded against 
 insincerity and the perfunctory mood. Those who 
 sweep the hat lowest are often quickest to follow 
 the exaggerated courtesy with some cynical re- 
 mark about women. And those who make much of 
 flag worship are not infrequently the hirelings and 
 tools of all those forces which make most against 
 the national welfare. Spread-eagleism and real 
 patriotism are usually a long way apart. 
 
 The life of Jesus was one long act of worship, 
 in that his every word and deed was saturated 
 with the sense of spiritual values. He taught his 
 disciples to " pray without ceasing," at the same 
 time that he warned them against long prayers. 
 There is no contradiction here, but the profoundest 
 harmony. He who does not pray always does not 
 really pray at all. The prayers that God hears are 
 the prayers that a man lives. " Your life speaks so 
 loudly that I cannot hear what you say," is especially 
 pertinent with respect to prayer. Prayer is essen- 
 tially moral attitude. Singing is nothing but sound 
 unless it is " making melody in your heart to the 
 Lord." Kneeling has only the dubious value of an 
 
50 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 easy-going physical exercise, unless the habitude 
 of a man's life is that of reverence for the infinite 
 and the eternal. Even the bread and wine of the 
 communion are less than ordinary bread and butter 
 if one has not learned to commune with the Father 
 in all his eating and drinking, and to make a divine 
 fellowship of all his intercourse with his fellows. 
 Unless the sense of God is natural and habitual to 
 the man, no exceptional attitude of body and no 
 formal phrase from his lips can make him a wor- 
 shiper of God. God has less use for form con- 
 sidered apart from the life than we have for the 
 corn husk after the grain is removed. Like the 
 husk, the form is only good when it protects the 
 life and aids its growth. 
 
 There may be less of formal worship to-day than 
 there was of old. This may, in part, be due to 
 influences which are not good. It is true, how- 
 ever, that formal worship is not without worth ; nay, 
 it is of much worth. To strip the husk wholly away 
 from the corn, especially when the corn is yet un- 
 developed, is to invite disaster and death. So far, 
 therefore, as conceit of knowledge leads men away 
 from that " beginning of wisdom " which is " the 
 fear of the Lord," or absorption in money-getting 
 and pleasure-seeking tend to turn men away from 
 the more abiding satisfaction and delight of waiting 
 upon God, we ought not to be indifferent to the evil 
 tendencies of the times. But the times are not 
 wholly evil in this respect. The churches are not 
 
The Gospel and Worship 51 
 
 deserted. Prayer has not ceased. Christian song 
 was never so frequent and so hearty as it is now. 
 There is much more of actual communion with 
 God than any man can measure. And apart from 
 all the forms of worship, the attitude of life which 
 is the heart of worship, grows more commanding 
 every day. The gospel of Christ is far from cere- 
 monialism. But it is through and through a life of 
 worship. It is " rejoicing in the Lord always." It is 
 perpetual prayer. It is getting and keeping " in tune 
 with the infinite." It is ceaseless adoration of the 
 might and love and wisdom which men feel more 
 and more is in all and through all and over all. To 
 worship in the terms of the gospel of Christ is to 
 " live and move and have one's being " every day 
 in God. There was never so much of this life of 
 worship in the world as there is to-day. And if the 
 life of worship increases, there is no need to fear 
 that any needful or helpful form of worship will 
 cease to be. And those who have this spirit must 
 see to it that helpful form of worship shall not cease 
 to be. 
 
 fuiz 
 
 I. What are the influences which make most 
 against religious worship in our day? 2. How can 
 real religion operate to decrease worship? 3. What 
 was the attitude of Jesus toward public worship? 
 4. What is the meaning of the word, " worship," 
 and what is it in spirit and in truth? 5. What 
 
52 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 does it mean to " pray without ceasing," and how is 
 this consistent with the teaching of Jesus against 
 long prayers? 
 
 Topics for Further Study 
 
 i. The influence of modern street railways, the 
 automobile, the bicycle, and other forms of trans- 
 portation upon church attendance. 2. The com- 
 parative rest value of Sunday " recreations " and 
 church attendance. 3. Is the appeal of music and 
 art primarily sensuous or spiritual? 4. What is 
 the moral value of formal worship? 5. How can 
 the one who is spiritual best aid formal worship? 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE GOSPEL AND HOME CONDUCT 
 
 THERE went the round of the papers, some years 
 ago, a- story, which was supposed to be humorous, 
 but which was really very far from amusing to any 
 thoughtful Christian man. According to the story, 
 a certain man came home and found, to his indig- 
 nation, that a tramp had called in his absence, and 
 had been very harsh and insulting to his wife. The 
 man was very much incensed, and at length, turning 
 angrily upon his son, a youth of twelve or four- 
 teen years of age, asked sharply, " Where were 
 you, Harry, when this occurred ? " "I was in the 
 woodshed/' answered the boy with some confusion. 
 " Couldn't you hear the man talking to your 
 mother ? " demanded the father, more severely now. 
 " Yes," replied the lad shamefacedly. " Then why 
 didn't you interfere ? " thundered the irate father, 
 ready to vent his vexation upon the child. But 
 the boy made answer, still hanging his head, and 
 without-any impertinence in his manner, " Because, 
 father, I I I thought it was you." 
 
 It is hardly too much to allow that this might 
 have happened in many a professedly Christian 
 home. There are Christian men, at least men of 
 
 53 
 
54 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 Christian profession not a few, who habitually talk 
 to their wives and children in a manner which they 
 would not for a moment tolerate from an outsider. 
 They snarl and scold and browbeat in a way in 
 which no gentleman would address a stranger of 
 either sex. And in this respect it is only fair to 
 say women are sometimes almost, if not quite, as 
 bad. They nag and whine and fret and fume in the 
 home, and are all smiles and graciousness on the 
 outside. So also, in many a Christian home, brothers 
 and sisters indulge in language toward each other 
 which they would not stand from anybody else. 
 Many a Christian boy, if overheard by his girl 
 friends talking to his sister or mother after the 
 manner in which he frequently " talks back " at 
 them, would hardly lift his face before his friends 
 again. And the sisters are not by any means fault- 
 less with respect to their manners toward their inti- 
 mates in the home. 
 
 This bad behavior in the home does not mean 
 that genuine affection is lacking between those who 
 thus abuse each other. Often people who strive 
 with each other irascibly all day long will resent 
 bitterly any slightest reflection by an outsider upon 
 the object of their ordinary irritation. Even the 
 mother who hardly ever gives her child a pleasant 
 look or a pleasant word will slave for the lad far 
 into the night, and will weep over his coffin in an 
 utterly heartbroken way when the aggravating 
 feet and hands are forever stilled. Perhaps the 
 
The Gospel and Home Conduct 55 
 
 saddest thing about our frequent bad behavior 
 toward each other in the home is the fact that we 
 cover up with roughness and harshness the tender- 
 ness we would give the world to express. But we 
 are afraid of sentiment, and ashamed of our own 
 awkwardness when we try to be gentle to each other, 
 and it is wofully easy to vent our irritation and 
 weariness and depression of spirits upon others, 
 especially upon those who know us and love us, so 
 that we can presume upon their love as we dare not 
 presume upon the courtesy of a stranger. We 
 know, and we feel sure that they know, the sincerity 
 of our affection for them, in spite of the discourteous 
 and often disgraceful manner in which we talk and 
 act toward them. Our very sincerity is more than 
 half the reason for our severity. 
 
 Nor does all this rudeness mean that the Chris- 
 tian profession of those who are guilty of this harsh 
 and unhappy home conduct is nothing but pious 
 pretense. They are often quite as sincere in their 
 love for God and for the things of the kingdom of 
 God as they are genuine in their affection toward 
 the loved ones whom they abuse. There is a wide 
 distance between insincerity and inconsistency. It 
 is neither wise nor just to impeach altogether a 
 man's Christian character because he sometimes acts 
 like a boor in the home. But when he is acting the 
 boor, he is certainly not acting the Christian part. 
 If the gospel is an actual saving power here and 
 now, it ought to give us the victory in the home. 
 
56 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 And the gospel will, when it is faithfully applied in 
 every aspect of everyday life. When every allow- 
 ance is made for the sincerity of our affection for 
 our kindred and household, despite our unloving 
 manners toward them, and for the genuineness of 
 our religious profession despite the frequent viola- 
 tion of Christian courtesy and decency in the privacy 
 of the family circle, it is still true that failure in 
 Christian living at home is both dangerous to the 
 home and disastrous to the whole development of 
 character. No man rises very much higher than his 
 home life. 
 
 There is a kind of cowardice about this rudeness 
 at home which ought to go far to shame us out of 
 it when it is rightly understood. We take liberties 
 with our loved ones which we simply do not dare 
 to take with strangers. They would not stand for 
 the tone in which we often speak in the home, let 
 alone the insulting roughness of what we say. If 
 they did not retaliate in kind they would surely 
 " cut us " from that hour. The intimates of the 
 home can hardly do so. They may, indeed, answer 
 back after the same manner, which does but make 
 the matter worse. They cannot very well cut us 
 out of the circle of their acquaintance, and refuse 
 to have anything further to do with us as outsiders 
 may very justly do. Therefore, we ought to be the 
 gentler toward them, because of their very helpless- 
 ness against us. If we are not so, it is because we 
 are taking a coward's advantage of their situation, 
 
The Gospel and Home Conduct 57 
 
 and doing toward them what we lack the courage to 
 do on a level where our rudeness would meet its 
 adequate reward. The more cowardly a man or boy 
 is, the more likely he is to play the boor at home. 
 
 Moreover, the manner in which we excuse our- 
 selves for our bad conduct at home is often anything 
 but honest. " Mamma," said a sharp-witted little 
 girl, who had been savagely taken to task by her 
 mother for a show of ill temper, " why do you call 
 it ' cross ' when it's me, and ' nervous ' when its 
 you ? " Most of us are exceedingly ready with 
 excuses when we ourselves are irritable and disa- 
 greeable and sharp tongued and peevishly fault- 
 finding. We are " tired," or " fatigued," or " not 
 feeling very well," or we have " an awful head- 
 ache " ; indeed, we can find a hundred reasons for 
 our mean conduct except the simple truth that we 
 are in bad temper and have not the Christian candor 
 and courage to control ourselves. When we are 
 willing to own the truth, and to lay the chief blame 
 where it belongs, at our own door, we shall be 
 already on the way to victory over the infirmities 
 of our disposition. 
 
 This is not to deny that life at home is some- 
 times truly more trying than it is on the outside. 
 Life's little irritations have their opportunity against 
 us when we are doing the daily drudgery and meet- 
 ing the very commonplace experiences of the fire- 
 side as they have not when we are dressed in our 
 best, and looking our best, and we meet men and 
 
58 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 women on the serener levels of social intercourse. 
 It is always easier to keep the flies out of the parlor 
 than it is to keep them out of the kitchen. The 
 buzzing, stinging, irritating little annoyances of life 
 also like the warm, sticky, and stifling atmosphere 
 of hard, prosaic work. Or they are like the dust 
 which fills the city streets, and puts a man's temper 
 on edge, when the same man would walk with smi- 
 ling memories of his boyhood thronging all the 
 chambers of his soul as he pressed softly the green 
 sward of the country field. The grit that gets 
 into our shoes is more trying to us by far than the 
 big boulders over which we climb with conscious 
 ease. So many a man and woman who will meet a 
 great trial with strong uplift of soul will fail miser- 
 ably to meet like a Christian the grit of the com- 
 mon day's work. Gulliver, in the land of the Lilli- 
 putians, could break any single rope with which they 
 sought to bind him ; but when they found him pros- 
 trate and tied their thousand threads to every 
 tenderest part of him that was exposed, weaving 
 the web into his hair, he found these threads, and 
 the thousands of tiny darts discharged against him 
 when he tried to break away, too much for him. 
 The Lilliputians are in all our homes, and their 
 little threads and darts are more dangerous to our 
 Christian liberty and to Christian serenity of soul 
 than any Apollyon's sword that can be wielded 
 against us. 
 
 The home was the patriarchal church. It is still 
 
The Gospel and Home Conduct 59 
 
 the first place in which to build our altars to the 
 Lord. Worship, as already emphasized, is primarily 
 an attitude of the soul. And the primary place to 
 demonstrate that attitude is the home. If a man's 
 life is filled with the sense of God he will not forget 
 God at his own hearthside. " If a man have not the 
 spirit of Christ, he is none of his." And if the 
 spirit of Christ is in the man, he will not wholly 
 fail of showing forth that spirit in the most inti- 
 mate and trying situations of home life. For man 
 or woman the foremost test of the genuineness of 
 faith and love toward Christ is its working worth 
 in the home circle, what it actually accomplishes 
 to raise the level of decency and discipline in the 
 home. 
 
 Neither in the home nor anywhere else is the all 
 in all of religion pleasure. There is a difference 
 between friction and irritation, between authority 
 and asperity. We are not likely wholly to eliminate 
 friction for a while, if we ever do. Neither have 
 we wholly passed from under the need of authority. 
 A Christian home life does not mean an easy- 
 going indifference to the infraction of reasonable 
 rules, or the ignoring of mutual rights. " I never 
 knew but one man without a temper," remarked a 
 certain excellent woman who, like Will Carleton's 
 " Betsey," had " a temper of her own," and she 
 added with a wry laugh, " and he was the most 
 aggravating man that I ever knew." There is 
 nothing necessarily unchristian in the possession of 
 
60 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 a temper. Indeed, the " possession " of a temper is 
 not that to which moralists generally object, it is 
 rather the " losing " of one's temper ; in other 
 words, the not possessing it enough to have control 
 over it. A Christian home is not a home without 
 temper in it, but it is a home where temper is 
 under the control of Christian motive and Christian 
 forbearance. We may go farther and say that a 
 Christian home life is not in terms of reasonable 
 ordinary expectation a faultless regime of exact 
 righteousness. David was a man of many blem- 
 ishes. He was " a man after God's own heart " ; 
 not because he was always right in conduct, but 
 rather because the prevailing disposition of his life 
 was right. He loved, and loved generously, and 
 was not too proud to be penitent nor too self- 
 opinionated to be brokenhearted over his own short- 
 comings. So also was Peter a man of many in- 
 firmities of daily life, a big blunderer in his ways, 
 but as big-hearted in his tears and self-rebukings as 
 he was hasty and impetuous in his speech. We love 
 him, not for his faultlessness, but for his essential 
 and enduring lovingness. A Christian home life 
 will not be always pleasant. It will not be without 
 friction, and certainly not without authority. It 
 will not be without its frequent faults and failures. 
 To expect too much of it is to invite the discourage- 
 ment which makes for worse defeat. But it will be 
 animated with a Christian purpose, the spirit of 
 mutual service, and the friction and fault of it will 
 
The Gospel and Home Conduct 61 
 
 be mitigated and in increasing measure overcome by 
 a willing forgiveness of offenses and a ready recog- 
 nition of " the law of Christ." 
 
