3ie '^ey //?uve?iii/^u^ , e^ (^^^t^J^^ O^^c/h^J^/UOy 7 czV.y^Uf/'t^ C^e/iAe^TTA 4(^//,/^- Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding-from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/expansionofreligOOdonarich THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION SIX LECTURES DELIVERED BEFORE THE LOWELL INSTITUTE BY E. WINCHESTER DONALD RECTOR OF TRINITY CHURCH IN THE CITY OF BOSTON BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 1896 DC Copyright, i8q6, By E. WINCHESTER DONALD. Al/ rights reserved. jjj&NRY MOr?SE STEPHfEHS The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company. TO ONE WHOSE UNCONSCIOUS BUT POWERFUL INFLUENCE WROUGHT WITH ME IN THE MAKING OF THIS BOOK ^>> - <.2544 PREFACE These Lectures do not claim to be original, eloquent, erudite, or academic. They are the record of a working clergyman's sober thinking upon a subject, profound interest in which is coterminous with the life of man. As such a record only, they are offered to the public. E. WINCHESTER DONALD. Trinity Rectory, Boston, Massachusetts, yamiary, j8g6. CONTENTS PAGE I. Religion and Salvation . , . . i II. The New Anthropology ... 49 III. Religion and Righteousness ... 98 IV. Religion and Industrialism . . . 151 V. Religion and Socialism .... 208 VI. Organized Religion .... 258 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. RELIGION AND SALVATION. The earliest universal interest of man- kind is its latest. Religion still stands in the foremost files of the world's passionate wishes, and equally of its most strenuous endeavors ; and it touches and colors, in frank or subtle ways, all the outcomes of man's many-sided life. No longer re- garded as the sole possession of organiza- tion and formal statement, it is rather an atmosphere in which the healthy life of man is most successfully lived. No longer identified with particular expressions of the great world's career, no longer thought of as something technical and arbitrary, which experts must make intelligible to the people, it is now, to our spiritual con- ception, like the sunlight which enters 2 THE EXPANSilON OF RELIGION. unbidden into every least bit of space that is open to its gracious presence. The sole condition of its possibility for every man is openness to the incoming of the Di- vine. The sole condition of its personal possession is sensitiveness and responsive- ness to the Divine. It employs organiza- tion, it does not require it. It admits of statement, but lives without it. It wel- comes the symbol, but refuses to be bound by symbol. It tolerates the most splendid and gorgeous ritual, it thrives and blos- soms in loneliest hut on the shore of the most lonely and distant sea. It stirs the heart of the pygmy in the -dark forest, and animates the soul of the tenant of the Vat- ican. The breath of God, the life of man, the heat of the heart, the vigor of the will, the liveness of the conscience, the one great hope of human nature set in this brilliant, beautiful, sad, and restless world, is still that mighty force which we call Relisfion. The conviction that this is true will un- derlie all that I shall say in these lectures. I cannot claim that I come coldly to study a vigorous force of the past, the spent force RELIGION AND SALVATION. 3 of the present ; for I am here rather as one who believes that Religion is seeing its best days, that it is asserting itself in quarters wherein it has frequently been regarded as an intrusion, and that it is assuming forms which, as yet, only spiritual eyes can recog- nize. The moment Religion was eman- cipated from the tyranny of sacred con- ventions, the moment it was trusted to take care of itself out in the great world of living men, it began, by virtue of its own divine force, to occupy all territory whereon were ideas, emotions, purposes, struggling to realize themselves in achievements. So long as Religion was described in state- ment, and uttered itself only in arbitrary and conventional conduct, it stood a poor chance to become the impulse and nourish- ment of the total life of man. Judge Sewall knew where Religion began and where it ended in the social and personal life of the seventeenth century. It began with a cor- rect notion and ended in correct conduct. How narrow, provincial, ascetic, that notion was, how hard and hardening that conduct came to be, his " Diary " bountifully shows. The expansion of Religion was unthinkable 4 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. two hundred years ago. To have given it the ample freedom it possesses now would, to English and New England thinking, have caused it to disappear as completely as Christianity has vanished from many of those cities of Asia Minor to which St. John wrote his striking and now pathetic letters. Religion was not trusted as we trust sunlight and storm ; it was guarded like crown jewels, which, if passed from hand to hand, may be lost, and, once lost, lost forever. It was looked at through glass. It is inability to perceive what a free force Religion is which explains the widely entertained opinian that Religion to-day is decaying. The disappearance of Fast Day counts for more than the ap- pearance of the conviction in the public thinking that to house human beings in a tenement the plumbing arrangements of which are a constant and cordial welcome to disease, is a moral crime. The disuse of the old Catechism is held to be indica- tive of waning Religion, but the erection and maintenance of a child's dispensary, of baby shelters, and the annual summer exodus of enough of the city's little ones RELIGION AND SALVATION 5 to lower the rate of infant mortality, fails widely to be interpreted as a direct result of Religion regnant. Again, what has been aptly termed the " theological thaw " of the last quarter of a century is too frequently set down as decisive of the melting out from the spiritual life of the community of the imperative sanctions of duty, and no less of the universal sense of awe and reverence in the presence of the eternal mysteries of life and death. And the ease with which so august an organization as a Church is created by a handful of dis- affected and fanatical, or earnest and con- scientious, men and women, has been ac- cepted as indubitable proof that all religion is no better than the outcome of human hopes or fears, employed by society to furnish direction and refinement to enthu- siasms tolerated by the state as helpful in keeping its citizens in order. It is not misrepresentative of our time, therefore, to describe it as unreasonably despondent about the present prospects of Religion. One set of men deplores the decay of authority, meaning thereby really nothing more than the blessed powerless- 6 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. ness of organization to compel assent to its dogmas by the exercise of force. Another set of men bewails the gradual disappear- ance of the multitude's willingness to ac- cept as true what is uttered in sacred places in solemn tones. And still another set is disheartened at the withdrawal of enthusiasm from stated worship, and its bountiful and beautiful gift of itself to what still are called secular and philanthropic activities. I have said enough to explain why a clergyman, who makes no pretension to erudition, ventures to speak to his fellows of the expansion of Religion, dares to give his reasons for beheving that Religion was never more active, more diffused, more hopefully energetic, than it is to-day. For I hope to be able to show by a calm and dispassionate summary of facts that are open to the inspection and verification of us all, and by a rational interpretation of their meaning, that Religion is to-day far more widely diffused, far more fruitfully and faithfully used, than when Samuel Sewall tried to comfort his little son, Samuel, sobbing with mingled fright and RELIGION AND SALVATION 7 sorrow at the solemn services of his kins- man's funeral, by quoting to him the text, " O death, where is thy sting ? O grave, where is thy victory ? " One wishes he have might taken the little boy into his arms and kissed away his fears. But it is time to say frankly what we mean by Religion as we shall use the word in our lectures. I am glad to believe, and I do believe, that the idolater, kneeling in blind hope or stupid terror at the feet of his hideous or fantastic idol, is as truly religious as the Romanist hushed and awed at the Elevation of the Host, or as the Lib- eral passionately moved by the splendid utterance of the great divine truth of the Fatherhood of God. I can imagine my- self kneeling, in a great temple of Buddha in Japan, or in the magnificent mosque of St. Sofia, by the side of the Buddhist or the Moslem, sure that my prayer and theirs reach the listening ear of the one Father which is in Heaven, and that God an- swers us both. It has ever seemed to me a bit of logical folly to point to the uni- versality of man's belief in Deity as proof that there is a God, and in the same breath 8 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. declare that the god of the pagan and heathen is no god at all. Abruptly to con- vince the heathen that his idol god is no- thing is to do one's best to plunge him into atheism, not to lift him up into the Chris- tian theism. I think if I were a mission- ary in Japan, I should begin my work of unfolding Christianity by worshiping Al- mighty God, Maker of heaven and earth, in a temple of Buddha, and I should ex- plain and defend my act by quoting the words of Jesus, " I am come not to de- stroy, but to fulfill." Religion, real Reli- gion, is in very truth the common posses- sion of all mankind, and " varieties of religions " means simply different reports or conceptions of one universal force or fact. Religion in the heart of man is everywhere the same in kind. The crude article is in Boston what it is in Ahmed- nuggur. But Religion in history, in organ- ization, statement, ritual, is as various as are the climates, civilizations, customs, and inventions of innumerable nations and tribes. Its unity is divine, its variations are for the most part historical and human. That is to say, the unreasoned feeling or RELIGION AND SALVATION 9 the reflected conviction that each human being is related to Deity, and that this relation can be realized by some sort of means, are at the heart of all Religion. The terror of the savage is the germ of the Christian awe. The Christian's contrite prayer is the blossoming of the pagan's attempt to purchase the Deity's favor by something done or something sacrificed. The sacred dance of the islander is of a piece with the jubilant psalm of the Chris- tian, exulting in his deliverance from his material danger or his spiritual foe. All forms of Religion, even the Religion of Jesus, if only we track them back far enough, will be found rooted in a single fact, — the soul's instinctive, fundamental, ineradicable feeling, or conviction, that it stands in a real relation to Deity, and that this relation is capable of conscious and continuous realization by action, — the adoration of an idol, the burning of a beast, the offering of a prayer. And that is what I shall mean by Religion generically in my lectures. Ten years ago, I might have regarded this statement as accepted and irritating commonplace ; but 10 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. as one listens to many of our missionary addresses and reads a good deal of our missionary literature, he perceives the ne- cessity of stating, with a flagrant plainness, that to think of Religion, in its elemental idea, as anything other than one the wide world over and all the centuries through, is to slip into the pit of hopeless bewilder- ment or to take fatal refuge in the paddock of provincialism. That there is one God is a truism until the heathen holds up his hideous or fantastic idol, and cries to the Christian, " Is this God ? " until a rigid, pitiless, marvelously well reasoned cate- chism implicitly asks. Is this God the God ? It is only as one sees clearly, and holds intelligently, a conception of Religion which is capable of roofing in every form of it, that there is so much as a chance of profound and unconquerable belief in it as the outcome of the Eternal Spirit working in the human soul. If one's philosophy of Religion can sweep away as human rubbish the idea which underlies even so horrible a thing as cannibalism in its primitive pur- pose, it may turn out that it can sweep away the idea expressed in the purest RELIGION AND SAL VA TION 1 1 worship ever offered up to Almighty God. Through and by the root, set deep in the rich soil of our humanity by the hand of God, can Religion live, however it may be nourished, strengthened, and disciplined by revelation and enlightened human thought. And I like to believe that this idea of it, upon which I have dwelt so long, is con- sonant to that conception of it which was held by the large minded, deep hearted founder of this Lecture Course. For it was at Luxor, on the site of Thebes, hard by the colossal ruins of El Karnak, mas- sive testimony to the puissant influence of a form of Religion that has ceased to be, on the banks of the river which flows past more, and more magnificent, marks of or- ganized Religion than any stream in all the world, that Mr. Lowell executed the codicil that created the foundation upon which to-night's lecturer is privileged to stand. Those huge monoliths spake to him of an ancient faith in God of which the family church in far off Boston was a true de- velopment. He must have felt that belief in God, however strangely named, however imperfectly described and weirdly wor- 12 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION shiped, was indissolubly bound up with an ancient people's moral life, just as belief in Jesus Christ and His revelation of the Father's nature was firmly linked in with the moral behavior of the people of Massa- chusetts. Because there was Religion in every one of the strange lands to which his travels bore him, because the evidences of Religion, among peoples whose civiliza- tion had long ago disappeared, were pre- eminently characteristic of the remains of those civilizations, he profoundly and pas- sionately felt that only by Religion, per- petually translating itself into morals, can men be secure of happiness in this world and in that which is to come. The Lec- tures wTre to show the " conformity of natural Religion " — that natural Religion which I have already defined — " to that of our Saviour." Here, then, is the distinct assertion that Natural Religion is in conformity with the religion of Jesus. It is the assertion that just as the tree, standing in stalwart strength, conforms to the slender sapling out of which it grew; just as the broad river, bearing upon its bosom the navies RELIGION AND SALVATION 13 of the world, conforms to the stream which has sung its way down from its native hills; or just as to-day's civilization con- forms to the ancient civihzations whose developed child it is, — so the Religion of Jesus conforms to the Religion of Abraham, of India, of the "summer isles of Eden lying in dark purple spheres of sea." This may seem on its face like surrendering the claim of Christianity to be the universal religion that is to be, like reducing it to the level of all Religions, differing, as the phrase is, " not in kind but in degree," from, say. Buddhism or Shintoism. But let us understand exactly what we mean by this phrase. It may be said that all oak trees differ from each other only in degree, since they are all oaks. And this is true. And yet it must be that white oaks and red oaks differ in kind, and that some intrinsically different sort of sap or leaf function must be working in them adequately to account for diversities which inexpert eyes easily discern. This also is true. Certain fundamental likenesses make them oaks ; certain equally funda- mental qualities make them white or red. 14 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. Degree and kind are not contradictory or mutually exclusive of each other, when degree and kind are working in the same organism. It does not affront us when we are assured that Buddhism and Confucian- ism differ only in degree, nor does it con- tradict our knowledge to affirm, also, that they differ in kind as well. Just why it is either perilous or untrue to assert that Christianity " differs in degree " from any Religion which has been a living force upon this earth, it is hard to say, nor has it ever been explained. Christianity is a far richer and nobler form of Religion than Taoism, for example ; yet- each has a com- mon root. Christianity is immeasurably truer to human instinct than Zoroastrian- ism, because Jesus has perfectly revealed the nature of God and perfectly stated in word and life the wish and will of God for man ; but none the less Zoroastrianism and Christianity are the same in their ele- mental truth. The disciples of each wor- ship the same God, however different be their report of what they mean by God and of what He wishes men to become. Every Religion which is " natural," which RELIGION AND SALVATION. 15 issues from the universal human instinct that man has a real relation to God and that that relation can be realized by action, conforms to the ReHgion of Jesus. Chris- tianity is possessed of truths of which the heart of the Dark Continent has never dreamed. Christianity is moved by a pur- pose to which much of India is yet a stranger, but its most characteristic truths and purposes are the developments of truths and purposes which have haunted the nature of mankind "since the first man stood, God conquered, with his face to heaven upturned." To foreshadow the meaning of the title I have given these lectures, Christianity is the great expan- sion of Religion, not simply of Judaism, but of every form of Religion which has sensitized the conscience, invigorated the will, and directed the hopes of mankind. So far from lowering the Religion of Jesus to the level of the so-called man-made reli- gions, this conception of it lifts it clean out of every petty, partial, provincial no- tion of it, and sets it in the heaven of humanity's variant yet ever related beliefs, there to shine as the star whose magnitude 1 6 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. and beauty dims all its sister stars, yet reflecting, like them, the beams of the one Eternal Sun, sole source of heat and light. It is this conception of Christianity which is every year becoming more and more that of all wide-minded and deep- hearted Christian thinkers. And it is no insignificant indication of the marvelous progress made towards the simplification of Christendom's apprehension of the es- sential unity of all Religion that one may make this frank and I hope lucid statement of the relation of Christianity to any Reli- gion whatever, without instantly meeting a prompt challenge, perhaps something more serious. Indeed, it is not extrava- gant to claim that to-day men find it easier and more rational to believe that Chris- tianity is destined to gather into itself the Religions of the world, when it is recog- nized as of kin with every Religion, than when it was regarded as bound by no vital, necessary, indestructible ties to every least belief of man in his God. For if we could find a nation to which the idea of Deity is as inconceivable as that of light to eyeless fishes in the lakes of subter- RELIGION AND SAL VA TION. 1 7 ranean caverns, to which worship is as unthinkable as the distance from March eight to the State House gate, the pro- posal to send to that nation the story told in our Gospels, with the hope that it would be so much as possible that they could receive it, would not find a sup- porter whose intelligence was not in seri- ous dispute. The sure warrant for believ- ing in the final supremacy of Christianity is its essential kinship to and its manifest completion of the capacity to know and love God, which lives in every man be- cause every man is made in the image of God. The more eagerly the missionary insists that the Religion of Jesus is a mes- sage of brotherly welcome to the Religion which builds temples on the banks of the Ganges, the sooner will Jesus be hailed as the long-expected Saviour by the multi- tudes who fill those heathen temples with their prayers and the smoke of their sac- rifices. I claim, therefore, that that is a true ex- pansion of Religion which has lifted Chris- tianity, as we know it here in America, up out of the narrow notion of it as standing 1 8 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. in solitary grandeur among the faiths of the world to which it has no ties of spirit- ual kinship, and is setting it forth as the evolutionary, divine fulfillment of what has been living and growing in the heart of man since the day he w^as placed upon this earth with a nature that had in it the potency of government, civilization, art, worship, invention, skill, and love. What may still be regarded in some quarters as an evidence of decay is thus seen to be the mark of vitality. The larger, the older, the more comprehensive Religion is conceived to be, the more absolute is its necessity, the more solidly firm is its pos- session of mankind. I have perhaps sufficiently — more than sufficiently — indicated why, to my think- ing, Religion needs no defense. It rests not upon arguments and institutions, but upon humanity itself. It will abide, not because of the clever ingenuity of logi- cians, nor of the well fortified erudition of scholars ; it will abide because man is man. He did not make himself ; God made him — made him capable of love and hate, of sleeping and waking, of dreaming and RELIGION AND SALVATION. 19 doing ; capable, also, of knowing and loving his Maker. What he is, he is. And he is no more compelled to hunger for meat than to hunger for God. The history of humanity's search for God is as true, as characteristic, as that of its search for food. Man plants his fields and rears his temples because from the one he gathers the grain that nourishes his body, and in the other finds the sense of mystery and awe and reverence which feed his soul. What he is, he is, and he is religious. The one plain, persistent, venerable fact about him is that he has, always been on the lookout for God, and the story of his search and his discoveries is the history of Religion. Not, then, as an apologist of a decaying, but as the interpreter of an expanding force, I come to speak, believing that a true interpretation of movements and achieve- ments, at the close of the century, which apparently mark the recession of Chris- tianity from the life of the people, will re- veal, rather, that religion is more and more taking firm possession of every human interest and endeavor, perpetually trans- lating itself into organizations, enthusi- 20 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. asms, and struggles, which, as yet, are largely unaware of the true nature of the force which gave them birth and is sup- plying them with the life without which they must die. If we have correctly and sufficiently indicated wherein religions are alike, it is time to develop wherein they differ. Their most obvious difference is in their report of the nature of God. The self-torture, the self-effacement, of the devotee of India is the outcome of an untrue conception of the nature of God. If God be what he thinks Him, his self-torture is natural. Man seeks to become -what he believes God would have him be.^ If you believe God is only force, then Religion will be a struggle to get on the right side of God, or to get out of His way altogether. Every Religion that has been, bountifully illustrates that very simple truth. Reli- gions do not make gods, but gods make Religion. A god who is conceived as bru- tal, lustful, capricious, and cruel, makes a brutal, licentious, shifty, and unmerci- ful Religion. The heathen who lashes his 1 Fairbairn, Religion in History and Modern Life. RELIGION AND SALVATION. 21 idol in maddened fury, because a boon is withheld, believes in a god of weakness. When Jacob made his bargain with the Almighty, saying, " If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and rai- ment to put on, so that I come to my father's house in peace, then shall the Lord be my God," he had in mind a deity whose nature was open to ordinary considerations of barter and exchanore. What a man thinks God is, inexorably determines what his Religion comes at last to be. And the rea- son no Religion remains fixed and final, the reason it is difficult, and sometimes impos- sible, to determine with exactitude what the tenets of a particular Religion are, is its perpetual tendency to develop, in the direc- tion either of spirituality or materialism, of refinement or degradation, its conception of the nature of the god it worships and adores. It is both unhistorical and irra- tional to hold that Religions have created gods. No one would say that a hundred years of successful government in Amer- ica, and of an ever ripening civilization, originated the idea of government which 22 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. is embodied in our Constitution. On the contrary, out of it, interpreted and ex- pounded by the authoritative utterances of the Supreme Court, and reahzed in con- crete laws enacted by the legislature and enforced by the executive, has flowed the great stream of our national life. So long as our Constitution remains unchanged, government, and all that government means to Institutions and peoples, will remain substantially what it Is. So the idea of God which man holds will inex- orably determine the character of his Re- ligion. Religion will expand, will grow truer, better, more beneficent, as the na- ture of God, disclosed by revelation, appre- hended by more accurate, patient, and humble study of His purposes In nature and history and man, Is slowly developed in human thought. To originate a new Religion, we must first procure a fresh God. To displace an old Religion, we must first show that the old god is no longer ade- quate. To attempt to reverse the process is both impossible and unphilosophlcal, as all history abundantly declares. In its conception of the nature of God, RELIGION AND SALVATION. 23 Religion has witnessed a marvelous expan- sion in the last half-century. Retaining its firm hold upon the ideas of justice and righteousness, adding richly to the idea of power manifested in law as against caprice and arbitrariness (even when consecrated by so dear a name as "special providence"), it has developed marvelously the idea of love, not only as an amiable quality, but as a magnificent force. The prolonged emphasis that accents the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God, which has become the commonplace of modern preaching, and which the present generation accepts as a matter of course, has, perhaps, ob- scured its real importance as a distinct addition to the idea of God to which mod- ern times have attained. So recent a writer as Mr. Fiske has given a child's picture of God, which many here to-night will recognize as representative of the conception of their own childhood. " I imagined," he says, " a narrow office, just over the zenith, with a tall standing desk running lengthwise, upon which lay several open ledgers bound in coarse leather. There was no roof over this office, and 24 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. the walls were scarcely five feet from the floor, so that a person standing at the desk could look out upon the whole world. There were two persons at the desk, one of them — a tall slender man of aquiline features, wearing spectacles, with a pen in his hand, and another behind his ear — was God. The other, whose appearance I do not distinctly recall, was an attendant angel. Both were diligently watching the deeds of men and recording them in the ledgers. To my infant mind this picture was not grotesque, but ineffably solemn ; and the fact that all my deeds and words were thus written down to confront me at the day of judgment seemed naturally a matter of grave concern." I doubt if any child of to-day, reared in a household whose religious life is correctly represen- tative of contemporary Christianity, would give us such a picture now. He might, to be sure, paint in a picture quite as anthropomorphic, but instead of a tireless watcher and bookkeeper, resolute to set down what is, careless whether what is be right or wrong, lovely or unlovely, we should see a colossal father with the RELIGION AND SALVATION. 25 world's children gathered about his knee, affectionately praising their little victories over tiny temptations, tenderly chiding their naughtiness, and gently urging them to live sweet, pure lives. Mr. Fiske, to be sure, was contending that " unless one's thought is capable of ranging far and wide over the universe, it is impossible to frame a conception of God which is not grossly anthropomorphic." But the special sort of anthropomorphism his childish fancy employed is unerringly indicative of the common ideas taught him in his early years respecting the occupation, interest, and activity of God. The anthropomor- phism of to-day's child, as it pictures God in heaven, with equal certainty indicates what ideas of God it has been taught or has unconsciously absorbed, and, there- fore, what ideas of God are now the com- mon possession of all religious people in our land and time. Nothing so definitely demonstrates the expansion of Religion, in its purely theological aspects, as the growth and profound influence of the idea of the Fatherhood of God. It means a new and better conception of His relation 26 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. to His children, a new and truer appre- hension of the nature of His treatment of the world of men, a new and far more powerful force in drawing us towards the ideal of life which has forever haunted human spirits. It has slowly, and for the most part silently, insinuated itself into the colder hymnology of the elder Church, and given us hymns which voice the real hopes and longings, the statural devotion, of our hearts, warm, tender, and trustful. From a literary point of view, our modern Christian lyrics may be inferior to the vig- orous, stately hymns our fathers sung, — though that is a question we cannot argue to-night, — but there can be no difference of opinion about the intended and wide difference between them as regards their variant conceptions of the nature of the God to Whom they are sung. And how- ever slender the warrant for making hym- nology do duty for theology, the religious songs of a people have ever been sure guides to the real heart of their beliefs. Nature's lover names the birds that sing in her fields and forests, by listening in delighted wonder to the notes which thrill RELIGION AND SALVATION 27 and flood, with inimitable music, copse and tree and sky ; the ornithologist traps, kills, dissects, stuffs them, and the label is ready to be written. Verily, I say unto you, each has his reward. It is significant, also, that with the ex- pansion of Religion into a confident con- ception of God as our Father, the appeal to fear has ceased in many quarters, and has been almost hushed in all. A super- ficial explanation of the disappearance of this once mighty weapon in the hands of organized Religion assures us that, since sin is now regarded as disease, and there- fore cannot justly be punished, the neces- sity of the machinery of torture, whether penal, punitive, or disciplinary, falls to the ground. But it is not true. For if any- thing may safely be affirmed by the stu- dent of concrete human life, it is that con- science testifies to the reality of sin as the result of self-determination, with all the vigor and unpitying sternness which have characterized its operations from the day on which the first liar uttered his lie and knew his soul was stained. That descrip- tion which we read this winter of the mas- 28 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION sive frame of the New York police ofHcer drenched in sweat as the story of his un- speakable wickedness was drawn from his unwilling lips in open court, is all of a piece with the story of Ananias falling dead at Peter's feet. Conscience works to-day in precisely the same way it worked in Judea two thousand years ago. Its tes- timony has remained unchanged through all the changes of the changing years. It asserts that there is as much difference between disease and sin as between color and sound, distance and time. The man or the community that counts upon the final extinguishment of- the sense of ill desert when bad deeds are done, is count- ing upon the extinguishment of humanity itself. For besides the indignation at the costly consequences of wrongdoing, besides the hot, angry vengeance w^hich man and society frequently wreak upon the destroy- ers of their goods and peace, there is always a clear, strong, mordant perception of the intrinsic wickedness of the wrong itself. The permanent is the moral; the passing is the special forms in wdiich the moral appears. The use of tobacco in RELIGION AND SALVATION 29 Wahhabee/ and untruthfulness in Boston, are regarded as the great sins ; but though Boston smile at Wahhabee and Wahhabee wonder at Boston, there lives in each the unshaken conviction that sin is not a dis- ease, but is forever, while man is man, the outcome of an exercise of the power of self- determination. It is clear, then, that the disappearance of appeals to man's fear of torment in a world to come cannot be due to the disappearance of man's conviction that he can be wicked or that he is wicked. But when one reflects upon the fullness and force with which the idea of the Fa- therhood of God has been presented in the last quarter of our century, and how com- pletely it has possessed our religious think- ing and worship, it ought not to be re- garded as strange that the old insistence upon the certainty of vengeance, uttering itself in endless torture of the wicked, should die away. Torture and a father cannot go together. If torture is to re- main, fatherhood must first disappear. If fatherhood is to be the root idea in our conception of God, then torture disappears 1 Herbert Spencer, The Sttidy of Sociology. 30 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. as naturally as does the darkness when the sunshine comes over the mountain top. There was no noisy battle between the idea of God as a bookkeeper recording the ac- tions which one day should become fuel for everlasting fires, and the idea of God as full of paternal yearning for His chil- dren's love and unloosing His punish- ments only to discipline and deter; just as there can be no fierce conflict when the innocence of childhood passes into the knowledge of the grown man. The de- cline, therefore, of the effort to create fear — though terror is the more descriptive word — as a means of securing man's obedience to God, and equally the refusal of men any longer to be coerced by it into acceptance of doctrines or conformity to observances, so far from indicating a weak- ening of Religion, rather attest its in- creased vitality ; for the obedience of love is ever more valuable, more lasting, more significant, than the compliance of fear, just as the willing obedience of the volun- teer is better than the enforced obedience of the drafted man, as the free, intelligent loyalty of the citizen, who never thinks of RELIGION AND SALVATION. 31 jails and fines, is more significant of the city's order than the multitudes cowed by the police. Before my eye are two stout volumes of theology, the pathetic monument of the industry, learning, culture, and logical acu- men of one of the gentlest souls and ripest scholars this or any country has produced, and whose author has within a year ^ gone home to God. In it two pages are devoted to Heaven, and eighty-nine treat of Hell. It is the record of the age that has died, not of the age that is alive. The theolo- gian of to-day would reverse the propor- tions, would sing of the " sweet and blessed country," and would leave to the fuller revelations of the future the disclosure of the meaning of a God who loves as a father, yet chastises every son whom He receiveth. Equally characteristic is the complete freedom of the intellect in its search for truth. The sole authority in Religion is truth demonstrated, fact verified. And there can be no other. For if men accept 1 The Reverend William Greenough Thayer Shedd, D. D. 32 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. any " outward authority " in Religion, or in science, or art, or government, it is only because that authority has proved itself competent by the character of the truth and fact for which it vouches. In a sense, every trained electrician is an authority to the timid layman threading his cautious way among wires and dynamos. His warn- ings of danger and his assurances of safety are unquestioningly accepted. I dare not touch what he forbids me to go near, I boldly tread where he asserts there is no possibility of harm. I will not so much as enter the laboratory or generating room unless he guide me. He is my authority, absolute, unquestioned. Apparently I have given up my private judgment. But only apparently. For every step I take, every act of avoidance of the deadly wire, and every confident touch I lay upon .an instru- ment, mean the continuity of t^^; working of my private judgment, \rlTfcn assures me that I am following a safe guide. Let the electrician tell me that the live wire is dead, and I follow him no longer. The fact that private judgment accepts an " authority " inevitably means that private RELIGION AND SALVATION. 33 judgment may.at any time reject it. It is a clear perception of this truth which has emancipated the human intellect, leaving it free to accept or reject religious or any truth without incurring outward penalties. But that perception is not due to a suc- cessful assault upon ecclesiastical power, it is the result of that expansion of Reli- gion which ensued the moment God was regarded as our Father. The sequence is, perhaps, not immediately apparent. Let me try to illustrate. The domestic gov- ernment of an orphan asylum is necessarily different from that of a family. It pro- ceeds upon the recognition that the chil- dren under its care cannot be supplied with the sort of discipline and education which as children they need and of which they have been providentially deprived. It must needs make a set of rules and set up a machinery for their enforcement. Even when, as in our later, wiser days, the at- tempt is made to rob the asylum of its in- stitutional character and clothe it with the semblance of a home, it is only too pain- fully evident that the asylum child feels the sanctions of its artificial home rather 34 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION, than the love which is undoubtedly behind those sanctions. Fear of the consequences of bad behavior acts more powerfully than hope of the rewards of good behavior ; and the reason is that inevitably the punish- ments of wrong-doing are more definite, more concrete, more certain than the re- wards of well-doing. The importance of obedience is emphasized, even if obedience is not almost wholly secured, by dread of the sure consequences of disobedience. This is not because the matron's heart is not overrunning with a pitiful love for the fatherless children under her care, not be- cause the government .of the institution has been deliberately planned to exclude the idea or the methods of parenthood, but simply because no one and nothing can take the place of a parent. Upon a totally different basis is built up the government of a home. The one thought which fills a true child's mind in a true home is that of the gladness and depth and tenderness of the personal love which runs out to it from the fountains of a parental heart. And love means mental freedom, just as fear means mental restriction. The father RELIGION AND SALVATION. 35 bids the child try to discover the essential reasonableness of the family command- ments by seeing how they all grow out of a passionate love of it, how they could not be uttered unless there were an absolute conviction with the father, and a growing conviction with the child, that every one of them is rooted in a wisdom and love which it will be the glory of sonship to discover. The wise father unfolds his truth to his boy just as fast as the boy is able to re- ceive it, and the father's delight is keenest when he knows that his son, freely ponder- ing upon any of the family laws, has dis- covered that it is resting, not upon an arbi- trary enactment, but upon the truth of the father's and family's essential nature. Fa- therhood, then, means freedom to the chil- dren in the realm of truth, and the family life is at its best, not when every child assents to a single statement of what the family belief may be, but when every child is most conscientiously endeavoring to find out what that belief should be and what are the grounds upon which it rests. If every member of the household is true and pure and honest, it is a united and happy 36 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. household, even if no two of them hold identical opinions as to the nature of the bond that binds them and makes them one. The Fatherhood of God, held as a firm personal belief, exerts the same influence upon the intellectual activities of His chil- dren as they freely study the nature of His truth and world. The idea of God as a father repudiates the necessity of homo- geneous beliefs ; it rather insists upon the absoluteness of loyalty to Him. Just as the child who conscientiously believes that the purpose of his father is the family's education, will not dispute his brother who has, with equal conscientiousness, been led to believe that the father's purpose is the family's refinement, because both are loyal to that father, and eager to do his will, so any man who has come to believe that God has spoken to mankind only in Jesus Christ, will not disown, much less perse- cute, his brother who equally hears God's voice in the utterances of every saint that has ever lived or is living now, if both are first bent on loyalty to God. It does not disturb me if I hear men claim to have RELIGION AND SALVATION 37 found in other books what I find in the Bible; it no longer appals me if I hear other men claim that God is more real to them, as they watch the process by which nature heals the wound upon the twig or of the bird's body, than He is when they stand beneath the roof of the Christian Church, if only I can see the truthfulness, purity, and compassion which live in man only as man lives in God. * The great question is not how or where do you find God, but have you found Him ? The mo- ment that question is the question of Reli- gion everywhere, anything like an attempt to secure identity of beliefs by processes of mere coercion becomes a solecism. But it is becoming the question of mankind more and more, not because the state has forbidden the use of force in the prosecu- tion of religious enterprise or in the per- secution of heresy, nor yet because of the mysterious rise of the " gospel of free thought," but because men have had the vision of God as a father and in that vision have clearly, and let us hope, forever, per- ceived that His truth is to be learned like any truth, through the rational and free 38 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. and honest processes of the intellect. I do not think this fact has been adequately, or enough lucidly, set forth. There is still an impression, widely and vigorously held, that the emancipation of the intellect in the field of religion has been secured in the teeth of a bitter opposition on the part of Religion ; that Religion reluctantly yielded to, rather than created, the freedom in which we now rejoice, and that she still looks with sad, defeated eyes upon the spoliation of her fairest territory. But the student of Religion, looking at spiritual forces apart from their embodiment in or- ganization, perceives the evolution out of Religion itself of the very freedom which some of her mistaken, however loy^, friends regard as her worst enemy. Out of a full, almost joyous, appropriation of the idea of God as a father which lies* at the founda- tion of the teaching of Jesus, and which our time preeminently has made familiar and winsome and universal, has come silently, and for the most part unobserved, that complete, magnificent, fruitful freedom to think straight and speak straight which, when the history of the end of the century RELIGION AND SALVATION. 