 In the largest way this is the test of the working 
 of the gospel in home life. It is very much to be 
 desired that courtesy should prevail in the intimacies 
 of the home circle. Harshness and rudeness are 
 shamefully out of place in a Christian home. The 
 young man or young woman who professes to love 
 Christ, and bears testimony thereto in public meet- 
 ing, ought to seek with painstaking conscientious- 
 ness to testify for Christ in the much more difficult 
 declaration of the daily life, and especially in a 
 decent and orderly walk at home. But let us not 
 lose sight here of what the distinctive thing about 
 the gospel really is. The gospel is not simply a 
 moral code. It is very much more. There may be 
 social and moral propriety without the dominating 
 doctrine of Christ. His gospel is, indeed, a life; 
 but it is much more than an outwardly correct life, 
 more even than a life which is correct in outward 
 appearance when viewed from the close standpoint 
 of the fireside. The life is only Christian when it is 
 through and through a life of love. We must strive 
 for perfection, indeed, and perfection will not be 
 satisfied merely to " mean well " the while we are 
 carelessly doing evil. We must not continue in 
 sin " that grace may abound," continue in unloving 
 conduct and excuse it by claiming that nevertheless 
 we have the loving spirit. If we are faithful to 
 
62 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 love within us it will certainly manifest itself in 
 word and deed. Yet it is not propriety nor out- 
 ward perfectness by which we may know the Chris- 
 tian home first of all. It is the Christian spirit 
 rather, the spirit of humility, the spirit of forgive- 
 ness, the spirit of readiness to be reconciled ; it is 
 the spirit of the self-effacingness and all-lovingness 
 of the cross. The Fifty-first psalm, the Beatitudes 
 of Jesus, the Master's prayer on the cross, these 
 are all tokens of that mind which ought to dis- 
 tinguish the Christian home. 
 
 And nowhere are the rewards of Christian living 
 larger than they are at home. To have the approval 
 of " them that are without " is worth while for any 
 Christian ; but how much more does it mean to 
 have the approval of them that are within the range 
 of the most intimate daily life? To lead a stranger 
 to Christ is an unspeakable privilege, but so to 
 live and speak as to lead one's own brother or sister 
 to the Master is to reap a double reward. It is not 
 without meaning that we have this record concern- 
 ing Andrew, " he first findeth his own brother 
 Simon." If our Christian living does not " find " 
 those who are nearest to us, there is something 
 seriously the matter with it. And if it does, there 
 is unspeakable comfort in the high compliment of 
 such confidence, there is an assurance which the 
 world will not be slow to appreciate that our foun- 
 dations are sound, and there is a foretaste already 
 in the rich enjoyments of a Christian home life 
 
The Gospel and Home Conduct 63 
 
 of that better life beyond which we cannot conceive 
 as yet, but which we do most significantly suggest 
 when we speak of heaven as our everlasting home. 
 
 *** 
 Quiz 
 
 I. How do you explain the frequent boorishness 
 toward each other of members of the same family 
 who are sincerely fond of one another? 2. Can a 
 man be habitually discourteous in the family circle 
 and yet be a Christian ? 3. Has a Christian a right 
 to be severe under any circumstances in the exercise 
 of family authority? 4. What is a Christian tem- 
 per? 5. What are the chief marks of a Christian 
 spirit ? 
 
 Topics for Further Study 
 
 I. Are we growing away from home life? 2. Is 
 family worship every day desirable and practicable 
 in the average modern home? 3. How shall we de- 
 velop a helpful candor in the home as to matters of 
 religious experience? 4. Is the average of home 
 conduct improving, and if so, is this directly re- 
 lated to the improved status of woman? 5. Would 
 a more equal participation of woman in public life 
 make for more Christian standards at home? 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE GOSPEL WORKING IN THE CHURCH 
 
 THERE is a disposition in many quarters to-day to 
 put " churchianity " and Christianity in opposition 
 to each other. One notable instance has been much 
 cited, concerning an audience of working men in 
 New York City, who applauded the name of Christ, 
 and hissed immediately afterward the mention of 
 the church. All over the land there are many who 
 speak respectfully of Jesus who criticize most harsh- 
 ly all the churches which profess to speak in his 
 name. It is comparatively easy to get a whole con- 
 gregation to rise if the question is one of Christian 
 faith. It is more and more difficult to get those who 
 acquiesce in the reasonableness of religion and the 
 claims of Christ to admit the claims of church-mem- 
 bership and church activity upon them. 
 
 Yet, the churches were never so numerous as 
 they are to-day, and probably on the whole, never so 
 effective. There was never so much of the gospel 
 outside of the churches as there is to-day, and there 
 was never so much of the gospel inside of the 
 churches. In spite of all real and apparent opposi- 
 tion to the churches, the gospel is working in and 
 through them as never before, and more than half 
 64 
 
The Gospel Working in the Church 65 
 
 the protest against them is an indirect tribute to 
 them, the tribute of men who have learned from 
 the churches how much more the churches ought 
 to be. Those who are most impatient with the 
 churches now, would be many fold more impatient 
 if they were brought face to face with the church 
 life of other centuries. Even the " apostolic 
 churches," which we have exceedingly idealized, 
 would probably prove profoundly disappointing if 
 we immediately confronted them. 
 
 How difficult it is to find men and women of 
 intelligence now, and with any appreciation of 
 Christian ideas and ideals who have not, at one 
 time or another, shared the beneficent ministry of 
 the Sunday-school. They may boast that they have 
 not been inside a church " in twenty years," but if 
 you catch them unawares they will boast quite as 
 emphatically that they know all about the churches 
 because, in youth, they were regular frequenters of 
 the Sunday-school or, even " forced to go to church 
 three times a day." This is an admission in fact, 
 if not in form, that so much of the gospel as has 
 found them, came to them through the church, next 
 to the direct ministry of the home. And with 
 many of them the home training was religiously 
 negative, and all that they have learned of Chris- 
 tian precept and principle they have gathered from 
 the Sunday-school or from occasional attendance 
 upon the preaching of the word. 
 
 Very few even of those who work in the Sunday- 
 
66 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 school to-day apprehend how widespread the in- 
 fluence of the Sunday-school is. It is not only true 
 that the majority of those who join the churches 
 come to church-membership by way of the Sunday- 
 school ; but, as already suggested, the Sunday-school 
 reaches in very influential ways a multitude who are 
 lost to church attendance in later years. Undoubt- 
 edly it is a misfortune that the churches do not hold 
 them. But just as when our loved ones die we are 
 apt to think of the fact that we have lost them more 
 than we do of the fact that we have had them; so 
 do we sometimes over-emphasize the fact that the 
 church does not hold all who have been under its 
 instruction, and ignore the value of the fact that at 
 least the church had much to do with the shaping of 
 their lives for a little while. Much more than half 
 of the decency and respectability of the world out- 
 side of the churches is due to the touch of the 
 gospel upon these men and women in their impres- 
 sionable years before they turned aside from the 
 Sunday-school. If the Sunday-schools did no more 
 than this, they would be well worth while. In fact, 
 the Sunday-schools do a great deal more. Much 
 of their teaching is very superficial, but there is very 
 little of it which is not, in some degree, beneficial. 
 Moreover, the character of the work is greatly im- 
 proving from year to year. There are few better 
 ways of learning what the gospel is than to attempt 
 to teach it conscientiously in a modern Sunday- 
 school. Expression makes for impression. Espe- 
 
The Gospel Working in the Church 67 
 
 cially does explanation within the range of the un- 
 derstanding of a child bring one back to the things 
 that are of first importance in the gospel of Christ. 
 This is another indirect ministry of the Sunday- 
 schools. They are unsurpassed gymnasiums for 
 the exercise of all those who teach and work 
 in them. He is a very poor teacher who does not 
 learn more than his scholars. To get at the very 
 heart of the gospel, one needs to try to tell it 
 over and over, week after week, to a child. It is 
 possible, of course, merely to entertain the child. It 
 is easier yet simply to compel the attention of the 
 child without so much as entertaining him. But the 
 young Christian who goes at it right, and stays with 
 the task faithfully, will sooner or later learn to know 
 some of the deep things of the gospel through in- 
 terpreting the Scriptures to the understanding of 
 girls and boys. What the Sunday-schools are doing 
 in general moral influence upon those whom the 
 churches do not hold is worth while. What the 
 Sunday-schools are doing for those who operate 
 them and are teachers in them through the reflex 
 influence of their work upon themselves is even 
 more worth while. And, besides this, there is the 
 incalculable worth of the work for those who are 
 thereby led to accept the gospel and give them- 
 selves to the service of the kingdom of God. No 
 man who knows what the gospel is, and believes in 
 it, can for a minute despise its working in the Sun- 
 day-school to-day. 
 
68 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 In the minds of many, the young people's move- 
 ment has spent its force. If this is true, its force 
 has not been spent in vain. It has added very much 
 to the cheerfulness of present-day religion. Edward 
 Payson and Francis E. Clark were pastors in the 
 same city, of churches of the same denomination. 
 Their ministries fell only a little more than half a 
 century apart. There is no doubt that Edward 
 Payson was a saint, according to the standards of 
 his time. He was certainly esteemed as such by the 
 Christian community in New England a century 
 ago. It is said that on a single morning the birth 
 notices in the Boston papers showed six little 
 Edward Paysons to whom the name of the New 
 England saint had been given. Yet he was a most 
 melancholy and even morbid saint. The contrast 
 between Payson and Clark is much more than per- 
 sonal, otherwise it would not be mentioned here. 
 It is the contrast between the ascetic, John the Bap- 
 tist piety of the puritanism of yesterday and the 
 saner, sounder, and far more Christian type of re- 
 ligion which prevails to-day. The young people's 
 movement in the churches has done much to de- 
 liver us from the unnatural and unhealthful serious- 
 ness of the religion of a century ago. The whole- 
 some manliness and happy helpfulness of " Father 
 Endeavor " Clark is typical of the whole movement 
 in which he has played such honorable part. Our 
 young people's movement may be " too light " in 
 many of its manifestations, but it is certainly much 
 
The Gospel Working in the Church 69 
 
 more like the ministry of Jesus than the sickly 
 scntimentalism and exaggerated sanctimoniousness 
 which was mistaken for Christianity awhile ago. 
 Even so good a tract as " The Dairyman's Daugh- 
 ter," marks the melancholy of ordinary religious 
 propaganda until recent times. The very Sunday- 
 schools used to teach the children to sing: 
 
 " I want to be an angel, 
 
 And with the angels stand, 
 A crown upon my forehead, 
 And a harp within my hand." 
 
 A sentiment this which never for a minute belonged 
 to any sensible child. If the young people's move- 
 ment has done its work, it has done its work well in 
 hastening the departure of this hypochondria in 
 religion. 
 
 But it remains to be proved that the young peo- 
 ple's movement has spent its force. There is very 
 much to show that it has not. The young people's 
 societies are still with us, and a multitude of them 
 are doing very effective work. The work might be 
 both deeper and broader than it is. " Confessing 
 Christ " is good, but it ought to mean something 
 more than a parrotlike repetition of a familiar 
 phrase, and a half-hearted request for the prayers of 
 other people as a kind of easy substitute for earnest 
 and thoughtful effort on one's own behalf. " Ral- 
 lies " are all right, if they mark real progress ; but 
 
70 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 a standard that stands still, though it may serve as 
 a May-pole for mere merrymakers to go around and 
 around, will never lead an army to victory. It is 
 rather pitiful to find in a prominent Eastern city, 
 which is filled all summer long with visitors from all 
 over the world, that the Christian young people's 
 societies have adjourned for a period of months, 
 and the only sign of their existence is a momentary 
 revival for the sake of a moonlight excursion upon 
 the bay. Yet, to reason from these things that the 
 gospel is not working, and working to very good 
 effect in and through the young people's societies, 
 is to confess ignorance of much of the most vital 
 Christian literature and the most wholesome and 
 enterprising Christian life of our time. 
 
 In this study of the working of the church in 
 modern life, the Sunday-school and the young peo- 
 ple's societies are put first, not because they are 
 necessarily first in their demonstration of the gos- 
 pel, but because they are most immediately related 
 to the young Christian, and through them the young 
 Christian comes into vital, personal activity in the 
 church. The Sunday-school of a church is nearly 
 always what its young people are. It can be made 
 more effective only as they become more effective. 
 In point of intelligence it is seldom beyond the intel- 
 lectual life of the young people. It is not always up 
 to them in this respect. It is for them to make it so. 
 It is for them to make the Sunday-school also an 
 effective evangelistic and missionary agency. At 
 
The Gospel Working in the Church 71 
 
 no point is there nobler opportunity for enlargement 
 and improvement in Christian service than through 
 intelligent, painstaking devotion upon the part of the 
 young men and young women of the church to the 
 best type of Sunday-school service. Their own so- 
 ciety is less important than the Sunday-school. Yet 
 their own society can be made, next to the Sunday- 
 school, the most immediately effective auxiliary of 
 the church. Its prayer meetings can be made promo- 
 tive of something more than a trite and tasteless testi- 
 mony through indolent indulgence in formal phrase- 
 ology. Its socials can be broadened and deepened so 
 as to be beyond all suspicion of caste and clique 
 feeling and frivolous entertainment, and so as to 
 answer to the profoundest longings of the heart of 
 youth for worthy fellowship and real enjoyment of 
 life. Our young people's societies do not begin to 
 make what they ought to make of their literary op- 
 portunity. They ought to stimulate right reading 
 on the part of their members. They ought to offer 
 the best in books and pamphlets to all who attend 
 upon their meetings. They ought to utilize the de- 
 nominational papers for a good clipping bureau, 
 the clippings to be arranged somewhat after the 
 card index style, and kept for ready reference where 
 all the members of the church can get at them. 
 They ought especially to be in touch with the best 
 social service of their own community, keeping their 
 members informed about it, and as far as they can, 
 getting into active touch with such service them- 
 
72 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 selves. In a word, the young people's society ought 
 to be a kind of a committee of the whole on the 
 part of the youth of the church to keep the church in 
 contact with the freshest developments of Christian 
 thought and manifestations of Christian activity. 
 Every good work in the community ought to feel 
 their hand in sympathetic touch upon it. They 
 ought to hold what the Sunday-school has gained, 
 and recover very much of what the Sunday-school 
 has lost. 
 
 When all has been said that can be said for Sun- 
 day-school and young people's society, and every 
 other auxiliary of the church, the pulpit is still the 
 citadel of the church. When the pulpit is weak, 
 the church is weak. When the pulpit is strong, the 
 church is strong. The strength of the pulpit is in 
 the strength of her youth. Nor is it only in the 
 strength of her young men. The young women who 
 are to be ministers' wives are a very large factor in 
 the strength or weakness of the pulpit. Much more 
 than this may be said. Henry Ward Beecher once 
 said, " The minister gives back to the people in 
 showers what he takes up from them in vapor." 
 Sometimes he takes up very little, and sometimes 
 he takes up very much. A congregation makes a 
 minister quite as much as a minister makes a con- 
 gregation. The Gospel " according to Luke " is 
 also the Gospel according to Theophilus. When you 
 write a letter, the one you are writing to is also the 
 one you are writing through. Very few Christians 
 
The Gospel Working in the Church 73 
 
 begin to recognize what part they have in every 
 sermon they hear. Ten hearers are worth ten hun- 
 dred sneerers to bring out the best that is in a man. 
 Jesus sent men forth to testify of " what great 
 things the Lord had done for them," but quite as 
 emphatically he reiterated, " He that hath ears to 
 hear, let him hear." His own preaching failed 
 where a sympathetic hearing was lacking. The pul- 
 pit of to-day would be a hundredfold more effective 
 in winning the world to the gospel if instead of a 
 careless, captious, conventional, or merely conserv- 
 ative hearing the members of the churches, and 
 especially the younger members, listened with 
 whole-hearted devotion to the truth, with sincere 
 desire for self-advancement, and with an intelligent 
 appreciation of what real preaching is. 
 
 With all its faults and failures, the church is 
 still the main medium for carrying the gospel to the 
 world. Its work is of primary and permanent im- 
 portance at the point of contact with childhood and 
 youth. The young Christian will do well to put 
 much of the emphasis of his own activity and assist- 
 ance there. He ought to seek continually to enlarge 
 and improve the working of the gospel through the 
 church in these beginnings of the gospel in human 
 lives. But let not the young Christian cease here. 
 The pulpit has need of him, and indirectly but most 
 importantly need of her. The pulpit is, and must 
 remain, for many generations yet the immediate 
 voice of the gospel to men. Never was the gospel 
 
74 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 working so mightily as it is working in the pulpit 
 of our time. Yet it suffers tremendously from the 
 handicap of the pew. And here and there it is 
 greatly helped by the pew, and especially by the 
 pew where the young Christian sits, thinking the 
 best thought of our time, eager to know the best 
 that life has to give, ready to translate and trans- 
 mit the message through all the innumerable op- 
 portunities which are open only to youth. Through 
 such as these the gospel is working, indeed, in and 
 through the church of to-day. 
 
 *** 
 Quiz 
 
 I. What are the chief lines of helpful influence 
 on the part of the Sunday-school ? 2. Mention some 
 marked contribution of the young people's move- 
 ment to modern religious life. 3. What literary 
 service is open to the young people of the church? 
 4. What is the importance of the pulpit in modern 
 life? 5. What constitutes a good hearer? 
 
 Topics for Further Study 
 
 i. What is a "call" to the ministry? 2. What 
 claim, if any, has the church upon the minister's 
 wife? 3. What place should be given in the Sun- 
 day-school to the results of modern biblical criti- 
 cism ? 4. Has the young people's movement as such 
 passed its zenith? 5. Does public criticism of the 
 churches do more harm than good ? 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE GOSPEL WORKING FOR SOCIAL BETTERMENT 
 
 THE most serious handicap upon the working of 
 the gospel to-day is the fact that the church, the 
 main medium of the gospel, belongs too exclusively 
 to the "better classes." We have gotten too far 
 away from the " common people," who heard the 
 gospel gladly from the lips of the Carpenter of 
 Nazareth, whom we call Saviour and Lord. We are 
 as respectable to-day as the people who crucified 
 him long ago. And, if the meaning of Christ is the 
 incarnation of God in humanity, there is much more 
 danger than most of us are willing to allow, that 
 our respectability may mistakenly crucify him again. 
 For, whenever we crucify humanity, we do actually 
 crucify him. Neither can we despise and maltreat 
 the dependent and the defective classes, or refuse 
 to carry the burdens of " them that are weak," 
 without refusing the " mind of Christ " and putting 
 him to our treadmill, or selling him for silver once 
 more. 
 
 I walked in the city of Washington, on the splen- 
 did pavement between those more splendid build- 
 ings, the Hall of Congress and the Congressional 
 Library. There passed between us and the library 
 
 75 
 
76 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 a plain, two-wheeled cart, which jolted over the 
 pavement most inharmoniously. In the cart were 
 perhaps a dozen Negro convicts, dressed in dull, 
 dirty, striped suits of dark gray, with sodden faces 
 and listless eyes. They seemed utterly and absurdly 
 out of place there. Yet, they held my eyes and my 
 heart, and the remembrance of them is keener than 
 all the beauty and splendor that I saw that day. As 
 they wheeled sullenly and slowly by, I remarked to 
 the companion at my side, " If Jesus Christ were 
 here, he would care more about those dozen Negro 
 convicts in that cart there than he would about 
 all the spectacular public buildings in this capital 
 city." And I verily believe that beyond question I 
 spoke the truth. 
 
 The biggest thing about Christianity is the de- 
 mocracy of Jesus, the most absolute and uncom- 
 promising democracy the world has ever seen. This 
 is the meaning of the nativity of Jesus: that when 
 God would enter into humanity, he chose humanity 
 shorn of all its trappings and trimmings. This is 
 the meaning of Nazareth, and the carpenter's bench. 
 This is the meaning of the fishermen who followed 
 with him, and the women toward whom Jesus 
 showed no sex-consciousness, but whom he treated 
 simply as souls. If the church were as democratic 
 as Jesus, she would be crucified to-day, and would 
 rise again in all the power of his resurrection. 
 
 This is preeminently the problem of our time, to 
 interpret the democracy of Jesus into terms of 
 
The Gospel and Social Betterment 77 
 
 modern life. We are afraid to do it and, therefore, 
 the church has only half a following. Architecture, 
 sculpture, literature, painting, music, institutions, 
 and laws, these things are more to us than men. 
 And until men, even Negro convicts, are more to 
 us than all of these we are not more than partial 
 and very imperfect followers of Christ. 
 
 How are we going to get at it ? Not by " mis- 
 sions " and " slumming tours," and " rummage 
 sales " for the poor, and giving away our second- 
 hand clothes. These things are not altogether vain 
 if they are not done in a vain spirit. But they are 
 mere makeshifts at the best. Even " institutional 
 churches " and " social settlements " are not sufficient 
 to bridge the chasm between the respectable and the 
 disreputable, between the classes and the masses, 
 between ourselves and our conventional Christianity 
 and our Lord and Master, who was known as " a 
 friend of publicans and sinners." In the last analy- 
 sis the problem is spiritual, not institutional ; moral, 
 not formal ; and its solution is in the heart, and not 
 in anything which head and hand alone can do. It 
 is fortunate that this is so because the institutional 
 church and the social settlement are hardly prac- 
 ticable for all. It costs money to begin them, and it 
 costs a good deal more money to maintain them. 
 And like the Y. M. C. A., their emphasis tends 
 toward the temporal and the physical. This is not 
 to undervalue their work. The temporal and the 
 physical are with us, and as in former times, " fools 
 
78 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 who came to scoff remained to pray," much more is 
 it true that men who come for soup do sometimes 
 get a real inner salvation, and young men who learn 
 the latest in athletics sometimes learn that more 
 ancient wisdom, that " bodily exercise is profitable 
 for a little, but godliness is profitable unto all things, 
 having promise of the life which now is, and of that 
 which is to come." But all who have had anything 
 to do with what is commonly called institutional 
 work, if they have themselves any spiritual vision 
 and have entered into the heart of the Christian ex- 
 perience will confess that the results of this material 
 ministry are often profoundly disappointing and 
 exceedingly meager in genuinely spiritual results. 
 Institutional work is better than a purely dogmatic 
 work, and the institutional church is richer in life 
 product than many a church which mistakes ritual 
 or theological definition for Christianity. But this 
 type of social betterment work is not practicable in 
 every place, and if it were, it would not solve the 
 social problems of our day. The solution lies in the 
 realm of the spirit, and is not only sufficient to all 
 the need, but it is also open to those who follow 
 Jesus everywhere. 
 
 " What shall we do that we might work the works 
 of God?" asked the Jews of old. And this was 
 Jesus' own reply : " This is the work of God, that 
 ye believe on him whom he hath sent." And this 
 is still the answer, and it is sufficient to the social 
 problem of our time. The first great work of the 
 
"The Gospel and Social Betterment 79 
 
 church if it is going to " reach the masses " is to be- 
 lieve on Jesus, to catch his spirit, to share his ideal, 
 to live his life among men, to incarnate human needs 
 and bear the burden of human sorrow and suffering 
 and sin with him. Nothing less than this will do, 
 whether it is ritual, dogma, or institution. Work 
 for social betterment is first and fundamentally the 
 realization of social identity with all our fellow-men 
 through fellowship with the Son of man. 
 
 The first thing a young Christian, or any other 
 Christian can do to help his fellows who are less 
 competent or less comfortable than himself, is to 
 try to understand them. It is easy enough to pat- 
 ronize peculiar activities of one kind and another to 
 very little profit. The fruit of this sort of activity 
 may be only pharisaic pride on the one side, and ill- 
 concealed contempt on the other side. This is 
 where many of our " city missions " fail. Likewise 
 social betterment work is a delusion and a snare 
 if it is undertaken in anything less than a spirit of 
 absolutely honest human fellowship. And if a man 
 has an absolutely honest human fellowship in him, 
 he will find ways to express it effectively, whether 
 ordinary social betterment work is open to him or 
 not. Let him get right with his fellows first of all 
 himself, then shall he see clearly in what ways he 
 may help them most in his own particular situation 
 and with his own peculiar gifts. 
 
 We have heard much about " getting right with 
 God." No man is right with God who is not right 
 
8o The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 with men. " If thou bring thy gift to the altar, and 
 there rememberest that thy brother hath ought 
 against thee: Leave there thy gift before the altar, 
 and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, 
 and then come and offer thy gift." To paraphrase 
 this saying of Jesus a little, " Get right with men 
 if you would get right with God." No man loves 
 God who hates his fellows. Neither does any man 
 honor God who despises his fellows. The man who 
 rejects or contemns anything that is human, there- 
 by rejects and contemns something that is divine. 
 We measure our actual attitude toward God always 
 by our actual attitude toward men. Misunderstand 
 men and you misunderstand God. Misuse men and 
 you misuse God. Take men lightly and you take 
 God lightly. The way into the heart of the eternal 
 is forever through the heart of humankind. 
 
 Social betterment work at the bottom is a matter 
 of individual moral attitude toward men. The spirit 
 of it, which is always the important thing about it, 
 is just as much at home in the Sunday-school as it 
 is in the Y. M. C. 'A. It is just as applicable to 
 the church social as to the soup kitchen or the social 
 settlement bath. The young people's society may act 
 as a channel for it just as truly as a labor lecture 
 course. It will make the pulpit live again, and will 
 go farther than any amount of entertainment to fill 
 up the empty pews. 
 
 The biggest thing that any one of us can do for 
 social betterment is to better our own relations to 
 
The Gospel and Social Betterment 81 
 
 our fellows, one and all. Begin at home by working 
 out the gospel there in the difficult role of family 
 and neighborhood intimacies. Carry your zeal for 
 social betterment into Sunday-school and young 
 people's society, and church, and let it work there 
 for the disintegration of all overemphasis of indi- 
 vidual rights and privileges. Social betterment 
 would come a great deal faster in the world outside 
 if there were less of egotism and exclusiveness in 
 religious circles. A church that is not truly demo- 
 cratic is not truly Christian. The pomp and para- 
 phernalia of Romanism are offensive to many of 
 us, since they seem to contradict so glaringly the 
 simplicity of the gospel of Christ. Yet many Prot- 
 estant churches are really more exclusive than 
 Rome, more provincial, more dominated by this or 
 that person or clique. The largest service the 
 churches can do to the cause of social betterment is 
 first of all to give themselves whole-heartedly to the 
 democratic spirit, to open their doors to men and 
 women without respect to intellectual or moral 
 caste lines. Let the churches, like the individual, 
 begin at home. Charity does not mean first of all 
 almsgiving. What it does mean let the thirteenth 
 chapter of First Corinthians declare. This is the 
 charity which properly begins at home. When the 
 church recognizes that eloquence and knowledge 
 and prophecy and faith and almsgiving and even 
 martyrdom for the truth's sake are less than love, 
 and when within her own borders she shows forth 
 
82 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 that long-suffering, all-enduring, and all-compre- 
 hending love which the apostle so wonderfully an- 
 alyzes, then will her ministry for social betterment 
 be like unto the ministry of Jesus himself. 
 