39 shall be adequately written, will shine as its noblest and most beneficent achieve- ment. The decline of the principle of arbitrary authority is not simply coinci- dent with the expansion of Religion, it is distinctly its creation, and when we shall have fully admitted it to legitimacy, we shall love it and honor it and glory in it, as a proud father rejoices in the splendid achievements of his illustrious son. The Religion of Jesus, therefore, in the marvelous expansion of its generic idea, has for its manifest outcomes the mitiga- tion, almost the removal, of the idea of torture in connection with the infliction of punishment, and the full-rounded doctrine of the freedom of the intellect in its search for religious truth. Christianity is identi- cal with all Religions in its purpose to bring man and God together; it differs from all .other Religions in its conception of the na- ture of the God to Whom man is forever trying to bring himself with all his power of love, obedience, and adoration. But it is time to ask, why should man be brought to God ? nay, why should it be true that all man's history is the story of 40 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. his unresting, never finished struggle to draw nigh to God ? I wish to try to an- swer that question as I close, because the answer will at once open the heart of all that is to follow. Let us try to answer it, not theologically, but in the familiar terms of life. Every Religion, the lowest and the high- est, alike proposes as its end man's sal- vation, and insists that man can be saved only as he knows God and does His will. Every Religion has succeeded in either winning or coercing man's allegiance only as it has first succeeded in persuading him that he is in some sort of peril from which he can be rescued by God alone. If the harvest threatens to fail, for instance, sacri- fice must be offered, incantations uttered, pilgrimages made, prayers lifted, — some- thlnor must be done to induce God to avert the peril. That is the crudest form which the religious activity assumes. The sacri- fice of Iphigenia, lamented through all the centuries and still powerful to touch our imaginations and move our hearts, is thor- oughly representative of the controlling purpose of the religious acts of men, how- RELIGION AND SALVATION. 41 ever abhorrent to us be the special form in which, in the Grecian legend, that pur- pose uttered itself. Agamemnon must be saved ; only the gods could save him ; only a favorable wind, blowing fair and free from Aulis, could speed his ships to the Trojan shore. Even a beautiful, innocent maiden, his own daughter, was not too great a sac- rifice for the offending general to make, nor for the offended goddess to receive, that Agamemnon might be saved from the consequences of his sacrilegious act. How clear it all stands out. " What shall I do to be saved 1 " is the Hebraic phrase to express the Grecian thought. What shall I do to be saved } is really the cry of hu- manity everywhere, if we listen with atten- tive ear. And it is the conception of what salvation really means in the mind of the man who cries out for it which explains what otherwise is inexplicable in the reli- gious worship of men. There have been rituals which prescribed, or at least per- mitted, acts which cannot so much as be hinted at in the ears of modern people, much less described ; but if one looks clean through their dreadful impurities, clean 42 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. through their cruelty and inhumanness, to descry, if possible, the purpose which made them so much as thinkable in a human mind, he always finds a wish for something which is best described as salvation, escape from a peril, or the possession of a good. To-day we are absolutely united in our conviction that a religious man must be a good man ; if he is not good, he is not religious. The moral element in Religion just now overtops in imperativeness all else. The solidest conviction of the truth of immortality is not permitted to do duty for the virtues of honesty, truthful- ness, and compassion in the character of the religious man. That is to say, hon- esty, truthfulness, and compassion are counted the evidence of a personal salva- tion. The court of public opinion de- mands this special evidence, and will not order an acquittal without it. But to my best thinking, there has always been a moral element in every conception of sal- vation. The difference between the best Religion and the worst is a difference in conceptions of wherein morality consists, and, as I have been saying all along, it is RELIGION AND SALVATION 43 the nature of the god worshiped, as that nature is represented, or as the revelation of it is apprehended or misapprehended, which inexorably determines what the moral conception of salvation shall be. The God who is revealed as proclaiming to His children, " Be ye holy, for I am holy," inevitably compels men to believe that to their salvation the element of holi- ness absolutely belongs. The God who was conceived as saying, " Be ye brave, for I am brave," was a challenge to all his wor- shipers to put prowess and courage and recklessness of life above love, truthful- ness, and justice. Again, when it was conceived to be the greatest and most lasting of all perils to mankind that men should suffer in a world to come the penalties of law broken in this; when men took the punishments that belong to this world with patience, and accepted the harsh conditions of living to which they were compelled to submit here with something like serenity, be- cause assured of freedom from punish- ment and of possession of bliss after life in this world is over, it is not strange, it is 44 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. historically and logically natural, that sal- vation should be regarded as mainly the assurance of God's pardon and of com- plete immunity from the certain doom of those who die unpardoned. The history of Evangelicalism in England and America — that Evangelicalism to which modern England and America owe an incalcula- ble debt, to which, let us gladly assert, we shall forever be indebted — is strikingly full of this conception of human salvation. To be moral was not enough ; indeed, by a curious, and to this generation, an in- conceivable process of reasoning, it was not infrequently maintarined that the pos- session of even the most beautiful moral character was consistent with the lack of personal salvation, perhaps stood in the way of the sinner's confession of his lost condition. A converted man was one who had the assurance of the divine par- don and the sure hope of heaven. The great effort of Religion, therefore, was to produce a conviction of sin, and thereafter an equally strong conviction that sin was forgiven and the sinner entitled to the hope of heaven. Salvation became, or at RELIGION AND SALVATION. 45 least tended to become, a limited, partial, almost technical matter, wholly so in the eye of certain well defined schools in all the churches; and to those who are igno- rant of the history which the Church and Religion have courageously made in the last quarter of a century, that is still the conception of what is implied in the zeal Religion bravely manifests to-day for what it persists in calling the " salvation of all men." But I am here to show, as I think I can, that to Religion to-day salvation means the saving of all in a human being which is capable of being saved, that sal- vation is having all that is best in a man at its best, that salvation is the development of every human faculty, the refinement of every quality, and the satisfaction of every need, which belong to him as a man. If any creature's powers are lying unused because circumstances, that can be and ought to be changed, are paralyzing or narcotizing them. Religion declares that that creature is not saved. If civilization is unnecessarily forcing any human being to live under outward conditions which keep him from bringing to ripeness the 46 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. seeds of any sort of power which God im- planted in the rich soil of his nature, Reli- gion now asserts that that human being is not saved ; if any child is met on the threshold of life with the dreadful necessity of coming in daily contact with what poi- sons the healthy fountains of its spiritual energy, wdth what stunts its body and dwarfs its mind. Religion cries that that child is not saved, however strong be its faith in the certainty of God, heaven, and pardon. Salvation is all that is best in a man at its best. And Religion, as yet inarticulate, as yet only half conscious of the meaning of her mighty movement, is setting herself, tentatively, sometimes clum- sily, mistakenly, even wildly, to bring in the free salvation of which we have but begun to appreciate the beauty and grace and strength. The expansion of Religion is best observed in all those enterprises which seek to furnish a ministry to every faculty of man, however true it be that a competent spiritual vision sees in the larger, profounder, more adequate concep- tions of the nature of God, the eternal source from which they all derive their RELIGION AND SALVATION. 47 vitality, force, and purpose. We shall see that Toynbee Hall and the People's Palace, the University Settlement and the Wells Memorial, the Trades Unions, the Public Baths and the Day Nursery, the discon- tent with alms, and the treatment accorded those in whom is slowly being born the love of struggle as distinguished from that meted out to those in whom cowardly de- pendence is an ineradicable habit — all are symptoms of a religious purpose, as yet dim, unformed, directionless, which is really endeavoring to secure to man the condi- tions under which all that is best in him shall have the best chance to be at its best. Perhaps the churches may be the last offi- cially to recognize and claim this purpose as their own. No matter. Out of the churches mainly are to come the heat and light which shall keep this purpose from dying down, or from forever stumbling blindly and wildly on its way towards the realization of itself in the sweet, happy, fruitful, peaceful life of humanity. What the special social forms of that new life shall be, what the required industrial, com- mercial, and political changes shall be, 48 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. what the fixed influence upon it the unre- claimed and irreclaimable character of the individual shall be, how long and how costly the processes by which it is achieved may be, no man knoweth. But what I think is already clear is this: that the rest- less movement of our time, witnessed by the uneasy throbbing of the great heart of society, and by the universal struggle to free itself from the conditions which seem at least to stunt it, proceeds out of the conviction, articulate or inarticulate, that salvation must be expanded to meet the requirements of a larger man to be saved. St. Paul, nigh two thousand years ago, wrote down the passionate wish of his great heart, " Brethren, my heart's desire and prayer to God for Israel is that she might be saved." That is the cry of Reli- gion to-day. But " Israel" is now mankind, and its salvation is the setting of every faculty and power of man in the frame that gives them the best chance ; and the power of salvation is still the power of God, to Whom, from Whom, and by Whom are all things in heaven and earth. II. THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to exaggerate the difference in the esti- mates put upon the value of a human life in our own day and in the times that are now in the custody of written history. If it be true that the " individual withers and the race is more and more," it may turn out that the value set upon the race is solely to emphasize the value of the individual. The purpose of all social organization is the protection and welfare of the individ- ual, whatever may have been the outcome of that oro^anization. The associated man secures what the isolated man cannot. The creation of a new unit is the begin- ning of richer blessings to the individuals that unite to form the new unit. The dis- tinct endeavor of association is to produce throu2:h association what without associa- tion cannot be. It is plain enough that many associations seek the good of those 50 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. alone who compose it, and not seldom by wresting from outsiders what the outsid- ers, being unorganized, are powerless to re- tain. But this is indicative, not of a faulty purpose, but of a limited one. It is good as far as it goes ; it fails because it is not comprehensive enough. It seeks the wel- fare of a selected or elected company, un- mindful of the welfare of the mass. But the point which is always discernible is this : that association exists for the sole purpose of securing an advantage to indi- viduals. Even the costly sacrifices which individuals make for the maintenance of their association become intelligible only as the hope is cherished that these sacri- fices are eventually to be paid back, in the form of rich and substantial benefits, to the individuals. The moment associated men feel that the association is neither bring- ing, nor likely to bring, an advantage which is distinctly personal, the associa- tion is discredited and finally dissolved. In other words, a high value is set upon the worth of a human being. Instead of sacrificing him for the sake of organiza- tion, — State, Church, Society, Guild, or THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 51 Order, all these exist to create and secure to him the conditions under which he may have the chance to live what he conceives to be his fullest life. One who is not a historian cannot draw from history the concrete illustrations of the gradual growth of the increasingly high estimate put upon the preciousness of a human soul in which history abounds. But one need not be a historian intelli- gently to read the human significance of so high-handed and heartless an expenditure of human life as the building of the Egyp- tian Pyramids unquestionably involved. Here are the tombs of kings, stupendous monuments, not of monarchical glory, but of the reckless waste of innumerable hu- man lives. Deep in the sands dug the myriad slaves, ignorant of everything save the stern necessity of yielding every least bit of strength in their bodies, and every least gleam of intelligence in their minds, to the demand of the king. Up from the sands it rises, that huge bulk of stone, testimony to the greatness of a Pharaoh, indestructible evidence of the cheapness and abundance of life. The whole is the 52 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION tomb of a monarch, but every stone of it the tombstone of thousands who perished that this pile might rise. In the quarries and on the roads, on the machinery and on the walls, for a score of years, toiled every day a hundred thousand men, wageless, half fed, scourged, overworked, sick, dizzy, and exhausted. The only hospital was the taskmaster's whip, which stimulated into one last agonized effort the exhausted muscles of the used-up body, the frenzied movement of the reeling brain. Death was a welcome discharge, not seldom hastened by despair. Be it that the glory of the king required -the speedy comple- tion of its symbol, be it that a too fecund people must needs be decimated without recourse to massacre, the history of the building of the Pyramids attests the care- lessly slight value set upon a thinking, feeling, human being made in the image of God. Better than statistics, more strik- ingly than could the graphic pages of the historian, more lucidly than any anthro- pology, those huge mountains of stone tell us of an age when, to reverse our Sa- viour's words, " a sheep w^as much better THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 53 than a man." It is impossible for us to exao^Q^erate the low notions of the sacred- ness of life which almost everywhere con- front us when we open the book of history and read. Abraham felt no weight upon his conscience when he made up his mind to slay his only son. The heart of the father blenched, but the ethical aspects of the killing did not concern him. Indeed, such a test of faith as he was subjected to could not have been applied had it been probable that he would ethically revolt aofainst human sacrifice as an idea. God had promised that in his seed all the na- tions of the earth should be blessed. The sole conceivable possibility of that pro- mise being kept lay in the preservation of Isaac's life. Isaac once dead, the pro- mise must fail. Could Abraham kill his son, and still go on believing that God was able to keep His word ? — that, and not some scruple about the morality of human sacrifice, was the patriarch's test. And that test could be applied only in an age in which life was held cheap. Very likely we shall sometime see clearly that that misinterpretation of God's will which 54 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION resulted in the butchery of Canaanitish wo- men and children was possible only among a people to whom had not yet come the perception of the preciousness of life. The sin of Saul in saving his prisoners from massacre would not have been sin at all had he saved them from motives of clemency and not of lust and gain. The plain fact of history is that the lower the estimate put upon man, the lower we shall find the conception of the nature of God to be ; and as we trace in this lecture the pro- gress of the idea of the exceeding great value of a human being, we shall see at every step that that idea is rooted in finer, more moral, more holy conceptions of what God is. Religion is the source of all those endeavors which, ignoring Religion, not in- frequently repudiating it, are seeking the reformation of human society, not merely in the mass, but in the concrete condi- tions of the individual, because Religion is the source of that new value given to man which makes saving him seem worth while. The first evidence of a higher value set upon man which I shall bring, is the estab- lishment of the hospital. Doubtless the THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 55 Romans, with quick insight into the neces- sity of guarding against the weakening of their armies by disease, made special pro- vision for the care of disabled or diseased soldiers ; but only those were cared for who gave promise of recovery and return to active duty. The Greeks reckoned the wounded and the sick a total military loss, and left their disabled men to the tender mercies of nature. There was a plenty more men where the fallen came from. It was not until the fourth century, when Christianity had become a power, mainly, to be sure, in the state, yet widely also in human hearts, that the first hospital was founded. It was a signal recognition of the fact that a broken body might be, ought to be, repaired ; a new testimony to an awakened sense of the value of life, however prominently was associated with it the idea of the economic wisdom of sav- ing life. On from the fourth century, the establishment of hospitals, especially in connection with ecclesiastical institutions, grew apace, until at the beginning of the present century they became a fixed fea- ture of municipal and military life. But it 56 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. was reserved for the last two generations to develop the hospital idea out of a natural pity for physical suffering, and of alarm at the loss of so much economically valu- able life, into the magnificent conception of hospitals as ministers to man's chance to live his life at its best on the physical side of it. Public interest has been so con- tinuously drawn to a consideration of the clever contrivances of the hospital system, to the amazing advance in surgery made possible by antiseptic treatment and by sterilization, by the ingenious devices of a newborn architecture, that we have seldom asked w^hence came ^:he motive which called into being these matchless provi- sions for the treatment and cure of human beings. We have taken for granted that knowledge of methods by which sickness can be turned into health, twisted limbs made straight, and poison ejected from the blood, has as a matter of course resulted in the application of that knowledge to the broken bodies of men. But the mo- ment we reflect upon it ever so little, w^e see that explanation breaking down. For at the start, a pure human pity, vitalized THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 57 by Christian love, cast about for means wherewith to mitigate pain. Rough and faulty those means were, but for the most part love of man called them into being. And running down from Fabiola's ven- ture of faith, inspired by Jerome, to the Vanderbilts' munificent provision for the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York, medical science has confidently counted upon the expansion of man's piti- ful concern for his brother's body to sup- ply it with the means to establish its hos- pitals and bring to perfection its surgical and medical appliances of cure. The Mas- sachusetts General Hospital two hundred years ago is unthinkable, not because of the cost it implies, but because there was in the colony but a faint glimmer of the beautiful compassion for physical suffer- ing which beats in the heart of the Com- monwealth to-day. The gifts and grants which have made it a benediction are not a people's homage to the marvelous de- velopment of medical science and to its economic outcome, but a testimony to a people's deep-hearted, warm-hearted belief that no man among us should languish in 58 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION, unsanitary, ignorant, and povert3^-limited conditions, or drag a maimed body through his painful years, if science can give him health and straightness. You cannot touch the motive which builds our hospitals with- out instantly feeling that you have your finger upon the heart of a religious con- viction that man's body must be saved because the man who lives in it is worth more than all else. The expansion of Religion, on that side of it which regards the human body, precedes and inexorably conditions the expansion of the hospital to meet the needs of suffering. It is this expansion of Religion also, perpetually as- serting the truth which long ago was ut- tered in the Bible — " Know ye not that your bodies are the temple of the Holy Ghost " — which has led to the separation of the generic hospital into hospitals for the sexes and for children, and finally into those reserved for specific diseases. At the end of the last century, when a stupid law in France, and an equally stupid one in England, compelled the hospital author- ities to receive every patient that applied for admission, irrespective of the crowded THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 59 condition of the wards and the nature of the applicant's disease, the mortaHty was so appalling that it became a serious ques- tion whether hospitals were a benefit or a curse. As schools for instructing medical students in the art of healing, they were an undoubted success, but the growing philanthropy recoiled from the thought of securing competent medical and surgical knowledge at so frightful a cost in human life. It revolted at the sight of four, and even six, suffering bodies crowded into a single bed in a ward which rivaled in populousness a tenement house in Mul- berry Bend. " These are our brothers and sisters," it cried, " each with a love of life, each capable of exquisite suffering and ex- quisite joy, each entitled to a chance with us of finding in this world the satisfac- tion of the nature into which they were born. The modesty of woman has rights which are being ignorantly but none the less shamefully sacrificed. The timidity of little children is daily made the occasion of an agony. The chances of life for the mother and her newborn babe are destroyed by the proximity of fever and 6o THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. contagion. The sacredness of human Hfe is overlaid by considerations of economy." That was the cry of an enlightened philan- thropy, of an educated political economy, if you like; but only as it reached the ear of those who profoundly felt the essential preciousness of a human being was there so much as a chance that reform would enter the hospital, insisting that, at any pecuniary cost, men and w^omen must be treated, not as cases, but as souls, not as organisms out of repair, but as persons, with all the rights of personality to a care and treatment which regarded a cure as the beautiful gate through which they were to go to a new life of privilege and endeavor. However o^reat be the contri- butions of medical science to that devel- opment of the hospital which has revolu- tionized its bills of mortality, and secured a seemly decency to its provisions for sex and infancy, we shall but half account for these splendid achievements if we fail to recognize the part played by Religion in creating the motive which compelled the revolution. Without that expansion of Religion which witnesses to a profound THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 6l and passionate belief in such a salvation for man as provides him with the best chances, and which includes in its conception of salvation the highest possible safety of his body, the evolution of the hospital out of something little better than a pest house into a system which has made the repre- sentative hospital the guarantee of the best treatment and the surest cure, could never have been. Out of a quickened and enlightened sense of the value of a man, which is thoroughly religious, has blos- somed this splendid provision for the care and cure of his broken body. The city hospital is the utterance of the city's reli- gious belief in man's physical salvation, just as a St. Vincent's or a St. Margaret's Hospital is the expression of the Church's religious belief in that salvation, — the one as much as the other. Destroy that reli- gious belief, let the care of the sick be handed over to the mercy of economical considerations, and while medical know- ledge and surgical skill may remain, even increase, the sources of power to utilize them, to furnish them with opportunity, run thin and perhaps dry up. 62 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. I do not think we can exaggerate the part played by Religion here. You and I may have been tempted by early and in- veterate ideas to look upon modern provi- sion for physical need as an indication of the decline of religious interest and the mildly hostile rise of materialism ; but when one calmly reflects upon the origin, not of knowledge and skill, but of the powerful motive which has seized skill and knowledge as instruments for the cure of human disease, he traces back to Religion, expanded and enlightened, the streams which are flowing through humanity to form a purer river of life. I find also that sanitary science is under larger obligations to religion than appears upon the surface. The instinct of self- preservation may safely be trusted to avail itself of every appliance known to sci- ence, provided that instinct is enough en- lightened. And in the dwellings of the well-to-do, in all first-class structures, hotels, ofiice buildings, schools and dormi- tories, for the use of the well-to-do, sani- tary arrangements of approved and up-to- date perfection are expected as a matter THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 63 of course. They are vitally necessary in the mansion, and economically profitable in all income-producing buildings whose tenants are alive to the dangers of bad sanitary conditions. And so we find them wherever legitimately selfish intelligence and competitive urgency demand them. But in another direction sets the religious spirit. Insisting upon the intrinsic value of man, independent of anything he pos- sesses and of the conditions under which he lives, Religion has been demanding that the ignorant poor shall share with the intelligent rich the benefits of sanitary science. The tenement-house question may turn out to be an economical one — for one, I think it will — but the agitation for the decent housing of the poor in both England and America has thus far been, not economical, but religious. It has never been the exclusive concern of the Church as an organized body, but when we scrutinize the nature of the motives of those who have been foremost in agita- tions for model tenement houses, we find them to be firmly rooted in the idea, which is distinctly religious, that man, just 64 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION because he is man, with capacity to grow and to shrink, to rise and to sink, to be- come more spiritual and more bestial, is entitled to a material condition which secures him a chance to develop as the nature of the body he inhabits declares he ought. Mr. Henry George, in answering the question " Is our civilization just to workingmen?" draws a picture of the homes of the rich and the abodes of the poor which will illustrate, in a way he did not intend, the point we have in mind. " Imagine," he says, " that the first man Adam in the slumber of the night stood by your bedside in one of those great cities which are the flower, ci-own, and type of our civilization, and asked you to take him through it. Here you would take him through w^ide and w^ell-kept streets lined wath spacious mansions, replete with every- thing w^hich can enhance comfort and gratify taste, adorned with magnificent churches. Again, you would pass through another quarter where everything is nig- gard and pinched, where families are packed together tier and tier, sometimes a whole family in a single room ; where even such THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 65 churches as you see are poor and mean, and only the grogshops are gorgeous. Which quarter do you think Adam would understand you to mean, if you spoke of the workingman's quarter ? " Mr. George is appealing to the public sense of justice, and his appeal is founded upon the argu- ment that such a deplorable contrast is proof of an inequitable distribution of the proceeds of labor. But the appeal chal- lenges instantly a reply in terms of polit- ical economy. It inaugurates a debate which is still in active progress, and mean- while the contrast between the Back Bay and the Cove, Fifty-seventh Street and Avenue B, remains as flagrant as ever, so far as any efforts of the debaters have mitigated it. But Religion, pushing its way through the discussion, has insisted that there is another argument which must be heard and heeded. " The human beings housed in the worst conceivable sanitary conditions are our brethren, part of the great whole, bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh. While you are debating, they are dying; while you are in search of an impregnable solution of an economical 66 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. question, little children are day by day drinking in the poison of a foulness of air and a degree of almost necessitated filth which, working in the blood, will put them on the threshold of manhood and woman- hood handicapped for life. God never meant that man should live as these are living. The hollow-eyed, bent, gaunt, white-faced woman who emerges from the tenement house of an August morning is not the type of the woman God meant should live upon this earth. Let her be bad, fond of beer and tea and snuff — that alone is incapable of producing this dis- tortion of womanhood. - God protests in the person of every comely woman against conditions which sap the strength and mar the beauty of a woman. God is every day declaring in the wholesomeness of health, and in the pathetic repulsiveness of the disease that grows naturally out of poi- soned air and reeking walls, that man was meant to be as beautiful as the leopard and the bird." You see that, after all, it is Religion speaking. Religion, which has conceived of man as so precious that it cannot tolerate the thought of his living THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 6/ in circumstances which, while they cannot of themselves degrade him, make his phy- sical deterioration inevitable. The move- ment in the direction of a better sanitary provision for the poor, however non-reli- gious here and there it may appear, is at heart religious. Christian as well. If legis- lation is at length slowly and tentatively incorporating into the body of statute law provisions for a rigid inspection of our tenement houses, prescribing the character of the plumbing which the owner must provide, testing it when it is in place, compelling its repair when defective, that argues something more than governmental solicitude for the health of those who must do the hard work of the nation and the tow^n. It declares, rather, that the reli- gious conception of the value of a man has insinuated itself into public sentiment, and that the sense of public duty has uttered itself in law. When I hear that sanitary reform is the direct outcome of an enlight- ened science of the laws of health, and that it shows how unnecessary, after all, is the Religion which once was the creator of all humane reforms, I must still ask whence 6S THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. came the uncalculating force which seized upon sanitary science as an instrument, and made into fact what before was only ascertained knowledge ? Whence came the courage, the heroic, persistent, large- hearted devotion which, after uncounted efforts, succeeded in permeating a public sentiment, half ignorant and half indiffer- ent, with the acute consciousness that city tenements are an outrage upon humanity? Not from a body of sanitary experts, as such, not out of a commercial forecast of a great new industry, not out of a threatened revolt of helpless tenants, but straight out of hearts in which lived the great convic- tion that man as man was too precious, too richly endowed with sensitive powers of feeling joy and pain, of rising into self- respect and sinking into animalism, to be allowed to live in conditions which daily threatened to break down the fair struc- ture of a body that tenanted a fairer soul. Men and women, who perhaps repudiate orthodoxy of every sort, have found in their devotion to their brother's need the surest warrant for believing that deep in their hearts was a truer Religion than that THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 69 illustrated in a scrupulous ritual, and in a devotion which may issue in hardness of heart. I cannot, and I will not, believe that Religion is decaying so long as vigor- ous warfare is waged against everything which lowers respect for the bodies which are temples of the Holy Ghost. The preachership which declares the gospel of the body is as truly religious as the preach- ership which proclaims the gospel of the spirit. And to that preachership we largely ow^e it that the distortion, " How much is a sheep better than a man," has been re- stored to its original divine form, " How much is a man better than a sheep." It is difficult, nay, it is impossible, not to break out into a fervent thanksgiving that, in our dear city, one noble-hearted, cour- ageous, undaunted woman ^ has made phy- sical living far less hopeless and far more hopeful for thousands who, but for her clear voice, would still be steeped in un- mitigated miseries and unspeakable sur- roundings. It is not yet clear to us all that every effort to make life materially 1 Mrs. Alice N. Lincoln. 