 There is especial need of the democracy of Jesus, 
 the appreciation of man as man, in all reformatory 
 work. " The Son of man was revealed that he 
 might destroy the works of the devil." And he is 
 destroying them like " a consuming fire." But no 
 man is quite fit to join him in this purifying work 
 until he has cleansed himself of pride and egotism 
 and the idea that he belongs to some superior sort 
 of man. Temperance reform is a splendid work for 
 social betterment, and a man can hardly identify 
 himself too positively with the movement for a 
 sober city or a sober State. But temperance work 
 is too often touched with phariseeism. It is easier 
 to fight the rum-seller than it is to save the rum- 
 drinker. The strongest point that the saloons have 
 in their fight against the churches is that they are 
 often vastly more democratic. We shall never 
 destroy the saloon in our great cities till the 
 churches have made their cause much more the 
 cause of the common man, and till the formalism of 
 religious worship is more displaced by a healthful, 
 hearty, human quality such as one finds in a certain 
 crude way in the ordinary saloon. Let the young 
 Christian who goes into reform work be very care- 
 ful that he does not get away from the large hu- 
 manity of Christ. He ought to be at least as demo- 
 
The Gospel and Social Betterment 83 
 
 cratic as the man in the street. If he is true to his 
 Master he will be more democratic in fact. 
 
 Both the individual Christian and the individual 
 church in whom this spirit of true Christian de- 
 mocracy abides, will find a multitude of ways of 
 serving the cause of social betterment in their own 
 particular place. Institutional features of one kind 
 and another will be found which are adaptable to 
 almost any situation. In this respect much of orig- 
 inality and freedom is to be desired. We are all 
 overmuch prone to copy forms of service, rather 
 than to seek the spirit and then allow it to work 
 itself out to fit our own peculiar opportunities and 
 needs. The Emmanuel Church found its own work, 
 a work which is practicable also, it may be granted, 
 in many other places. It does not follow, however, 
 that the same spirit in which the Emmanuel Church 
 went to work to serve the poor and the needy and 
 the suffering of Boston will work out in the same 
 measures for every country village church. Neither 
 can every church be a Judson Memorial Institu- 
 tional Church, nor a Moody's Institute. It is very 
 hard to imitate and keep up first quality. Social 
 needs are so complex, social opportunities so mani- 
 fold, and life is so continually seeking to express 
 itself in new forms, that we may well be cautious 
 lest we mistake some borrowed motion toward 
 social betterment for the one essential thing, the 
 spirit of a Christlike identification of ourselves 
 with our fellow-men. If we love men as Christ 
 
84 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 loved them, we shall find our own ways in our own 
 time and our own circumstances to make that love 
 manifest to them. And if we lack that love, all our 
 institutions and good ideas will be very largely in 
 vain. 
 
 Because the social problem is so emphatically our 
 problem to-day, and because the social spirit is 
 breaking out in a hundred different ways, it is of 
 first importance that we shall make no mistake here 
 as to what is really the first thing. Social better- 
 ment does not necessarily mean that all our churches 
 shall be institutional churches of the same type ; or, 
 indeed, of any recognized institutional type. It does 
 not necessitate any kind of uniformity of method, 
 but only a great Christian unity of mood. Let the 
 young Christian learn the mind of Christ; that is, 
 the mood of Christ toward men, and let him make 
 that mood his own in relation to the men and wo- 
 men among whom he lives ; let him use the church 
 and the Sunday-school and the young people's so- 
 ciety, and every other instrument and agency which 
 he can influence to carry out this mood toward men ; 
 but let him never forget that the mind, the mood, 
 the living spirit, is the beginning and end of it all. 
 Social betterment will not come with anything less 
 than a better social spirit on the part of us all. 
 " The kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but 
 righteousness, and peace, and joy in the spirit of 
 holiness." And this is open to us all. Dream not 
 of millions with which you would endow this or 
 
The Gospel and Social Betterment 85 
 
 that good work. Nor yet of this or that device with 
 which you will recreate the world. Rather seek for 
 yourself that spirit which, if made perfect in all, 
 would make all things perfect, and remember that 
 the largest contribution which you or any one else 
 can make toward the betterment of men is a heart 
 which is wholly one with human sufferings and 
 human needs and the very highest human ends. 
 
 Quiz 
 
 i. In what way is respectability a danger to the 
 church ? 2. Was there any sex-consciousness in the 
 teaching of Jesus? 3. What is the fundamental 
 thing in social betterment? 4. How is getting 
 right with men related to getting right with God? 
 5. What are the difficulties in the way of general 
 " institutional " methods as a part of ordinary 
 church work? 6. What is a real Christian de- 
 mocracy of spirit? 
 
 Topics for Further Study 
 
 i. Are the churches respectable because they ap- 
 peal most to the respectable classes, or because re- 
 ligion tends, through correct habits of life, to ma- 
 terial well-being? 2. Does the democracy of Jesus 
 imply ultimate social equality everywhere? 3. Is 
 almsgiving on the whole an evil or a good ? 4. Will 
 the Emmanuel movement prove permanent? 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE GOSPEL WORKING FOR KINGDOM EXPANSION 
 
 No man believes in the gospel of Jesus Christ who 
 believes in it for himself alone. Neither does any 
 man believe in the gospel of Jesus Christ who be- 
 lieves in it for his own city or county or country 
 alone. The gospel that a man holds, is for the 
 world, or else it is not the gospel of Jesus Christ. 
 
 It is true that a man may have the missionary 
 spirit and not have the gospel of Jesus Christ, or 
 have it, if at all, in a very imperfect form. The 
 religion of Mohammed is a missionary faith, but it 
 is very far from the faith of Jesus. There are few 
 stories which are at once so heroic and so pathetic 
 as Francis Parkman's history of " The Jesuits in 
 North America." What did they not endure of 
 danger and hardship and suffering and cruel 
 martyrdom? And this oftentimes for the pitiful 
 purpose of squeezing a few drops of water out of a 
 wet handkerchief surreptitiously on to the fever- 
 heated brow of a dying child, not to cool its brow, 
 but to save its soul. Their zeal and its immediate 
 objective is in curious contrast with the missionary 
 indifference of much modern liberalism. 
 
 Why should a man who believes in salvation 
 86 
 
The Gospel and Kingdom Expansion 87 
 
 through sacrament or through ecclesiastical con- 
 nection be so much more in earnest for the salvation 
 of his fellows than the man who thinks larger 
 thoughts of God? Why did the very Pharisees 
 whom Jesus scored so unmercifully for their shal- 
 low, selfish faith, " compass sea and land to make 
 one proselyte " with the ordinary result of such 
 unethical enthusiasm that they made him "twofold 
 more the child of hell " than themselves, when so 
 many to-day who hold the Christian faith in more 
 than ordinary purity are singularly indifferent to 
 any active propaganda of their principles? 
 
 It is well to remember the strong saying of the 
 first great missionary of Christianity, to the effect 
 that neither the faith that can remove mountains 
 nor the zeal by which a man gives his body to be 
 burned, is of any large consequence without love. 
 Yet, it is perplexing that faith and zeal should so 
 often inspire men and women to greater effort and 
 self-sacrifice than love itself. Or is this only ap- 
 parently so? 
 
 Whatever the explanation of this problem, it is 
 certain that the love wherewith Jesus himself loved 
 the world, inspired in him the utmost of zeal to 
 give his doctrine to the world. He was far removed 
 from the petty proselytizing spirit of the Pharisees, 
 but he was also far removed from the indolent indif- 
 ference of a self-complacent Christianity. His one 
 passion was the kingdom of God, and the one su- 
 preme end of all his ministry was to make that king- 
 
88 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 dom known to men. Nothing less than this is ab- 
 solutely Christian. So far as any man cares more 
 for money-getting, or any other kind of getting 
 more than he cares about getting men into the king- 
 dom of God, and getting the kingdom of God into 
 men, he is out of harmony with Christ. If his doc- 
 trine interferes with the dissemination of the gos- 
 pel of the kingdom, it is to that extent, at least, 
 out of harmony with the doctrine of Jesus. And, if 
 he has less zeal than men who have a less intelligent 
 faith, there is something seriously the matter with 
 his faith, however superficially intelligent it may 
 appear. A faith that is not a missionary faith, 
 whatever excellencies it may have, lacks a good deal 
 of being the faith of Jesus. 
 
 The early church was a missionary church. In- 
 deed, the church has always been a missionary 
 church when it has been in actual touch with the 
 spirit of Jesus. The Reformation church was a 
 missionary church. So also were the churches 
 which Methodism kindled into something like 
 apostolic life. Whenever the spirit of Jesus has 
 worked outside of the churches in some great en- 
 thusiasm for humanity, as in the movement for the 
 overthrow of human slavery, missionary zeal and 
 self-sacrifice have always been manifest. False 
 faiths and false enthusiasms also have their mis- 
 sionary zeal, it is true, as weeds have their upspring- 
 ing and self-asserting qualities. But a true faith 
 and hope can no more be without missionary en- 
 
The Gospel and Kingdom Expansion 89 
 
 thusiasm and prosper in a world where falsehood 
 is to be found on every hand, than one may expect 
 a profitable harvest from a plant which is with- 
 out self-assertive qualities. However excellent the 
 plant may be in other respects, it will utterly fail in 
 the struggle for existence with more aggressive 
 and assertive forms of life. So has every church 
 failed and every movement which has not had in it 
 much of the missionary spirit. 
 
 Jesus affirmed in many forms the expansive char- 
 acter of his kingdom. It was to be like the mustard 
 seed in the contrast between its humble and ap- 
 parently insignificant beginnings and its later large 
 and impressive growth. It was to be like the leaven 
 which a woman took and hid in three measures of 
 meal, a very large quantity of flour from the stand- 
 point of individual need, or even the need of the 
 ordinary family, and by and by the whole was 
 leavened. The Great Commission is a commission 
 to evangelize the whole earth. The more clearly 
 the character of Jesus' teaching is understood 
 the more does one perceive the truly universal 
 application of his doctrine and the imperative 
 mood in which it stands toward all human- 
 kind. To deny it to any part of the world is to 
 deny the very heart of the message itself, and no 
 man who really knows what the gospel is can fail 
 to feel its inevitably universal appeal. The strange 
 thing is not that every Christian church which has 
 any claim to the Christian name is more or less 
 
90 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 missionary in its outlook and activities. Much 
 stranger is it that any such church can think itself 
 alive at all if it does not throb through and through 
 with the passion to give its gospel to the whole 
 earth as rapidly and as compellingly as it is pos- 
 sible to send forth the word. There is more excuse 
 for the military missionism of Mohammedanism 
 than there is for the dead indifference of many a so- 
 called Christian church. Better a pagan who thinks 
 he has something worth while for the world and 
 is mad with zeal to give it to the whole earth than 
 a " Christian " who claims a faith which is for all 
 ages and all nations, and is too absorbed in himself 
 and his own narrow environment to make any at- 
 tempt to tell the world his good news. Either he 
 does not believe that his " good news " is good for 
 much, or else he is not good for much himself. 
 
 The democracy of Jesus means more than the 
 leveling up of classes to the one vast fellowship of 
 the sons and daughters of God where there can be 
 no high and no low. It means also, and quite as 
 imperiously, the passing of all provincialism and 
 lesser patriotism into the highest patriotism of all, 
 the final fellowship of humankind, the universal 
 household of the kingdom of God. The kingdom 
 of heaven cannot be less expansive than this and 
 be the kingdom of heaven indeed. And no man is 
 in the kingdom of heaven very far who does not 
 long and pray and work for the day when every 
 other man shall be also there. 
 
The Gospel and Kingdom Expansion 91 
 
 Fortunately ours is a missionary age. We have 
 the opportunity for missionary effort as never in 
 the history of the world before. When William 
 Carey looked up from his cobbler's bench at the 
 map of the world, a little more than a century ago, 
 not only were the doors of many nations closed 
 to any would-be missionary of the cross, but the 
 material means of giving that gospel were nothing 
 like as adequate as they are to-day. Carey had the 
 printing press indeed, though printing itself was 
 crude and clumsy enough when compared with the 
 processes of publication to-day. And the railroad, 
 the telegraph, the telephone, and a hundred other 
 devices which have to do more or less directly with 
 intercommunication between men and nations, were 
 yet to come. If all this improvement in the material 
 instruments of communication does not make for 
 greater interest in telling to the earth the story of 
 Jesus Christ and his message to men, it can only 
 be that we do not think that story and that message 
 actually worth while. The young Christian who can 
 read even the " Scientific American " and not arise 
 from it with enlarged missionary interest and en- 
 thusiasm, has not yet learned to make the kingdom 
 of God first in his thoughts. 
 
 Neither does any man or woman appreciate the 
 age in which we live in an economic way who does 
 not recognize the missionary appeal. It is no mere 
 coincidence that modern machinery and modern 
 missions were born in the same country and about 
 
92 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 the same time. The expansion of material produc- 
 tion was bound to break down the barriers between 
 nations, and necessitate foreign markets as wide as 
 the world. Commerce would have been clogged 
 long ago but for these new channels for the wider 
 distribution of goods. *Had these channels been 
 opened without reference to religion, they must 
 have been very much narrower and shallower, and 
 the results must have been mischievous beyond 
 measure, both to the heathen and the Christian 
 world. They would have been narrower and shal- 
 lower because the needs of men who are barbarian 
 are nothing like as broad and deep as the needs of 
 men who are Christian. The man whom Jesus 
 healed was seen sitting " clothed and in his right 
 mind." There is a close connection between a right 
 mind and the demand for clothing and all the other 
 good things which make for civilization. And had 
 the missionaries of commerce been able to create 
 some crude demand for their manufactures without 
 the missionaries of the cross to go before them, 
 the result to heathendom and civilization may be 
 measured in a way by the appalling conditions 
 which prevailed in some of the islands of the seas 
 where foreign seamen added the vices of civilization 
 to the ignorance and lawlessness of untutored peo- 
 ples. The world would have been overwhelmed 
 with a lava flow of iniquity which one hesitates to 
 more than suggest. 
 
 Fortunately the missionary was first. The true 
 
The Gospel and Kingdom Expansion 93 
 
 " advance agent of prosperity," as many of our 
 big business men are coming to recognize, is the 
 man who makes men out of barbarians by showing 
 them the way into life. Elizabeth Barrett Browning 
 says somewhere: 
 
 " We must be here to work, 
 And he who works can only work for men, 
 And not to work in vain must understand hu- 
 manity 
 
 And so work humanly, and raise men's bodies 
 Still by raising souls, as God did first." 
 
 This indeed is always the divine method, to 
 " raise men's bodies still by raising souls." And 
 this is missions. City missions, home missions, for- 
 eign missions, they are all absolutely in line with 
 good business sense. The young business man who 
 does not see this needs a course in elementary 
 economics. Whenever you raise men's bodies, as 
 you always do when you actually raise their souls, 
 you do at the same time raise the demand for all 
 legitimate goods. " The stars in their courses 
 fought against Sisera," and all the stars of our 
 economic world are fighting against provincialism 
 and against barbarism and against heathenism, and 
 for the coming of that kingdom of God which, if 
 it be not " meat and drink " is, nevertheless, on the 
 side of " more abundant life," even in the things 
 which commerce supplies. 
 
94 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 Missionary interest is both common-sense religion 
 and common sense in business. It is real Christi- 
 anity, and it is real modern enterprise. We shall 
 neither hold our own in faith nor in commerce if 
 we do not give the gospel to those who are un- 
 evangelized. The gospel works inevitably toward 
 kingdom expansion. All the commercial forces of 
 the day are working also toward the larger life of 
 men, which is the ultimate of Christian faith. The 
 first impulse of the new convert, to tell his faith 
 abroad, is central in all living Christian faith. If 
 we have gained in understanding of the gospel, 
 we shall have gained also in the desire to make it 
 known, for the more one knows the gospel the 
 more he sees how naturally and needfully it belongs 
 to all mankind. Likewise every gain in the demo- 
 cratic spirit makes for missionary interest, since 
 it includes all humanity in a large, loving human 
 sympathy which will not be content with anything 
 less than the best for all our fellows. Modern busi- 
 ness also is emphatically on the side of missions 
 when it is broadly and intelligently viewed. The 
 young Christian who is enthusiastic for missions 
 may, therefore, know that he is but thinking Christ's 
 gospel in the terms of Jesus' own thinking, and is 
 one with the profoundest and mightiest movements 
 of our time, the expansion of business, the expan- 
 sion of the democratic spirit, and the expansion of 
 real religion in the world. Moreover, he can 
 justify his interest in missions by the miracles 
 
The Gospel and Kingdom Expansion 95 
 
 which the missionary spirit has worked and is 
 working in modern times. 
 
 *** 
 Quiz 
 
 i. How do you explain the missionary zeal of 
 many whose gospel message is most imperfect? 2. 
 Is a selfish or self-complacent indifference to mis- 
 sionary activity less mischievous than a blind and 
 intolerant sectarianism? 3. What is the economic 
 importance of missions? 4. Does religion pay from 
 the standpoint of general commercial consideration ? 
 5. What are the missionary motives which modern 
 conditions emphasize? 
 
 Topics for Further Study 
 
 i. Is there any close connection between the in- 
 vention of machinery and the modern missionary 
 movement? 2. Has biblical criticism weakened the 
 missionary impulse? 3. Is the material or the 
 moral first in the quickening of nations? 4. Is the 
 enlargement of missionary benevolence dependent 
 in any marked degree upon the correction of our 
 present missionary methods? 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE GOSPEL'S MODERN MIRACLES 
 
 IN the " Missionary Review of the World " for 
 January, 1897, there is a brief article under the cap- 
 tion, " A Mighty Miracle." It is the story of a wo- 
 man evangelist in India, Miss Stevens, " Evangel- 
 ist Elizabeth," and a heathen priest in the vicinity 
 of Madras, to whom she gave certain of her tracts, 
 after she had prayed in his presence for the blessing 
 of God upon them. He was decked out in all his 
 horrid priestly gear, and was inwardly furnished 
 with all manner of clever argument against the 
 gospel, having the reputation of being one of the 
 ablest dialecticians in that part of India. He had 
 himself posed before the people as a god, and had 
 received homage as such. The tracts had apparently 
 only an ill effect upon him, for a few days after- 
 ward he poured out his abuse upon a native worker 
 because of them. The preacher -answered him never 
 a word, but read to him the first chapter of John, 
 and then, kneeling, wrestled in prayer for him. 
 Not long afterward Miss Stevens was astonished 
 to see this same priest standing in her own room, 
 and to hear him say, "Jesus has conquered me." 
 He asked baptism, but was advised to consider care- 
 96 
 
The Gospel's Modern Miracles 97 
 
 fully what the step meant to him. Nevertheless he 
 returned, and in such childlike spirit proffered his 
 request again that he was received, the signs of his 
 pagan priesthood were removed, and he became al- 
 most immediately an effective preacher of the gos- 
 pel which he had despised and opposed. 
 
 " O Galilean, thou hast conquered," are the 
 words attributed to the apostate emperor Julian, 
 when his effort to stay the Christian conquest of the 
 Roman Empire proved futile. This ancient con- 
 quest of Rome by the early church has been cited 
 often as one of the miracles of the ages, a kind of 
 crowning demonstration of the supernatural origin 
 of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Yet, in our own day, 
 the conquest of heathen nations and peoples by this 
 same gospel has been a no less divine demonstration 
 of the presence and power of God in and through 
 the gospel of Christ. The Hindu priest's confession, 
 " Jesus has conquered me," is worthy to be written 
 side by side with the more famous saying of the 
 unhappy emperor, and there is every reason to be- 
 lieve that the Christian conquest of India and heath- 
 enism generally will be reckoned by the ages to 
 come as no less miraculous than the successes of 
 the gospel in the earliest centuries of missionary 
 endeavor. 
 
 The miracles of missions are by no means all the 
 miracles of our faith. There are miracles of healing 
 in the name of Christ in these modern days which 
 will compare favorably with those recorded in any 
 
98 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 century since the Son of man himself " went about 
 doing good." Many of these miracles are wrought 
 by the physicians themselves, and with the use of 
 the latest scientific appliances. We do the gospel 
 of Christ injustice when we exclude from the works 
 of Jesus all the indirect ministry of his spirit 
 whereby Christian nations have been quickened into 
 the better understanding of the laws of God in the 
 realm of the physical and have learned to co-oper- 
 ate more effectively with him. All that is best in 
 modern civilization belongs, in a large way, to 
 those " greater works than these " which Christ 
 promised that his disciples should do. But mis- 
 sions, at home and abroad, are a kind of first fruits 
 everywhere of the marvelous working of the spirit 
 of Christ among men. 
 
 Yet the miracles of missions are by no means 
 confined to the conversion of the heathen abroad 
 and the outcast at home. In many respects the 
 missionaries themselves are the supreme miracle of 
 modern missions. Not since the days of the apostles 
 has there been a greater galaxy of splendid names 
 than the story of modern missions affords. The 
 missionary activity of the church, quite apart from 
 its direct results in the saving of those to whom the 
 gospel has been preached, has justified its cost many 
 fold by its priceless product of heroic men and 
 women who have written their names with the 
 heroes of faith whom the writer of the Hebrews so 
 inspiringly enumerates. 
 
The Gospel's Modern Miracles 99 
 
 The young Christian who does not know some- 
 thing of William Carey and Adoniram Judson, of 
 Robert Morrison and Alexander Duff, of Robert 
 Moffat and David Livingstone, and John Williams 
 and Bishop Patton, and a host of others before and 
 after them, " of whom the world was not worthy," 
 is almost as unpardonable as an aspirant for Ameri- 
 can military promotion who had never heard of 
 Hannibal and Alexander, of Caesar and Charle- 
 magne, of Napoleon and Wellington, or of Wash- 
 ington, General Jackson, and Ulysses S. Grant. 
 These men themselves, last named, are the study 
 of every man who counts himself a soldier and seeks 
 success in arms. How shall our Christian youth 
 excuse themselves for their scant acquaintance with 
 even the names of those whose character and career 
 is such a mighty demonstration of the greater good 
 and more enduring glory of the warfare in which 
 the followers of the Prince of Peace are engaged? 
 
 One need not go away from home for that matter 
 to find these modern miracles in the missionaries 
 themselves. Christianity has never done anything 
 greater in its way than the raising of Jerry Mc- 
 Cauley from the dead. This derelict of the New 
 York slums was more hopeless, if possible, than the 
 heathen priest or any heathen outcast. Yet the 
 work of the gospel in him gave the world a Chris- 
 tian hero worthy to be compared for self-sacrificing 
 devotion and utmost love for the fallen among his 
 fellows with the greatest of the apostles of ancient 
 
ioo The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 days. Here was a Christian athlete and wrestler 
 with whose record of immortal achievement in him- 
 self and for others every man who aspires to 
 spiritual stature and strength ought to be thor- 
 oughly familiar. Nevertheless, Jerry McCauley was 
 no more of a miracle than was Dwight L. Moody, 
 though Moody came not from the slums. The 
 Northfield lad who, without an education, came 
 forth from that farmhouse in northern Massachu- 
 setts to electrify the world with the power of a 
 Christ-inspired personality and made of his mustard- 
 seed beginnings such a mighty tree of righteousness 
 was a veritable apostle to our times. And Mc- 
 Cauley and Moody are but two of a multitude of 
 men and women whose being and doing in the spirit 
 of Christ make modern Christian biography such a 
 rich field of holy inspiration. Cornelia, the mother 
 of the Gracchi, is said to have boasted of her boys, 
 " These are my jewels." With much more justi- 
 fication may the church of modern days point to 
 her sons of strength who are shaping the empire 
 which shall never pass away and say of them, both 
 for what they are and for what they have done, 
 " These are my miracles." 
 
 The miracles of missions are manifest, not only 
 in the missionaries themselves and in their works, 
 but quite as wonderfully in the churches at home. 
 The best answer to any Baptist objector to foreign 
 missions is the Baptist denomination. One need 
 not exaggerate the weakness of our denomination 
 
The Gospel's Modern Miracles 101 
 
 before Judson came to us out of the bosom of New 
 England Congregationalism, nor the relatively 
 feeble growth of that wing of our denomination 
 which rejected the call of God in Judson's appeal, 
 to prove beyond peradventure of doubt that great 
 as have been the achievements of Baptist mission- 
 aries on the foreign field, the heathen have done 
 more for us than we have done for them. Or, if 
 you like the statement better, the reflex influence of 
 foreign missionary effort has been worth more to 
 the churches at home than all the cost of it abroad. 
 Our own denominational growth, since we heard 
 and heeded the call from the Macedonia of heathen- 
 ism, is one of the most mirvelous results among all 
 the marvels of missions. How any Baptist, young 
 or old, can be indifferent to foreign missions in 
 the face of this practical demonstration of the 
 splendid dividends which we as a denomination have 
 received from our reluctant investment in this for- 
 ward march of the faith passes all understanding. 
 Yet, when have miracles ever convinced men against 
 their own captious and covetous moods? 
 
 This is not a book upon missions, and I do not 
 propose to fill even this chapter with the vain attempt 
 to catalogue the conquests of modern missionary ad- 
 vance. The literature of missions is abundant, and 
 most accessible, and there is needed for an intelligent 
 appreciation of the strength and success of missions 
 only the willing mind and a fair degree of appli- 
 cation. What the writer of the fourth Gospel says 
 
IO2 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 of the miracles of Jesus himself is exceedingly 
 apropos with reference to the miracles wrought in 
 his name on the mission fields at home and abroad : 
 " If they should be written, every one, I suppose 
 that even the world itself could not contain the 
 books that should be written." But what is writ- 
 ten and what may easily be read by any young 
 Christian who will give a very moderate amount 
 of time and attention to these modern miracles, is 
 enough to prove again that " Jesus is the Christ," 
 and that believing in him men may still find " life 
 through his name." 
 
 Read what God has wrought in Africa since the 
 days of Moffat and of Livingstone there. Florence 
 Nightingale, herself one of the finest products of 
 the last century, whose sun still lingers in our own, 
 said of David Livingstone, that he was the greatest 
 man of the nineteenth century, that century of al- 
 most countless mighty men. Read his story till the 
 spirit of that Christlike life flows through all the 
 channels of your own. Then read the latest words 
 of Theodore Roosevelt concerning what missions 
 have done and are doing in the once " dark con- 
 tinent " where the glow of the morning of a Chris- 
 tian faith and life now touches even the long- 
 sought sources of the Nile. 
 
 Or read the story of China and Japan, and con- 
 sider the miracle of Nippon, and the slower but 
 hardly less marvelous awaking of the vast " Celes- 
 tial Empire." Those who watched beside the sea 
 
The Gospel's Modern Miracles 103 
 
 the feeding of the five thousand with that handful 
 of bread and fish, long ago, saw a sight less marvel- 
 ous than the refreshing of millions upon millions of 
 men and women, and the renewal of a whole nation 
 of nations through the apparently puerile efforts 
 of Robert Morrison and his coadjutors and succes- 
 sors in China. When Morrison was about to sail 
 for China, and was settling the matter of fare and 
 freight with a " practical " shipowner, the man of 
 business said to the Christian argonaut, who seemed 
 to him to be going out after a visionary " golden 
 fleece," " Now, Mr. Morrison, do you really expect 
 that you will make an impression on the idolatry 
 of the Chinese Empire ? " And Morrison answered 
 the smile which thinly veiled the practical man's 
 contempt with a dignified severity becoming one of 
 the prophets of Israel, " No, sir ; but I expect that 
 God will." Nor was the missionary's expectation in 
 vain as concerns even his own years. Morrison, in 
 a measure, " lived to see of the fruit of his soul, and 
 was satisfied." 
 
 In no irreverent spirit may it be said, but with 
 utmost acknowledgment, that it is the work of 
 Christ himself, and not our own, that greater than 
 the works which he did when he walked upon the 
 sea or stilled the storm-tossed waters of Galilee 
 have been the works of the missionaries of the cross 
 in the far stormier and more uncertain islands of the 
 Pacific. John Williams' " Narratives of Missionary 
 Enterprise " have been compared by an eminent 
 
IO4 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 prelate to " The Acts of the Apostles." The mar- 
 tyrdom of Williams in the New Hebrides recalls, 
 indeed, the martyrdom of Stephen, and the success 
 of the gospel in the south seas is as thrilling as the 
 story of Pentecost. 
 
 And what shall be said of the marvels of mission- 
 ary success which have crowned the long waiting 
 and unwearied labors of our own missionaries 
 among the Telugus? Or what of Mackay and 
 Uganda? Or what of the McAll Mission in 
 France? Or what of the transformation which is 
 going on in the Philippines, more marvelous than 
 when the Master himself " manifested his glory " at 
 Cana in Galilee by turning the water into wine? 
 Is not the whole story of missionary effort one long 
 enlargement of this miracle, the Lord of Life turn- 
 ing the water of our weak endeavor into the satis- 
 fying draught which is making the whole earth 
 jubilant with his joy? 
 