70 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. fairer for the unfavored many is an effort which only Rehgion explains and makes possible ; but it is growing clearer, and when the salvation of man is seen to be having all that is best in him at its best, organized Religion will proudly claim as its own the least of the acts which furnish man his chance to become what God in- tended him to be. And this leads naturally to a considera- tion of that feature of modern life here in America which is still the object of praise and blame. The astonishing increase of physical exercise — whether in the form of athletics in our colleges; or sports in clubs, or drill in the gymnasium — has to many minds frequently worn the look of a logical consequence of the so-called materialism of the day. " Of course," they say, " all this was bound to come ; what else should follow the decline of spiritual Religion, the decay of a reverent belief in the powers of the world to come ? This exaltation of the body, this rich provision for its devel- opment and perfection, is rooted in that passionate devotion to things which char- acterizes all modern life. Beauty in art, THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 7 1 luxury in living, sumptuousness in ap- pointments, and money as a measure of worth, require a perfect body for their per- fect enjoyment. The more this Hfe crowds out the consideration of the next, the surer will be man's effort to secure the only vehicle which can carry him safely from start to finish of the journey which begins at birth and probably ends at death. To ' Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,' has been added, ' Let us exercise and develop our bodies, for without their health and vigor we perish before we die.' " But such a judgment overlooks several consid- erations which have to do with Religion. Religion, as we have been saying, is intent on saving all that is best in man. But it has been taught by physiology, and more recently by psychology, that while wicked- ness is not the outcome of a depraved body, a depraved body is the removal of many of the most valuable restraints to evil impulse, and perhaps the occasion of evil impulse itself. It certainly is provo- cative of restlessness on the one side, of lethargy upon the other ; and the moment a man is thoroughly restless or thoroughly 72 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. lethargic, he is open to a set of temp- tations to which the normal man is a stranger. It is not true, historically or ra- tionally, that wickedness is the necessary consequent of ill health, but it is true, his- torically and rationally, that national phy- sical deterioration is followed by national moral deterioration, or, if not followed, is accompanied by it. The mere perception of this fact, however, and its abundant ver- ification by both past and present, is pow- erless to secure a right treatment of the body for the sake of ethical or intellectual results in man and nation. What was needed, and what is "needed still, is the profound conviction that man is so rich in capacity of development, so intrinsically worthy, and so manifestly planned for a career that demands the perfection of every power, that to ignore his body is to thwart God's purpose. The moment a man cries out in deep belief, " I have no right to deny my body what, as an instrument of mind and spirit, it demands ; I have no right, in the supposed interest of that mind and spirit, to interpret ' keeping it under ' as permission to let its channels become THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. y^ clogged or foul, its blood to run hot and thin ; I have no right to allow it to become the hotbed of disordered nerves or the pit of narcotized force," we have a new an- thropology, in which the religious signi- ficance of physical vitality has its rightful recognition. So far, then, from physical culture being a sign of decaying spiritual- ity, it is rather the as yet unconscious, but none the less true, insistence upon the in- dubitable fact that ministry to the body is as truly an act of Religion as ministry to the soul. The only reason our boys and young men are unable to recognize that the drill of the gymnasium is integrally one with worship in the chapel, is that they have heard the two acts spoken of as having no relation to one another, or, if not that, have never listened to a frank declaration of the fundamental equality of them as exercises — " gymnastics," to use St. Paul's striking phrase — which have in view the symmetrical development of the perfect man. But there are not wanting signs of an increasing, and increasingly intelligent recognition^ by both educators and preachers of Religion, that in the near 74 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. future the training of the child's body must keep equal pace with instruction in morals and Religion too ; not as a graceful accom- plishment merely, not as a physical prepa- ration for the hard work of manhood only, but as the necessary accompaniment of anything like a true development of the na- ture which looks up to God for inspiration that it may look out on the world w4th sanity and hope. In other words, the pre- sent wide interest in physical exercise is essentially a religious one, because it rests squarely upon our profound conviction that to do adequately what we can do, to meet faithfully what membership in society involves in the way of task and duty, there must be a body which, by its vigor and strength, can keep our noblest purposes from degenerating into feeble good wishes. That is the religious basis of physical ex- ercises. And it is characteristic of our time that it has lifted, or that it is trying to lift, the passion for the body's develop- ment clean out of the idea of it as valua- ble mainly for making a nation of vigorous soldiers and muscular toilers, and is setting it forth as an integral part of the ideal THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 75 of the perfect man. It is corroborative of this view of it that when physical exercise secured recognition as a necessary part of education, when provision was made for it in our schools and colleges in the same way that provision had been made for in- struction in chemistry and for worship in the chapel, there was at once discrimina- tion between physical culture and competi- tive sports. Competitive contests are to the development of the body what a ritual is to Reliofion. A ritual is forever in dauQ-er of sinking into superstition. It can perpet- uate itself in safety only as it scrupulously regards itself as the vehicle of a devotion which is perpetually strengthened and illu- minated by personal loyalty to God. The moment ritual ceases to regard itself as vehicle, and decorates and prolongs itself regardless of its sole function, it becomes a superstition. So competitive sport is, ideally, the exhibition of the progress and achievement of physical training ; it is the disclosure to the public of the results, in power of sustained exertion, endurance, grace and nerve, of a systematic and in- telligent corporal development. The mo- "je THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. ment it loses sight of its true relation to the education of the whole man, it sinks to the level of the uncontrollable frenzy of the bull-dog, the blind tenacity of the Tas- manian devil. It ought to be clear that there is no permanent cure for the brutal- ity and ferocity which have too frequently attended athletic contests, nor for the in- consequential, but none the less deplora- ble features of some of them, in marshal- ing arguments to prove that brutality is no true element of a trial of physical strength, endurance, and skill ; it will be found in the powerful and continuous insistence that physical exercise fs not for the sake of athletic competition, but for the produc- tion of a body meet for all the demands which the serious business of life shall make upon it, and for the creation of the healthy nerve and normal brain, fed by pure cool blood, which furnish noblest pur- poses for the conduct of life with their finest chance. The new anthropology, by insisting upon the sacredness of the body as the instrument of the mind, and upon the mind as the servant of the spirit, and, further, by declaring that the salvation of THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. yy each is essential to that salvation of the total man for which Religion exists, will soonest and surest elevate physical culture to its rightful place in the economy of edu- cation, soonest and surest preserve it from the danger of degenerating into sheer ani- malism, — the possession of a magnificent physique pledged to nothing better than service to physical sensations. Over all this apparently non-religious outbreak of a passionate devotion to the gospel of the body broods the spirit of man's religious faith in himself as intrinsically precious because allied by indestructible bonds to the God from whom he came, with Whom he lives, to Whom he shall one day return. That devotion can never sink utterly down into materialism, however refined and beautiful, so long as Religion, uttering her- self anew in this more spiritual anthro- pology, more and more illuminates the blind play of human physical force, and shows to it the real meaning and purpose of its energy. To regard it as the indubi- table symptom of an increasingly robust materialism, or the mark of a decay of Reli- gion, is flagrantly to misinterpret it ; it is, yS THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. rather, Religion asserting herself in fields on which it has been supposed she had no business, no duties, and no rights. It is the working of an instinct fundamental and unerring. We can misinterpret it, have misinterpreted it; but it is well to re- member that acute saying of Mr. Arnold, " A man's instinct is always truer than his interpretation of it." But the coming years will, I think, witness two significant events : first, the permanent and ample provision for physical culture as part of the educa- tion which the state provides for all her children ; and, second, the frank, glad rec- ognition that this provision is the outcome of an intelligent religious purpose to have all that is best in a man at its best, which is the salvation for which Religion exists. Again, the relation of the new anthro- pology to the use of Sunday must not be ignored. It has been said that New England Puritanism is modern Levitical Judaism, and that the conception of the meaning of Sunday which Puritanism illus- trated was taken unaltered from discredited pre-Christian Jewish sources. The pre- sent use of Sunday is widely regarded as a THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 79 revolt against ancient Sabbatarianism, and equally a revolt against Religion as a force regulating both belief and conduct. It would be far truer to interpret the modern Sunday as a return to what was most char- acteristic in the Levitical doctrine of the Sabbath, and a fulfillment of what is im- plied in the Christian doctrine of Sunday. Levitical legislation was bent on securing a cessation of toil on the Sabbath. It pro- tested against continuous labor, insisted upon the necessity of rest. The Fourth Commandment lec^islates not asfainst re- creation nor amusement, but against toil. It is the only Commandment of the ten which defines with exactness what it en- joins. " Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy." But what was the holiness so rigidly commanded ? Was there not the chance of misconceiving or misinter- preting it } The Commandment, there- fore, was expanded into an explicit defini- tion of what " keeping the Sabbath day holy " really meant. By it there is an ab- solute prohibition laid upon all sorts of work by every sort of people. Sabbath breaking was thus identified with toil on 8o THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. the Sabbath day. When young Nehemlah wished to picture graphically the desecra- tion of his nation's holy day, he cried, " I saw people treading winepresses, binding sheaves, and lading asses. I heard the fish dealers of Tyre crying their wares in the streets and selling to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and the men of Judah." Work, the prosecution of any calling that involved it for one's self or for other people — man- servant or maidservant, even for ox or for ass — was the real breach of the holiness of the Sabbath day. And all the legisla- tion which undertook to express in statutes what was necessary to -safeguard the ele- mental principle, conforms to the purpose of that principle. The scrupulous obser- vance of the Sabbath was to be a sign between God and Israel that Israel might know that, through strict obedience to the Sabbath law, Jehovah " sanctified " them, .that is, kept them whole, safe from the mutilation which continuous toil has ever caused. It is utterly to mistake the mean- ing of that still powerful, still beneficent institution to regard it as an exasperating restriction laid upon the happiness and THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 8 1 freedom of man. The true Fourth Com- mandment has ever been a bulwark against the ignorant, or the sordid, or the ava- ricious spirit which would rob man of his well-earned rest. The Hebrew doctrine of the Sabbath, when it is philosophically and historically appreciated, will be seen to be the elemental truth of which the larger and more joyous freedom of our later day is the expansion, just as the sani- tary precautions, which modern bacterio- logy is everywhere crying up, are the lineal descendants of those ceremonial purifica- tions in which the Books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy abound ; for the correlatives of sterilization, antiseptics, and medical lustrations are bountifully to be found in those old Scriptures, the sanitary wisdom of which is more and more accepted as modern science itself becomes thoroughly enlightened. Our modern Sunday, with its emphasis upon recreation, so far from being a revolt against Sabbatarianism is demonstrably a return to it, — a return led by that expansion of Religion which has taught us to look through custom, tradi- tion, and statute into the heart of the great 82 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. fundamental principle of the need of phy- sical rest, of which many customs, tradi- tions, and statutes are the distorted report. Of the religious institution of the Sabbath there can be no doubt. Of the real purpose of that Sabbath there can be no doubt. And of the true significance of the emanci- pation of our modern Sunday from gloom, depression, and an irrational prohibition of recreation, there ought to be no doubt. It is the product of the new anthropology, which itself is the distinct creation of that expansion of Religion which sees in man a creature too precious to be disfigured by continuous toil, and disbeartened by lack of recreation. Sunday is the great rest day. It is kept sanely — that is kept " holy " — when it joyously and gratefully is used as the clement, periodic suspension of the primary universal law of human life upon this globe, " In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread." With all its stupid, irrational, frivolous, lamentable, and blame- worthy features, exhibited through all the year, it is still a distinct religious gain that our Sunday is not the Sunday of a cen- tury, nay, half a century, ago. For we THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 83 have come at last to perceive that if it is to be a day of rest, it cannot be spent as a day of the repression of everything except that activity which takes the form of pub- lic worship. Doing nothing is not rest, it is indolence. Rest is activity in recreation. We have, therefore, opened the doors of museum and library, that the weary thou- sands may enter in and bathe their tired spirits in the cool fountains of beauty and knowledge. We have deliberately enlarged the number of permitted pleasures because we have intelligently concluded that what- ever ministers to the physical betterment of man is a legitimate ministry to his soul as well, for it is providing him with one more chance to live as God intended he should when He lodged his soul in a body and declared, in the physical law which governs the body and in the spiritual law which directs his spirit, what the life of a man should be. Perhaps a clergyman is peculiarly fitted to observe the effect of Sunday emancipation upon the general religious public habit of the people as that habit is seqi in attachment to organized Religion. Disuse of public worship is, I 84 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. think, more general than it was a quarter of a century ago. Abstention from it is also more respected and expected now than then. Not only does the great body of the people find in a multitude of provisions for their entertainment and recreation an attraction more powerful than that of the Church, but the favored few are accepting Sunday as the natural, as it is the conven- ient, time for retreat to the country, which offers to the reawakened urban mind op- portunities for delight and healthy excite- ment undreamed of a score of years ago. A Sunday in the country as guest or host, a Sunday in the country as pedestrian or wheelman, is now the winsome promise to thousands whose weekday lives are bounded by shop and factory and office, and to hundreds who are under the tyrannous en- gagements of a complex and conventional social life. Public worship suffers, — the regularity of church attendance is broken, becomes fitful, frequently ceases altogether; a yawning gulf of emptiness in many a church, urban, suburban, country, stretches from the middle of June to the middle of September. A period of " masterly inac- THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 85 tivlty " in nearly all forms of enterprising relisfious endeavor ensues. The centri- petal force which, like a magnetic influ- ence, draws thousands to the city in the winter is transformed into the centrifugal force which sends them out again on Sun- days to green fields and the cool fringes of the sea, singing, with altered meaning, " Welcome, sweet day of rest." It will not be claimed that thus far the people have been entirely successful in the use of their new freedom. They use it clumsily, vulgarly, mistakenly, — counteracting the blessings of air and exercise by the curse of drink, excitement, and irrational exer- tion. As yet they are experimenting, and already have paid heavy bills in disordered nerves and exhausted bodies. Superfi- cially viewed, the American Sunday is not pleasant. It is too heated, too boisterous, too exhausting. It lacks that calm, deep content, that easy self-restraint, that skill in seizing what is most refining and stimu- lating, which we rightly associate with symmetrical, full-rounded life. And one can understand how there still survive those who sincerely and reflectingly believe 86 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. that the old Sunday, with its decorous, serious, earnest behavior, its faithful use of the church, and its strenuous endeavor to see in all that is done in this world only a preparation for the next, is preferable to this noisy, churchless, material Sunday which we have come to know so well. But costly excess and misdirected energy are characteristic of emancipation. We are experimenting. Physical recreation, sen- suous amusement, are overlaying that deep sense of the necessity of sensitiveness of conscience and responsiveness to awe, which lives in us all because the conscience is constitutionally a faculty of human na- ture, and awe is native to a child of God. We are experimenting. Disuse of the Church, which stands in the community for morality and compassion, for the creation, maintenance, and direction of those power- ful currents which run through all asso- ciated life to keep it pure and true, seems now, at least, to be unattended by serious loss of moral force in communities and men. But in a near future, men will ask whether there has not resulted a serious deterioration in character from an unre- THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. S7 strained freedom to use Sunday as the most acute impulse may suggest. Such a deterioration is bound to follow. But let it be clearly seen that reformation is not to come by way of the old custom, nor by a curtailment of recreation. It is to come by a serious awakening to the fact — which even now is evident to many a champion of the freer Sunday — that unless along with physical recreation and social plea- sure go ministries to the conscience and the spirit, to reverence for God and belief in Heaven as the justification of earth, physical culture will produce only splendid animals, and social energy degenerate into empty-headed frivolity. The modern Sun- day is imperfect. But its imperfectness is not due to a misconception of the signifi- cance of recreation, but to a miscalculation of the relation of recreation to the invigor- ation of the conscience, and to the educa- tion of that ineradicable though slumber- ing sense of the nearness of God which sets off man from brutedom. That im- perfectness will not be corrected by pro- hibiting recreation, but by restraining its present excess. And that restraint will 88 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. best and surest be improved by leading men, gently and persuasively, into that larger conception of what it is truly to live, which includes the worship of God. The doors of the museum and library will never be closed on Sundays, the fields and the sea will not cease calling weary men and women to come to them for refreshment, — and no man sensitive to the conditions of toil which will forever be the lot of our humanity would wish it, — but the doors of the Church must stand wide open too, that the spirit may find its recreation and refreshment in prayers and praise. For 3^ears to come, it may be, the Church is to suffer loss, but not forever. The great human instinct of worship will draw back into a better instructed, into a more enlight- ened House of God those who can now turn away from it, to find in physical activ- ity and acute sensations what hits the pre- sent mood. To-day's treatment of Sunday is not final. The very fact that what it is to-day, in larger freedom from ancient and venerated restraints, is due to Religion, is ample warrant for believing that Religion is competent to recast Sunday into a day THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 89 in which the culture of the spirit is recog- nized as so vitally an accompaniment of the culture of the body, that the worship of God in the temple will be all of a piece with the education of the mind in museum or library, and the invigoration of the physical organism in the field or on the river. At any rate, we ought to be clear as to this : that if blame for the disappear- ance of the old Sunday of our fathers is to be laid at any door, it is at the door of Religion, the Religion which has taught us the preciousness of the body, soul, and mind of man, the Religion which has stood for Sunday as the great rest day, the Reli- gion which proclaims that rest is not idle- ness, and, finally, the Religion which de- clares that, since our bodies are the temple of the Holy Ghost, no man can with guilt- lessness defile that temple, and whoso doth defile it, him shall God destroy. It is this new anthropology, also, which has set sickness in a new light. When Jesus healed the paralytic at the pool. He dismissed him with the searching warning, " Sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon thee." It is a declaration that disease 90 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. is frequently the outward and visible sign of sin. That is one of the commonplaces of theolog}^ But its common interpreta- tion has been that sickness is a sign of sin only when the disease is casually or visibly connected with a particular act. The ship captain who smoked himself stone blind and reached port only to die, the hardy sot who drank three pints of whiskey at a sitting and found himself paralyzed for life, these preeminently were ill men whose disease visibly proceeded out of their sin. But when the unnoticed, prodigal expenditures of vitality, or the unnoticed, persistent disregard of the laws of the physical organism resulted in lan- guor or decay or disease, men were pitied, not blamed. Indeed, within the memory of living men it was regarded as something to be apologized for if a member of one of the learned professions betrayed athletic strength. Luther, with his robust vigor, might have been cast into the shade by pale Philip Melancthon in one of our par- ishes half a century ago. There are ill- nesses of which men ought to be thor- oughly ashamed, for which they ought not THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 91 to seek a cause in the " mysterious dispen- sation of Providence," and which they ought to have the manliness and honesty to confess are the result of deplorable, despicable, and deliberate wrong -doing. The pride of health and vigor must forever be recognized as justifying shame when health is broken and vigor falls into decay long before age has " darkened the win- dows " and compelled "the keepers of the house to tremble." I knew nothinor more hopeful in the sentiment of young men touching the w^hole question of athletics than their clear perception and their frank declaration that ill health in a young man who starts out with no hereditary or con- stitutional weakness is a disgrace, and not a misfortune. It is a recognition, con- scious or unconscious, that their health is in their own keeping, like their manners and their morals. When physical exercise was made a compulsory part of education at Amherst thirty years ago, ranking in importance with the study of Greek and mathematics, it was, and w^as intended to be, a bold denial of the opinion that a student's health w^as at the mercy of Divine 92 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION, Providence, an assertion of the truth that health is in part a religious achievement. Not to train athletes, but to create health, not to develop the skill which delights in feats, but to secure to vitality that protec- tion which is owed to the body by its possessor, was that experiment in educa- tion made in a preeminently religious col- lege. The result has amply demonstrated its wisdom. And the adoption of similar systems elsewhere has resulted in incal- culable good, not alone in raising the standard of physical vigor, but in creating and spreading the belief that for most young men sickness is 'a disgrace. It is the new anthropology declaring itself in a new field, the gospel of the body and the gospel of Jesus working together to pro- duce the perfect man. " Conviction of sin," upon which evangelicalism laid great stress, so far from disappearing in the so-called materialistic spirit of our day, receives a new definition and a new em. phasis in that expansion of Religion which now includes physical health as an object of its care and prayer. And we shall never appreciate the meaning of all our THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 93 provision for the production and main- tenance of public health until we see in all its least arrangements the utterance of the Christian spirit. I think I have shown that the care of the sick, the application of sanitary science to the conditions of living, the growth of interest in physical exercise, the transfor- mation of Sunday and the estimate put upon the spiritual significance of health and sickness, are the direct result of what I have called the new anthropology. And the new anthropology is not the child of social economy, nor of that vulgar mate- rialism which knows nothing beside the earth with its power to furnish delights and to evolve pains, nor of the reasoned purpose to secure the acutest sensations with least loss of force to repeat them; it is distinctly the work of Religion seeking the salvation of man, and counting that salvation incomplete unless man has all his chances fixedly secure, and all his chances turned into the concrete facts of vitality and health. When one looks back fifty years and contrasts the nature of the effort Religion 94 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. made to save man with the passionate efforts she is making now, he cannot think that RcHgion has decayed ; he must find, rather, in the character and extent of her enterprises for the betterment of the con- ditions under which Hfe must be Hved, in the firm recognition of the physical side of hfe as at least equal to that of the spiritual, and in the declaration that the two belong to each other, the indubitable proof that Religion is more live, more in earnest, more enlightened, more sagacious, and, finally, more fruitful, than it has ever been. Organized Religion but imper- fectly records the achievements of Religion itself. It never has presented — possibly never may present — the perfect picture of man steadily rising in the scale of worth. In France, for example, where renuncia- tion and devotion are thoroughly organ- ized, it is possible to estimate the achieve- ments of Religion by taking the statistics of institutional enterprise. Goodness in France is largely vicarious, if we mean by goodness the maintenance of good works by organized Religion. The Sister of Charity is in evidence everywhere, and the THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 95 Church absorbs into itself pretty much all of religious activity there is, sending it out again impressed with the seal of ecclesias- ticism. But in America Religion is every- where — almost as much of it outside as inside the churches — independent of visi- ble means of spiritual support, yet always eager to do what Religion lives to accom- plish. And in the last quarter of a century it has perhaps in nothing so powerfully and beneficently declared its presence as in the widespread eagerness it has shown to create right physical conditions of liv- ing, and in the evident fact that this eager- ness is born of a profounder belief in the preciousness of man. One hundred and fifty years ago, a New England Puritan officer in the Colonial army set down in his diary an account of an incident in the French and Indian wars: "Killed the Chief indian, a Saga- more from the Island of St. Johns, which are known by the name Mickmack. He lived about five hours after he was shott, and behaved as bold as any man could till he died, but wanted Rum and Sider which we gave him till he died. He was shott 96 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. through the bodey just below his ribs. He measured six feet two inches, and very large boned, but very poor." Is this the description of man or brute ? Yet how agreeable it is to the stern anthropology of that elder day. In Hindoo catechisms we read, " What is cruel } The heart of a viper. What is more cruel than that? The heart of a woman. What is the chief gate to hell ? A woman. What are fetters to men? Women. What is that which cannot be trusted? Women. What poison is that which appears like nectar ? Women. Woman is a great whirlpool of suspicion, a dwelling-place of vices, full of deceits, a hindrance in the w^ay of heaven, the gate of hell ! " That is the Hindoo anthro- pology. The Hindoo treatment of women and widows, of which America has heard so painfully in recent years, is the natural outcome of that anthropology. Place Ramabai's description of the condition of her sisters by the side of what we know of widowhood as honored by Religion, place the Puritan's description of the dying In- dian by the side of Bishop Whipple's story THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. 97 of his life among the red men of Minne- sota, or Herbert Welsh's reports to gov- ernment, and then ask whether the new anthropology measures a Religion con- tracting or expanding, decaying or waxing strong, among the children of men. The question. What is man? can be adequately answered only in terms of Religion. III. RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. Religion makes more stir in the world as a theology and as an ecclesiasticism than as a visible moral force, working through theology and ecclesiasticism, — makes more stir, attracts more public at- tention, and writes a more dramatic, not to say theatric history. The councils, the controversies, the heresies and schisms, the promulgation of edicts, confessions, catechisms, and articles, — these make up so large a portion of the great story of organized Religion that it is not strange that we should think of these as the chief indications, not only of her existence, but of her purpose and influence. When Pro- fessor Draper wrote his interesting and vivacious book on the " Conflict of Reli- gion and Science," Religion, to his think- ing, was altogether an ecclesiasticism, and he consequently found no difliculty in RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 99 abundantly illustrating the evil effect of Religion upon the enterprises of science. But the quick oblivion into which that book, and scores like it, fell is grateful evidence that to the reflection" of the peo- ple Religion is vastly more than its theo- logy and ecclesiasticism. When a great clergyman said, some years ago, " I have written about six hundred sermons, and I thank God none of them deals with the reconciliation of Religion and science," there were speedily found those who criti- cised him for a failure to do his duty at a time when Religion and science were in sore need of reconciliation in the interest of them both. But clearer and wiser minds saw in that statement the declara- tion that Religion and science have never needed any reconciliation and never will, because each of them is in search of truth, and that just in proportion as each of them finds her they will be in agreement. ReliQ:ion can make mistakes, science can err ; and when the mistakes of the one and the errors of the other meet together and clash, it is not a meeting of Religion and science, but of untruths or half truths. 100 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. That this is true is amply shown by the changed attitudes toward each other of organized Rehgion and that which we loosely call science, in the last twenty years. Organized Religion has markedly receded from many a position of open and sometimes bitter opposition to the dis- coveries and theories of men of science. But that recession has been an intelligent one, it has not been sentimental. Organ- ized Religion has been slow to accept the results of experiment and the conclusions drawn from them, but its leisurely action is due to a wholesome caution. It has had the wit to perceive that not every proclaimed discovery of truth is real, not every inference is sound. It has for the most part patiently awaited the verifica- tion of the many startling announcements of critical facts, frequently acknowledged its mistakes, and hastened to incorporate into its interpretation of its doctrines the new truth finally established. Nor can it be denied that it has learned the lesson of patient, expectant silence. It no longer breaks forth into violent denunciation of the utterances of scholars and men of RELIGION AND RIGHTEatrSNES!S. 10 1 science. It has at last perceived that what at first sight wears the look of enmity, on closer inspection may prove friend and ally. It can afford to wait in silent hope, confident that its fundamental doctrines will receive no harm from anything which the labor of man discovers in any field of investigation. The frequently urged claim that this altered habit of organized Reli- gion is the child of a less confident belief in her long cherished truths, is founded upon nothing more substantial than a mis- interpretation of her disciplined convic- tion that all truth is one. Her hold upon her peculiar truth is not slackened ; she has simply opened her doors, with a bolder confidence, to receive what comes to her claiming to be truth, ready to listen im- partially, yet ever cautiously and carefully, to what the new truth can say for itself. This, too, is an expansion of Religion, not in the direction of dogma, but of a more spiritual confidence in the impregnable nature of the fundamental truth of which Religion is the expression. The hypothesis of evolution may or may not prove true, but the attitude of 102 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. organized Religion towards it to-day, in contrast with the frightened, panicky con- demnation both of it and those who urged it, a quarter of a century ago, is grateful evidence that Religion has grown calm, has regained confidence in herself as in no danger from the new interpretation of herself which evolutionary theories may require, or have already effected. But, on the other hand, the spirit and temper of science have changed more radi- cally, even, than those of organized Reli- gion. For Religion has acquired a new interest, and consequently a new impor- tance, in the thinking of men of science. It is not too much to say that Religion is frankly recognized as the formulation of a force just as real and just as persistent as that of which gravitation is the scientific name. Man is as much a part of the uni- verse as a star. If it is worth while to determine the nature of the star's sub- stance by the spectrum analysis, and thence to declare its similarity to the material of which our earth is composed, it is equally worth while to determine the nature of the spiritual forces which declare what man RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 103 has done and is doing, what he has been and what he is likely at last to be. The high doctrine of to-day is that the world was made for man, not man for the world. Consequently what man is, is seen to be of more importance than anything belong- ing to the world in which he lives. He has many marks of identification : he is a poet, musician, artist, politician, adven- turer, inventor ; he is a thinker, statesman, soldier, by turns ; but he is always and everywhere religious. He ceases to be enterprising now and then along all lines save that of Religion. It is the recogni- tion of this fact, more than of any other, which explains the otherwise puzzling fea- ture of our latest scientific activity, — its growing interest in Religion while push- ing its investigations into the phenomena of the material world with unabated vigor, with undiminished brilliancy of result. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to affirm that Religion, as distinguished from theo- logy and ecclesiasticism, is as much an object of serious and intelligent interest to men of science as to men of Religion. Its persistence, its power of revival, its skill 104 T^HE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. in adapting itself to altered conditions of thought, its sturdy appearances as the great moral force of humanity in crises when morality is absolutely essential to the preservation of public order and the main- tenance of public justice, its perpetual demonstration of itself as the visible sup- ply of all those motives which influence men to stand by righteousness, personal and national, the proved inability of hu- manity to supplant it by any system which does not root itself in the divine, — all this, and much more, has made Religion of first importance to the scientific spirit of our day. Secondary causes are now rec- ognized as secondary causes, as much in need of explanation themselves as that which they explain. After their long mis- understanding of one another, and conse- quently their bitter hostility to each other, Religion and science are now sitting down as friends, ready to learn what each has to teach, and convinced that the outcome of their conference will be a compact to help one another to the uttermost. Now, one of the points which is clearer to-day than ever, because of this better un- RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 105 derstanding which I have tried to describe, is this : that Religion and science equally perceive that the outcome of faith and knowledo^e should be righteousness. Reli- gion says: "Faith, unless it translate itself into righteousness, is dead ; " and science declares " that knowledge, if it cannot in- corporate itself in righteousness, is no true contribution to the welfare of mankind." And Religion, having thus compelled science to go a mile, is now endeavoring to compel her to go twain, and to see in Religion the power that is forever using fresh knowledge to create more righteous- ness. But, first of all. Religion had to be expanded into a larger conception of what righteousness for man really involved. We tried to trace that expansion in the last lecture, which dealt with the new anthro- pology. You will perhaps recall that when the preciousness and value of a human life became a reason for furnishing a ministry to all of man that can be ministered to, Religion seized upon all the knowledge of whatever sort science had obtained and used it as material for the construction of human welfare. Religion, in other words, I06 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. enlarged itself to receive the help which science furnished in the form of know- ledge. And now science is enlarging itself to receive from Religion the help which Religion furnishes in the form of motives derived from a divine source. I do not assert that as yet there is the perfect un- derstanding which conditions the perfect success, but I do assert that the movement of both science and Religion is distinctly in the direction of a compact whereby each shall gladly furnish the other with what shall produce the individual and social righteousness which is now seen to be the inexorable condition of human progress. The first result of this better under- standing of one another and of this expan- sion of the field of each, is the clear recog- nition that righteousness has an economic value. But that economic value was un- derrated when Religion conceived herself as concerned mainly with man's correct understanding of her theological doctrines, with his spiritual preparation for life in the world to come, together with his satis- factory ecclesiastical behavior in this. The incorporation of the economic value of RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. lO/ righteousness into the estimate put upon its spiritual value is one of the most marked features of our time. But it is indisputably the outcome of an expanded Religion. We accept it as a religious achievement, not as an indication of ma- terialistic conversion. That is to say, thanks to Religion, which has for its prime endeavor the production of righteousness, an economic value is set upon godliness. It is worth as much as the Fire Depart- ment, the Public School system, the Pohce, or Insurance, in the total life of the peo- ple. It is no longer regarded as some- thing from which we derive spiritual bless- ing alone, the fullness and value of which shall be disclosed only when we enter the New Jerusalem ; but out of it, here and now, flow material blessings to the community and the individual. They who administer the government, in its many branches, are inexorably dependent for a successful administration upon the amount and quality of righteousness active in the community. And they who frame laws for the government to execute are com- pelled to reckon with the spiritual vitality I08 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. of those for whom the laws are enacted. A thoroughly wise statute frequently be- comes inoperative because there is not enough concrete righteousness in the peo- ple to bear it; and on the other hand, a bad statute becomes void if the public conscience and the public moral habit resist it, on the score of its inadequacy or injustice. All government is, finally, the expression of the spiritual will of the governed. The people's whim, frenzy, or selfishness, and the people's will and moral quality, are alike, but not equally, powerful in shaping legislation and in enforcing law. Righteousness, therefore, so far from being a merely personal quality, limited in its consequences to the contracted circle in which the individual moves, is that great pervasive element in the total life of the people from which spring, and in which thrive, all our public virtues and our ma- terial prosperity as well. It is not merely the light which lightens the mechanic's bench or the pages of the student's book, it is the sunlight which floods the city and conditions the efficiency, the safety, the prosperity, of all its myriad men. To RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 109 think of righteousness as no more than a beautiful and useful quality of those who put themselves under the guidance of God that they may gain and keep it, the reward of which is jealously reserved in heaven, is to miss its true glory, and no less its im- mediate and solid worth. One of the most alarming and discour- aging features of modern municipal admin- istration is its enormous cost. The crimi- nals of any great city lay upon it a burden of expense equal to that of maintaining the public education of all the children in its schools, if all the people who are in its hospitals, asylums, and workhouses, as the direct or indirect result of their wrong- doing, are added to the number confined in its jails. The statistics which the city publishes for the information of her citi- zens are appalling, if we turn only to those pages which record the cost of detecting, trying, and punishing criminals, the cost of maintaining those whose vices have landed them in disease, poverty, and helplessness, the cost of repairing the damages caused by criminal incompetence, jobbery, and waste. It all makes a huge item in the no THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION yearly budget, and we have heretofore regarded that item as a yearly necessity, because somehow we had regarded the unrighteousness which created the charges for which the item provides, as an inevita- ble feature of the city's life. We reasoned about it in this way, if we reasoned about it at all : " The provision for taking muni- cipal notice of committed crime, and for caring for the consequences of that crime, must be cheerfully, amply made, because the government is powerless to quench the fountains whence perpetually flow the evil influences which make the crimes and criminals that disturb our peace and cost us dear, so much as possible. The gov- ernment has power to appropriate money to improve the sanitary condition of the city jail ; it has no power to bestow a penny upon the Boys' Club which seeks, and seeks successfully, to train boys in those qualities which keep them out of jail. The government can create the park through which may roam all through summer-time her troops of children and her hard-worked men ; it cannot erect a single decent tenement house in her most pestiferous RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. Ill quarter, in which men, women, and chil- dren may enjoy the simplest conditions of the wholesome physical life which so powerfully affects all moral life. The city is compelled to say, ' If you steal and cheat, if you murder or burn, if you are drunk or disorderly, I will put you in my jail and feed you there at the public expense ; if you ruin your health by your vices, if you sink down into pauperism and trampdom by your improvidence and evil living, I will receive you into my hospitals, giving you the best medical treatment, or into my workhouses, clothing and feeding you at the public expense ; but I cannot spend money in any large or direct way to set up the machinery of righteousness to keep you back from the criminal spirit, and to foster in you the love of struggle, the hab- its of right living, and the principles of thrift. And every year I must take from the pockets of the industrious, sober, thrifty, and well-behaved, a sum of money large enough to defray the enormous cost of your wickedness, shiftlessness, and self- inflicted disease.' That is what the poor perplexed city is compelled to say as she 112 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION stands to-day sadly looking at the ma- chinery for producing wickedness and dis- ease and pauperism which revolves in the midst of her ceaselessly every day. So far as she is a government; that is the only utterance she can make, until government is something other than we have thus far agreed that it shall be." But could there be a stronger argument made in behalf of righteousness than is presented by even a superficial study of the expenditures of our municipalities 1 * Could there be a severer arraignment of wickedness framed than is already at hand in these amazing figures which tell us how mucli unrighteousness costs us every year t Religion to-day is declaring that she has a right to ask the people to reflect upon the disastrous con- sequences to political, industrial, commer- cial, and social welfare, of the wickedness which heretofore she has mourned over mainly because it was disobedience to God and the spiritual ruin of souls. She has found a new weapon for use in her warfare against sin, and a new argument in her debate with those who have re- garded her as ministering to a wish for no- RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 113 thing nearer or surer than a far-off heaven. Unrighteousness is waste, - — waste of men, w^aste of material, waste of energy, waste of the pubhc trust. Unrighteousness is a spendthrift, scattering the earnings of heaUh, of industry, of enterprise, and self- denial. It is like a mob of idle loafers insolently living upon labor of the toiler. This has always been true in fact, but the relation of wickedness to municipal expense has been set forth vividly only in modern times, and Religion is the first to cry aloud in the ears of men who have underrated her, that righteousness is as necessary to the welfare of the city as its aqueducts and sewers, its schools and parks, its firemen and judges. She is telling the people, as never before, that it is idle to expand commerce and foster trade, idle to enlarge the city's borders and to increase its wealth, unless there be growing, with the city's growth, a deep, strong, intelligent hold upon that right- eousness of conduct and of life, which God, without consulting us, has made the inflexible condition of prosperity. Gov- ernment as government has been cease- 114 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. lessly at work upon statutes, and methods of stringently enforcing them ; has, with marvelous ingenuity and infinite patience, toiled on for the welfare of the people, hoping with magnificent courage that the burdens resting on all human enterprise might be lightened ; and yet every year wickedness rolls up its enormous cost, paid out of the earnings of the upright. If the expenditures caused by unrighteousness for half a century could be capitalized, the income would maintain the public school system for all time to come. If the annual cost of crime could be devoted to the adornment of the city, every year w^ould see added to its beauty an object, perma- nent and refining, which in a score of years would make the city almost fulfill our dreams of the splendor of the City of God. Religion, alive to this economic truth, is just beginning to make herself felt in quar- ters in which, heretofore, she has been re- garded as too unworldly to have the right to speak. It is becoming clear that the ma- terial welfare of the city is as truly in the custody of Religion as in that of industry and trade, and Religion has once more RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 115 found herself entrusted with a message. If in these last years we have seen, as thank God we have, critical revolutions in the conduct of the municipal business of more than one great city, — if waste and cost have so thoroughly exasperated the people that they have turned upon wicked doers and cast them out, we surely have been careless observers if we have not seen that it was Religion in its simplest and most august form — the form of righteousness — which created the passion needed to rouse the people to attempt their emancipation from the tyranny of the wickedness which was not only fouling all the avenues of public life, but also draining the resources of the people to pay the bills of sin. It has not been theology nor ecclesiasticism which have won recent battles for muni- cipal reform, — it has not been the demon- strated extravagance or corruption of offi- cial life which have roused the people's indignation, nor the sense of the huge cost of meeting the charges of wicked- ness ; it has been Religion, seizing the people's angry discontent with the econo- mic burdens unrighteousness has laid upon Il6 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. them, which has lashed the public co7t' science, until it rose up in wrath and did the work which nothing but the public con- science can ever do. Remember that the economic cost of crime has always been a fact; remember too that it has been urged again and again in deaf ears, if you would perceive that it was Religion, by its appeal to the instinct of righteousness, which turned economic cost into an irresistible argument for a moral reformation. A city without a theology may live a prosperous life, but a city without righteousness is a ship without a sail, an engine without steam. The distinct contribution Religion has made in recent times to political sci- ence is the political truth that you cannot build up a society or a state ordered, free, prosperous, and safe, unless you build it upon righteousness, and that righteous- ness, to be strong, continuous, inflexible, indestructible, must be the product of a profound belief in God. Atheism, what- ever else may be said of it, is uneconomic, because it fails to create the righteousness upon which economic prosperity solidly and forever rests. You can out-argue it RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 117 speculatively, and it will return. You can make it a crime punishable by law, and it will survive. You can make it an eccen- tricity, indicative of an unphilosophical esti- mate of the world and of man, and it will persist. But indict it as hostile to the proved best interests of men who must live their lives on this earth, because it is hostile to that righteousness without which life is not worth the pains required to live it, and atheism shrivels into the cold, un- happy thing it is and ever must be. The argument which all men understand is that which can be stated in concrete terms. Exactly that is what Religion is doing to- day. She has done her best to show the enormous cost of sin, has set before our eyes with unprecedented vividness the picture of society struggling to provide for all her members the chances each has the right to expect, battling with all adverse conditions that she may gather sustenance for all her sons, — yet perpetually checked by the per- petual resistance offered by her criminals, loafers, and the prematurely exhausted, — and then has cried to men, " Your noblest endeavors, your wisest laws, your cleverest Il8 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. contrivances, are all in vain without the righteousness which lives from God to man." I foresee that insistence upon the eco- nomic value of righteousness runs the risk of being regarded as rank utilitarianism, or as an exalted form of political philoso- phy. It might be urged, " You are not playing fair, you are not consistent with even your own dangerously broad defini- tion of ReliGfion, — sensitiveness and re- sponsiveness to the Divine, — you are only urging what would be urged by the most thorough-going materialist, you are appeal- ing to a sordid pecuniary consideration, and yet you claim that it is Religion which speaks." But the answer to that is simply this, that when the economic value of righteousness is insisted upon, there is always beating warm beneath it the con- viction that righteousness is the result of a personal and conscious relation to God. If Religion can convince us that godliness is great gain in tJiis world, if it can rouse in us the acute belief that, in this world, we arc suffering huge losses from the pre- valence of wickedness, then it has put itself RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 119 in better position to assert with power that righteousness is possible, not to say rational, only as we both believe that the moral nature of God is at the foundation of the moral order of the world, and that only a moral God can produce moral men. Righteousness, Religion is now dogmati- cally teaching, becomes concrete and lasting by faith in a Divine source for it, not by any clearest demonstration of its necessity and value. Religion frankly acknowledges that it is now emphasizing the imperative necessity of righteousness to the material welfare of society for no other reason than this : to set men seriously thinking how righteousness is produced. It is harnessing the lower motive to the service of the higher. It is with renewed vigor and im- mensely increased confidence bringing the economic argument to bear upon society's thinking for the sake of getting a more attentive, more sympathetic hearing, for the strictly spiritual argument. It does not for one moment advocate righteous- ness solely because righteousness is mate- rially profitable to the community. Yet, because that advocacy is legitimate, it de- I20 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. clares we ought to make the most of it, to be moved and energized by it, and finally add it to that supreme motive by which every religious man should be swayed, — the motive that unrighteousness should be displaced by righteousness because that is the will of God, It always comes back to that. Religion has been declaring to society with almost startling passion, " You must possess integrity, self-mastery, purity; these are the only qualities that can save you ; all your successes, your wealth, your knowledge, your power, your countless contrivances for human comfort, and your multiplied chances for expansion, are really uncovering your exigent need of moral strength. The history of your unparal- leled material and intellectual progress is matched by the dark history of your moral failures. And you have at last begun to perceive it. You know that the uneasiness which pervades the huge bulk of your complex organism is a moral un- easiness. You are afraid. You distrust yourself. You are wondering how long you can go on with all this flagrant wick- edness in the midst of you, with all this RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 121 suspected powerlessness to make the pos- session of material riches safe. You are either vainly trying to blink the facts, or idly hoping that some scheme may emerge from this chaos of discussion and experi- ment which shall, of itself, produce the conditions which you are clever enough to perceive are inexorably demanded if peace and security are to be your lasting portion. I join my voice to yours when you cry that the sole safeguard of successful society is the prevalence, not simply of sound political or economic principles, but of that moral intensity and ethical virility which are to the community what founda- tions are to the building that rests its vast weight upon them. I reinforce your in- dictment of wickedness of every sort as the black, ugly portent in the social sky over our heads. But more than that, I affirm, with a confidence reinforced by all past history and reinvigorated by the events of to-day, that the righteousness re- quired to give each of us security is to be found in a deeper dependence upon God. I may have relaxed the rigor of my theo- logy, I may have given up the attempt 122 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. to inflict penalties, I may be entreating instead of commanding and threatening as in the da3'S of old ; but I insist, with an imperiousness almost novel, that out of me received, used, magnified, and sup- ported, can alone come the power that cre- ates the integrity, justice, and purity you so sorely need." So speaks Religion to society. It is the utterance of old truth, but the tone of that utterance is so fresh, so strong, so confident, that it is almost as if a Religion of righteousness were new given. And society is listening; she is beginning to heed these voices proceeding from quarters whence she has for so long heard only contentions about dogmas and politics. Original sin is pushed aside by interest in contemporary sin. Baptismal regeneration is thrust one side by a pas- sion to secure goodness in all men whether baptized or not. Religion has her eye upon concrete society, and is anxious, with a divine solicitude, that the social organ- ism shall be penetrated with a thorough- going dependence upon God, because only so shall be arrested the vast economic waste which is taxing society's resources RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 123 beyond her permanent ability to pay. This discovered genius for enforcing the value of godliness to human society and government is one of the most character- istic marks of the expansion of Religion, and is destined soon to become the bond of a new union between Religion and the world. For it is a frank declaration that, after all, their interests are one. It is a revelation, if you like, that they belong to one another, and that even the material welfare of organized society is bound up with the life of Religion, and the concern of the citizen is identical with the concern of the saint. We ought to be prepared to see this new attitude of Religion increasingly strengthened in the immediate future, be- cause Religion is sure to draw to herself, when she speaks as we have just been making her speak, all those who felt little interest in her when she seemed concerned only with the life that is to come and bent only on getting men through this world in any sort of fashion, because the other world is the only one of any impor- tance. So long as the New Jerusalem was 124 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION accounted the city for which we were to wait and for citizenship in which we were to prepare, the glowing splendor of which ought to reconcile us to a patient, unenterprising toleration of the city of Boston, it was idle to expect men whose heart was in the activities of this earth to care very much for what Religion con- cerned herself with. Whether or not a man had been baptized could not be con- cluded by anything he did as an official of the town. His view of inspiration and his eschatology could not be learned by watch- ing him in the market. If he took bribes, his baptism was the symbol of a super- stition. If his word was rightly distrusted, men cared little for his theological opin- ions or his ecclesiastical attachments. His unrighteousness was entailing economic loss to society, and Religion seemed more anxious about his theology and ecclesias- ticism than about his character. Rightly, therefore, society concluded that Religion was of little value, spite of its promises of heaven and its threats of hell, because society perceived that unrighteous men would not find heaven to their taste were RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 125 they safely landed in it ; and it wondered with a legitimate wonder how correct opin- ions united with bad character could pro- duce any other results in heaven than they are producing on earth, namely, loss, mis- ery, and waste. But now that Religion ac- counts Boston as of equal importance with the New Jerusalem, because it takes, al- most literally, the vision of St. John, who saw the " New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven " to occupy this earth, and be- cause it resents with the passion of a bur- dened taxpayer the presence of costly wickedness and would banish it, not simply as wickedness, but as indefensible cost, Religion has made itself attractive — at- tractive by its usefulness to the social life that now is. The old question whether Religion should have anything to do with politics ceases to be a question, for politics is Religion and Religion politics, by virtue of the identity of their ideal struggle to produce political righteousness and right- eous politics. Religion has enlarged her territory and made room for those earnest spirits upon whose hearts rests heavy the burden of the world's costly sin. 126 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. But some men will ask, " Has organ- ized Religion eagerly and sympathetically accepted this new attitude of real Reli- gion ? " It has not. It is still too eagerly absorbed in quesions of dogma and polity to manifest to society that passion for righteousness of which I have spoken so much, still too unconscious of its real iden- tity with the world against whose attitude toward it it fights, and which resents its description of itself as a misdescription of what a true Church should be. And yet the signs of the coming revival of organ- ized Religion to meet the new needs of a new day are neither few nor feeble. Here and there are churches which have awak- ened to the fact that their only chance of life, their only warrant for hoping that they can gain the ear and hold the love of the multitudes, is in their more frank and hearty identification of themselves with the real life of the people, tormented by wickedness and impoverished by costly crime. And when all organized Religion shall have courageously thrown itself into the struggle against unrighteousness, then we shall hear the Church crying, " Unto RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 127 you, O men, I call; give me your encour- agement and cheer, if you cannot give me your belief; give me your strong, intelli- gent, virile help in my effort to produce the righteousness which the poor, stum- bling world so sorely needs, and out of your help, so given, must one day come a strong and reasonable belief; for it is abstention from the effort to make society righteous, here and now, which makes belief in a Redeemer and a world to come so hard." But not only is Religion insisting upon the necessity of righteousness to the eco- nomic welfare of society, she is re-defining righteousness. It needed re-definition. Righteousness is, as we might phrase it, conformity to what is right, that is, to what is good. This is perfectly simple and thoroughly clear. One need only know what is right, or good, in order to determine whether or not a man is right- eous, whether or not a society possesses righteousness. But to know what is right or good is not the simple affair it pro- mises at the start to be. The determina- tion of right is not the sole work of the 128 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. intellect and the conscience. The intel- lect may be weak and the conscience dark, and this weakness and this darkness may be the result of forces working uncon- sciously in the total nature. Consequently, we find that even men seriously in earnest for righteousness may blunder, and substi- tute for real righteousness conventional righteousness. The history of Religion abundantly declares how frequently this happens. The Old Testament is very largely the record of a people's struggle to keep the real righteousness, which is salva- tion, from degenerating into that counter- feit of it presented by express statutes which could be scrupulously kept while the righteousness they were intended to secure was successfully evaded. Selfishness of whatever sort can always play havoc with statutes and yet manage to preserve a fairly good conscience. That was the be- settino- sin of Israel. The nation had a genius for righteousness, never ceased ex- tolling it, declared righteousness was peace and joy, taught their children that only the righteous should be blessed and that the wicked should not live out half his days. RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 129 The Old Testament is simply unintelligi- ble without the word righteousness to in- terpret it. It plays as conspicuous a part in the history, poetry, and prophecy as does Jehovah himself. It is canvas and pigment both, with emotion as color. No one can take up the Old Testament to- day, and read it as the record of a nation's religious struggle, and fail to be impressed by Israel's continuous, insistent, and con- sistent belief that salvation is the outcome of righteousness. The one hundred and nineteenth psalm is a marvelous achieve- ment in poetry, which can sing the praises of law, statute, commandments, testimo- nies, precepts, and judgments, through a hundred seventy and six perfected lines, with no impression of monotonous repeti- tion ; but it is more than matched by the whole body of the Hebrew Scriptures, which begin and end with the exultant cry, " Thou hast loved righteousness and hated iniquity, therefore God hath anointed thee with the oil of joy above thy fellows." And yet, " Poor Israel ! Poor ancient peo- ple ! It was revealed to thee that right- eousness is salvation : the question what I30 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. righteousness is was thy stumbling-stone. Seer of the vision of peace that yet could not see the things which belong unto thy peace ! " — could not see that the conven- tional righteousness of statutes and cere- monies scrupulously kept was not the right- eousness which exalteth and saveth the nation and the man. The ruin of Israel was not wrought by her failure to perceive the necessity of righteousness, but by her failure to understand exactly what it was, — justice, mercy, and truth ; by her falling before that world-old, fierce, subtle, satanic temptation to cloud her perfect vision for the sake of temporary gain. There grew up that masterly system by the opera- tion of which injustice was made to look like justice, cruelty sheltered itself behind law, and blindness became vision. But there is nothing peculiarly Jewish in that system, except its form, and its form is determined altogether by local custom and national chances. Christianity started out with the clearest possible perception of the fatal error in Jewish righteousness. Jesus laid his finger upon the heart of Israel and said, " The disease is there ; you RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 131 are trying to create righteousness by ma- chinery, the machinery of statute. Good- ness Cometh not by way of the under- standing, it Cometh by way of the heart, it is an inward creation. Not the man who understands, but the man who does, possesses the secret of the Lord." No- thing could be more satisfactory than was Christianity at the beginning, in laying bare what righteousness is and how it could be obtained. It boldly declared in the face of venerable tradition and invet- erate custom that statutes, ceremonies, and observances have nothing to do with it. As St. John explicitly, and with refresh- ing candor, said, " He that doeth right- eousness is righteous." No one else can be. And what, at the start, distinguished the early Christians from the Jews was not theological opinion or ecclesiastical polity, for it required nigh a hundred years to complete the doctrinal separation of the new faith from the old, so that everybody could appreciate it; it was a fundamental difference between the two conceptions of the origin, and the nature of righteous- ness. Jesus, and the Apostles after Him, 132 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. asked men to divest goodness of its set- tinsf, to banish from their minds the idea that any part of outwardness of conduct had anything to do with inwardness of life. They were not to expect righteous- ness of hfe to grow out of righteousness of conduct, but conduct to grow out of life. The whole stress of early Christian teach- ing, and the great glory of early Chris- tian life, are right there : the fundamental truth that righteousness is the expression of a pure heart and a trained, disciplined, energized will, joyfully placed at the ser- vice of the pure heart, — the whole man intent on securing the favor, not of men, but of God. The essential inwardness of righteousness is the commanding feature of the earliest Christianity. It seems im- possible that Christians should ever repeat the blunder of the Jews, when we recall how plain Jesus made the path which avoids that blunder. But w^e have re- peated it, and are only just now discov- ering how great it is and how costly it has been. Let me try to make this plain. One of the evil results of an otherwise beneficent evangelicalism pushed too far RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 133 — or, rather, too heavily emphasized, — is its doctrine of justification by faith, in- terpreted (as it was inevitable it would be interpreted when accepted undiscriminat- ingly by ordinary people) as meaning that it is far more important that a particular doctrine should be believed and acted upon than that conduct should square with eter- nal right. No one has ever frankly taught, nor ever will, that conduct is of no impor- tance. On the contrary, evangelicalism urged that the man justified by faith in Jesus Christ should manifest as a result the fruits of the spirit : love, joy, long- suffering, meekness, temperance. But the special emphasis was upon the conscious- ness of justification ; that was the critical affair; all else was important, but secon- dary. Consequently, salvation was inter- preted as the conscious possession of par- don of sin^ not sins simply ; and as the conviction that this pardon would stay by throughout the longest life, warranting its hope of entrance into heaven. " Once saved, forever saved," became a postulate of evangelicalism. When evangelicalism ceased to be a visible, organized, powerful 134 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION body, residing In many of the denomina- tions and welcomed as the highest expres- sion of Christian faith, it did not cease to be an influence. It colored the ideas of four fifths of all our religious bodies, even after they ceased to look to It as authorita- tive and fruitful. Consequently, the ten- dency to substitute doctrinal correctness on the one hand, and demonstrative emo- tion on the other (and, between them, lib- eralism as well), for inward righteousness, has characterized Religion for nigh a cen- tury. To be sure, that tendency appeared very early in the history of Christianity, and was carrying almost everything before it when Christianity and the Empire joined hands; but it never, perhaps, was so fla- grant as within the memory of living men. More than half the dreadful scandals which have disgraced and harmed organized Re- ligion in the last fifty years can be traced back to this vicious, irrational, and irreli- gious tendency to make doctrinal correct- ness, demonstrative emotion, and liberal- ism, do duty for that " stern daughter of the voice of God " which insists that integrity of life is the only legitimate ground for RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 135 believing that a man is justified before his God. The difficulty is not in the doctrine, but with the use — or, rather, the misuse — of the doctrine which is held; and once more the traditions of men make void the commandments of God. The Hmitations wisely placed upon this Lectureship expli- citly forbid the illustration of this evil tendency in current Religion about us, but that man of us who has not indignantly resented or sadly owned the disastrous working of this tendency is dull and stupid, or, what is worse, dishonest. It assumes as many forms as there are organ- izations to shape it to their ends. But it is, and ever has been, that worst of all foes, the foe that intrenches itself, unsus- pected, within the household walls. Now Religion, as I said, has begun to discover her blunder or her sin — call it which you will — and to set herself once more in her rightful place as the teacher of doctrine for the sake of righteousness. Her great announcement is no longer the absolute necessity either of a definite dogma or of a particular experience ; it is rather, " Let every one that nameth the name of Christ 136 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION depart from iniquity. Abhor that which is evil, cleave to that which is good." No- thing can take the place of that real right- eousness which is inward personal purity ; not thorough adhesion to any definitive dogma, not the mystical spell of a demon- strative spiritual experience, not a liberal mind. For, however true the dogma, pre- cious the experience, and beautiful the tolerance, and however powerful, in coop- eration with a consenting will, to develop purity, integrity, and truthfulness, they are not the equivalents of these virtues. The disasters and losses which have ever over- taken Religion when she has forgotten the imperative of Jesus, " Seek ^^ first the Kingdom of God and the righteousness of it," are as natural as the shipwreck of the vessel which bends new sails on rotten masts and spars. Insistence upon real righteousness is now everywhere the char- acter mark of livins: Reliofion. The new fields on which Religion is to-day culti- vating righteousness, the new conditions which she is attempting to create by an application of it to enterprises with which it was once thought to have nothing to do, RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 13; we shall speak of In another lecture ; but to-night I wish to make clear, as a needed preparation for what is to follow, that Reli- gion has fairly been born again in her fresh consecration of herself, even at the sacrifice of some things she has long held dear, to the cause of producing a type of goodness which will stand the fierce tests applied to it by the mordant temper of our day. But, it may be urged, has not this new attitude of Religion towards actual life been purchased at the cost of paring down her cardinal truths ? Has she not been compelled to throw aside much which has so long been Identified with her very sub- stance as to appear to be essential to her very existence as Religion, as distinguished from morality ? Have you not unwittingly explained the " theological thaw " of which we have heard and seen so much in the last quarter of a century ? Have you not lost from Religion what you have gained for righteousness ? Are you not pleading for an ethical school in place of organized Religion ? And what room have you left for God ? These are indeed fair and they 138 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. are familiar questions. But an adequate reply is not difficult. Religion has cast aside nothing that is peculiarly hers, no- thing that is essential to her integrity. The old elemental beliefs, say what men will, are as resolutely held as ever, though their interpretation changes as often as religious experience deepens and reveals a new thought of God. Divine pardon is as eagerly besought to-night by some sin- ner overtaken, not alone by the material consequence of his sin, but by the acute consciousness that he can no longer be- lieve the love of God, as it was in the days of Wesley ; but what that' pardon means, what it involves, and what it may accom^- plish, look very strange beside what was thought of it a hundred and fifty years ago. The death of the Redeemer as the guarantee that the obstacles to pardon are made by human hands, and that besides these there are none in heaven or hell, is as firmly rooted in current Religion as it has ever been, though we no longer hear of contrived plans of salvation and very little of the atonement. The real expla- nation of the present passion of Religion RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 139 for righteousness is not the decay of theo- logy, but of the theological temper, not the displacement of old beliefs, but the replacement of them in their true posi- tion. " You may be orthodox, you must be righteous, if you would inherit that eternal life which is as true a part of this life as this life is of that which is to be. You may find yourself unable to accept what I hold to be true, no matter ; you must strive to develop love, joy, long-suffering, meek- ness, gentleness, temperance, truth, into concrete character. These are the fruit of that spirit which you can receive, even though you cannot receive my statements of what God has revealed as truth." To speak particularly of the Christian Church. It holds, in its familiar language, that " Baptism and the Lord's Supper are necessary to salvation." But when it says that, it means by salvation a far larger thing than was meant when that proposi- tion was framed. Books are necessary to intellectual salvation, but a man is not in- tellectually saved by shutting him up in a library full of them. It is only as the student transmutes books into personal 140 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. knowledge that he delivers himself from ignorance ; and the process of intellectual salvation is a long one, never finished, be- cause truth is never, on this earth, fully explored and disclosed. Baptism is not a magical rite, it is the symbol of entrance into a chance " to live a godly and Chris- tian life." It is " necessary to salvation " only in the sense that to possess a chance to be virtuously brought tip is necessary to the development of the personal righteousness y which is salvation. The Lord's Supper is necessary to salvation only because through it and by it the reverent^ soul receives a Divine strength which that reverent soul is to transmute into the personal right- eousness which is salvation. Neither Baptism nor the Lord's Supper are salva- tion, any more than matriculation and resi- dence at the university are intellectual salvation ; but they are in Religion what matriculation and the university are in education, the bestowment of the chance, the help, the inspiration, the direction which in the one lead to knowledge, and in the other lead to righteousness. To educate, not to grant diplomas ; to make RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 141 righteous, not to secure doctrinal correct- ness, are the aim of the College and the Church ; yet the one grants diplomas and the other asks for faith. Religion is in no danger of becoming an ethical school because her passion for righteousness is measured by her conviction that righteous- ness is not the product of a perception, but the outcome of a faith in God. Her new attitude towards conduct is not at the expense of any cardinal truth, because her cardinal truth is that salvation, the state she aims to produce, is righteousness, and righteousness is possible only as man knows, obeys, and loves a righteous God. And we have not lost from Religion what we have gained for righteousness, because there is no real righteousness without Re- ligion. I think we have but begun to appreciate what this promises for the future. It leaves dogmatic truth intact, but puts it in its proper place. It leaves ecclesiasticism substantially untouched in bulk, but de- clares it is an instrument and not an end. It refuses any longer to go on with the old reversal of the divine order, righteous- 142 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION ness and the kingdom first. Religion is asserting that all other things — faith, wor- ship, creed — will never be added unto it unless first of all it can make it plain that its foremost purpose is to produce right- eousness of life. A score of years ago Matthew Arnold gave to the world " Literature and Dogma." It was a strong, clear plea for reality, a somewhat flippant, if brilliant, arraignment of the Religion which made the three Lord Shaftesburys of more importance than the development of justice, mercy, and truth in the life of the English people. After twenty years, what do we see ? The Bishops of Gloucester and Winchester still believing that their conception of Je- hovah is far truer to fact and reason than the metaphysical " not ourselves which makes for righteousness " that Mr. Arnold defines and explains in a speculative phraseology which rivals the nomenclature he condemns. Not one of their dogmas is relinquished, but no longer are they set in the door of entrance into life, no longer are they urged as the condition of salva- tion. Mr. Arnold would have swept them RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 143 relentlessly away. The result he was sin- cerely bent on securing, and to which he gave his genius for revealing the intensely spiritual meaning of the Bible, seemed to him possible only as dogma was supplanted by literature. But all that Mr. Arnold contended for in his exaltation of right- eousness has been secured. Dogma re- mains ; it always will remain. Mr. Arnold himself framed a new dogma which for a while was ardently accepted by the dogma- haters ; but righteousness is now almost everywhere in Religion made the end which dogma must loyally serve. It is a great triumph, the meaning and result of which we as yet but imperfectly grasp, but in the coming years we shall more and more reap the fruits of it in the finer char- acter, the larger moral power, of those who profess and call themselves religious, and in the more ready allegiance to Religion, with her faith and worship, of all those who forsook her in the days when she was theologically stubborn and ecclesiastically insistent, rather than obsessed by a passion for righteousness. Finally, it must needs be said that Reli- 144 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION gion has by no means thoroughly finished her work of discriminating between real and conventional righteousness. For the frame in which conduct is set still blinds us to the moral quality of that conduct. There are no more misleading terms in use to-day than " criminal classes," " vicious classes." The " criminal class " means, to almost all of us, low, brutal ruf^ans who murder, steal, and burn whenever the safe opportunity is presented. The "vicious classes " are the social outcasts, stained black or red with dissipation, debauchery, and sensuality, and frankly refusing to do any work save as work is necessary to keep body and soul together. These, we say, are the moral pests of all society ; these are the real menace to civilization and corporate righteousness. Their sur- roundings are repulsive, base, filthy; or tawdry and impure. Their haunts are un- der constant surveillance. We Increase the police force on their account. We localize them, and then speak of the " bad quarters " of the town in which they con- gregate and to which they give a notorious character. Their very appearance is for- RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 145 bidding, their language coarse and brutal, their manner of life repulsive. Yes, truly, these are the " criminal and vicious classes" whom we justly dread, and on whom we pour our indignation. But Religion, be- fore it shall thoroughly rehabilitate itself, must include in the criminal class that not inconsiderable number of respected, though not respectable, men who break law in gen- tlemanly fashion, who have grown richer far than any burglar, by methods not one whit more honest than the burglar's and tenfold more destructive to the security of society. There is no smallest room for doubt that thieving on a colossal scale has characterized all too many of our huge enterprises of the last twenty years. The courts now and then convict it, but for the most part it goes untouched. Too often it is like the clever w^ork of the bank burglar who leaves no clue for his detection. But the fact of robbery remains. Success, with the concomitants of good breeding, good manners, generous alms, and pure life, has blinded Religion to the moral fact that breach of law^ lies at the door of many of our " best citizens," as we like to call them. 146 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION, There are too many corporations wrecked outright, or rendered profitless, by men who are not included in the " criminal classes," who have, on the contrary, waxed fat and who shine, for us ever to believe that Reli- gion has done all she ought in discriminat- ing between real and conventional right- eousness, between real and conventional wrong. The contrast between the usual surroundings of crime and this fine and refined condition in which dishonest suc- cess, and the powerlessness of law, per- mit our well-bred, gentlemanly criminal to live, has befogged our moral vision. The beauty of the frame has' made us forget the ugliness of the picture. But there are signs in our moral sky that the expansion of Religion in the direction of ethical clair- voyance will not always tolerate this con- fusion. Unrighteousness will be spied out and denounced even when its appearance is so respectable that it seems by right to deserve respect. We shall no longer de- fine the criminal class as the ruffians and common thieves who infest society in bru- tal fashion ; we shall include in it any man who has broken laws, however safe he be RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 147 from the penalties of the law which he has broken. And so of the vicious class. Religion will ask, if indeed it is not asking now, whence comes the material support of this dreadful vice which festers in all our great towns. And it will not hesitate to track it back to the doors of those gentlemanly people whose evil desires, regulated by a devilish calculation of what it is safe or dangerous for the man of good repute to do, lead them from the quiet, respectable quarters of the town, or from well behaved villages, into the haunts of vice, at which they pharisaically shudder when safely back again in their homes. There will surely come a day of reckoning between the so-called vicious classes and those who, preserving their respectability, have helped to support vice, and it is odds on which side shall lie the weight of blame. But meanwhile Religion, expanding more and more to the moral exigencies of a complex and artificial society, will grow bold and firm in its determination to characterize with ethical exactness, and to treat with un- pitying and equal sternness, the wickedness 148 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. which is dull and ugly, or clever and re- fined. The frame fools no artist as to the artistic value of the picture. The dexter- ously arranged lights of the auctioneer mis- lead only untrained and conceited purchas- ers. It may be hard for me to class the drunkenness of the ragged sot with the tip- siness of the fine-mannered gentleman, the lowness which is brutal with the vileness that sparkles. Indeed, without Religion, uttering itself as righteousness, it may be impossible for me to see that each is but a manifestation of a wickedness which is only too ready to don rags, or purple and fine linen. But that only goes to prove how nec- essary Religion is, and how necessary, too, that its standard of righteousness should be such as inerrantly to discriminate between the conventional and the real. "All unright- eousness is sin," runs the old Hebraic phrase. Centuries old, we have not yet learned its truth ; but we are learning it. Out of the perpetual tendency of Religion — markedly vigorous at the end of the centur}^ as I have tried to-nioht to set forth — to trans- late itself into conduct, is to come that in- errant, quick perception of intrinsic right- RELIGION AND RIGHTEOUSNESS. 