 The miracle goes on every day under our very 
 eyes, and we are wondrous slow to see it and quick 
 to forget. The apostles of Jesus themselves saw 
 less of the mighty power of the gospel than our 
 own generation is beholding. The modern world 
 is one vast arena of Christian, effort, a thousand- 
 fold more expansive than the arena at Rome where 
 weak women confounded the power of the Caesars 
 with their overcoming testimony for the Christ. 
 And again men and women, even young men and 
 maidens, are wrestling with the wild beasts and 
 
The Gospel's Modern Miracles 105 
 
 wilder men, and are overturning nations with their 
 message of the undying Christ. We need not look 
 back across the centuries for our help and inspi- 
 ration. The inspiration is here. We need not argue 
 about the miracles of the past. The present miracle 
 is its own witness. It is in our own land, and 
 ought veritably to be a part of our own life. 
 
 *** 
 Quiz 
 
 i. Can the word miracle be fairly used of any 
 modern manifestation of the power of the gospel? 
 2. Are the works of modern engineers and other 
 wizards of the material realm in any sense wonders 
 of the gospel? 3. What is the first miracle of mis- 
 sions? 4. Are Baptists indebted to missions in any 
 unusual degree; and, if so, where do you find the 
 evidence of it? 5. Are we actually doing greater 
 works to-day than Jesus did while here; and if so 
 how do you account for it? 6. How can we make 
 the miracles of missions a part of our own life ? 
 
 Topics for Further Study 
 
 i. Who was Robert Moffat, and what were his 
 relations with David Livingstone? 2. What part 
 may be fairly claimed for missions as the awakener 
 of Japan? 3. Will the Eastern nations, as they be- 
 come more Christian, modify the forms of our 
 Western Christianity ? 4. If so, what type of heresy 
 or what lines of influence may we most reasonably 
 
io6 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 expect? 5. Have missions produced as yet any 
 characters among the heathen themselves of really 
 heroic size? 6. Is the pursuit of foreign markets 
 making for the Christianizing of the world? 7. 
 Who is your favorite missionary hero, and why? 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE GOSPEL AND BUSINESS 
 
 THERE are two words in very common use to-day 
 which nowhere appear in the Bible. These words 
 are, employer and employee. Very much of the 
 problem of Christian living centers about these 
 words to-day. They at least suggest the wide dif- 
 ference between the " business " of the Bible and 
 the " business " of our time. 
 
 In the Roman world of Jesus' day, one-half of 
 the people or more were slaves. Our word " serv- 
 ant " is the old Roman word for slave, hardly 
 changed at all as to form. Paul, signing himself " a 
 servant of Jesus Christ," was, in fact, designating 
 himself as a slave. He returned the slave Onesimus 
 to his master, Philemon; but, as he had bowed 
 himself to the lowliness of a slave in relation to 
 Christ, in the same relationship he lifts Onesimus 
 to the dignity of a brother in the Lord. Though 
 not in form the denial of slavery, the whole bear- 
 ing of Paul in this matter was fundamentally con- 
 trary to any and all kinds of selfish commercialism 
 between man and man. 
 
 In some quarters there is much talk of " wage- 
 slavery " to-day. The ancient slave was, in some 
 
 107 
 
io8 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 respects, undoubtedly better off on the side of com- 
 fort and security than the less fortunate of modern 
 industrial workers. He was not in constant dread 
 of losing his job, the nightmare of a multitude of 
 laborers to-day, and not always laborers of the 
 poorer class alone. He had no such fear of the age 
 limit, as prevails widely among the workmen of this 
 present strenuous period of keenest industrial com- 
 petition. And very frequently he was better housed 
 and clothed and fed than is the laborer of the city 
 now. The modern workman has this advantage, 
 sometimes a dubious advantage enough as it works 
 out in practical life, that he is technically his own 
 master. In a great multitude of cases, it means 
 little more than that he is compelled to shift for 
 himself when his profitableness to his employer has 
 passed, or some cheaper kind of labor, human or 
 mechanical, is found to take his place and grind 
 out greater dividends. He is not a workman, in the 
 sense of the craftsman periods, of skilled individual 
 labor, nor yet a slave in the sense that he is any 
 man's property to be cared for, with at least the hu- 
 manity with which an average man will care for the 
 horse or dog that is spent and outworn. He is 
 merely a " hand," which is in some ways the most 
 terrible term that was ever used to designate the 
 common soldier in the fearful battle for bread. 
 
 If modern industrialism has made the status of 
 a multitude of workmen so hard that they are in 
 a position of very doubtful advantage when com- 
 
The Gospel and Business 109 
 
 pared with the better class of slaves in ancient 
 times, it has made even more difficult, if pos- 
 sible, the position of many a modern employer. 
 If the Christian life is next to impossible in the 
 sweatshop and the factories where unrestrained 
 greed controls, it is not less difficult in the offices 
 and " counting rooms " where the toll of such toil 
 is taken. Imagine a race between two ancient gal- 
 leys, driven each by its quota of whiplashed galley 
 slaves! It would be hard enough for the driven 
 slaves, under such circumstances, to keep a Chris- 
 tian spirit with the cords ever and anon biting their 
 all but broken backs. It would be harder still for 
 the man who wielded the whip to maintain anything 
 approaching personal fellowship with Jesus Christ 
 without throwing down his whip and leaving the 
 ship. And to attempt this might mean a seat for 
 himself on the oarsmen's bench with the slaves, 
 and a worse master with the whip in hand over 
 both him and them. 
 
 Grant that this illustration is severe, and does not 
 fairly represent average industrial conditions in our 
 modern world it is nevertheless but a heavily out- 
 lined picture of what prevails in many quarters 
 employee and employer both alike driven by the 
 harsh necessities of business into a situation where 
 real Christian living is tremendously and tragically 
 difficult for both. Whatever the difficulties of 
 work on the foreign field, and however great the 
 call for heroism there, the difficulties of Christian 
 
no The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 living at home in the heart of the market-place are 
 hardly less, and the demand for heroes and martyrs 
 in the business world is as great as it is anywhere 
 on earth to-day. Neither shall we make business 
 Christian nor deliver our brethren from bondage 
 often fitly compared to that which Israel suffered in 
 Egypt long centuries ago, until we recognize the 
 .severity of the conditions which do actually prevail 
 and hear the voice of the Lord calling us to serve 
 our less fortunate fellows at whatever cost to our- 
 selves. 
 
 Yet, there is need of great common sense in all of 
 this matter. Not the hard " business sense," which 
 denies or defends the evils, and will hear nothing of 
 any proposals which make less of immediate money 
 than of the everlasting rights of man. Such " busi- 
 ness sense " is not even good business, as the his- 
 tory of every reform movement has proven; much 
 less is it the gospel of Jesus Christ. The sense 
 that is needed is the sense of patience and kindliness 
 and justice to all. Jesus was not on the side of 
 " class consciousness," and " class consciousness " is 
 an exceedingly dangerous weapon to wield. Those 
 who take up that sword are in great peril of perish- 
 ing by it. Neither was Jesus on the side of imme- 
 diate revolution wherewith to establish the better 
 social order. Jesus spoke bravely, and even radic- 
 ally, on the side of the poor. His denunciation of 
 social injustice was terrific at times. But the inci- 
 dent of wealth no more robbed a man of Jesus' 
 
The Gospel and Business in 
 
 sympathy than did the incident of poverty. He had 
 as little use for the covetousness of the " have 
 nots " as for the covetousness of the " haves." He 
 did not measure materialism by the size of its ac- 
 cidental and objective desire, but rather by the 
 weight of its moral displacement in the soul of the 
 man himself. The sense that we need is not the 
 sense of material values, which tends, on the one 
 side, to a riotous covetousness, and on the other 
 side to an equally and possibly more dangerous re- 
 pressive covetousness. The sense that we need is 
 spiritual sense, the sense of life's larger values and 
 man's deepest relations to the world about him and 
 to his fellows. This is as far removed from the cold 
 calculations of the mere moneymaker on the one 
 hand, and the time-serving timidity of all those who 
 think first of " vested interests," as it is from the 
 ravenous rancor of the appetite-driven throng. It 
 is the sense of God first of all, and in the best mean- 
 ing of the words it is also " the sense of man." 
 This is the preeminent need of every man who is in 
 business to-day, whether he is employer or em- 
 ployee. 
 
 Most of current advice to young people who are 
 in the midst of business life to-day is too much 
 dominated by the philosophy of self-help. There 
 is no doubt that this philosophy has had its vic- 
 tories, and victories which were worth while. But 
 it does not seem to have occurred to many who are 
 at pains to tell us that Jesus said nothing concern- 
 
ii2 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 ing the social issues of his day a very doubtful 
 declaration that neither did Jesus expatiate on the 
 much-lauded economic virtues of our time, industry 
 and thrift and enterprise and " getting on in the 
 world." I do not remember that he even so much 
 as advised any of the young people of his time to 
 " get an education." This is not to be taken as im- 
 plying any disparagement of education nor of any 
 of the virtues mentioned above. It is good that 
 every young Christian should get the best educa- 
 tion to be had. It is good also that every young 
 Christian cultivate the spirit of industry and 
 economy and enterprise within the limits of that 
 " mind of Christ " which moved him, " though 
 rich," yet, " for our sakes," to " become poor." 
 But better than any of these things, good as they 
 are in their place, and with only a Christian em- 
 phasis upon them, is the one great thing which 
 Jesus did teach, the seeking " first " of that " king- 
 dom of God and his righteousness " which is the 
 real business of every Christian life. The passion 
 for the kingdom of God, rightly understood, is the 
 great need of modern business life. No man can 
 be a Christian in business or anywhere else, though 
 he may be a much esteemed moralist with a Chris- 
 tian name, unless something of the vision and 
 passion of the kingdom of God is first in his heart. 
 A young woman, who was an applicant for 
 church-membership, was asked by her pastor why 
 she believed herself a Christian. Her reply, which 
 
The Gospel and Business 113 
 
 has been much quoted and commended, was this: 
 " Because, sir, I sweep under the mats." And then 
 she explained that before she became a Christian, 
 in her work as a servant, she had slighted her 
 sweeping wherever it did not show; but now she 
 did it with conscientious thoroughness as " unto 
 the Lord." Therefore she swept " under the mats." 
 It was a good answer, and reminds one of the 
 famous and familiar verse by the devout George 
 Herbert : 
 
 " A servant with this clause 
 Makes drudgery divine; 
 Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws 
 Makes that an th' action fine." 
 
 The Christian spirit certainly works for faithful- 
 ness, and thoroughness, and conscientiousness, and 
 all the finer individual characteristics. But it does 
 not end here. The Christian in business will be more 
 than industrious and thorough, and as capable as it 
 is in him to be at his own particular task whether 
 he would prefer that task or not. He ought not 
 to be satisfied with any lower ideal of individual 
 excellence nor to excuse himself on any plea for 
 being a second-rate workman as compared with the 
 man of the world. And he ought not to be satis- 
 fied with this individual excellence alone. He is 
 in business to seek " first " the kingdom of God, and 
 that kingdom cannot be confined to his own soul. 
 
 Henry Havelock made a great success of Chris- 
 H 
 
1 14 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 tian living, though he lived it under the radically 
 unchristian conditions of militarism. We have had 
 other great and good soldiers who have served God 
 and man most heroically in the camp and on the 
 battlefield; and this, notwithstanding the fact that 
 better than all warfare is the war against war. So 
 also there are great " captains of industry," and 
 common soldiers not a few who are serving Christ 
 splendidly in the camps of industry and on the 
 sanguinary fields of fiercest commercial competi- 
 tion. It is a limited and qualified service in the one 
 case as in the other, but that it is real Christian liv- 
 ing can hardly be successfully denied. We are 
 coming more and more to appreciate the limited 
 character of Christian living in the midst of an 
 unchristian economic environment. We need more 
 than economic Havelocks to show forth the beauty 
 of Christian living in camp and battlefield; we need 
 our economic Tolstoys to cry out against the vast 
 wickedness of economic war. But we must not 
 judge in the one case more harshly than in the 
 other, nor deny that even a " Napoleon of finance " 
 may have some high qualities, and may, in the 
 providence of God serve the ends of that kingdom 
 which shall never pass away. 
 
 " Diligent in business " is a very ancient exhorta- 
 tion; but there is still place for it in the armory of 
 Christian advice. War is not only passing, but 
 even while it lingers here, its conditions are being 
 modified by the " Red Cross " and other manifesta- 
 
The Gospel and Business 115 
 
 tions of the spirit of Christ. We may believe that 
 Christ would not approve war, but we cannot keep 
 him from the battlefield when men are actually 
 there. Neither can we keep him out of the stock 
 exchange, nor away from the railroad headquarters, 
 or the factory, though these be not to his mind. Let 
 us, by all means, work for the " new birth " in the 
 business world, when all our industrialism shall be 
 converted into a Christlike ministry to men, and 
 let us no more despair of this transformation than 
 we will of the possible salvation of human indi- 
 vidual derelicts like Jerry McCauley, or of religious 
 and political institutions apparently more hopeless 
 than he. But while we work for this large ideal, 
 let us work also every man over against his own 
 door and make our own business as Christian as it 
 may be under whatever actual conditions we find. 
 Let us also " sweep under the mats " and do our 
 work as if Christ himself were our employer. Let 
 us receive our employee as another Onesimus, even 
 though he has not yet found his Paul. Let us be 
 " diligent in business," but willing to fail if thereby 
 the kingdom of God may the more quickly suc- 
 ceed. Despise not the martyrdom which none will 
 applaud, and which may be reckoned as only in- 
 competence or worse. Nowhere in all heathendom 
 to-day is the opportunity for splendid, self-sacrifi- 
 cing service greater than it is in the apparently un- 
 romantic and unheroic surroundings of ordinary 
 business life. And when the roll of martyrs and 
 
u6 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 mighty servants of God is made up, it will include 
 many who were only known as " business men," 
 and very ordinary business men from the stand- 
 point of their fellows in whom the vision of truth 
 and righteousness was dim. The best success that 
 any man can have in business is to succeed in keep- 
 ing himself clean, and kindly, and high-minded, 
 holding fast in the midst of the material his own 
 faith in the things that are unseen and eternal, and 
 working steadfastly through the yielding of his own 
 more immediate and impressive prosperity for the 
 growth of commercial conditions which Christ him- 
 self would approve. Nothing less than this is busi- 
 ness success. 
 