149 eousness which shall deliver us from the moral blunders which we excuse on the ground of love of the beautiful, the clever, the refined. Yes ! out of Religion. For what but Religion is nurturing mien in righteousness and love ? What but Reli- gion speaks uncompromisingly of our need of godliness 1 The new claim which she is making upon the loyalty of all men is pre- eminently one which appeals to them on the score of what she is doing for the life that now is, — never mind, for to-night, that which is to come. If she is hold- ing men back from wickedness, if she is reclaimino: criminals and sinners, settino: their feet once more in honest ways, then she is increasing the world's material pros- perity and saving its money for noblest uses. If she is insisting that the laws of health ought to be obeyed, or warning us of the inevitable physical consequences of evil living, then she is improving the qual- ity of the public health. If she is preach- ing industry in her manual schools and inculcating thrift in her postal savings, then she is doing something to destroy the con- ditions under which the costly idle and the 150 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. expensive improvident come to be. Every man whom she saves, in that large mean- inof of salvation we have used thus far in our lectures, is an addition to the common- weal, the commonwealth. The expansion of Religion is in very truth the hope of the future. Our security lies not in our wealth, our knowledge, our government, or our society. The public safety — safety for goods, for persons, for laws, for rights, for privileges — lies in the moral quality of the people produced by the Religion that holds up for the people's reverence a moral as truly as a loving God. There is no other place under heaven in which to bestow it and have it sure. Righteousness is peace, and it is peace because it is the work of God in man. IV. RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. Within the last quarter of a century, to speak in the rough, there have grown up a class of problems and a series of move- ments which are rather loosely included under the name of Industrialism. These problems are made up of questions touch- ing wages, hours of work, conditions of labor, and distribution. The movements are almost entirely towards some sort of association, first for the protection of cer- tain advantages already secured, and, sec- ond, for the purpose of acquiring more of these advantages. I do not mean to assert that these problems and movements are characteristic of the last half of our century alone. In variant form they have always haunted civilization, disturbed it, affected it, and critically changed it. But the agi- tations in respect of labor, previous to our day, have been concerned with particular 152 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION crafts. The organizations which resulted from those agitations were essentially local and selfish. The trades guilds were de- signed to be protective of the interests of a single industry. They seem to have included, but incidentally and for the pur- pose of increasing their attractiveness, a good many provisions for social pleasure and religious worship. They grew in strength, finally acquired political power, and developed the guild merchant, who was the capitalist of that elder day. But the idea of a federation of all guilds, in order to protect all labor of every kind, cannot be discovered in the history of those or- ganizations which are frequently cited as the ancient types of the labor unions of the modern world. The reason is not obscure. The conception of the interde- pendence of every form of industrial labor had not then been wrought out. The crafts appear to have been, economically and socially, independent of one another. Craft was caste, and caste has never con- cerned itself with any questions save those which touch its own safety. Craft as caste can be cruel, unjust, grasping, sordid ; and RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 153 the craft-guilds not infrequently built up their power and wealth at the expense of general labor, or of other crafts. It is unprofitable, therefore, to go back to the history of mediceval guilds for light upon the industrial conditions which confront us to-day ; for what preeminently charac- terizes labor unions now is their clear perception and strong conviction that the interests of all labor, whatever be its spe- cial form, are one. It is the present soli- darity of labor which, more than any other, or all other, contemporary conditions, has created what is called Industrialism. And what brought the fact of solidarity into view is first, the rise of great industrial enterprises which transformed the pro- ducers of a finished article into producers of a single, and frequently slight, part of a completed article. The fact that the fail- ure of one shift to turn out in suf^cient quantity, or with sufficient rapidity, the part it was set to produce, threw out an- other shift, dependent upon the first for prepared material, disclosed how intimately all the workers in a huge establishment are related to, and dependent upon, one 154 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION another. Take the construction of a great modern building. It ImpHes, for Its pro- gressive, economical erection, the simul- taneous, or the cooperating, labor of stone masons, stone cutters, draymen, miners, smelters, iron-workers, house-smiths, car- penters, carvers, plasterers, painters, plum- bers, electricians, gas-fitters, and, above all, transportation. Each craft is dependent upon all the others. Disturbance in any one of them means disturbance of the whole ; and when skilled labor is scarce, or the organization of the particular craft disturbed is perfect, there is paralysis of the whole. A bid for a big contract is not only a nice calculation of the amount and cost of materials, of the amount and kind of labor, and of the special engineering or other difficulties likely to arise ; it is also a plan of campaign, mapping out strate- gically how to meet successfully the sur- prises and checks which may at any moment rise out of organized labor to confront the contractor. But this is an illustration of the Interdependence of labor in modern times, drawn from a single enterprise. We need only extend it, until RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 155 it embraces the Industries of the whole country, adequately to understand the co- lossal proportions of this new figure which has risen up in sturdy strength among the movements of the end of the century. Moreover, we must count in the con- solidation of the world's markets. The provincialism of trade and industry has expanded into the cosmopolitanism of industrial and commercial activity. Fall River competes not alone with Lowell, Lawrence, and the new-born textile estab- lishments of the South, but with every loom running anywhere in the civilized world. Massachusetts carpets are dis- played by the side of genuine Oriental tapestries in the shops of the whole coun- try, and the wages of the Persian work- man, toiling in his solitary hut in the dim, far-off East, touch the wages of the weavers of New England. Any sort of production anywhere affects every sort of production everywhere. The industrial world is now one huge workshop, and all its parts are interdependent. Again, this feature of work is compar- atively new. It is the result of the new 156 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. forces discovered in the last century, for the most part, but applied in this. The o:reat industrial centres and the methods of regular and rapid transportation are all of recent origin. They came into exist- ence long before their economical signi- ficance was clearly foreseen, much less provided for. They have disturbed all the traditional economics, complicated all the venerable theories, and displaced many of the old methods. The nature and extent of the disturbance in industrial relations are far less momentous than we had reason to expect. The radical changes wrought by a score of new forces are out of all proportion to the economic difficulties thus far experienced. The number of strikes, the amount of violence, and the losses entailed during the last twenty-five years, however deplorable, do not for a moment compare with w^hat might have been predicted by some prophet who, a hundred years ago, " had dipped into the future far as human eye could see," and had beheld the vision of all the industrial and commercial changes which are now before our eyes. We have gotten off thus RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 157 far very easy, so easy, in fact, that there are still multitudes of people who refuse to believe that Industrialism presents any specially critical problems for civilization to solve. These people, it may be urged, are the blind, the dreamers, the idlers, and the hopelessly selfish. But they exist in force, and meanwhile Industrialism is filling our ears with its angry and defiant, or its sad and hopeless cries, and equally filling with reasonable alarm those who know how real are the problems this age is set to solve, how sure it is they will not settle themselves. The importance conceded to them is not too great, nor is the hard, patient, heroic study given them a costher service than they deserve. So much real distress, so much blind revolt, so fright- fully huge losses, and so much bitter con- flict must mean — together with much wise, effective, and sagacious organization — the existence in the midst of us of a deep-seated trouble. In other words, we must reckon with Industrialism. Now labor — using that word for the sake of convenience, and asserting at the outset that it is totally unsatisfactory, be- 158 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. ing largely misdescriptive — urges against civilization that it is unjust in these three respects : first, it metes out to labor an insufficient wage ; second, compels too long hours ; and third, insists upon an inequitable distribution of the products of labor. I beg you to notice that this charge brought against civilization differs from the concrete charges urged against individuals or corporations that employ labor. It implicitly declares that low wages, long hours, and an inequitable dis- tribution of what labor produces, are the result only incidentally of the injustice of Mr. A. or corporation B. They are the outcome of a condition wdiich civilization has created deliberately or unconsciously, and which civilization is unwilling to change. The average workingman and the average capitalist, as well, regard them- selves as hopelessly at the mercy of forces which they vaguely call civilization or society. The workingman denounces soci- ety as unjust, cruel, sordid ; claims that until she is thoroughly reformed, radically readjusted, there is no hope that labor will have its " rights." And, on the other RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 159 hand, capital cries, " What can I do other than what I am doing? I did not create the law of supply and demand. I did not inaugurate competition. Society, not I, is responsible for them. I found them ready to my hand and I employed them, because there was nothing else to employ." Each, at any rate, disclaims any share in creating or perpetuating the conditions which labor pronounces to be unjust. This accounts for two distinguishing fea- tures of the situation : first, the inability of Industrialism to prosecute its claims and obtain its " rights ; " and, second, the in- ability of our political economists to bring civilization to a real account. Civilization cannot be brought into court. Society cannot be subpoenaed. That is to say, civilization cannot be unjust, only a per- son or a corporation can be unjust, and civilization is neither a person nor a corporation. Society cannot be cruel, only a person or an association can be so. Justice and injustice, cruelty and kindness are qualities of civilized and social individuals.^ However convenient, 1 The Reverend William Kirkus, LL. B. l60 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. therefore, it may be to charge civilization or society with wrong, it really means nothing, save as we regard civilization as an aggregate of civilized persons, who have concerted to do an unjust thing. If this aggregate of individuals has made a compact to do and to perpetuate a wrong, that compact must somehow be put in evidence ; otherwise the wrong is either no wrong at all, or is the expression of a maleficent, but undetermined, result of an aggregation of individuals. No one for a moment doubts that the result of the ex- istence of a great city is hardship for thou- sands of people, but no one will claim that great towns are formed for the purpose of subjecting any of their inhabitants to hardship. For the history of municipal legislation and administration is the story of unflagging attempts to reduce and re- move hardships. Savagery has its dis- advantages, but the reason savage people never accuse their savagery of responsi- bility for those disadvantages is that there are no contrasting advantages to bring the disadvantages into disrepute. In a civil- ized state, on the contrary, there are pro- RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. l6l duced abundantly striking and precious benefits in which all generally, but un- equally, share. " How big is too big? How small is too small ? " have ever been the questions civilized beings have always asked, as their respective shares were sharply contrasted. Why a palace, why a hovel .^^ Why unceasing toil, why unlimited leisure 1 But, as the tenure of the hovel stands or falls with the tenure of the pal- ace, as the laborer's holiday is but a bit broken from the idler's life-long leisure, the easiest way of expressing discontent with social arrangements, and disbelief in their essential justice, has ever been to call civilization unjust and society cruel. Once more, I say, civilized human beings can be, and are, unjust, and their aggre- gated injustice be the dreadful thing it is claimed it is; but civilization itself can do neither right nor wrong. We shall return to this further on in our lecture, but meanwhile it ought to be clear that to hold civilization responsible for low wages, long hours, and inequitable dis- tribution of labor's produce, is as idle as to hold the sunlight responsible for bad 1 62 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. pictures, or bronze guilty of the aesthetic crimes which so frequently stare us in the face in public squares. Remembering this perhaps common- place truth, let us examine the charges Industrialism urges against civilization. Its wages are too low. If by this is meant that wages are less than wage earners would like them to be, lower than is neces- sary to secure certain desirable, or at least desired, conditions and possessions, lower than is consistent with the cost of what is frequently, not always, necessary for the re- pair of exhausted force, we are all agreed. If any one asks me how I should like to work for one dollar per day, of course I must reply, I should not like it at all if I can get two or ten, any more than I should like ten if I could get a thousand ; nor should I like to earn less than w^ould secure me certain comfortable conditions, good and enough food, good and enough clothing, sanitary housing, and the like. But after easily answering these easy ques- tions, every one of us knows that the real question is this : how much can the fund, out of which all wages are paid, devote to RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 163 the compensation of labor without exhaust- ing itself, without failing to receive the increase necessary to preserve it as a fund from which wages can be paid ? That, of course, is a purely economical question, which only political economy can answer, if, indeed, there is ever to be an answer to it. Into its determination enter a score of complex considerations, the currency, the tariff, the state of trade, the quantity of labor — regarded for one moment as a commodity — the quantity of labor avail- able, the quantity of capital seeking em- ployment, the cost of living, the amount of the product, and the cost of producing, distributing, and selling it. Before civili- zation can say how much wages should be paid, science must first show us how much can be paid, without fatal injury to the industry itself. That wages fluctuate, that the nominal wage is sometimes greater than the real wage, and sometimes less ; that wages are at times so high as to cause capital to stop paying them alto- gether, that on the other hand they fall so low as to make idleness as profitable as labor, since the idle man eats less than the 1 64 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. toiler; that for one year capital enjoys profit and for another joays losses — all this is now so familiar that one is tempted to apologize for rehearsing it. But it is worth rehearsing for the sake of making clear this truth : that civilization, as such, is absolutely powerless to raise and equally powerless to lower the wages of any man. That act is performed by another aggre- gate of forces. The engineer who drives the fast express from New York to Spring- field, a distance of one hundred and thirty- five miles, in three hours and a half, re- ceives fifteen dollars for the trip.^ The operative in Fall River, by working fifty- two hours per week, receives thirteen dol- lars. Now suppose civilization had a voice, what ought civilization say to this appar- ently gross inequality, not to say injus- tice } Civilization would be under the necessity of ascertaining with exactness a score of facts difficult to obtain, and still more difficult to interpret in their bearing upon the point involved. That is to say, she would be obliged to accept the con- ^ So, at least, I was informed in 1S91, by apparently good authority. RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 165 elusions of political economy, which has undertaken to collect, arrange, and inter- pret all the economical data which alone can determine whether the engineer is overpaid, the operative underpaid. Im- ao^ine the result, if that bit of civilization represented here to-night should undertake to decide the question by a show of hands. The folly of it would be unspeakable. But what guarantee is there that our folly would become wisdom if we multiply our numbers here by a million, or by ten ? If, however, it is urged that civilization should promptly accept the precisely stated con- clusions of political economy, and straight- way come to the relief of the wage earn- ers, we are sadly obliged to confess that there are no such conclusions ; that is to say, conclusions touching the regulation of wages by legislation. Every attempt thus far made in that direction has resulted in demonstrated failure. The legal rate in the long run has been the market rate; and legislation by representatives of the people is the nearest approach to action by civili- zation conceivable. Indirectly, legislation can improve wages. It can provide for 1 66 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION methods and times of payment, secure their protection from attachment, consti- tute them privileged debts, and make suit for their recovery an easy and inexpensive process ; but that is all. Political economy has to-day no accepted theory of regulat- ing wages by arbitrary enactment. It is obliged to admit that the law of supply and demand, no matter how much that law can be modified by special and local con- ditions, is still the only law according to which the business of the world can be conducted. Hence, to charge civilization with injustice in the matter of wage rates is irrational. The labor-unions, all forms of association for the protection of indus- trial interest, have had, and in the future are bound more and more to have, a power- ful influence in securing better wages, but only because " combinations can make bet- ter bargains than individuals." The unions are the consolidation of labor just as ma- chinery is the consolidation of individ- ual skill, and they are destined to produce ultimately, when perfected, a permanent and beneficent effect upon the condition of wage earners. But the point I wish to RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 167 make and keep clear is this : that labor unionism itself is an industrial factor to be treated like other factors, such as the cur- rency, the tariff, and the cost of living. Secondly, it is charged that civilization decrees long hours to wage earners. It is obvious that " long," applied to hours, is altogether indefinite. Eighty years ago, men worked ninety, and in some instances and countries, one hundred hours, a week. To-day, the average number of hours for adults is fifty-three, if we exclude a small number of special trades. Here, then, is a very considerable reduction of hours of labor, so considerable that to designate the hours of eighty years ago and those of to- day as " long " is misleading. The work- ingmen and the political economists have recognized this inconsistency, and have therefore agitated for a fixed number of working hours. First, for a ten-hour law, then a nine-hour law, next a nine-hour law with Saturday half holiday, and finally for an eight-hour law. Beyond eight hours no one has thus far proposed to go. Eight seems to be tacitly accepted as a limit. But as Mr. Cox and Mr. Webb, who are its 1 68 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION vigorous and able champions, take pains to admit, " there is nothing sacred about the figure eight, and any other unit would do as well for the rough purposes of political agitation. Largely from historical and sen- timental considerations, eight has forced itself to the front as symbolizing the popu- lar demand for a shortened working day." Of the physiological and social advantages of reduced hours of toil, we shall speak further on. The primary question is what w^ould be the economical effect of shorter hours on wages, on production, its cost and its amount, and finally on profit. The history of the economical results of the reduction of hours already secured, while it does not show an unvarying result to wages, production, and profit, conclusively proves that the dire prophecies of the man- ufacturers, and many of the economists, failed of fulfillment. Wages have not de- creased, except during a short period fol- lowing immediately the operation of the ten-hour and nine-hour laws in Great Bri- tain. Production has increased in amount and at no greater cost, although unchanged cost has been affected by causes other than RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 169 that of reduced hours. Profits have de- creased, in a few instances have disap- peared. On the whole, however, the eco- nomical results of shorter working days during the last fifty years have vindicated the economical vv^isdom of the reduction. Shareholders and capitalists have recon- ciled themselves to diminished profits, if not with grace, at least with equanimity. The question of to-day is simply this : whether, under general industrial condi- tions, another reduction of hours can be made with safety to any dividends or prof- its at all, and with safety to wages. It is once more a problem in economics. That problem is still unsolved. There is no agreement among the economists, no agree- ment among manufacturers, nor among workingmen. The old arguments fail. That a man can do, and will do, as much work in nine hours as he did in twelve may be true ; that he can do as much in ten hours as he did in eleven is true. That his work will be more carefully done, with less damage to material and fewer defects in the manufactured fabric or article is true. But manifestly there is a point in I/O THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. reduction of hours be3^ond which it cannot, economically, be carried with safety to all the interests involved. Whether eisfht hours is that point, we have at present no means of knowing, and prophecy, when one reflects upon the m.ultitudinous and complex elements involved, is not rational. When, then, civilization or society is ac- cused of guilt in imposing long hours upon labor, it ought to be clear, as it was in the case of wages, that civilization is powerless to inaugurate a change. Goodness and love, mercy and compassion, are simply in- capable of overriding the stern laws which decree what shall, and shall not, be the length of a day's toil. If the matter could be decided by a show of hands, very likely the eight-hour law would be enacted, if the owners of the hands were willing to decide the question solely on the basis of what they would like. Whether or not eight hours are sufficient for the continu- ance of a healthy industrialism has not been determined, however many individ- uals may think it has ; and until it is de- termined, and determined with enough of demonstration to win the rational assent RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 1 71 of those whose interests are immediately concerned, both employers and employees, it is not sane to charge civilization with injustice; and, for reasons which will be given further on, when it is demonstrated that eight hours of work meets all the re- quirements of society, economically, society will not only yield, she will initiate. In the third place. Industrialism charges civilization with the responsibility of main- taining an inequitable distribution of la- bor's produce. But it ought first to be ascertained how much of all that is pro- duced by the only three producers known to political economy — land, capital, and labor — is directly due to labor. Suppose we imagine the total production of the United States to be heaped up on one of our western prairies in the shape of com- modities. It would be a vast and complex pile. Every article known to the arts and sciences would be there. Foods, clothing, drugs, implements, machinery, furniture, books, pictures, architects' drawings. To produce them there had to be land, capital, and labor. Each of these three is unpro- ductive without the other, in an industrial 172 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. sense. Each is clamoring for the largest share of this heap of commodities. Rent, interest, and wages, put in their respective claims. Now rent, now interest, and now w^ages, seems the rightful claimant to the lion's share ; and each in turn has been the successful claimant, each in turn the rejected claimant, though in the long run land or rent has beaten capital, or interest has beaten labor, or wages. Occasionally there has been a fight, or scramble, as the three have gathered round the heap of commodities produced by their joint effort, eager for its division among them ; but no fight thus far has substantially altered the proportionate division which from time immemorial has been made.^ The share of each has been increased in this century, but only because the heap is bigger than it used to be, for the nation's productivity has enormously increased. But Industrial- ism is not content with an actual larger share, it demands a larger proportionate share. The laboring man to-day is fed, clothed, and sheltered, in a manner of which ^ Whence I borrowed this illustration I cannot now ascertain. I am confident, however, that it is not my own. RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 173 the toilers of a hundred years ago never dreamed. He has opportunities of recrea- tion, self-culture, and self-assertion, some of which were open to a very limited num- ber in the last century, many of which were open to nobody. None the less, round that supposed heap of commodities are gathered the producers of it, each strenu- ous to maintain his claim to the biggest share, each resting his claim on his biggest contribution in its production. Labor, however, has recently made the claim that it produced the whole of it ; and, if it could substantiate that claim, it would get the whole of it; but labor has not convinced land and capital that its contention is true. Indeed, the indications are that capital, or, as Mr. Mallock calls it, " ability," has been the chief force in the enormous production of modern times. But, at any rate, it ought to be clear that whether or not the present proportion of distribution is equitable or inequitable, the question is not to be de- termined by anything save the working of economic law. First comes the question, Can land give more of what is produced to capital and labor t next, Can capital give. 174 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION more to land and labor? and finally, Can labor give more to land and capital ? Until these questions are determined, it is idle to discuss whether each will give, or is morally bound to give, or can be made to give, more than each is giving now. Can one afford to relinquish from its respective share a substantial portion for the relief or enrichment of the others and still maintain its ability to go on doing its part as a pro- ducer? For it is absolutely essential — and here anybody may be dogmatic — that each one of the three producing forces shall be maintained in its efficiency as a producer. Labor's interest in the econom- ical welfare of capital is as real as capital's in that of labor. An injury to one has always turned out to be an injury to the other. If every part of a machine is essen- tial to the operation of every other, the efficiency of any one part is dependent upon the efficiency of all the rest. The integrity of each of our three producers is economically imperative. It is clear, there- fore, that the determination of labor's claim, like that of land and capital, is to be effected by the economic operation of RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 175 economic law. There is no escape from such a conclusion ; for if any one of the proposed schemes of cooperation shall be adopted, its success will be wholly depen- dent upon the working of the three w^orld- old forces in strict accordance with the laws which govern them. The farmer owns his land, supplies his necessary capi- tal out of his surplus — never mind now whence he derived it — and does his own work unaided. His produce is a hundred bushels of wheat. He takes as his own every one of those bushels, but he takes them as landowner, capitalist, and laborer, — all in one. If he cared to keep books and credit himself as landowner, capitalist, and laborer, with the respective shares due to each, he would be in a fair way to ap- preciate the mysteries of our industrial problems. The great practical truth which is slowly emerging from the history Indus- trialism is making, and from the studies of our political economists, seems to be this : that the action of none of the three pro- ducers should ever be hampered or checked in such a way as to diminish their pro- ductive efficacy, either by interfering with 176 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. their freedom, or by so diminishing their rewards as to diminish the vigor which they themselves exert ; but that, on the con- trary, each should have its freedom and rewards jealously maintained and guarded, and the conditions most favorable to its exercise most scrupulously secured. " By such means, and by such means alone, is there any possibility of the national wealth being increased, or even preserved from disastrous and rapid diminution." This examination of the threefold indict- ment of civilization has thus far been con- ducted on economic lines. But you will have noticed that no prophecy has been uttered, and no economic solution of the problems involved has been so much as suggested. It appeared to me necessary to state in simple and, I hope, lucid fashion, the irrational character of that indictment as it is commonly framed. I wished com- pletely to separate the work of political economy from the task of Religion, in order the more clearly to set forth the powerful influence which Religion, expanded to the new needs of the new day, is destined to exert in determining the solution of the RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM, lyj problems of Industrialism. It is the con- fusion of the offices of each which has brought political economy into contempt and Religion into distrust, not seldom into disrepute. Political economy will never be a Religion, Religion will never be polit- ical economy, but an identity of purpose as regards a part of man's salvation — that salvation which means having all that is best in a man at its best — will ever make them friends and allies. They are the brain and heart of the coming civilization. The one must point the way, the other must persuade us to take it, even if taking it involves sacrifices and concessions. It is significant that Religion has at last roused itself to a consciousness that it has a duty towards Industrialism. The vener- able tradition that Religion had no vital relation to Industrialism, that its function was wholly that of an alms-gatherer and alms - distributor, caring for the conse- quences of a disturbed Industrialism — poverty, disease, and misery — has been completely shattered. It lingers only in quarters where men are too timid to face, or too blind to see, the thoroughly altered 178 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. conditions of our later day. Yet even in these quarters, men are vaguely aware that the perpetuation of old traditions are fla- grantly failing to satisfy the demands made upon them by the imperious and outspoken champions of the new order. They are not skeptical as to the truth they hold, the aims they pursue, but they are dimly con- scious that their truth is not all the truth, their aims are not sufHciently inclusive. But enterprising Religion — the Religion which is obsessed by the larger conception of salvation — is thoroughly alive to the fact that it has a duty towards every form of human movement, and has already be- gun to provide itself wdth the knowledge and the spirit which the fulfillment of that duty inexorably requires. To such an ex- tent has this been done that organized Re- ligion has now and then been betrayed into uttering a warning to those of its rep- resentatives who have forged a little ahead of their more conservative, not to say more intelligent brethren. The incident of Doc- tor McGlynn, complicated though it was wuth purely personal accidents, is a case in point. His suspension and his reinstate- RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. ij(^ ment are significant. Frequently the com- plaint is uttered that the clergy no longer preach the Gospel of Christ, but the doc- trines of political economy. Our Divinity Schools have made provision for sociologi- cal training, and some of them have ele- vated social economics to the rank of scriptural exegesis and ecclesiastical his- tory. The institutional Church, of which we hear so much and are destined to hear more, finds a place for the study of all those industrial questions which touch the real life of man. Religion is thoroughly awake to something more visibly pressing than original sin and baptismal regenera- tion. There are not wanting clergymen who openly champion, in the name of Reli- gion, some of the most radical of industrial measures. An increasingly large amount of the spiritual vitality of our churches is every year disengaged from the technically religious enterprises of organized Religion and attached to enterprises which are not religious in name at all, but promise to mitigate the industrial and social burdens. Many of the best missionaries the churches have ever trained and sent forth are found l8o THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION to-day, not in Africa and China, nor in Arizona and Nevada, but in the organiza- tions which directly seek to secure to our toilers more of the concrete blessings which their toil has largely produced, organiza- tions whose field of operation is the great cities and the centres of industrial activity. It is hard to exaggerate the profound in- terest which Religion is disclosing in every movement which promises to make this earth fairer and the conditions of life sweeter to the members of that vast indus- trial world which, by its rapid organization of itself, is every year more in evidence. It is a signal proof of that statement which I made in my first lecture, that Religion, so far from being in a state of decay, is all alive with a divine purpose to make itself felt on fields from which it was once with- held or rejected. There can no longer be room for doubt that whatever may have been the interest or the attitude of Reli- gion in the past, she is to-day in the fore- front of the ranks of radicals, revolution- ists, visionaries, and doctrinaires, as regards a deep and permanent interest in indus- trial problems. RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. l8l And yet Religion was never so blamed as to-day for withholding her influence and her effort from the cause of the working- man. The labor unions would very likely deny everything which I have claimed for religious interest in industrial conditions. They do deny it. They are denying it with bitter vehemence, and thorough sin- cerity. The radicals deny it, and urge, as a reason for deserting the churches, that Religion is on the side of privilege, and that they prefer to work for the salvation of man in this world to working for his salvation in a world to come. This ap- parent contradiction of our primary asser- tion must be explained. In the first place, Religion is identified with ecclesiasticism, and the behavior of the churches is naturally charged to Reli- gion. It must have been noted, however, that in these lectures Religion has been treated as essentially distinct from the churches. The churches exist for the pur- pose of uttering Religion in social life. This distinction is fundamental, and how- ever illicit it may appear, is radical and real. Now, " disbelief in Religion is for 1 82 THE EXPANSION' OF RELIGION the most part intellectual, while disbelief in the churches is social or moral, or emo- tional. The one comes to a man through education, the other through the experi- ences of life. Disbelief in Religion may go hand in hand with conformity to a Church : disbelief in the churches involves the refusal to be identified w4th Religion as they present it, or to join in their pro- fession and worship. The two unbeliefs are generically unlike. The one is that of the man whose mind has outgrown the faith of a world with whose social order he is satisfied and wishes to maintain : the other that of the man who is dissatisfied with the social order in which he finds himself, and so comes to doubt the ideas or facts invoked as its sanction and basis." But the churches have always lagged a lit- tle behind the free religious spirit. They have the conservative caution of organiza- tion, and are tempted to send out scouts to reconnoitre and experiment, before throwing the great bulk of the unwieldy organization upon one side or the other of a pressing present question. Moreover, the churches are probably right. They RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 183 avoid costly blunders, and even ludicrous mistakes, by their slow conservatism. Only the very impatient or the very prophetic will blame them for deliberated delays. But, at any rate, the organized churches are, as organizations, frequently in the rear of the frank championship of new causes. Consequently, whoever identifies Religion and ecclesiasticism will upbraid Religion for her tardy allegiance to the cause of the workingman. But Religion, which only im- perfectly utters itself through the churches, is always in the forefront of the battle waged against injustice and wrong. And it must be so, for Religion cherishes the profound belief that man and God belong absolutely to one another ; that man, be- cause of that belonging, was meant to be perfect; and that he cannot be perfect — be saved, that is — so long as he is the victim of injustice and wrong. It takes possession of individuals and through them gets on the side of right and justice, when the churches, out of which they come and by which they are nurtured, lag sadly in the rear. The moment Religion is differ- entiated from the churches which it ere- 1 84 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. ated as organs of utterance of itself, half the charge that Religion is on the side of privilege and the present social order falls to the ground. In the second place, Religion is de- nounced as hostile to industrial conditions because it does not commit itself to all the plans of relief which Industrialism or polit- ical economy have proposed. The signi- ficance of the long statement of the purely economic character of industrial problems, with which we started out, becomes ap- parent. How can Religion champion plans which have not received the sanction of political economy .^ It is not her func- tion, she has not the requisite knowledge. It might turn out that the very scheme which she is blamed for not championing would, in concrete operation, injure the very cause she is most anxious to serve. Is, for example, the proved history of the effect of legislation touching wages so eco- nomically promising that Religion would be certain to inflict no injury upon indus- trial interests if she should throw all her weight in favor of further and radical legis- lation ? Is it economically so sure that RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 185 eight hours a day would be a real boon to the workingman, so sure that it would not only result in the maintenance of his nom- inal wages but of his real as well, that Re- ligion is justified in rising up to demand of law-makers the enactment of the law which fixes eight hours as the maximum length of a day's toil ? Is it so demon- strably certain that a serious alteration of the proportion of the world's production now given labor could be inaugurated with perfect safety to that interdependent play of all the forces of production upon which the material welfare of the people solidly rests, that Religion may dare to commit herself to its championship? One needs not to be a political economist to per- ceive the possible folly of these industrial changes ; and the truest and wisest friends of workingmen would be the first to hesi- tate radically to alter our present economic arrangements with no more knowledge of the consequences of such an alteration than is possessed to-day by any set or school of economic theorists. Each of the schemes of Industrialism may sometime prove the highest economic wisdom ; no 1 86 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. one of them is beyond reasonable doubt to-day. But it is the unwillingness of Re- ligion to identify herself with mdustrial programmes which explains the charge so frequently urged against Religion that she is against Industrialism itself. It is the business of Religion to side boldly and vigorously wdth the wronged, the op- pressed, — there can be no doubt of that ; but, first of all, it is necessary to ascer- tain by methods more trustworthy than vehement pity and pitiable vehemence who are the wronged and oppressed, and where lies the cause of the wrong and oppres- sion. And that was never easy, save in those instances where the wrong was so indubitably visible and so unerringly lo- cated that righting it has followed hard upon detecting it. Discriminating between Religion and ecclesiasticism, between sympathy with In- dustrialism and adherence to industrial programmes, we shall have no room for a doubt that Religion's interest in labor's complaint is keen and enterprising. Nor ought we to doubt that her influence is powerful when we attend to the real busi- RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 187 ness of Religion in its relation to Indus- trialism, which we now proceed to do. > We have already seen how real is the distinction between the functions of Reli- gion and political economy, but those functions will never be exercised fruitfully for the welfare of mankind save as they work together, mutually influencing one another at every step. It is the business of Religion to create an atmosphere of love and trust in which the rightful claims of antagonized, but not antagonistic, inter- ests may be calmly and dispassionately presented ; an atmosphere of justice and righteousness, in the pure sunlight of which the richest advantage looks poor and mean beside the slightest injustice which secures it ; an atmosphere of brotherhood in which the selfish powers of might shall hesitate and falter and fail to do any deed which crushes out of a brother's life that ideal of salvation — having all that is best in a man at its best — which it is the duty of man to evoke and nurture and refine in every man born on this earth. For it is, first of all, a condition of dislike and hard suspicion which makes the settlement 1 88 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION of industrial disturbances so difficult to effect.!^ No strike has ever been caused by the purely economical question of wages, hours, or distribution alone ; that is an element, powerful and capital ; but into every strike there enter, as almost equally powerful elements, the angry or sad dis- like of the workingman, the hard, suspi- cious dread of the employer. It is these which defeat all attempts to resolve the differences in debate, these which destroy the possibility even of the compromise which is better than war when no princi- ple of morality is surrendered, these which breed the conscienceless and stupid pride which finally accepts ruin, misery, and social disaster, rather than accept anything less than unconditional capitulation. Long after it is clear that an increase of wages is economically safe for the employer, or a return at the old rates is economically best for the workman, the angry, defiant con- testants prolong the costly struggle, when nothing divides them save the passion which, unlike the economical element, is absolutely within their personal control. It is becoming as clear as a proposition in RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 189 geometry, that no industrial problem into which the personality of man enters as an element will ever be satisfactorily or peace- fully solved, unless there is love enough to create the patience, forbearance, consider- ation, and conciliation necessary to hear and understand the truth, and to create the conviction that a difference of opinion touching an industrial disturbance is con- sistent with an honest determination to extricate from tangled meshes the truth which shall make all clear. Political econ- omy, which for years has depreciated Reli- gion, is now prompt to own her incompa- rable influence in fields whereon she was once regarded as an impotent intruder. The Bishop of Durham brought to a happy end the great miners' strike ; but he did not do it as a bishop (in spite of his ecclesiastical office, perhaps), nor did he do it because he was the superior, in eco- nomic knowledge, of all those who had tried their hand at a settlement and had failed ; he did it, could do it, because he brought to the task so much of genial love, of willingness to believe in the integ- rity of motive on the part of employers and IQO THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION employed, that he could melt out of them their bitter anger and their stubborn pride and so make a way over which the shining feet of peace could walk in safety. That was Religion, the influence, not of a great Church dignitary, but of a man full of the love of Christ, and therefore able to teach his brothers the lesson of love and trust. What a Giffen or a Marshall or a Rogers could not do was done by one who would humbly sit at their feet as masters of the science of economics ; and he did it by the power of Christian love. That achieve- ment of Religion outranks any most defi- nitive championship of any of the especial propositions which labor has laid down as essential to the material welfare of work- ingmen. The scornful rejection by the parties in interest of the good offices of Religion in creating a kindly spirit, as impotent good nature, is irrational. Lu- brication is not power, nor is it machinery, but without it the machine is motionless or tears itself in pieces. " Love one an- other," which is the social watchword of Religion, is worth as much to Industrialism as the announcement and verification of _ J RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 191 its most precious economical truth. And it is the profound and passionate convic- tion of this truth, it is the hope which has been created by what it has already achieved, that arms Religion to-day with the invincible belief that she has a minis- try of healing to Industrialism which no- thing else can give. That belief keeps her patient and unresentful when she is bit- terly denounced by labor for not coming bodily and boldly over to its programme — silent and undiscouraged when radicals in her own ranks upbraid her for timidity and cowardice. Industrialism has faith in the justice of its cause, hope in its final triumph. Religion is begging it to add the charity, which, though it suffereth long, is kind, thinketh no evil, and can rejoice in the truth even when the truth declares itself to be something other than was hoped or believed. Political economy will deserve Carlyle's fretful characteriza- tion of it as " the dismal science " until it thoroughly accepts love as the sole medium through which to speak. But more than love is needed. Love can degenerate into an easy good nature, which, like the tender 192 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. mercies of the wicked, is cruel. Religion must also create an atmosphere of justice and righteousness in which the richest advantage will look poor and mean beside the slightest injustice which secured it. The idea that justice and righteousness are entities, that they can be handled, dis- tributed, and dealt in like commodities, finds support nowhere in Religion, morals, or government. Justice and righteousness are known to us only as they appear in the person of a just and righteous God and of just and righteous men. The appeal to justice is not to an abstraction, but to a person. If the cry of oppressed men for justice does not enter into the ears of a just God or of just men, it is as if it had never been uttered. Now " Religion is the power w^hich makes and keeps men just, because it believes in a just God. The character of the God believed in de- termines the character w^hich men are to achieve. This explains why the progress, the forward movement of the world, has been worked by good persons — persons made just by their religious beliefs; no- tice that I do not say ecclesiastical alle- RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM, 193 giances." Therefore Religion, instead of giving herself wholly or even mainly to the task of establishing justice by enact- ment, has thrown herself into the work of making men just. In the world of Indus- trialism, more just and righteous men are needed, in order that justice and right- eousness may have their way in settling the incessant disputes and differences which seem inseparable from the working of a vast and complex machinery of pro- duction. They are necessary, because not infrequently arrangements and agreements, which were believed by both parties to them would work exact justice, unexpectedly turn out to be flagrantly unjust, harsh, or burdensome to one of them. In such a situation there is no redress, short of costly violence and equally costly rupture, save as a high sense of justice lives in the breasts of all — employers or emiployed. The sight of the employer, imperiled by his agreement, is as dreadful in the eyes of employees who love justice and righteous- ness, as is the sight of starving employees in the eyes of the employer who would rather be right than be rich. Religion 194 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION has expanded to the recognition of this truth, and holds it with the firm tenacity with which organized ReHgion keeps its fundamental creeds. This energized de- votion to the task of leading men up to the idea of a just and righteous God, and, through that idea, to personal obedience to Him, is the preeminent characteristic of Religion to-day. Men full of the passion for justice are always men to whom the action which promises to enrich them by its injustice is abhorrent. No considera- tions of economical rectitude ever silence the voice of moral rectitude when men are determined that their material gain shall not be the measure of their moral loss. And so Religion, awakened to her splen- did chance, expanded to take that chance, is resolutely, confidently, vigorously plead- ing for the prime necessity of just and rio^hteous men as one of the essential con- ditions of industrial peace and prosperity.j And Religion is right. The irreligious and the radicals may despise her for what the one calls her powerlessness, may taunt her with what the other calls her cowardly timidity. No matter. Her head at last is RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM, 195 clear, her heart warm, and she is doing to- day a far nobler and truer work than when of old she literally baptized nations in a day. Not only shall the just live by their faith in justice, they shall also impart life to all who are on the lookout for justice. In the third place, Religion is creating an atmosphere of brotherhood in which the selfish powers of might hesitate, falter, and fail to do any deed which crushes out of a brother's life that ideal of salvation, hav- ing all that is best in a man at its best, which it is the duty of all of us to evoke, nurture, and refine. The tendency of naked political economy is to produce separations among men by subtly teach- ing them to look at one another as imper- sonal parts of a huge machine. The em- ployer is perpetually tempted to look upon his employees as he does upon his looms, — impersonal producers of so many com- modities. The loom and its attendant can turn out so many yards of textiles per day. The improvement of the loom, and the improvement in manual skill of the man who tends it, are so indissolubly bound up together in the employer's mind that he 196 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. can as easily think of the man as a ma- chine as to think of him as a living soul. That is the snare into which all too many of our employers fall. How much can the workman produce .^ is the first and last question, and the man is lost in the produc- tive intricacies of the machine. The work- man, on the other hand, is equally tempted to regard his employer as no more than a bank on which he draws. " How much can I make him pay ? " is his first and last question, and the man is hidden beneath his ability to honor the drafts labor makes upon him. There can be no brotherhood between a machine and a depository ; brotherhood exists between persons, and the more acute the consciousness of per- sonality, and the more sensitive the re- sponse of man to man, the stronger will be the sense of brotherhood, and the more vital the feeling of responsibility for the welfare of each. The prevalence of the pragmatic spirit, this loss of the man in the maze of the machinery which he guides, has cost Industrialism dear. It has hard- ened the heart of many a manufacturing Pharaoh to say, " The people are idle, RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 197 therefore they complain ! " and has caused workingmen to turn against some mod- ern Moses, who has led them into the wilderness of concession and concilia- tion, that he might bring them into the promised land of industrial freedom and social chances. It has produced the deep- seated, irrational, destructive feeling that there is not, nor can be, a sameness of interests, a sameness of purposes and ideals. And this feeling has negatived many a demonstration of the economic fact that labor, land, and capital stand or fall together finally. But Religion, which has been working recently along the lines of the new anthropology — that anthro- pology of which we spoke in our second lecture — is insisting upon the necessity of brotherly union in the interest of the com- monweal. '' That is no true success," she confidently asserts, " which is content with the achievement of a material product." Man is worth m.ore than anything he makes ; and if the making of anything means the deterioration of the man who makes it, it were better for civilization that it had never been made. A really reli- 198 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. gious employer — that is, one who believes in salvation as we have defined it — will not be content to see his wealth increase if the human beings who cooperate with him to create it are, by the conditions of their toil, deprived of every chance to develop and discipline themselves into something other than cogs on the great wheel of Industrialism. He will not only see that an improvement of men is an im- provement of product; he will also see that every man, who is lifted out of the hopelessness of servitude into the hopeful- ness of work, is a distinct addition to the causes which are to fashion human soci- ety into a true City of God, and that every man who is changed from a " hand " into a person, with all the chances of personal- ity guarded, is a fresh contribution to the stability, order, and happiness of the world. He will in practice conform to his belief that he and his workmen are brothers, owing one another duties of generosity, kindness, care, and not simply the bare, hard duty of justice. The curse which has long rested upon Industrialism is the curse of unsympathetic, unintelligent, and RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 199 unnatural relations between all the parties who create Industrialism. Those relations are unsympathetic, because neither em- ployer nor employed has cared for each other's ideals of life, but only for each other's ability to produce some material commodity; unintelligent, because each has failed to see that the higher the ideal of life, the loftier will be the sense of responsibility for each other's permanent and symmetrical welfare ; and unnatural, because the whole history of mankind is witness to a struggle to fit men to dwell with one another in a society which shall furnish all with chances, and protect all in their rights to those chances. To lift that curse, to teach the world the precious- ness of life, and so to lead men to set life above anything which living men produce, promptly to put herself upon the side of any movement, agency, enterprise, which is demonstrably enriching life or demon- strably promises to do so, is the task Reli- gion in these last days has set herself to perform. And her evident purpose never to rest until her task is finished, her grow- ing willingness to see value in every enter- 200 J HE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. prise which aims to Hft life out of the mire of wickedness, misery, stupidity, clumsi- ness, ignorance, or mistake, is the evidence of her large expansion. It is this characteristic of Relimon which discloses her nearness to the as yet in- complete federation of labor. The trades unions began in unconscious selfishness. They sought to gain and retain certain advantages for themselves alone, not sel- dom securing their ends at a heavy cost to workmen outside their crafts. They were bent on compassing very limited results. But long ago their narrow vision widened till it embraced every toiler in any depart- ment of industry. The federation of labor means the consolidation of all the inter- ests, and all the powers and resources, of those who toil, for the purpose of safe- guarding their rights. It is a noble dream, for the realization of which no lover of men will fail to hope, for it is only another form of the working of the spirit of Him who came that men " might have life and have it more abundantly," however incom- pletely the membership of the unions to be federated have conceived the nature of RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 201 that life to be. The essential selfishness of the unions is to be, nay, is fast being, destroyed by the unselfishness of federa- tion. And when federation is completed, when all the rights of all the toilers have been safeguarded to the farther verge of organization's ability to protect, when the cries for justice are hushed in the full pos- session of power, then shall surely come the acute consciousness that man for his salvation needs something more than to possess his rights : he needs to be guided, lifted, chastened by a Divine Power ; needs something, nay, some one, to breed in him self-respect, self-control, reverence, compas- sion, purity, and love, without which all his material gains will count for naught. It is the certainty that this truth will finally be grasped by Industrialism, which is leading Religion to watch eagerly for any signs that, here and there, the labor unions are catching glimpses of it. The contention of later labor utterances that not simply higher wages and a larger share of production for the laborer is wanted, but a better chance to develop and discipline and refine himself, and that 202 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. higher wages and shorter hours are merely the conditions of that development, marks an advance over the earlier demands. It means a faint but true suspicion that what the man becomes is more important than what he possesses, and that what he pos- sesses is important at all only as it minis- ters to quality of life. That is the working of Religion, imperfect, feeble, impercepti- ble to the ecclesiastical mind that cannot see over its wall of historic tradition, but still Religion, because it is a tendency towards man's salvation. If they did but know it, the aims of Industrialism and of organized Religion are every year ap- proaching identity, however divergent be their methods. And the more Religion expands to embrace every human interest, the more its sympathies reach generously and warmly out to every struggle man is making to free himself from the machine- quality industrial relations tend to fasten on him ; and, on the other hand, the more Industrialism opens to receive the full rounded doctrine of the nature of man, — a being capable of spiritual and social and intellectual development, — the nearer will RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 203 be their approach to one another, and the more feasible their complete union. The federation of labor is imperfect Religion, just as a good deal of our ecclesiasticism is imperfect Religion. Their concurrent and symmetrical expansion will be the be- ginning of their happy and fruitful unity ; their unity the pledge and prophecy of their union. Labor unionists are begin- ning to perceive this truth. One or two of their wisest leaders have already more than hinted that until the labor unions have added the religious element, success will delay its coming; and the services which Religion, in the persons of its no- blest sons, has already rendered Industrial- ism, justifies this intimation. I should like to close my lecture by briefly pointing to one unhappy feature of modern Industrialism in regard to which I am unaware that any special notice has been taken. With the rise of our great manufacturing establishments, there has been an enormous increase in the employ- ment of women as toilers by the side of men. Our factories of various sorts are crowded with them, from the age of six- 204 ^-^^ EXPANSION OF RELIGION teen upwards. Their superior deftness, not to say conscientiousness, has proved them, in certain branches of productive enterprise, the equal of men ; perhaps, eco- nomically, their superiors, if we take into account their lower wages. Dating from the Civil War, women have invaded more and more those places which theretofore had been traditionally reserved to men, until to-day there is scarcely an occupation, outside of those in which crude physical strength is an essential, which does not count women in the ranks of its workers. That this innovation has. brought women a larger freedom, and a more self-respect- ing independence, cannot be doubted, nor that it has increased the amount of pro- duction and wealth. Moreover, the eco- nomical disturbance which it was prophe- sied would ensue has failed to occur. We have reconciled ourselves to it socially, commercially, economically. Unchival- rous man is willing, after all, that woman should do his work. But it cannot be long before we shall have to pay the cost of it ; and that cost will be an enfeebled feminine physique, disclosing itself in neu- RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 205 rotic diseases, in hypersensitiveness, and in functional disturbances of many and alarming varieties. The deterioration of the stock, to use an objectionable phrase, is eventually inevitable, even if its shadows have not already fallen upon the coming generations. For the holy office of mater- nity, the present position of woman in In- dustrialism, the tasks laid upon her, the hours and conditions of toil, are the worst preparation conceivable. One need be neither a biologist nor a physician to fore- see what the effect upon posterity must be of an arrangement which permits, or compels, so large a proportion of the women of the nation to do work for which they are fitted neither by physique nor temperament, nor by their intended des- tiny as the possible childbearers of the world, to perform. All the economic advan- tages of the present system shrivel into nothingness in comparison with the fun- damental damage done to woman by her unnatural struggle to secure those advan- tages. Her competition with man in sev- eral departments of industry is injurious to her and to man alike. Not to speak 2o6 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. of the waning power of that chivalry which is of inestimable value in giving tone to the social and domestic relations of the sexes, there is a serious blow given the sacred institution of marriage, and, by con- sequence, to the family. Anything which lowers the general estimate of marriage and the family is a distinct social wrong. Not yet — but in a future less remote than the public unconsciousness of the evil wrought by the modern place of woman in Industrialism would lead one to expect — we shall set ourselves radically to reform the culpably careless arrangement which has increased our wealth, but has corre- spondingly decreased reverence for mar- riage, by lessening its social necessity, and has weakened many of the bonds which bind the family together and preserve it as the most powerfully beneficent social force in civilization. If it was Religion, the Religion of Jesus, which originally lifted woman from a condition of ignoble servitude, and too often something worse, and set her in the respect, the chastened affection, and the chivalrous reverence of the world, it may turn out that Religion, RELIGION AND INDUSTRIALISM. 207 seeking to have all that is best in a human being at its best, is to be the power that shall once more bring her back to a more intelligent, rational, and natural position in the economy of civilization. V. RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. Raphael Aben Ezra dwells upon the bad temper Hypatia betrayed if he ven- tured to ask her, when making her appeals to universal experience, how she proved that the combined folly of all fools re- sults in wisdom. It is some form of that question which occurs to all of us when we are presented with any plan to place in the custody and under the direction of all men what, when under the direction and in the custody of individuals, fails to pro- duce the results we all desire. We proba- bly should all turn monarchists if we could find the king who knew as much as all of us and a little more, and was as good as the best of us and a little better. But though the world has been on the lookout for this sort of king, and has known Arthur the Good and Peter the Great, Arthur's goodness has not been enough RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 209 without Peter's greatness, nor Peter's greatness without Arthur's goodness, to reconcile humanity to the idea that roy- alty is divine. It will be divine when the Divine King appears and has His divinity of goodness and greatness recognized; not till then. On the other hand, we should all be converted to thorough-going democracy — to which at present we are not converted — if the demos acting as demos made fewer mistakes and achieved more wisdom than history assures us is true. It is one of the great commonplaces of history that the failure of the noblest speculative theories and the most wisely elaborated programmes for the improve- ment of human society have been wrecked upon the rocks of human selfishness in one or many of the forms of wrong- ness which selfishness perennially assumes. Until this century, nearly all the ideal societies which philosophers and poets have described as realized in actual cir- cumstances, have been judiciously located upon islands ; and Mr. Richard Whiting's rediscovery of Pitcairn's Island, as set forth in his too little noticed book, is a skillful 2IO THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. employment of the old device, to make a speculative theory work well by exhibiting it in the framework of a distant and un- known — or at least unnoticed — civiliza- tion, in which Individualism could be repre- sented as acting as it should. Between the ideal beauty of the perfect society and the iron facts of existing Individualism, there has been from the beginning of civiliza- tion an uninterrupted warfare, with varying fortunes to either of the combatants. The ground lost by the one to the other in one century is recovered in the next. Mon- archical supremacy in one age yields to democracy in the next. It looks like a perpetual seesaw, this alternating battle between Society, pictured as it should be, and Individualism as it is; and the only pleasant feature of it is the unfailing hope which shines through it that in a future, as certain as the past, such an adjustment of Society and Individualism shall be evolved as will cause Society to do only justice and Individualism to perform all its duties. For Society recognizes that it must reckon with Individualism, and In- dividualism perceives that Society is prac- RELIGION AND SOCIALISM 211 tically itself. They so fundamentally be- long to and are so necessary to each other, that any proposition to extirpate either has failure written upon its face. That, I think, is the truest characterization that can be made of the present agitation for a radical reorganization of all Society. So- cialism, as defined by the extreme left, will never be incorporated into living gov- ernment, not because its arguments will fail to convince us of its abstract justice or beneficence, but because it must perpet- ually meet the " wild living intellect " of the individual. And pure Individualism can never become the working law of Society because it must meet the solid re- sistance of instinctive organization. This statement is fundamental in all I shall have to say in to-night's lecture ; and in the attempt to state the relation of Reli- gion to Socialism, I shall be guided by the elementary truth that Religio7i can be 071 the side^ exclusively^ of neither Socialism nor Individualism, because from the be- ginning Religion has taught Socialism, while, at the same time, insisting upon Individualism, and because it is this fea- 212 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. ture of it which makes it Religion, and not political philosophy nor political econ- omy. Jesus may have been the first and the great socialist, but He was also the great individualist. He had a doctrine of Society and a doctrine of the individual ; and these two doctrines, running down through Christian civilization, have sur- vived in undiminished vitality unto this day. An exposition of these will make clear this eternal relation to both Social- ism and Individualism — especially to So- cialism, which for nearly half a century, thouo;h its voice has been heard all round the world for not more than a score of years, has been exploiting a social revolu- tion beside w^hich the change from the ancient world to feudalism, and again from feudalism to the existing order of free con- tract, are insignificant. It will be helpful to point out how strenuously Religion insists upon the sepa- rateness of the individual. It is its nature to do so, for Religion is primarily a mat- ter between God and a personal soul. So long as men regard themselves as related to humanity, as the lump of coal to the RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 213 vein from which it is mined, not as the soldier to his comrade and to the captain whom both obey, there is no chance of their appreciating the part each man plays in the evolution of the race. To believe that one is no more than a helpless frag- ment of the nation, or of the class to which one belongs, is to stifle every generous ambition, and to dull, if not destroy, the sense of personal responsibility for not only character but for influence upon the forces which are working in mankind. And so Religion cries to each of us, " Re- alize your own separateness, stand up for your character as an individual, recognize your own power of self-determination, resent and reject that conception of the individual which represents him simply as a cog on the great wheel of humanity turned helplessly by an unknown power ; and develop and cling to that conception of yourself which gives you the power to elect, select, choose, and reject." One of the finest of Hebraic phrases is, " Come and let us reason together, saith the Lord ; " for it is the splendid representa- tion of Deity entering into rational con- 214 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION verse with a rational, self-determining being. Christianity is preeminently, char- acteristically, eager for the growth and vigor of the idea of Individualism realized in a virile, personal will. It bids man be candid about his individual attitudes towards everything which can conceivably touch with shaping hands any legitimate human interest, to be " either cold or hot," never " lukewarm." It charges him to retain possession of his mind and con- science, even when ecclesiasticism would have him give them away. It exhorts him to look clean through every institutional arrangement to which he consents, or by which he is coerced, and to behold the im- mediate relation which he sustains to God and truth and justice. " The soul that sinneth, //," and not some other soul, " shall die ; " the soul that obeyeth and loveth truth and justice, it, and not some other soul, shall live. All through the his- tory of vigorous Religion runs the strong thread of the Individualism which is the assertion of the total separateness of every being born into this world. Without this individual consciousness, there is no strong. RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 215 clear sense of personal responsibility, and men will throw upon society, upon class, upon a general set of conditions, upon ancestry, ill health or good health, upon inherited tendencies — upon anything — the guilt of acts whose consequences are only evil. Where no per so7z is responsible' for personal character nor for social condi- tions, there is no responsibility, and men rage against civilization as the impersonal, yet real, creator of the evils which weigh them down. The bad cry out, " We are delivered to do all these abominations ; " the good moan and lament their birth into a world of hopeless misery, hopeless sin. The complete absence of Individualism is fatalism, and fate may be lodged anywhere, in secondary causes, or in a single self- originating cause, named, described, ex- plained, as each of us may take a fancy, — but always fate, the power which shapes us to its will, irrespective of anything we do. Half of being " born again," in the phrase of Jesus, is the recovery of the conscious- ness of separate self-hood. That recovery is the beginning of a true moral educa- tion, which, again, is a rationalized and 2l6 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION refined form of what science has called " the strusrsfle for existence " in the world of organic life. The instinct of self-pres- ervation and self-assertion, which works as thoroughly in a baby as in a philosopher, is altogether unconscious, and placidly ex- ists concurrently with the conviction that we are the passive instruments of another's power. But the interpretation of the in- stinct of self-preservation as the prophecy of conscious personality, as the rudiment- ary form of what, by reflection, may and ought to become the power of self-deter- mination, is the work of Religion, because it insists that each of us was meant to live in a relation of conscious dependence upon God. That is Religion, for the reli- gious man is he whose conception of God is such that it reacts immediately upon his total personality. This is preemi- nently true of Christianity. Its doctrine of the Incarnation is summed up in the statement that Christ sought to bring man to God through the sublime illustration of an intensely individual human life in complete union with God. Jesus is al- ways exhibiting the necessity of this con- RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 217 sciousness and fact of individual separate- ness. " I lay down my life of myself, no man taketh it from me. I have power to lay it down, and power to take it again. What shall a man give in exchange for his soul ? " that is, himself realized as a self- determining personality ! " What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul ? " Christianity has been truest to itself when it has coura- geously and consistently stood upon this fact. It has been visibly at the height of its power when it has laid the emphasis of its teaching upon the duty which one owes himself as a distinct and separate person- ality and upon this duty as a natural and inalienable fact. " Our being, with its faculties, mind and body, is a fact not admitting of question, all things being of necessity referred to it, not it to other things. If I may not assume that I exist, and in a particular way — that is, with a particular mental constitution — I have nothing to speculate about, and had better leave speculation alone. Such as I am, it is my all ; this is my essential standpoint and must be taken for granted ; otherwise 2l8 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. thought is but an idle amusement not worth the trouble. There is no medium between using my faculties as I have them and flinging myself upon the external world, according to the random impulse of the moment, as spray upon the surface of the waves, and simply forgetting that I am. I am what I am, or I am nothing. If I do not use myself, I have no other self to use. My only business is to ascer- tain what I am in order to put it to use. It is enough for the value and authority of any function which I possess to pro- nounce that it is natural." This clear, firm, conscious conviction of self-separate- ness or personality is the door through which all responsibility passes. Anything which threatens to weaken or destroy it is fundamentally false. I am, of course, well aware how differently speculative philoso- phy has interpreted this fact, how variously its origin and limits have been defined, but all our great speculative thinkers — if one who is not a scholar may venture to speak of them — are agreed that personal- ity is not only a fact, but the only fact which is capital in the spiritual life of RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 219 man on the human side. Religion is both on the side of Individualism as a fact inalienable from humanity, and on the side of whatever develops and refines its operation. Through it m.an comes into his intended relation to God and into his intended relation to Society. I have in- sisted upon this natural fact, as reinforced and revitalized by Religion, because it has an indestructible relation to any form of Socialism which has been, or ever can be, proposed, because it lays bare one of the primary foundation stones upon which the structure of Society can alone solidly rest; and because, finally, its exaggerations and distortions are not to be made a warrant for denying its value or its necessity. Our first proposition, therefore, is that Reli- gion is on the side of whatever emphasizes the self-separateness of the individual. The importance of this proposition will appear further on. In the second place. Religion is on the side of organization by the great stress it lays upon the duty of loyalty to superiority, and upon the duty of protection to in- feriority. These two duties are rooted in 220 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. the stubborn fact of the native inequalities of men. If we were all born equal, there would be no need of loyalty to superiority, no need of protection to inferiority. But as we all know, the differences among men are so wdde as respects a dozen powers, that the moment the most rudimentary society emerges, it is largely a reflection of the effect of these differences ; and the question which tormented the earliest, tor- ments the latest Society: " What shall be the attitude of the less favored to the most favored, and what shall be the position of native superiority to native inferiority } " The first of these questions is as important as the second in affecting the w^ll-being of that total Society w^hich is necessarily made up of unequally gifted human beings. The progress of the world has been attained largely through competent leadership, in- telligently and loyally follow^ed. When we say that the history of civilization is the history of its greatest men, we are only half right ; but we are half right. The great man, with the power of leadership, is the coronation of the widely diffused in- telligence, virtue, and struggle of the na- RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 221 tion. He takes up into himself the lesser leaderships, and the great total body of hopes and activities to which each indi- vidual contributes, and gives them direc- tion and force. His greatness, his power to secure beneficent results — liberty, chances, justice, rights, possession, know- ledge — is inexorably dependent upon the intelligent and continuous support of those to whom these results are a boon. His contribution of ability is always prodigious, — prescience, wisdom, courage, skill — but there must be a bulk of ability of the same sort, though of inferior degree, resident in the people upon which his superior ability plays. In war the strategist, engineer, commander ; in politics the statesman ; in industrial arts the inventor and the user of the invention the inventor invents ; in Religion the thinker, the saint ; these are the leaders by whose leadership obediently followed the blessings of victory, govern- ment, increased production, and spiritual truth descend upon Society. " He that receiveth the righteous man in the name of a righteous ma7i shall receive a right- eous man's reward." That is the voice of 222 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. Religion urging the necessity of loyalty to proved superiority, not unintelligently nor with any slightest diminution of the con- sciousness of separate self-hood, but rather with the loyalty that perceives in the act of obedience the exercise of individual rea- son and wisdom. Now it is clear that this loyalty, to be thoroughly effective, must in some way be the exercise of an association which, while binding men together, unites them as independent persons, not as pas- sive instruments. It is Religion which furnishes the type of such association, be- cause, dimly in its lowest forms and dis- tinctly in its highest, it asserts the duty of obedience to God. It sometimes calls Him the Supreme Being, and sometimes Father, but always it requires that every man shall intelligently yield his personal will to that of God, yet ever retain the consciousness of distinct personality. In all Religions, but of course preeminently in the highest, the well-being of man is represented as hanging upon his obedience to his Creator, individual perfection ever issuing from the personal union of man Vvdth God. The leadership of God, not the omnipotence of RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 223 God, is the true idea of the relation of man and his Creator. But once men perceived that by putting themselves under leader- ship, and not simply by resting passive under power, they were in the way of life, their endeavor became energetic to organ- ize their loyalty, and to add to individtial obedience corporate obedience. This is the genesis of the Church, which is ideally a brotherhood, that total brotherhood ex- hibiting, as an organization, the corporate loyalty which lives in the individual, and receiving, as an organization, the corporate blessings which descend upon the individ- ual. " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God," is addressed to the individual, and the spir- itual value of such a love is forever certi- fied to the individual. But to this is added, " and thy neighbor as thyself ; " immedi- ately the social duty of man appears, not as rooted in something diverse from that in which duty to one's self finds its sanc- tion, but as growing out of obedience to God. Part of that social duty, and the part we have in hand just now, is that which is owed by inferiority to superiority. To the man who can lead me, guide me. 224 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. inform me, teach me the path of safety and welfare, I owe loyalty because It is my duty to make the most of myself, and I can make the most of myself only as I am loyal to him. But more than this, I can help my neighbor, my brother, my fellow- man, to make the most of himself only as I consent to be led by superiority. Even if I am willing to forego the advantages to myself of such loyalty, I have no right by disloyalty to diminish like advantages to my brother. The moment obedience to competent leadership is demonstrated to be fruitful in valuable result, obedience becomes a duty. Individualism is for the sake of the highest order of association, and the highest order of association thus far known, is, in part, the result of an in- telligent subordination of the individual to proved superiority. The " divine right of kings " and the " omnipotence of Parlia- ment " are the historical distortions of this fundamental truth of Religion and organ- ized Society. Tyrannies of every sort — oppressions, hereditary rights, intrenched injustices, a whole multitude of wrongs — are the irrational exaggerations of this RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 225 elemental truth. But, for all that, it is as evident now as it has always been in the history of civilization that this truth is essential — I will not say to any sort of progress — but to progress of the noblest order. Religion without lo3^alty to God is unthinkable. Progress without loyalty to superiority is impossible. The two ideas are so indissolubly bound together that vigorous Religion and continuous progress have always gone together in human his- tory. Religion dies before progress decays in the national life. But the duty of protection to inferiority is equally fundamental. Leadership is un- der bonds to furnish its followers with all the blessings leadership can secure. Now, the effect of leadership is to bring out into visible, concrete conditions the natu- ral inequality of human beings. It empha- sizes the differences in physical strength, intellectual power, in daring ingenuity and enterprise, which are common everywhere. It reveals, as by some powerful alchemy, the inequalities into which we are born, sets them in circumstances which attract attention, creates measures of value, deter- 226 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. mines rank and reward, and originates contrasts which inevitably tend to become fixed and final. As a consequence, the leadership which begins with the noblest purposes to secure advantages to the whole social body is under subtle and fierce temp- tation to furnish by attaching to itself, for its own use and as its own possession, such a share of those advantages as it never dreamed of when power was put into its hands. It follows, therefore, that the duty of inferiority to be loyal to superiority is absolutely conditioned upon the duty of superiority to protect inferiority. " Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself " is the formal sanction of leadership. " He that would be greatest among you, let him be your servant," is the noblest description of its function. Leadership for leadership's sake is tyranny and finally suicide. If it forgets its sole sanction, if it betrays its trust, the result is, first, a fixed inequality of chances for classes and individuals, ever producing contrasts of wealth and poverty, culture and ignorance, power and helpless- ness, which appal the mind and wring the heart; and, second, a revolutionary move- RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 227 ment which may bhndly overturn Society at enormous loss to every interest con- cerned, and strive to build up another so- ciety just as maleficent, because founded upon the opposite principle of disobedience to superiority. The first of these results is bountifully illustrated in history. Lead- ership in some form false to itself, that is, recreant to the obligations it incurs by the very fact of being entrusted with power, is responsible for almost all the disasters which have overtaken the world since it had anything like an organized Society. Leadership has been the greatest curse and the greatest blessing the race has ever known, but the curse is the perversion of the blessing ; and the only known force to persuade or to compel leadership to dis- charge its sacred trust is Religion, which consecrates leadership to the unceasing task of exercising itself to secure equality of chance to inequality of endowment. Religion forever broods over superiority, and urges, through the conscience, through compassion, justice and love, the indestruc- tible claims of inferiority to the best pro- tection superiority can afford. 