 *** 
 Quiz 
 
 I. What were the industrial conditions of the 
 world in which Jesus had part when upon earth ? 2. 
 What is the so-called " wage slavery " of our day ? 
 3. What do you understand by the philosophy of 
 " self-help " ? 4. How do you explain the silence 
 of Jesus concerning industry and thrift and enter- 
 prise and education and like individual virtues? 
 5. Who was Henry Havelock, and how did he dis- 
 tinguish himself? 6. What forms does martyrdom 
 take in business life? 
 
 Topics for Further Study 
 
 i. The origin of slavery. 2. The rise of modern 
 industrialism, and the special characteristics of the 
 
The Gospel and Business 117 
 
 " machine age " in industry. 3. The self-help teach- 
 ing of Samuel Smiles, and its relation to present- 
 day economics. 4. Christian living and military 
 life. 5. How much money can a Christian properly 
 make? 6. Ideal business men. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE GOSPEL AND RECREATION 
 
 WHETHER is it easier to-day to live a Christian life 
 at work or at play? Certainly it is not easy to 
 make one's work always measure up to the high 
 standard of Jesus. Many a weary disciple im- 
 agines that if he might but change his task, or bet- 
 ter yet, be released from all necessity of doing any 
 unchosen task for the sake of mere bread and but- 
 ter, that Christian living would be much more prac- 
 ticable than it is. But if life were one long holiday, 
 and we were wholly free to use our time just as we 
 would, the average of Christian living would prob- 
 ably fall rather than rise. 
 
 If there is any need to prove this, the lives of 
 the " leisure class " afford abundant proof. Here 
 and there one is found living for high ideals and 
 for his fellows in some truly worthy way, but in the 
 main those who have nothing to do are doing 
 nothing that is very much worth while. They do 
 not seem to find their much desired freedom a 
 stimulus to lives of devotion. Nor may we think 
 from the way in which most of us spend our brief 
 play periods that playing more and working less 
 would make us better Christians than we are. 
 118 
 
The Gospel and Recreation 119 
 
 The little fellow who sat at the table with us 
 was just learning to talk. One of his favorite 
 words, expressive of a great deal of human nature, 
 was, " More, more ! " He seldom said this with re- 
 spect to the mush or any other such prosaic dish. 
 But he used the word vociferously with respect to 
 the doughnuts, to the considerable embarrassment 
 of his mother, who was afraid of more serious em- 
 barrassment for him. 
 
 Few of us are crying for more work, but a great 
 many of us are crying for more play, with little 
 more wisdom than the child. Even the churches 
 are compelled to make much of entertainment, and 
 the chief attraction of the young people's movement 
 to many is the " doughnuts " in prospect, of which 
 they never seem to have enough. There is a good 
 deal of spiritual indigestion on the part of those 
 who are very young in Christian living, because 
 they will have little of plain, substantial, blood and 
 muscle making food, and will insist upon the cake 
 and candy and condiments of " fun " and much mis- 
 called " recreation." 
 
 Nothing is recreation which does not recreate. 
 Some of our play does this, and is, therefore, good 
 for us, and not to be condemned. A sense of humor 
 is almost indispensable to a well-balanced character. 
 The man who cannot enjoy a laugh has not yet 
 entered into life. Play is an instinctive exercise of 
 youth, and as we have discovered in these modern 
 days, has an important physiological bearing upon 
 
120 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 health and growth. Of play of the right kind we 
 have hardly yet enough, despite the exaggerated 
 emphasis upon some aspects of the play life. The 
 churches have made too much of entertainment and 
 too much of certain states of more or less abnormal 
 excitement, but they have seldom made enough of 
 all-around wholesome enjoyment. Goodness and 
 gladness have much more than an alliterative af- 
 finity for each other. " Restore unto me the joy 
 of thy salvation, . . then will I teach transgressors 
 thy ways " was the prayer of a man who judged 
 rightly that spiritual life and health and spiritual 
 usefulness are also related to joy and play. 
 
 The artists are largely responsible for our over- 
 emphasis upon the melancholy of Jesus. He was 
 undoubtedly " a man of sorrows, and acquainted 
 with grief," but this might also be said of some of 
 our modern humorists who have ministered of 
 mirth to others while walking in a Gethsemane. 
 Jesus was not a humorist. Neither does he make 
 the use that Paul made of the games and sports of 
 his time to illustrate Christian activity and excel- 
 lence. Certainly there was no slightest touch of 
 frivolity in him, and on the surface of the records 
 there is little appearance of play. But the fact that 
 his father and mother could go a day's journey 
 without missing him, so as to be at all concerned 
 about him, supposing him to be somewhere in the 
 caravan, indicates that as a boy of twelve he was 
 no unnatural prig, but a healthy, hearty, happy 
 
The Gospel and Recreation 121 
 
 child. And the further fact that they sought him 
 for three days before it seems to have occurred 
 to them to look for him in the temple, together with 
 his own mature insistence upon the naturalness of 
 his whole attitude toward his Father in heaven, 
 speaks also for a lad who was wholly and most joy- 
 fully alive. There are traces of keenest humor here 
 and there in his teaching, as when he exaggerated 
 concerning the " beam " in the critic's own eye. 
 Much of his argument against the Pharisees was 
 ridicule, cutting indeed, but more mirth-provoking 
 by far to his contemporaries than it appears to us. 
 And in his great eulogy of John the Baptist, the 
 apostle of seriousness in religion, Jesus refers to 
 the play of the children in the streets, playing 
 funeral and playing weddings, and compares him- 
 self and his ministry to the martial procession with 
 its dance and song. Indeed, his enemies called 
 him, according to his own confession, " a wine- 
 bibber and a glutton," as compared with the ab- 
 stemious recluse who shunned the social and festive 
 board. Jesus was not only very much a man among 
 men, but there is every reason to believe that " noth- 
 ing that is human " was " foreign " to him. And 
 mirth and play belong to normal and healthy life. 
 Christians have just as much right to all manner 
 of reasonable and helpful recreation as other men. 
 That they may forego their rights in the interests 
 of a Christian expediency with regard to their own 
 peculiar opportunities and responsibilities to others 
 
122 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 is also true, and a truth of very great consequence, 
 requiring much Christian common sense to apply. 
 But nothing is wrong in and of itself for a Chris- 
 tian which is not also wrong for others. Church- 
 membership and Christian profession do not create 
 a special moral code. Every man, whether he con- 
 fesses faith in Christ or not, or whether he denies 
 or affirms Christian obligation is, as a matter of 
 fact, bound to acknowledge God's first claim upon 
 his life. It is mischievous to admit even by impli- 
 cation that a man can escape his responsibility to 
 be all that he can be for himself and the world. 
 Every man's life is a stewardship whether he will 
 or not. Ignoring the fact does not cancel the obli- 
 gation, or make less serious his failure to live up 
 to his opportunity. No man has any more right to 
 throw himself away than has any other man. Every 
 man will be held responsible for all that he might 
 have been and done in and for the kingdom of God. 
 " I would like to join the church, and I know 
 I ought to live a Christian life, but I dearly love to 
 dance, and I do not think that a Christian ought to 
 dance," said a young woman to me some years ago. 
 I had not raised the question of dancing at all, and 
 had no desire to do so. Get a man or woman right 
 on fundamentals and incidentals will take care of 
 themselves. We have made and do make alto- 
 gether too much of dancing, and card-playing, and 
 theatergoing, and all that kind of incidental in so 
 far as we have allowed these things to obscure the 
 
The Gospel and Recreation 123 
 
 real issue, the question of questions, the conscious 
 dedication of a man's heart and life to God as the 
 one thing without which everything else is vain. 
 The fact is that feeling as she did that dancing was 
 contrary to the highest type of living, that young 
 woman had no more right to dance outside of the 
 church than in it. She was bound, as every other 
 woman is bound, to act up to her best vision of 
 achievement for herself and usefulness toward 
 others. I am not saying that dancing is wrong. 
 Neither am I saying that it is right. I refuse to 
 be side-tracked from the main issue. The fact is 
 that you belong to God. All that you are, and all 
 that you can do is his, for his kingdom. Your own 
 happiness is bound up with this divine intention in 
 you and for you. To defeat it is to defeat yourself. 
 To trifle with it is to trifle with yourself. God 
 wants nothing of you but what is best for you. 
 Whatever is consistent with this is yours, and no 
 church can take it away from you. Neither can 
 anybody give you what is not yours, what is con- 
 trary to your whole being's aim and end. It is just 
 as wrong for me to eat poison whether I am a mem- 
 ber of a pure food club or not. The wrong is in the 
 injury it does me, and through me the society to 
 which I belong. No one has the right of suicide 
 in whole or in part, except as he lays down his life 
 for the world. Neither has any one the right of 
 moral suicide, either to the extent of refusing moral 
 obligation and service altogether or of refusing it 
 
124 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 with reference to any act or feature of his life. A 
 man has no more right to cut his ear off than he 
 has to cut his head off. Neither has a man a right 
 to cut off one part of his life and mutilate himself 
 with reference to the end for which he is alive. 
 And that end, whether he knows it and recognizes 
 it or not, is to do God's will. 
 
 We shall never settle this question of amusements 
 and entertainment by discussing in detail this or 
 that petty piece of self-indulgence. We must get 
 back to first principles or we shall never get for- 
 ward toward perfection. Whatever makes you 
 more of a man, or a woman, is right for you, and 
 nothing is right which makes you less. The appli- 
 cation of this principle you will have to settle for 
 yourself. If you settle it dishonestly by any kind 
 of subterfuge or evasion, you will suffer the loss 
 in yourself. If you exclude anything which you 
 might fairly include, you are that much the poorer, 
 unless your exclusion has worked some larger gain. 
 If you include what in all simplicity and unselfish- 
 ness you ought to have excluded, you are as bound 
 to pay the price as if you had taken hurtful food 
 into your body. God is not whimsical. He works 
 through law, and always his law is working, 
 whether we wisely work with it or try to get the 
 better of it. We never do get " the better " of it, 
 but always the worse when we are out of harmony 
 with his purposes for us. 
 
 A glass of wine is wrong, not because the man 
 
The Gospel and Recreation 125 
 
 who drinks it is a church-member or a minister, 
 though it may be granted that these considerations 
 might enter into the mischievous influence of this 
 or that man's indulgence in wine-drinking. But the 
 primary evil of it is the mischief it does the man 
 himself, and the tendency of the habit to make or 
 mar his usefulness toward others. If wrong at 
 all it is wrong because indulgence in wine-drinking 
 makes a man less a man in relation to the kingdom 
 of God. Judged by the same standard a cup of 
 coffee may be wrong, though taken at a church so- 
 cial ; it may lessen a man's value to himself and to 
 society. There is a vast amount of very dubious 
 devotion to late refreshments in our churches, and 
 much harm to clean living and high thinking by 
 reason of the animalism which prevails at many a 
 religious feast. The churches have a long way to 
 go yet to set the world a worthy example of real 
 temperance that is, real self-control with respect 
 to appetite. 
 
 The young Christian may permit himself any 
 amount of play and any kind of play which con- 
 tributes to his manhood. He ought to deny himself 
 any sport or " refreshment " or enjoyment which 
 makes him less a man. Whatever subtracts from 
 his self-respect is wrong for him, however innocent 
 it may be in itself. Any indulgence which injures 
 his influence for good is too expensive for him, 
 though he have a " season ticket " free. With re- 
 gard to self-respect, he ought to study for a large 
 
126 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 view of his own manhood. With regard to his in- 
 fluence he ought to study for a large view of the 
 manhood of others, their ultimate and not only 
 their immediate welfare. In both of these estimates 
 he needs to be guided again by first principles, the 
 desire to advance the kingdom of God in others 
 and not only to win them for this or that institution 
 or system of thought, and for himself the determi- 
 nation to be a Christlike man, and not merely an ac- 
 ceptable church man. Only let his ideal of Christ be 
 wholesome and actually Christian, and not a weak, 
 modern imitation of some medieval ideal. Then 
 may he laugh as heartily as any on occasion, or take 
 his place on the athletic field, or join in games 
 a-plenty, or indulge with moderation in late refresh- 
 ments, or enter into the vacation season with all the 
 enthusiasm of the most devoted lover of fishing 
 and hunting and the study of nature, with only one 
 sensible check to hold his head up lest he stumble, 
 the thought that he must be always and everywhere 
 a clean and conscientious man, playing and working 
 alike, " as in his great Taskmaster's eye." 
 
 A Christian may do anything, at any time, and 
 in any company which will forward the interests of 
 the kingdom of God. And those interests are as 
 wide as all wholesome life. He may do nothing 
 legitimately under any kind of dispensation which 
 will harm himself or others. This applies to his 
 business as much as to his recreation. It applies to 
 his recreation as much as to his business. It is 
 
The Gospel and Recreation 127 
 
 hard to weep unselfishly, and sorrow like a Christian. 
 It is harder yet to laugh always as a Christian 
 should. Nowhere to-day is there greater need of 
 conscience and common sense than with respect to 
 recreation. Much of it is dissipation, and some of 
 it is very mischievous dissipation in religious guise. 
 None of it is good or right, for the Christian or for 
 anybody else, which does not make the world better 
 in some way or other, in greater or less degree. 
 Go where you please so that you can take the inter- 
 ests of the kingdom of God with you, and play as 
 you please, so that your play does not undo any of 
 the good work of the world. Only remember that 
 working or playing we are always His. 
 
 *** 
 Quiz 
 
 I. Is Christian living more difficult with refer- 
 ence to business or recreation to-day? 2. What can 
 be said for humor and play as features of Christian 
 character and life ? Is there any evidence of humor 
 in Jesus? 3. Is a church-member under more obli- 
 gation to live soberly and earnestly than other men 
 or women? 4. On what principle shall we deter- 
 mine our rights and duties with reference to the so- 
 called doubtful amusements? 
 
 Topics for Further Study 
 
 I. Relative religiousness of the leisure class now 
 and in former times, is it greater or less, and what 
 
128 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 are the causes ? 2. The use of the games and sports 
 of apostolic times by the Apostle Paul in the illustra- 
 tion of Christian truth. 3. The sports of the ancient 
 world and modern athletics and amusements from 
 the standpoint of the gospel type of life. 4. Has 
 the church made too much or too little of absti- 
 nence from the theater and the dance? 5. What is 
 a Christian attitude toward present-day college ath- 
 letics? 6. Is ours a frivolous age? 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE GOSPEL AND HOME-MAKING 
 
 HERE and there a novelist is found with the courage 
 to begin the story where romances in books com- 
 monly end, when the proposal is made and the wed- 
 ding is fairly in sight. But this is a very daring 
 proceeding, indeed, as daring as it is unusual, for 
 who will wish to amend the ancient and honorable 
 ending of all " good " stories, " and they lived 
 happily ever after " ? 
 
 Whether we wish an amendment or not, life 
 mocks our sentimental optimism, and insists that 
 the wedding is not the climax which the story 
 books pretend, but is rather the beginning of love's 
 serious narrative. If we thought of marriage more 
 as a beginning and less as a finality, it would, 
 in a multitude of cases, prove much more final 
 than it is. 
 
 The divorce problem is one of the largest prob- 
 lems of our day. Much is written concerning it 
 that is wise and strong. But there is great need of 
 recognizing more that the root of the divorce evil 
 is farther back than many of us go. Easy divorce 
 comes of easy marriage, and the frequency of di- 
 vorce is to a much greater extent than most of us 
 i 129 
 
130 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 admit, the result of false thinking and foolish acting 
 with regard to courtship and marriage. 
 
 Men and women will never stay married until 
 they get married with more sense than most of 
 them show to-day. The wonder is not that divorce 
 is common, and that efforts to prevent it in a legal 
 way are so often abortive. The much greater 
 wonder is that divorce is not vastly more common 
 than it is, and that so little of marital misery gets 
 aired out in the courts. Not but that there are 
 many happy marriages, for undoubtedly there are. 
 As Mr. Dooley very shrewdly remarked, " Doin* 
 good ain't news." And " bein' good ain't news " 
 either. One unhappy marriage will attract more 
 public attention than ten happy unions. But that 
 there are so many happy unions is much more due 
 to the grace of God than it is to the good sense of 
 the average young man or young woman who is 
 seeking a life companion. And the amount of good 
 sense actually shown by the average man and wo- 
 man after marriage is out of all proportion to the 
 very modest amount commonly exercised before. 
 Nearly every man who is happily married will ad- 
 mit in his more candid moments that he owes it 
 more to the preventing providence of God than he 
 does to his own wisdom and judgment. 
 
 Most young people, even Christian young people, 
 look upon marriage as a good deal of a joke. 
 There is much to encourage this most mischievous 
 view in the popular attitude toward married life. 
 
The Gospel and Home-Making 131 
 
 More jokes are cracked at the expense of marriage 
 than on any other theme. Witticism and cynicism 
 flourish everywhere in the funny columns of the 
 newspapers and in familiar conversation whenever 
 courtship and marriage and divorce are to the 
 front. Husbands and wives who are sincerely fond 
 of each other often cover their real affection by 
 cheap cynicisms and insulting witticisms in the 
 presence of other people. This whole attitude 
 toward marriage is nothing less than wicked, and 
 has very much to do with the appalling decadence 
 of happy and wholesome family life among us. 
 There is no finer field for the exercise of Christian 
 good sense and for insistence upon the mind of 
 Christ to-day than in the domain of ordinary con- 
 versation and conduct with respect to love and mar- 
 riage. Every Christian ought to set his face against 
 this fatal facetiousness, and ought to do his utmost 
 to raise every reference to the marriage relation in 
 his presence and all his own thinking concerning it 
 to the high level of decency and seriousness and 
 reverential regard. For, if there is anything serious 
 in this world of ours and anything sacred in human 
 relationships, courtship and marriage and family 
 life belong to the very innermost court of the 
 temple, and ought not to be profaned by the foot- 
 ball play of careless feet. I question whether the un- 
 clean talk of many men concerning the marriage re- 
 lation does as much harm as the cheap witticisms 
 and cynical slurs upon marriage which are so com- 
 
132 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 mon with better people, and the moonshine of senti- 
 ment through which the whole matter is viewed by 
 the great majority of the youth of our day. 
 
 Apart from direct dedication of one's self to the 
 immediate service of the kingdom of God among 
 men, home-making is the biggest business in which 
 any man and woman can engage. It has more to 
 do with individual happiness and ordinarily more to 
 do with social usefulness than any other relation 
 of life. A prominent railroad manager called the 
 attention of a friend who was riding with him to the 
 quick whistle of the engine as they passed a certain 
 farmhouse standing back from the road. At the 
 same time a woman appeared at the door and waved 
 her apron above her head. " That is the engineer's 
 wife," remarked the railroad manager. " He al- 
 ways salutes her when his run brings him past his 
 home, and she always returns the salute." And 
 then, he added thoughtfully, " I like it. I have 
 noticed that a happy home life is back of nearly 
 every first-class workman. A man who has a good 
 home life is worth more to his employer." 
 
 And though every man who has a good wife may 
 well confess that she is " from the Lord," and justly 
 attribute much of his fortune to the guiding good- 
 ness of God, it is nevertheless true that the exercise 
 of good hard common sense brings nowhere surer 
 and larger returns than it does when exercised with 
 regard to getting and guiding a home. For, in this 
 matter, quite as certainly as with respect to any 
 
The Gospel and Home-Making 133 
 
 work of a man's life, it is preeminently true that 
 " God helps those who help themselves." 
 
 Generally speaking, it is better to marry than not 
 to marry. The solitary life tends to selfishness, 
 unless it is devoted to some large social service, or 
 is saved by some exceptional devotion to other 
 family relationships. Very seldom should these 
 other family relationships be allowed to stand be- 
 tween a young man and woman who are wisely 
 mated, except in a temporary way. Parents are 
 sometimes painfully short-sighted in requiring of 
 their children the sacrifice of their own happiness 
 and welfare for a less duty at home. I have 
 known a father, and a prominent Christian man at 
 that, to sacrifice all the future of his daughter for 
 the sake of a passing emergency in the home when 
 he himself allowed his own desire for a second 
 union to set aside his own first responsibilty to the 
 younger children of his first wife. There is need 
 on all sides of real and rare unselfishness in such 
 situations, and neither a young man nor a young 
 woman ought to be in such haste to satisfy senti- 
 mental impatience as to disregard the reasonable 
 demands upon them of the home from which they 
 come. But the right to marry and to have a home 
 of their own belongs to all young people at a rea- 
 sonable age, and there is much self-sacrifice which is 
 neither good for those who offer it nor yet for those 
 who receive it. The right to live one's own life in 
 the world is usually more than a right ; it is a duty, 
 
134 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 and it is too often set aside for some smaller good. 
 Even the Master specifically allowed that " for this 
 cause," because " it is not good for man to be 
 alone " and man and woman were made " in the 
 beginning " for each other, " for this cause shall a 
 man leave his father and mother and cleave to his 
 wife." The home instinct is born of God, and ought 
 not to be lightly set aside by any man. But it is 
 better not to marry than to marry wrong. " Mar- 
 riage to a good woman," says the old proverb, " is 
 a harbor in the tempest; to a bad woman it is a 
 tempest in the harbor." And it is worse, if pos- 
 sible, for the woman who is wedded to a bad man, 
 for the man unfortunately married spends relatively 
 much less time in his " harbor " than the woman 
 must needs spend. His home life is much to him, 
 but her home life is more to her, and the better 
 woman she is, the more it is likely to be. Better a 
 parrot and a kitten for her sole companions in old 
 age than a lifelong bondage to a fool or a brute in 
 the guise of a man. If women were less eager to 
 marry, many of them would marry much more 
 wisely than they do. 
 
 A man who married twice, and married well in 
 both instances, gave this glimpse afterward of his 
 heart experience. " I prayed for the wife of my 
 youth before I ever met her. Perhaps it was 
 visionary from the standpoint of some, but I rea- 
 soned it out after this fashion: In our home, al- 
 though there was much merriment and frequent 
 
The Gospel and Home-Making 135 
 
 joking, we were none of us allowed to tell any 
 story or make any remark which reflected un- 
 favorably upon marriage. Father simply would not 
 have it. I grew up with the conviction that mar- 
 riage was the right and reasonable thing for every 
 normal man, and that it was a matter of utmost 
 consequence. One day it came over me that if I 
 ever married, the woman I would marry was doubt- 
 less alive somewhere, and forming her character, 
 as I was forming mine. I was about seventeen, 
 but as I had dedicated myself to a considerable 
 course of study, and did not mean to marry till that 
 course was finished, I had no idea who the woman 
 might be. But I remember distinctly carrying the 
 matter to God in prayer, as I carried all the affairs 
 of my life, and asking that God would bless her 
 and have her in his keeping and make me worthy of 
 her. I met her a year or two afterward, though it 
 was not for years after that we married, but I have 
 always felt that the happiness of the twice seven 
 years we walked together began with that boyish 
 prayer before I so much as knew her name. And 
 when she had been in heaven for years, and I chose 
 again, I chose with the same sense of a divine fel- 
 lowship upon me. I have never done anything in 
 my life which I measured more carefully, or which 
 was to me in the very act more utterly an act of 
 religious devotion than when God called me to 
 choose a woman to walk with me and share my 
 life." 
 
136 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 This is not only real religion, but the highest 
 sense. A man's wife is either no real wife at all 
 or she is the very heart of his heart and the life 
 of his life. To choose her carelessly is to invite 
 upon himself the greatest disaster which can fall 
 upon a man short of the loss of his own character. 
 And he will find it no easy matter to keep his char- 
 acter if he makes serious mistake as to her's. All 
 that a man buys is as nothing to his choice of a 
 wife. Better far that he should all his life spend 
 his money with his eyes and ears shut than that he 
 should choose a wife without the utmost exercise 
 of his best sense, and then an earnest prayer for 
 the saving grace of God to preserve him against 
 himself. And the woman has need of even greater 
 caution, for the average woman is better qualified 
 to make at least a tolerable wife than is the average 
 man to make a decent husband. The average wo- 
 man outdares Columbus when she lets loose from 
 the moorings of her own home and ventures out 
 upon the matrimonial sea. Yet many a girl picks 
 out a husband with less caution than she would 
 exercise in buying a spring hat. 
 
 A man ought not only to be careful in choosing 
 a wife, but he ought to be even more careful to 
 make himself worthy of her. It is the height of 
 impertinence for any man to ask any woman to 
 marry him unless he is all that he might be in 
 effort and intention, at least. The colossal conceit 
 of many a young man in asking a woman to give 
 
The Gospel and Home-Making 137 
 
 herself to his care and keeping when he is so wholly 
 irresponsible that he is not fit to be trusted with the 
 care and keeping of a dog and a wheelbarrow is 
 enough to excite the laughter of angels, if it were 
 not so much more provocative of tears. Would 
 that every young man, before he proposes, might 
 read often those rebuking words of Elizabeth Bar- 
 rett Browning, speaking for her sex and not for 
 herself: 
 
 " Do you know you have asked for the 
 
 costliest thing 
 
 Ever made by the Hand above? 
 A woman's heart, and a woman's hand, 
 And a woman's wonderful love." 
 
 And all that follows. It might, at least, impress 
 him for the moment with the marvelous confidence 
 which any man has who takes a woman's life and 
 love as his own; a venture, indeed, so daring that 
 " fools rush in " where angels might well " fear to 
 tread," and where no man should tread who is 
 not fit. 
 
 There is no greater victory that the gospel can 
 have in modern life than the redemption of the 
 home. It is more important because more funda- 
 mental than the conquest of politics and business 
 and education and literature for Christ. These will 
 all follow upon a truly Christian home life, or will 
 grow easily and naturally out of the same stem of 
 pure purpose and finest self-culture. Nor is the 
 
138 The Gospel at Work in Modern Life 
 
 redemption of the home a matter of marrying at 
 this or that age, with this or that amount of money, 
 or with so much or so little regard for social lines. 
 It is much more than all these matters which must 
 be determined severally by careful exercise of the 
 best sense with regard to all the circumstances. 
 
 Specific advice here is of little worth, except as it 
 applies to specific circumstances, and even then it 
 is worth much or little, according to the measure 
 of a man's independence of it. If he has not sense 
 to make it needless, it is very doubtful whether he 
 will have sense to use it. The redemption of home 
 life means a larger valuation upon the home and 
 home-building first of all, a valuation which will 
 manifest itself in the highest type of seriousness. 
 It means more exercise of Christian common sense 
 upon the part of young people, especially in choos- 
 ing their companions and partners. It means much 
 of Christian forbearance and forgiveness in making 
 the inevitable adjustments after marriage is entered 
 upon. It means the daily application of the gospel 
 to daily living under the severest test conditions 
 oftentimes, and always with regard to the highest 
 type of Christian conduct. Home-building requires 
 the very best material to be had in the way of indi- 
 vidual Christian character. And it is worth all the 
 cost of it, for he who builds and maintains a 
 really Christian home has established a kind of 
 heavenly experimental station on earth, a little king- 
 dom of God which is the best analogy we know of 
 
The Gospel and Home-Making 139 
 
 for that universal and everlasting kingdom which is 
 to be. 
 
 *** 
 Quiz 
 
 i. What is one of the commonest causes of di- 
 vorce to-day? 2. Is there any justification for the 
 light and humorous fashion in which most of us 
 refer to love and marriage? 3. What is cynicism? 
 4. What are the principal reasons which favor mar- 
 riage as the normal state of men and women? 5. 
 What apt comparison is used to illustrate a good 
 marriage? 6. What is fairly involved in a man's 
 making himself worthy to be a husband? 7. In a 
 woman's making herself worthy to be a wife? 8. 
 What relation is there between the building of the 
 Christian home and the social welfare? 
 
 Topics for Further Study 
 
 i. The growth of the divorce evil, here and in 
 foreign lands, causes and cure. 2. The influence of 
 the popular novel in stimulating or correcting false 
 views of love and marriage. 3. The value of the 
 church as a meeting ground for the sexes. 4. Does 
 the broadening of woman's sphere work toward 
 more intimate and helpful companionship in the 
 home, or away from it? 5. Some notable instances 
 of Christian marriage. 
 
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