228 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. These, then, are the elemental proposi- tions of Religion touching the everlasting conflict between Individualism and Social- ism. First, Religion is pledged, by its doctrine of the personal relation of every soul to God, to help on all those forces which are emphasizing and refining the sense of separate self-hood. Second, it is equally pledged, by its doctrine of human brotherhood, to further the exercise of every leadership which produces, or tends to produce, the welfare of the great total body of Society. These two propositions describe the means of the moral education of the individual and a bond of union for the race. They exhibit the necessity of preserving a balance in the working of the law of life, the law which provides for self- preservation and self-assertion, and for the intelligent subordination of these to the organization which we call Society. Such a statement runs the risk of being branded as a cowardly compromise by those who hotly demand the sanction of Religion for pure unrestricted Individualism on the one side, or for thoroughgoing Socialism upon the other. But these propositions are RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 229 simply the formulation of the law of all life in any of its developments. We find them powerfully at work in every Society of which record remains, and in undimin- ished vigor, though with varying fortunes, in the marvelous social changes which are developing under our eyes to-day. " The balance which sustains our solar system between the central force drawing all into one and the centrifugal velocity which rep- resents at every point the tendency of each body to continue its own isolated course, is a symbol of the spiritual law of society formulated by Religion, but rooted in hu- manity itself." I have dared to dwell so long upon these two propositions and their indisso- luble relations because one or the other of them is likely to be obscured according as we accept or reject that scheme of social revolution now known in a vague way as Socialism. The attitude of Religion to- wards it ought to be determined by intel- ligent acceptance of the two propositions we have named. The individualist is wrong, as against Socialism, when he stands up for unrestricted free contract and com- 230 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. petition ; the socialist is wrong, as against Individualism, when he champions the scheme that reduces the sense of independ- ent personality and dulls the incentive to fullest self-development. Before attempting to define Socialism, it is necessary to describe briefly the causes which have made it the formidable or hopeful, but always the important and in- teresting, movement of the end of the cen- tury. Apparently it is a modern growth or discovery, but really it dates back to the days when the military organization of society was slowly broken up and the pro- cess of political emancipation and enfran- chisement was inaugurated. The French Revolution is the spectacular exhibition of how far this process had extended at the close of the last century in much of Euro- pean society. It was an astounding reve- lation of the strength and extent of the forces which had been at work in the constitution of Society, a revelation which startled radicals and conservatives alike. It did not create those forces, it is doubt- ful if it appreciably strengthened them ; but, as nothing had ever done before, it RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 231 displayed them, put them on record, and bade Society henceforth remember their existence. And since the French Revo- lution an almost uninterrupted process of extending powers and privileges to classes once excluded from them has characterized modern Society. Politically, no Society in Europe, not even Germany, is to-day more than a reminiscence of what it was at the beginning of the century. Every govern- ment has yielded something to democracy, regarded either as a theoretically sound abstraction, as in France, or as an institu- tion which practically suits the purposes of Society, as in England and America.^ The power of the people has increased since 1832 with every decade, and is in- creasing still. Political rights are so uni- versal that, with no more worlds to con- quer, female suffrage becomes rational, and all the rights and privileges which the people politically have acquired are subtractions from the possessions of the privileged classes. But the extension of political rights has been accompanied by an equally significant, though not equally ^ French T?'aits. William G. Brownell. 232 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. great, admittance of the people to educa- tional, industrial, and social opportunities. The number of highly, not to say academ- ically, educated persons in Europe and America is estimated to be tenfold more to-day than fifty years ago in proportion to the population. Entrance to the univer- sities and technical schools of a high grade is more costly, but more free ; and the chance of education once open almost ex- clusively to the well-to-do or to young men who proposed to enter the sacred but not lucrative ministry, is now practically open to any one who is willing to undergo the self-denial which is and always will be involved. The public school system has been not only extended but lifted. Laws have been enacted in certain communities making attendance upon the schools com- pulsory. Equally significant is the history of industrial legislation. It is all, without a break, on the side of labor. It would be difficult — I have found it impossible — to name a single act of legislation frankly intended to regulate industrial relations which is not protective, or intended to be protective, of the rights and chances RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 233 of the workingman. All the demands of labor upon legislation have not been granted, but none of the requests of capital for relief has been incorporated into stat- ute. Any advantage capital has secured has been by indirection. The encroach- ments of the people upon the privileges of the powerful classes by the peaceful meth- ods of legislation in the last fifty years would, if exhibited in bulk, look enormous. Those of us whose interests are not directly affected, fail to appreciate the radical and wide extent of the changes in laws regu- lating the rights of employers on the one hand, and the duties of employed upon the other, which have been wrought throughout the whole industrial world; but those whose lives and fortunes are immediately touched are aware that the changes directly resulting from machinery and inventions are matched by changes in statutory regulation of the conditions under which that machinery shall be worked. And finally, the social improve- ment of the people has kept pace with their political, educational, and industrial betterment. The larger leisure, the op- 234 '^HE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. portunity for culture, the easy and safe depositing of savings, the plentifulness and cheapness of many articles of luxury, — all these have made their mark upon the general social condition. The un- stayed tendency of modern Society is to- wards an equalization of chances, to an equal distribution of rights and privileges. But this tendency which has already wrought the social changes we have briefly enumerated, this tendency which is so dis- tinct and powerful that it cannot be mis- taken, has suggested the thought that by the operation of law, enacted by the State, there may be created an absolute equality of every human being as regards means, rights, opportunities, labor, and enjoyment. It is the historical fact of an unprece- dented advance towards such an equality in the last one hundred years, without the aid of state action, except in isolated stat- utes, and not the speculative philosophy of Marx and his more recent disciples, which has made Socialism the hope and dread which it is to-day. The successful past has prophesied a still more successful future through the employment of an RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 235 agency, existing from the beginning of civilization, but never utilized. The utili- zation of the State to produce absolute equality of opportunity and means for every human being is the programme of real, thoroughgoing Socialism. I must not be criticised for giving a definition of Socialism which many socialists would repudiate, nor be accused of ignorance of the many varieties of Socialism which are vigorously urging their different pro- grammes upon our consideration. The historical fact is that Socialism, as a prin- ciple of organization for the reconstruction of society, is comparatively simple. Com- plexity arises from the chaos of methods which different schools of socialists have agreed to adopt, and from an unconscious unwillingness to accept all the logical con- sequences of the characteristic and cardi- nal principles of true Socialism. And I shall not allow myself to be betrayed into attempting the endless task of elucidating the relations of Religion to any or all of the milder and less logical forms of Social- ism, which bear to the real, the undiluted, article about the same significance that 236 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION the " domestic cat bears to the royal Ben- gal tiger." Socialism is in strict principle the proposal so to reorganize human So- ciety by state enactment that there shall be an absolute statutory equality of oppor- tunity and possession for every member of Society. That this definition is not un- just to Socialism is apparent by contrast- ing it with that of one of its foremost and frankest champions. " Socialism," he says, " denies individual private property, and affirms that Society, organized as the State, should own all wealth, direct all labor, and compel the equal distribution of all pro- duce." That we understand; it is frank, lucid, self-consistent. " When Proudhon was brought before the French magistrate in 1848 and asked, ' What is Socialism?' he answered, ' Every aspiration towards the amelioration of Society.'" That is generous, but it is not frank nor lucid nor self-consistent. It is applicable to the great total body of human struggle from the beginning, and no more describes So- cialism than it does the Salvation Army. Similarly Doctor Barry says, " Socialism, I take it, must mean the emphasizing and RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 237 cultivating to a predominant power all the socializing forces — all the forces, that is, which represent man's social nature and assert the sovereignty of human Societ}^" Apart from the fatal effect of bringing into the body of the definition the very thing to be defined as part of the definition, the word means nothing at all as regards So- cialism, because civilization from the be- ginning, and not simply in the last fifty years, has been struggling to cultivate all the forces which represent man's social nature. Social evolution, as distinguished from Socialism, began the moment two or more men, forced to live near to and de- pend upon one another, found it was not an easy matter, and set to work, uncon- sciously to be sure, to invent a modus Vivendi. The history of civilization is the record of a blind or reasoned effort to establish Society by cultivating all the forces which represent man's social na- ture. Cain and Abel, the Israelites and the Canaanites, the Puritans and the In- dians, were all involved in that effort, one as much as the other. Socialism, on the contrary, has just celebrated its sixtieth 238 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION birthday. So Doctor Westcott — whose ability is unquestioned, and of whose ser- vices in behalf of the EngHsh miners I have already spoken in a previous lecture — writes : " Socialism has been discredited by its connection with many extravagant and revolutionary schemes, but it is a term which needs to be claimed for nobler uses. It has no affinity with any forms of vio- lence or confiscation, or class selfishness or financial arrangement. I shall there- fore venture to employ it apart from its historical associations as describing a theory of life, and not only as a theory of econo- mics. In this sense Socialism is the oppo- site of Individualism, and it is by contrast with Individualism that the true charac- ter of Socialism can be described. Indi- vidualism and Socialism correspond with opposite views of humanity. Individual- ism regards humanity as made up of dis- connected or warring atoms. Socialism regards it as an organic whole, a vital unity formed by the combination of con- tributory members mutually interdepend- ent. It follows that Socialism differs from Individualism both in method and aim. RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 239 The method of Soclahsm is cooperation, the method of Individ uaHsm is competi- tion. The one regards man as working with man for a common end, the other re- gards man as working against man for private gain. The aim of Socialism is the fulfilhiient of service ; the aim of Individ- uahsm is the attainment of some personal advantage, riches, or place, or fame. So- cialism seeks such an organization of life as shall secure to every one the most com- plete development of his powers. Indi- vidualism seeks primarily the satisfaction of the particular wants of each one in the hope that the pursuit of private interest will, in the end, secure public welfare." This definition of Socialism is very beau- tiful, and if it were true would win our instant and cordial assent. But it is not Socialism — the historical fact — which Doctor Westcott eloquently champions ; it is a conception of it which he himself has made, independent of hard, undeni- able facts, in answer to a profound sympa- thy with those upon whom heaviest fall the evils of an exaggerated, unregulated Individualism. Without being aware of 240 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. it, he would extirpate the Individualism absolutely necessary to the creation of the sort of Socialism he so attractively de- scribes. Socialism does have afHnity with forms of confiscation and the most impor- tant conceivable financial arrangements. To say that a scheme which proposes to do away with final fee simple in land, and to distribute wath exact equality the total produce of the world's energy, has no affinity with confiscation or financial ar- rangements is to turn both language and thought upside down and downside up. No. Socialism, frank, philosophical, his- torical, is none of these mild, pared-down, and worked-over theories; it is the straight- forward doctrine, no private property, and state ownership, state management, and state distribution. It is w^ell, now and then, to call things by their right names. The two forms which Socialism assumes are Communism and Collectivism, the for- mer being fast superseded by the latter. Isolated communistic associations have be- come familiar to us in America, with a history beautiful like that of Brook Farm, which was w^orth all it cost in money and RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 241 disappointment, since it gave us the im- mortal " Blithedale Romance," or hideous like that of Mormonism, or fantastic like that of the Shakers ; but each of them has proved powerless as a social force, save as their members have turned away, cut themselves loose, from the very Society they longed to reconstruct. Communism is like those perfectly working models which utterly break down when realized in the massive engines they were fashioned to prove the practicableness of. The seques- tered company, knit together by homoge- neous beliefs and similarity of spirit, creat- ing its own state, so to speak, is able to exhibit the graces of Communism ; but the great, restless, heterogeneous mass of men, out in the world, long ago perceived that Socialism would never find in Commun- ism the highway which leads to equality of opportunity and possession, and they have discredited it by abandoning it to those who timidly shrink from following social- istic principle to its ultimate conclusion. Communism is equality by voluntary con- sent, erected into fact by the free action of all contributors and consequent sharers ; 242 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION but Collectivism is another thing. It means, not simply the abolition of private property by a free compact, as Commun- ism preaches, but, by capturing the gov- ernment, the imposition of itself by legis- lation upon the nation. The State is to own all material, all tools, all products, to own and direct all systems of transporta- tion and communication ; is to manage directly all financial, industrial, and agri- cultural enterprises ; and to determine every economic question which may arise ; guaranteeing to all citizens an equal share of all the benefits of every sort which may result. Collectivism rejects as final or logical, every attempt which, under the name of Socialism, seeks a readjustment of industry and administration by arbitra- tion or private compact. This readjust- ment must be incorporated into national law, and must be enough thoroughgoing not to stop short of merging the State into an organized Commonwealth, absolute owner of everything there is to own. This Socialism has its philosophers, orators, writers, and agitators, and is animated by a deep, earnest, almost prophetic convic- RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 243 tion that the regeneration of the world hangs helplessly upon its universal adop- tion. It is time to determine, if we can, what is, not what ought to be, the relation of Religion to Socialism as thus defined by itself. Religion, as we saw, stands for per- sonality, for the assertion and refinement of self-separateness and for the duty of self- development. That is cardinal in Religion, because it seeks to bring the individual, as an individual, into relation with God, to elicit personal love, personal obedience, per- sonal righteousness. It follows, therefore, that Religion is opposed to Socialism, if the effect of Socialism is to reduce w^hat is most characteristically individual and to sacrifice it upon the altar of organization. But is that the effect ? Manifestly, there is no answer to that question, because there is nowhere, and never has been out- side of books. Socialism realized. Appar- ently the effect of Socialism upon the individual is an affair of pure prophecy, always an uncertain, and frequently an unheeded, voice. But those isolated illus- trations of voluntary Communism, which 244 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. are, thus far, the only examples of concrete Socialism to which anything like a rational appeal can be made, seem to show what that effect would be. Brook Farm broke in pieces because the organization was not powerful enough to subjugate the person- ality of its members, or their individual vigor was too much for the organization. Its theoretical excellence preserved a sem- blance of success long after the impossi- bleness of such an arrangement was as clear to its founders as were the waters of the brook which gave their farm its name. They foresaw the certainty of defeat in the splendid Individualism which, in an- other frame, was to lay literature and poli- tics and philosophy under imperishable obligations. If it be urged that a com- munistic experiment, tried by men like Hawthorne, Ripley, Dana, and Dwight, was doomed to fail, it may in turn be asked whether the success of Socialism is dependent at all upon the exclusion of all strong, enterprising Individualism from the field of its operation — and Social- ism would be the first to deny so dismal a condition. The pot was shattered by RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 245 the growing oak ; oaks always break pots ; always have, always will. On the other hand, those communistic communities which have survived illustrate " a monot- onous, dull, unprogressive existence, the prosperity of peasants, with a peasant's hope, a peasant's aim." There is no great uplift for the individual He sinks down to the level of the general mediocrity. Genius is dangerous or discredited, educa- tion is reduced to a strict utilitarianism. There is no art, no poetry, no outlook, no vision, and ambition is dead. A safe, unenterprising, material prosperity of low degree is all that the oldest and most successful of our communistic communi- ties can show as the social result of their theory reduced to practice. It is depress- ing, repressing, the social influence of such a community upon the vigorous Individu- alism which produces leadership, heroism, invention, and illumination of life. There is no place for recreation, little for emo- tion, none at all for that illimitable hope- fulness w^hich is the source of almost everything that lifts life up out of the dullness which the constant attrition of 246 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. care, toil, sorrow, and loss everlastingly tends to create. This criticism of Socialism is neither theoretical nor prophetic ; it is strictly his- torical, and it shows that Socialism, so far as it destroys Individualism, is opposed by Religion. It fails to conserve the consciousness of self-separateness which is essential to salvation ; as Religion con- ceives it — having all that is best in a man at its best. If, then. Religion is on the side of a regulated and refined Indi- vidualism, it cannot be on the side of that thoroughgoing Socialism which, under the form of Collectivism, proposes by legisla- tion to reorganize society nationally upon the basis of absolute equality of opportu- nity and wealth. Notice I say " it cannot be." Organized Religion may be on its side, may possibly champion it as the formulation of the aims it has all alonor been cherishing, but organized Religion has been on the wrong side too often in the history of mankind for us ever to regard its position as necessarily infallible. The severest test to which Socialism can be sub- mitted is its ability to counteract success- RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 247 fully its powerful tendency to extirpate the spontaneity of personality. Tested on a small scale, as in the case of the Shakers, the Icarians of Iowa, the Rappists, the Oneida Community, and forgotten Flor- ence, Socialism has dismally failed, and failed simply because either too strong per- sonalities cracked and split it, or too weak personalities reduced it to a dull, dreary, repulsive, organized mediocrity. Religion is unwilling, nay, is unable, to give itself to Socialism, not at all because it does not acutely sympathize with its sincere and noble aim, but because Socialism funda- mentally contradicts a cardinal principle of Religion — the principle of the self-sepa- rateness of man as essential to his complete development Godward and manward both. That contradiction is fatal. It is an im- pregnable argument against that thorough- going Socialism with which alone we are concerned. One need not so much as refer to the vulgar identification of Socialism with atheism and agnosticism, or even with the immoralities incident to the abo- lition of the family and a community of wives, in order to show how irreconcilable 248 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. Collectivism and Christianity are. For apart from the fact that unbelief and wick- edness have no more to do with Socialism than with democracy or monarchism, and therefore will not be considered by the impartial student of its elemental princi- ple, it is enough, and more than enough, to discredit Socialism in the eyes of real Religion that it would inevitably overturn one of the eternal foundations upon which Religion solidly, eternally rests. For as the disappearance of vigorous personality is necessary to the establishment and main- tenance of Socialism, so the perpetual presence of personality is necessary to the vitality of Religion. But this is not all. You will remember that we found Religion standing for the duty of loyalty to leadership and of protec- tion to inferiority, and we now proceed to inquire how far Socialism squares with this elemental duty. I find in Socialism no place for leadership, but only for power, and power lodged in a vague organization. Society must be directed, but how can it be directed without a director? and how can there be a director when all oppor- RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 249 tunity for the rise of a director has been removed — rigidly, completely removed ? Genius becomes an impudent intrusion, a dangerous quality, in a society which looks upon the first beginnings of superiority as hostile to that absolute equality of every human being as regards opportunity and wealth, upon which Society is to be se- curely based. Genius is inequality of op- portunity, because it is competent of itself to open new paths of enterprise and to behold new visions of truth. But what must Socialism do ? Either it must fol- low genius — that is, leadership — and so give to Individualism an irregular power, that is, an exceptional opportunity, which theoretically and practically would be the end of Socialism as a principle, or it must suppress genius, so closing up the path of development and causing the vision of new truth to vanish away. One or the other. But God has so ordered the deep instincts of humanity that they can be interpreted, regulated, and refined only through leader- ship ; blessing follows obedience, safety issues from obedience ; likewise enlighten- ment, inspiration, and the vision without 2 so THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. which " the people perish." Whatever view, theologically, men may take of the Incarnation, its marvelous power is best explained by the insistence of Jesus that His disciples should follow Him, should accept Him as the true interpretation of the nature of God and the destiny of man. The Divine leadership and the human obedience to it constitute the real history of Christianity, and remain the source of its power. It was not an arbitrary crea- tion, a novel arrangement. It was the perfect exhibition of processes of human development as old as Society itself. It built itself up upon the inalienable, ele- mental qualities of human nature. It was God's great declaration that by and through obedience to leadership, — the leadership thoroughly, divinely competent, and the obedience thoroughly intelligent, — the salvation of humanity alone could be se- cured. The vigor and fruitfulness of Chris- tianity spring not from councils, agree- ments, order, organizations of any sort whatever, but from loyalty to the leader- ship of Jesus. The divine method of the education and development of the race is RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 25 1 illustrated in the heart of Africa and in the heart of America, only in America the leadership is perfect (in the incomparable words of the Bible, " The Captain of our Salvation is perfect through suffering"), and the obedience is both more rational and implicit, because largely the inherited habit of centuries of Christian faith. But at any rate, the Incarnation, which is the supreme and central power of Christianity — in- creasingly so — testifies that salvation — having all that is best in a man at its best — comes through obedience to leadership. Socialism makes no provision for anything of the kind. Absolute equality of oppor- tunity and wealth excludes it, rigorously, pitilessly excludes it, and so immense chances for development are unsuspected and unused. That is why I think Social- ism can never be the basis of human So- ciety. It contradicts a natural instinct which Religion has so marvelously devel- oped and directed, that it is essential to the existence of any sort of human associa- tion that can be called Society. To deny the right of that instinct to utter itself, to shut it completely out from the play of all 252 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. other social forces and yet look for a Society in which all that is best in man is at its best, and all that is best in Society is at its best, is like trying to obtain a product in arithmetic with a single factor. Again, Socialism makes no provision for the duty of protection which strength owes weakness. It is not foolish enough to claim that under its universal sway there shall be no weakness, no inferiority. It sees with clear eyes that men will continue to be born with flagrant inequalities of powers and gifts for fighting the battle of life. But it protests that w^hen it shall have remade the world, there will be no battle of life, because weakness shall have as good a chance as strength. But w^eak- ness needs a better chance than strength, needs it because it is weakness^ and what the Society that now exists is trying to do is to secure to weakness that better chance. Religion has developed compassion to the point of energetic, explicit demand that superiority shall stand aside that inferior- ity may secure the opportunity which, unaided, it is powerless to seize, yet pa- thetically needs. We find the modern RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 253 movement in Religion simply unintelligi- ble unless we perceive its direction toward guarding the rights of those who formally have an equal chance with the strong, yet really are on grossly unequal terms. An adjustment can never protect the weak, an arrangement can never put men upon equality of footing, no legislation under heaven can make " chances equal by mak- ing them uniform," and uniformity is all that even Socialism dreams of establishing. Inflexible uniformity of chances, with no provision for protecting the inferiority bound to exist forever, is no better than inequality of chances with a perpetual in- sistence upon, and a growing provision for, the protection of the weak against the strong. Nay, it is not so good ; for, with the expansion of Religion to perceive and meet the duties which arise out of the ap- palling contrasts of the modern world, and with the indubitable and really undoubted accumulations of compassionate justice in the heart of Society directed by economical wisdom, one by one — as fast as is, per- haps, good for us — the old injustices fall and the weak find protection and protec- 254 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. tors. If the goal toward which our social evolution is peacefully moving is ever reached, it will be found to be, not the Socialism whose programme I have tried to-night to be fair to, but something in- finitely better, a Society in which Religion, enlarged for all its new and nobler duties, shall sacredly guard the rights, refine and regulate the exaggerations, of Individual- ism, provide competent leaderships for in- telligent obediences, and exact from supe- riority a scrupulous and tender protection for every form of inferiority humanity betrays — a Society which shall exhibit throughout its complicated structure the perfect working of that social truth which St. Paul has finely phrased, " We that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak." Doubtless the criticism has already been passed upon this lecture, " Why has it not discussed Socialism in terms of its own political economy ? Why has it been silent upon the cardinal questions of private ownership of land, of private capital, of private production ? " My answer must be that I am not a political economist ; that RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 255 I confess my incompetence adequately to discuss the economic aspects of Socialism. A certain intellectual temper, unwilling to accept second-hand, and even third-hand, expositions of social economics, and un- able to find, after prolonged and careful study of the literature of Socialism, any uni- versally accepted, or at all demonstratively established, economic truths as the basis of Socialism, is inclined to test it by its conformity to those fundamental facts of humanity which have persisted in all the social constitutions that have ever been. Man himself is more than a match for his own political economy. In war it looks to- day as if man had contrived death-dealing engines so dreadful that soon no soldiers will be found to face them. And it may be that when men intelligently appreciate what Collectivism means to humanity, not merely economically, but spiritually, they will shrink back from it in reasonable alarm. For humanity by nature is in- dividual, by nature loves leadership ; by nature, w^hen enlightened by Religion, is on the side of weakness. I should be sorry to create the impres- 256 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. sion that Religion has no deep and tender sympathy with the social conditions which have given the programme of Socialism the interest it possesses for all thoughtful men. The havoc unregulated Individual- ism has caused, and is causing Society, is dreadful. It cannot long be tolerated. It is not tolerated. For all the changes in the direction of securing a more substan- tial and a more intelligent equality of chances for men of every occupation, which the last fifty years have wrought, are enor- mous. History, not contemporaneous ob- servation only, is necessary to a just appre- ciation of the distance Society has traveled along the road which leads from oppres- sion to freedom, from harsh condition to gentle condition. And the beneficent movement has not ceased ; nor will, until strength has conceded all it can with safety to itself as one of the supporting pillars of the social organization. Religion is behind it and beneath it, — Religion ex- panded to meet the duties which are rooted in all of human life, individual and corpo- rate. Religion is the inspiration of every proposition that looks towards human wel- RELIGION AND SOCIALISM. 257 fare, and has the right to claim the credit of creating all the social forces which are working for the commonweal, though she may hold aloof from many of the forms through which those forces work. And, if I may venture to quote the book which has proved a wedge to cleave, as well as a bond to unite, let me set down these words of Mr. Kidd : " It is seen that the process of social development which has been tak- ing place, and which is still in progress in our Western Civilization, is not the pro- duct of the intellect, but that the motive force behind it has its seat and origin in that fund of altruistic feeling with which our civilization is equipped, and that this altruistic development, and the deepening and softening of character which has ac- companied it, are the direct and peculiar product of the religious system on which our civilization is founded." These are wise words. The expansion of Religion precedes and creates the altruism without which every plan to raise man in the social scale is doomed to irretrievable failure. VI. ORGANIZED RELIGION. Not long ago one of our most distin- guished artists, after an unbroken absten- tion of nearly thirty years, attended divine service at one of our large churches. So unusual an event could not fail to make a deep impression upon his mind, and what he had seen and felt became, in the even- ing, the subject of his familiar, unreserved conversation. He said that the feeling which was strongest, as he watched the reverent behavior of the multitude, volun- tarily assembled, was that humanity must have some one to adore, some oi.e lifted clean above all that we know of one an- other, and holding the secrets and desti- nies of life in his intelligent and loving keeping. Then, as he noted the ordered beauty of the service, he felt how imper- ishably necessary is some form of ritual as the vehicle of this instinctive adoration. ORGANIZED RELIGION. 259 And finally, he said that to his thinking it must be true that the sermon (which very likely was no better than the average one heard from our pulpits), boldly ad- dressed to the conscience, must inevitably help to make men ashamed of their sins, and to create a wish to live nobler lives, — that, indeed, it had that effect upon him. This is not common testimony. It is the expression of a thoroughly candid and unprejudiced opinion regarding Religion, uttering itself in worship and prophecy, by one who came to Religion with a freshness untouched by custom. That spectacle of Religion set in the frame of public worship was a surprise. It was a revelation of the fact that there is a great human instinct which is to-day, as truly as in any past age, interpreting prayer and praise, and minis- try to the conscience, as a rational exercise of the human spirit. The artist rests his case confidently upon the existence in man of a love of the beau- tiful. He seldom stops to ask whether this instinctive love of beauty is rational. He never questions its reality in himself or in his fellows ; and his imagination, 26o THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. penetrating into the mysteries of life and of the world, always seeing events, ideas, and things, as pictures, sets in the sensible form of beauty what his spiritual vision has beheld. His canvas, marble, song, or symphony, is organized beauty. It is the evidence of things not seen, the proof of their reality. It is the everlasting and im- pregnable demonstration of the living love of the invisible which is an inalienable ingredient of humanity. A cracked vase dug from Greek earth, untouched for two thousand years, is worth more than a bond of the Boston and Albany Railroad, but the actuary of the Mutual Life Insurance Company cannot tell us why. The cost of a Van Dyke would build a commodious asylum for the poor, but payment for the Van Dyke, while the asylum goes unbuilt, is wholly defensible. George Peabody, Cardinal Newman, and Corot, make an im- pression upon us different from that made by Watt, Stephenson, and Mr. Edison, but it is not less distinct or deep. Education, Religion and art, which have no visible foundations, are as real in humanity, as are force, locomotion, and communication in ORGANIZED RELIGION. 261 the world. Education is the name given the process of imparting information and of disciplining the mind, the knowing and the knowing how to know. The school, the university, the library, are education organ- ized. The schools use many faulty methods, the universities contain much dead wood, the libraries hundreds of books opaque or discredited. Yet library, university, and school stand justified by all their legiti- mate children. Art is both the report, and the creative process, of beauty. The schools and museums and galleries are art organized. The art-schools suffer from the hard tyranny of precedent and convention, extolled and exalted by the practitioners of technique, frequently smoothing down a vigorous originality to the correctness of a harmless mediocrity. The museums gather by purchase sometimes, by gift many times, the work of men's hands, but not the caught visions of their imagina- tions. The big galleries easily bear this burden of inartistic possession because of their splendid wealth in solid beauty of color and form ; the little ones are fre- quently crushed by it. But both school 262 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. and museum, spite of their flagrant defects, have won recognition from both artists and people. They reinforce and refine the general love of beauty, they awaken and direct the artist's slumbering soul, and they reveal the wonders of a new heaven and a new earth in which dwelleth beauty. Their imperfectness is recognized, their failure to produce all the results which their institu- tion and the cost of their maintenance lead us to hope, is admitted ; and yet, if art is to be something more than a vague sen- timent, uttering itself in happy-go-lucky performances, and vainly struggling to ex- press contemporary ideas, these schools of training, and these museums which exhibit the creations of the past, must be main- tained. Let us grant that the art schools are frequently their own enemies, that the museums are treasuring, among the no- blest works of the human imagination, the whimsical products of an unregulated fancy, none the less they are the powerful influences and instruments of that art-in- stinct which occupies the total body of the people. Without them, no one knows, and there is no knowing, whither our aesthetic ORGANIZED RELIGION. 263 taste would drift, to what depths it would sink. They are to be valued for their pur- pose, and for their finest achievements, even at the moment when we are most acutely dissatisfied or unsatisfied with their work in specific direction. Our artists and lovers of beauty would be guilty of gross folly, and of a destructive enmity to the development of art, if they should re- nounce the schools and museums on the ground of their failure to be perfect. These commonplace observations may serve to introduce the subject of our last lecture, — the claims of organized Religion upon the allegiance of the people. Thus far in our treatment of our general subject we have had our eyes upon the Religion which is living both without and within the churches, but I own that it was with the deliberated intention of finally present- ing the cause of organized Religion that that special method of dealing with Reli- gion was adopted. Theoretically, it is easy to find Religion outside of organization, and, practically, it is not hard to find it there, if we are spiritually alert. But the plain fact is that for the most part, in the 264 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. past and in the present, Religion is to be found inside of organization. Popularly it will be always judged by the spirit of the organization through which it utters itself. Much as a considerable number of us would like to see it disowning organization, much as others of us would be glad to have it reduce its organization to the scanty and loose agreements of general society, abolishing tests and conditions of every sort, making rites and ceremonies the spontaneous expression of a momentary impulse, we are to see nothing of the kind. Indeed, I should not b,e surprised if the uneconomic, the spiritually disastrous, and the theologically impotent, result of easy sectarianism shall turn our intelligent attention towards the necessity of more compact and unified organization. The perfect Church on this earth is a dream. Reduce its creed and polity to the precise requirements of John and Jane, and Jane will have her doubts about John. The " glorious Church, not having spot or wrin- kle or any such thing," is the Church of the "first born written in heaven," not these communions, jealous, wrangling, im- ORGANIZED RELIGION, 265 perfect, which we know so well on earth. Only the thoroughgoing ecclesiast, Catho- lic or liberal, ever expects the coming of an organization which shall satisfy all the needs of all men, and is willing to go on with the unending process of adjustment, as if perfection could ever reside in the framework and not in the spirit. A mu- seum in which every picture is perfect and every marble faultless will never be. A church whose doctrinal structure is with- out flaw, and whose ritual is absolutely adequate for the general need, has never stood upon this earth, and never will. Forever we shall be pained by some out- break of narrowness, by some jar upon a sensitive ear, and by some repression of a generous ardor. Forever we shall find our separate ecclesiasticisms failing to minister fully to our deepest hunger, to our pas- sionate wish to hear the full rounded doc- trine of man and God. We all sympathize with one another when we try to set forth symmetrically the distinguishing marks of the church of our affection and find them unsatisfactory. The unended creed revi- sions, the perpetual tinkering with canons, 266 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. the frequent ritual enrichments, the divi- sions and the schisms, all bear testimony to the venerable fact that the churches, in almost everything but their spirit and their noblest aims, are regarded as either com- plete or perfect by nobody, least of all by those whose allegiance to them is most loyal. The very love we bear the churches of our choice frequently makes us sensi- tive to their defects, as the mother is most jealous of the fame of her best loved son. When one's own Communion perpetrates a folly, ignores a splendid chance, or be- trays an ungenerous spirit, the pain it gives us is far more acute and lasting than the glee of her enemies can ever be. But that pain each of us has felt in turn. The his- tory of every church that has ever stood in the community has pages which its ad- herents wish were blotted out. The his- tory which every church is making now, is, to its noblest children, far from being the history they long and pray might be written. Only stiff ecclesiasts, to whom the polished beauty of the instrument is an ample excuse for its dull edge, will deny this ; but denying it does not make it untrue. ORGANIZED RELIGION. 267 What, then, can organized ReHglon in our time, thus frankly admitted to be im- perfect, urge as valid claims upon the alle- giance of the people ? First of all, I name the substantial con- tribution organized Religion makes in the form of ministry to man's instinctive sen- sitiveness to God. It is the reality and richness of this ministry which keeps our churches alive. Without it they would wither and die. They may keep their particular creeds, perpetuate their peculiar rituals, maintain their benevolences, but unless beneath all these there throbs a deep, passionate belief in the real presence among men of the God Who made heaven and earth and sustains them by His power and love, a deep, passionate belief in His mysteriously given strength to weakness, consolation to sorrow, and illumination to bewilderment, the Church is bound to die. Churches can die, do die ; but they die only when God is no longer felt to be in them. Upon this instinctive sensitiveness to the presence of God in all human life the churches are solidly built up, and from it particular churches, interpreting in dif- 268 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION ferent ways what this sensitiveness requires for full expression, evolve their architecture, liturgies, and ceremonials. It is a reversal of the historical process to conclude that architecture and its symbolical accompa- niments create the awe and adoration of those who, beneath the cathedral's lofty roof, kneel in hushed and solemn rever- ence, when, " in the high altar's depth divine, The organ carries to their ear The accents of another sphere." For who reared the cathedral, of what idea is it the material expression, and whence came an idea so powerful that not once, but many times, in widely separated lands, it has captured the human imagination, and bent it to the joyous task of realizing in these massive structures, which sing their way in rhythmic beauty up to heaven, the hope which lived in David and Solomon, and lives with undiminished force in the breast of man to-day ? It was not a people that believed God could be imprisoned in earthly walls of stone, that builded Solo- mon's Temple ; for the King, at its dedi- cation, declared in a spirit almost modern, ORGANIZED RELIGION. 269 *' The heaven and heaven of heavens can- not contain Him, much less this house which I have builded." Not a supersti- tion, then, but a reverent and intelligent belief that the great Temple, which em- bodied in strength and beauty the convic- tion of the people that God made Himself a felt presence on this earth, would per- petually minister to that conviction, living in all the generations, built and adorned that Jewish temple. The history of every great house of God tallies exactly with that of the Temple erected by " David's son, the sad and splendid." Every church is at once a testimony to the living faith of the past, and to the living faith of the present, if it is still reverently used — faith in an unseen God ; and that faith is the utterance of the world-wide instinct which God has safely lodged in the nature of all His children. It ought to be clear — for it shines like a star in the religious firma- ment of man's long history — that the visi- ble, material temple does not create belief in an overshadowing God ; belief in a never absent God rears the temple. But once built, it stands as a witness to an 270 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. everlasting truth, when man is tempted to forget that truth, or to allow other consid- erations to obscure it. Apart from any statements of particular theological truths which a Church may urge, apart from any liturgical arrangements it may adopt as vehicles for worship, apart from any politi- cal theories of ecclesiastical government it may cling to, the primary significance of organized visible Religion is its articu- late witness to the real presence among men of a living God. It gathers up into itself the separate convictions of the com- munity, robs them of ^ any suspicion of eccentricity, challenges the superstitious accretions which tend to fasten upon them, and presents itself as the reflection, imper- fect yet real, of the universal sentiment of all humanity. To minister to, not to cre- ate, veneration and awe, are the churches maintained. To furnish opportunities for self-expansion, to interpret and direct the hunger for worship, and to keep faith from degenerating into fantastic extravagance on the one hand, and into idle dreaming upon the other, has been and is the func- tion of organized Religion from the begin- ORGANIZED RELIGION. 271 nins:. To men who believe that God is the manufactured product of human imagina- tion, hope, and fear, a Church will always wear the look of a transparent device for fooling the unreflective and timid; or, as a skillfully contrived social machinery for giving a decorous or decorative treatment to the perpetually recurring and necessary functions of organized society, it will al- ways be a thin trick performed by human hands. " I do not believe a word of it all," said one of these men at the close of a funeral service which social and personal considerations compelled him to attend, " but so long as funerals must be, and Reli- gion has charge of them, nothing could be more decorous and decent than this of^ce for publicly bidding the dead good-by." Or, as another like-minded man observed with frank candor, " I wish my children to attend a Church for the same reason I send them to dancing-school, and search out a governess from Paris to teach them the refined accent of the French tongue. Some day they will be married, or they may die, and what but the Church should take charge of the wedding or the funeral? 2/2 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. For the one, the Mayor is utterly inade- quate, spite of his authority ; and for the other, civil or chance arrangements are clumsy, cold, and bald." But these voices are eccentric, they are misrepresentative of the universal human voice when men are confronted with the great mysteries and the critical experiences of life. For that voice, responding not to the tyrannous bidding of social convention, but to the deep undertones of all healthy being, turns instinctively to the organization which speaks a blessing and declares a " reason- able and religious hope." The Church does not create that blessing, it conveys it, utters it, accents it. The Church does not claim to have sole possession of that reasonable hope, she claims only to declare it in the ears of men who cherish it as their only solution of the dread mystery of death. The " burial of an ass " is ab- horrent to humanity, because to the sane thinking of humanity the brute is other than man. That is why men who find themselves incapable of assenting to much which the churches hold and teach, in- capable likewise of cordially sympathizing ORGANIZED RELIGION, 273 with many of their methods, still give them a measure of support. They in- stinctively recognize that with all their faults of administration and teaching, the churches do consistently voice the univer- sal human conviction that God is not an intellectual abstraction, that man is more than a tree or stone, and that the felt pre- sence of a Father " too wise to be mis- taken, too honest to deceive, and too good to harm," is the richest possession man can hold. And what I claim for the churches at the end of the century is, that relaxing, but not relinquishing, the impor- tance of formal test, they are more and more ready to give a cordial welcome to all who wish to live lives inspired by the elemental truth of Religion. The tend- ency towards expansion has invaded the churches, all of them, though in different degrees, and is distinctly declared in the freer spirit, the wider hospitality, the more characteristic spirituality, which have be- gun to fashion and color all their ways. The contemporary fiction which upbraids and derides the churches for their bigotry and unhumanness is already antiquated, 274 ^^^ EXPANSION OF RELIGION. discredited, pitiably inadequate as pictures, or even amateur photographs, of the organ- ized Reh'gion of to-day. The churches are best represented by their largest-hearted, widest-minded leaders, and they are for- ever opening wider the doors that the multitudes, who are more eager to be pro- foundly moved by the felt presence of God than to define Him and dictate to Him, may enter in to worship and adore. And when this altered attitude of the churches, this splendid expansion of their spiritual purpose, is thoroughly understood and cor- dially received — as to-day it is not — we shall yet hear the old Hebraic phrase on the lips of our American churchless, but not unchurched, people, " I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go unto the house of the Lord, and He will teach us of His ways, and we will walk in His paths." I am not dismayed by the indisputable fact that this ministry of the churches to elemental faith in God is still so largely unrecognized by those who have forsaken them, because the lack of recognition is due to icrnorance of what the churches ORGANIZED RELIGION. 275 stand for to-day. And that ignorance is best explained by an abstention from the churches which began to be general five and twenty years ago, and which is, I think, at its height to-day, with signs of an ebb, however, that promises to increase and become general. I frankly confess that the churches were themselves unwit- tingly, but none the less really, respon- sible for the defections which thinned the ranks of their adherents. For the churches, by an irrationally rigid interpre- tation of their several dogmas, and by failure to place in the forefront their true purpose, and, on the other side, by their suicidal depreciation of the value of or- ganization, rites, and worship, created the impression that outwardness of ecclesias- tical behavior was of far more importance than the inward spirit of reverence and faith in God our Father. As a conse- quence, we see to-day multitudes of men and women who believe in God, who really reverence Him, and are showing forth their reverent faith in their lives, detached from the churches, because they ignorantly regard them as still absorbed in 2/6 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. the antiquated business of protecting their dogmas or mildly proclaiming that intel- lectual liberalism is spiritual salvation. And we see another thing : multitudes of people, unable completely to suppress the religious instinct, drifting helplessly into the depths of indescribable superstitions, sometimes into immoralities masked under Religion itself, while the churches they have abandoned are slowly but surely ex- panding in power of expressing adequately and wholesomely the very instinct they are so grossly or grotesquely misinterpret- ing. No patient student-of Religion, and no one who has profoundly felt the incom- parable value to life of a rational and steady belief in God, will ever accept this defection from the Church of so much ethically and spiritually noble character as final. It cannot be ; for when once it is widely perceived and cordially believed that organized Religion with all its imper- fections — the imperfections of excess and defect — is in earnest to minister, first of all, to our elemental, native desire to feel about us and above us a gracious, divine presence, to whom our perplexities are ORGANIZED RELIGION. 277 clear and by whom our sorrows are felt, the people will return to the churches with an intelligence new born. They will share with the artist, of whom I spoke at the beginning of my lecture, the convic- tion that some sort of ordered ritual is necessary as the vehicle of instinctive human adoration. I should not be sur- prised if the coming revival of Religion had its origin, not among outcasts and the frankly bad, but among the intelligent and upright. But its note will be, not repentance, but recovery, — the recovery of the lost sense of God s presence among men. The second claim I urge in behalf of organized Religion is its exercise of ethi- cal force in the life of Society. Righteous- ness is as necessary to Society as com- merce and industry, and righteousness is the product of Religion. It is incontest- able that there is a great deal of Religion outside the churches, and consequently, much of the righteousness which we find active in Society is not directly traceable to the churches. We have sufficiently emphasized this. But an impartial exam- 2/8 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION inatlon of the influence of organized Reli- gion upon Society abundantly discloses that the most continuous, steady, frank, and powerful force in ethical fields is exer- cised by the substantially uniform moral action of our churches. By a trained and disciplined instinct they are on the side of right, frequently before right is clearly defined or generally acknowledged, in- variably when the moral issue is fully dis- closed. That they have been on the wrong side in more than one great moral battle on the morning it w^as joined, is freely admitted, but before the struggle was over they had changed sides, and helped win the victory. Every experience of ethical error has been followed by both repent- ance and an increase of resolute deter- mination to exercise a more clairvoyant spiritual vision in the future. To-day the churches are more sensitive to the ethical significance, not only of their own especial action, but of all those movements and agitations in the great world of Society which tell the direction of its current, than at any time in their history. There is a wholesome dread of that sharp criticism ORGANIZED RELIGION. 279 unsparingly passed upon them by those who are hostile to their dogmas when the genius for righteousness, or the passion for it, decays, and there is a lofty, earnest, enterprising spirit resident in them, which is emphasizing the imperatives of truth, justice, and purity. Society confidently counts upon organized Religion to cham- pion every thoroughly ethical question which arises. Society invariably turns to the churches when some extraordinary issue demands an untiring, undaunted ad- vocate. You cannot name a ^in^^ frankly moral movement in any community which the Church, in some one of its many or- ganizations, is not behind. It must be frankly moral ; not some muddle of liquor legislation nor any perennially vexing ques- tion of manners as distinct from morals, but a clear ethical issue. In any such crisis the churches take the side of right- eousness, hold it, urge it, and wait for the certain victory. Their contributions, through their unbroken, tireless insistence upon the imperatives of conscience, to the moral vigor of Society is simply enormous. Without those contributions no one knows, 28o THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. and there is no knowing, whither would drift the standards and principles of soci- ety. The figure the churches make, save in those comparatively rare instances which display them set only in noble architecture and magnificent ritual, may be dull, petty, grotesque, fantastic — what you like — but it is always moral ; it is never that of the Italian marquis deploring the desecration of Good Friday by Madame Cardinal, the mother of his mistress. No ! Whatever else organized Religion is, it is the change- less friend of goodness, the changeless foe of badness. Contrast the impression and influence of the churches with the influence and im- pression, ethically, of the press, the stage, the schools, our three powerful agencies in affecting Society. As joicriials, the press almost without exception is on the side of righteousness, social and individual. It voices the best moral sentiment of the community, it values, while freely criticis- ing, contemporary Religion, denounces crime and vice, and gives generous sup- port to all our noblest endeavors to lift society up. But as newspapers — with rare ORGANIZED RELIGION. 28 1 and honored, as well as honorable, excep- tions — the press is largely on the side of what inevitably stains, vulgarizes, and finally corrupts the imagination and heart of man. To turn from the serious, re- flective, measured dignity of the editorial gauge to the unspeakable dreadfulness of too many of the news columns, is like turning from the crystal waters of a moun- tain lake to the noisome liquid of a sewer. The mystery of it, short of the stereotyped explanation that the people want it, is the " mystery of iniquity." No one seriously denies it; the press, when driven into a corner, admits it, and offers the indefensi- ble defense that a newspaper is a photo- graph of the world's daily life. On the other hand, the churches care nothing for the wishes and hankerings of the people. Not what we like, but what we ought to like, is the sole motive of their utterances and endeavors. As never before in their long history they seek to know what the world really is, boldly acquaint themselves, first hand, with the sentiments, habits, aims, and struggles of the people, but always that they may resist the evil and foster the 282 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION good. If the churches of any denomi- nation should unite to condone a clearly defined immorality, public or private, or if they should conjoin a lofty ethical teach- ing with a grossly demoralizing practice, they would instantly feel the lash of an indignant, overwhelmingly united, protest from all the other churches, which would bring them to their moral senses. The press, with all its visibly exercised power for righteousness, is every day negativing its noblest influence by its willingness to make evil attractive by dressing it in gauze and spangles that it may be interesting. So dressed it is interesting, but which of us does not know that the public con- science is thereby dulled, the public taste vulgarized, the public habit stained? The " liberty of the press " is not worth to So- ciety half so much as the vigor of the churches, for what Society needs, as it needs nothing under heaven, is the strong, uncompromising utterance of the impera- tives of the moral law. That utterance to-day proceeds from organized Religion as it proceeds from nothing else, and while it may be true that the total influence of ORGANIZED RELIGION. 283 the press Is wider and weightier than that of the churches, it is not an influence un- mixedly pure and wholesome. It stains even when it seeks to cleanse. Of the need of the playhouse to healthy life there ought to be no serious doubt. It directly and fruitfully ministers to one of the most legitimate instincts of human nature. The strain of uninterrupted toil is too great, the drain of unbroken serious- ness is too heavy, the pressure of care and anxiety is too severe, and the tendency of emotion to subside into hardness is too pronounced, for a healthy nature to forego all amusement and the hour which obliter- ates the acute consciousness of self. It is good for a man to laugh the hearty laugh which brushes the cobwebs from his brain, to feel the unusualness of a stronsf emo- tion kindled by something other than his chances of success, his danger of defeat, and to be freed, if only for a space, from the heavy weight upon his heart. And the opportunity for this the playhouse fur- nishes. How important a part the theatre plays in modern Society it is needless to describe. How wholesome much of its 284 '^HE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. influence is upon the spirit of Society we gladly admit. But there haunt its doors, like evil spirits, the subtle temptations to mino^le with its innocent diversions and with its representation of life's noblest pas- sions, the vulgar spectacle that debases, the clever, brilliant wickedness that destroys the bloom of innocence and introduces sweet poison into the soul. The playhouse is not set for the ethical health of Society ; it is set for its entertainment. The exi- gence of success too frequently drafts the unwholesomeness of a bad excitement, the portrayal of a false situation, into the ser- vice of diversion, and evil — evil that lives and grows and obsesses — is done the soul, though at the moment the soul is uncon- scious of it, as the man cut by the sharp stone in the tumbling waters knows he is wounded only when his skin is dry and the gash begins to throb. But the churches, which in the last twenty years have intro- duced many an attraction which the sober, perhaps sombre, judgment of our elders would repudiate, have never — save in in- stances too insignificant to be worthy of notice — lowered the standards of right- ORGANIZED RELIGION. 285 eousness. Their aim has been openly ethical. Diversion for the sake of moral education has been, and is, the principle which is intended to control the aim of every enterprise, not specifically religious, which the churches have organized and maintained. Nothing so visibly marks the expansion of Religion, as illustrated in the life of the churches, as the extension of its interest and action into scores of fields once abandoned to purely secular associa- tions or to the chances of circumstance. But nothing more successfully proves how competent Religion is to cover all these fields and to reap on them harvests of good living, than its evident power to be Religion when apparently engaged in the business of entertainment. Whoever, in his thought, elevates the moral influence of the stage to the height of that of the churches, is ignorant of either the theatre or the Church, or both. And yet scores of us, who see clearly that only righteous- ness exalteth a nation and keeps Society sweet and true, are expending upon the playhouse ten times the amount they de- vote to the Church, unconscious, appar- 286 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. ently, that the producer of righteousness makes the dispenser of diversion a safe person in the community. The churches are the doors which open into righteous- ness; the theatres are the beautiful gate- ways into wholesome recreation, but too frequently also into ways of harm and sin and shame. The primary purpose of the school is to impart knowledge and discipline powers. Their wards are to be informed, mentally trained, and physically developed. It would be too sw^eeping to affirm that Religion and morals have been banished from our schools. It would be more exact to say that ecclesiasticism, and the ethics which are grounded in ecclesiasticism, have dis- appeared from the formal curriculum of all state schools and of many private schools as well. But there is still an appreciable insistence in our public education upon cardinal morality, and a clear recognition that character is the only guarantee of the safe possession of knowledge. The ex- pansion of Religion has permeated to a considerable degree the atmosphere of our public schools. They are neither wholly ORGANIZED RELIGION. 287 irreligious nor unmoral. The character of those in whose care they are forbids it. Yet the nature and extent of ethical teach- ings in them are satisfactory to no one who is alive to the fact that what is done for children in developing, directing, and vitalizing moral force, is worth more than is done for them in the after years of the longest life. The ethical bent of our boys and girls is given before they are fifteen. " Give me your boy until he is twelve," said the shrewd ecclesiastic, " and you may have him after that." And he was thinking, not alone of the boy's future ecclesiastical allegiance, but of his moral fibre as well. This unsatisfactory condition of the ethical influences in public education explains the disposition to maintain parochial and Church schools, which has developed mar- velously in the last quarter of a century. Those whose heated imaginations see in these schools a covert attack upon the pub- lic system of education and, finally, upon our liberties, are the victims of an irrational fear. For it is the conviction that for the healthy development of sound morals there must be a distinct religious education, and 288 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. that a distinct religious education in our public schools is impossible, which has led so many people to make the costly sacrifices necessary to maintain parochial schools, and elicited the generosity which has founded other schools under denomi- national control. After making full allow- ance for the patrician spirit which depre- ciates the public schools and exalts private institutions for selected youth, there re- mains a sturdy belief among thousands of our most thoughtful citizens that educa- tion will never be what it ought until some plan is evolved which shall secure to the future generations of America an adequate ethical training based upon a rational reli- gious belief. And we shall see in the future an extension of private and denomi- national schools, in which such training can be and is given, unless we can success- fully solve the momentous question of how to make our public schools thoroughly reli- gious without making them offensively sectarian. That unsolved question em- phasizes the importance and value of the churches, which are free to teach their several conceptions of Religion which, ORGANIZED RELIGION. 289 though issuing in conflicting theological and ecclesiastical opinions, produce a mo- rality that is identical. Theology may be denominational ; morality is undenomi- national, and it is morality for which we struggle. The claim of the churches upon an intelligent, ethically earnest Society is stronger to-day than ever, because Society recognizes as never before how indissolu- ble are social righteousness and social prosperity, and because the schools have been deprived of an adequate provision for religious teaching. " You teach too much arithmetic," said the Japanese traveler at the close of his inspection of one of our typical public schools ; " you teach too much arithmetic. In Japan we teach our boys manners, then we teach them morals, after that we teach them arithmetic ; for arithmetic, without manners and morals, makes men sordid." Perhaps we do not have too much arithmetic ; it is certain we have too little of manners and morals. In the third place, organized Religion urges, as a valid claim upon the allegiance of Society, that it is distinctly on the side of weakness, ignorance, and innocence. 290 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. It is not an exaggeration to assert that at the end of the century we find the great agencies for the protection of the unfortu- nate and helpless in Society, not most fre- quently in the direct control of the churches, but in unecclesiastical hands. The state creates and maintains these agencies more adequately every decade, and non-ecclesias- tical corporations relieve the churches of what once was wholly in their hands. I should repeat much of my first lecture if I should describe the causes of this detach- ment, from the Church to state and secular corporations, of the work of relief and care. To-night I wish to emphasize the fact that as from the churches in the past proceeded the influence which penetrated and intenerated the public conscience and the public heart, so to-day the strength of Society's compassion, generosity, and gen- tleness is most largely recruited from the life of the churches. They are educating thousands in the grace of personal sympa- thy with suffering, in the art of intelligent helpfulness, in the doctrine that possession of any sort — wealth, health, brains, skill, wisdom, — is a stewardship ; they are per- ORGANIZED RELIGION, 29 1 petually and persuasively urging that to bear one another's burdens is the fulfill- ment of the law of Christ, and ought therefore to be the fulfillment of the law of humanity. Out from the churches, as a consequence, flows a beautiful and boun- tiful stream of compassionate generosity towards every institution which seeks to lift weakness into strength, and to protect innocence from the snares laid in its path. Out from the churches comes the divine hopefulness which, all through Society, keeps men and women from dismay and desertion when the tides of misery and wickedness roll in black, cold, and strong. Out from the churches issues the warm pity for the clumsy, the dull, the unskilled, who have only a capacity for suffering, but whose claim upon grace, wit, and skill, must not go unheeded. And up to the churches confidently goes every appeal in behalf of helplessness and ignorance and want. The black man with his pathetic plea for the creation of a chance to repair the ravages of two hundred years of debas- ing slavery, and of thirty years of riotous freedom; the blind crying for light and 292 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. the deaf mutely asking for the sight that must do duty for sound ; the incurable, the maimed, the poor, the little children starved and stunted in their cradles, the struggling schools and colleges of the South and West, the whole world's want and woe — all are there, looking to the churches for a help that is never refused. It is a marvelous sight, a stupendous fact. That these churches which can be so nar- row, so intolerant, so theologically stub- born, and so ecclesiastically unyielding, can yet be fountains of blessing and hope to Society, is indisputable proof of a claim upon the allegiance of men which cannot rationally be refused. For Society needs to feel through all her frame the beating of a warm heart as well as to possess a clear head. Many of our finest social achievements in modern times have been secured to us by the insight of compassion and the civic illumination of a profound sympathy with those whom the harsh con- ditions of congenital defects, of accident, disease, and social maladministration have heavily handicapped in the race of life. The man who cherishes the belief that ORGANIZED RELIGION. 293 justice is enough for the success of social evolution, is not only leaning upon a reed, he is clinging to a theory which Society is fast casting aside as discredited by history, because Society, as I have tried to show, is consciously and unconsciously energized by the Religion which speaks on this wise : " None of us liveth unto himself and no man dieth unto himself ; for whether one member suffers, all the mem- bers suffer with it." And, because the churches are the chief, though not the only, producers of the compassionate sympathy which works miracles of social healing and social progress, no one, who believes that Society ought to be, and will be, something better and more beautiful than a chaos of warring individuals, classes, and aims, will refuse to give these imper- fect, unsatisfactory, yet always spiritually fruitful, organizations called churches, the allegiance which their demonstrated value to Society warrants them to claim. " I have no authority to speak for the churches, but I think that one who care- fully and candidly studies the history of their spirit as illustrated in the concrete 294 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. working of their several organizations, and as declared in their more enlightened mod- ern treatment of their dogmas, is com- petent to assert that their conception of the meaning, value, and purpose of Reli- gion has so splendidly expanded that their future is bound to be more beneficent than their past. They will never be ex- empt from a legitimate criticism, never incorporate into the body of their beliefs all the truth men hold, never banish from their symbols everything other men long since rejected, never be ready always to acknowledge that sincerity of motive and nobleness of aim do not guarantee wisdom of method, never be emancipated com- pletely from the sentiment which cherishes the past because it is venerable and dear, never be stripped bare of the tendency to identify an enthusiasm for novelty with devotion to the truth ; but forever and forever, because in them reside a profound faith in the presence of God, a puissant force of righteousness, and a divine com- passion, they will be the great, visible, practical instruments for bringing all that is best in man and Society to its best, ORGANIZED RELIGION. 295 which we have called salvation, and which is the sole and splendid purpose for which Religion exists. The expansion of Reli- gion is a fact of history — like the expan- sion of chemistry, pyschology, transporta- tion — what you like — as the civilizations of Europe and America attest ; and when this expansion is recognized, its profound significance appreciated, those of us who have either complacently tolerated organ- ized Religion, or half sadly, half scornfully deserted it, will begin, or renew, our alle- giance to it with a more Intelligent devo- tion and a chastened spirit. We have heard much in these last eager years of the duty of Religion towards the " lapsed masses " of our great cities, the " pagans " of our rural communities. The mission to these is energetically prosecuted with varying results. The churches have awakened to the peril to Society of enor- mous aggregations of people who have practically abandoned organized Religion. One prays that they may never relax their heroic efforts, and that every organization which seeks to draw men into the cleans- ing currents of civic righteousness and rell- 296 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. gious faith may never die ; but I think the most significant portent in the religious firmament to-day is the abstention from organized Religion of so many people in whom culture, education, and refinement are in admirable evidence, and to whom righteousness enough for social safety is dear. Organized Religion will never be content — ought not to be — with the allegiance of those who are the weakest members of Society; she longs for the support and loyalty of her best and noblest sons. She must have them if she would wield her strongest influence. She cannot be the power she ought to be if those to whom she has the best right to appeal shall ignore her call. The churches' work for men, in this world, ought to be warrant enough for the sympathetic, energetic support of those who cannot accept all the articles of her creeds, or be helped by the use of all her provisions for worship. Let the churches stand convicted of im- perfection, like our government, our art, our education, our society, but let them also be generously recognized as the chief producers of the human faith, the civic ORGANIZED RELIGION. 297 righteousness, and the social compassion, which are the sunhght of our civiUzation. It is not chivalry to allow the great moral and social forces of our time to struggle against the indifference to them which so much of our culture and educated compe- tence show ; it is not generous, it is not just, if men see, as in these lectures I have tried to set forth, that Religion has out- grown her exclusive devotion to ecclesias- ticism and dogma, and has expanded to the human conditions which confront her on every side — eager, with a divine eager- ness, to achieve the salvation of humanity, that salvation which is having all that is best in a man at its best, and which has been the inspiration of all I have endeav- ored to make clear as a rational interpre- tation of our times. And if this modest treatment of Reli- gion as the Great Force of Modern Life, as the Creator of a New Anthropology, as the Unfailing Source of Righteousness, as the Hope of Industrialism, as the Reconcilia- tion of Individualism and Socialism, and finally, as Uttering Itself Mainly in our !j Several Churches, has been of help to any 298 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION. one, I may heartily thank God for the priv- ilege of standing here to speak to you — to you intelligent believers in God and in the Society which, through belief in God, is one day to realize itself in beautiful per- fection upon our earth. BOOKS OF RELIGION, Charles Carroll Everett. The Gospel of Paul. Crown 8vo, ^1.50. An exceedingly valuable addition to the theological literature of the day. — The Christian Life (London). John Fiske. The Destiny of Man, viewed in the Light of his Origin. i6mo, gilt top, $1.00. The Idea of God, as affected by Modern Know- ledge. i6mo, gilt top, $1.00. 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