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THE COMING GREED 
 
 BY 
 
 PARLEY PAUL WOMER 
 
 Author of "The Relation of Healing to Law, 
 ** A Valid Religion for the Times'* 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 SHERMAN, FRENCH ^ COMPANY 
 
 1911 
 

 .-"^s 
 
 Si" 
 
 "V. 
 
 Copyright, 1910 
 Sherman, French & Company 
 
TO THE 
 DANFORTH CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH 
 
 OF SYRACUSE, NEW YORK 
 IN APPRECIATION OF THE FRIENDSHIPS 
 THAT WERE MADE DURING FOUR 
 YEARS OF PASTORAL SERVICE 
 
 "Follow Light, and do the right — for man can 
 
 half control his doom — 
 Till you find the deathless Angel seated in the 
 
 vacant tomb. 
 Forward let the stormy moment fly and mingle 
 
 with the Past. 
 I that loathed have come to love Him. Love 
 
 will conquer at the last.*' 
 
 .'?04i .57 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The question as to whether Christianity 
 should be considered primarily a system of 
 doctrine, or a way of life, is of fundamental 
 importance. For centuries the former idea has 
 overwhelmingly predominated. Life has been 
 subordinated to dogma. The effort of the 
 church has been to crowd the eternal truths 
 of the Gospel into narrow and unelastic creedal 
 statements, and to make assent to these the 
 condition of its fellowship. This is the dog- 
 matic ideal of church life which has become 
 so strongly intrenched in the thinking of many 
 Christians that it seems to them like treachery 
 to the cause of Christ even to call it into 
 question. 
 
 One of the most significant features of the 
 present religious situation is the growing dis- 
 content with the dogmatic ideal of church life. 
 The feeling is wide spread that the creeds, 
 which in the historic orthodox churches stand 
 for Christianity, are in their present form 
 the survival of a thought world which has been 
 outgrown, and that they are consequently a 
 hinderance to faith rather than its bulwark. 
 
 The writer profoundly sympathizes with 
 this feeling. He believes that the dogmatic 
 ideal has been a source of great hurt to the 
 church, that it has been the chief cause of 
 our endless divisions, that sectarianism is to 
 
PREFACE 
 
 a very great extent its product, and that it 
 will have to be abandoned before there can be 
 that unity of believers that Jesus had in mind 
 when He prayed that the disciples might be 
 one with Him even as He and the Father are 
 one. 
 
 To many churches which have inherited 
 complex and elaborate creeds, the difficulty 
 seems to lie in their complexity and elaborate- 
 ness, and hence the movement in not a few 
 cases that looks toward reduction and simpli- 
 fication. However, it is not merely the simpli- 
 fication of the dogmatic ideal as a basis of 
 church life that is needed, but its absolute sur- 
 render. It must be remembered that the 
 church began without the dogmatic formulas 
 and it has no more need of them now than 
 it had in the beginning. 
 
 The ide^ of Christianity as a way of life, 
 the spirit of which is love, rather than as 
 a system of theological and philosophic doc- 
 trine, is one that appeals to the writer with 
 great force, and in the pages which follow 
 an effort has been made to set forth this idea 
 as the basis of a true church life. The move- 
 ment for Christian unity has begun, to the 
 careful observer it is evident that it is daily 
 gathering force, and it seems to the writer 
 that it is along the lines here indicated that 
 unity is destined to be realized. It will be 
 noted that the distinguishing feature of the 
 
PREFACE 
 
 coming creed is its emphasis upon unity of 
 spirit rather than intellectual statement or form. 
 
 Parley P. Womer. 
 
 Park Congregational Church, 
 St. Paul, Nov. 15, 1910. 
 
I 
 
 THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A 
 CHURCH AND A SECT 
 
With all lowliness and meekness, with long 
 suffering, forbearing one another in love; giving 
 diligence to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond 
 of peace . " — Paul . 
 
 ** Part as we may with what once was de- 
 manded by the Church, there is something — and 
 that too, the very holiest influence of life — ^that 
 is still with us; and this residuary truth, this 
 Divine Spirit, which emerges from the mixed in- 
 heritance of Christendom, when all that is per- 
 ishable has been discharged, does but own its 
 descent, and look up with fitting reverence to its 
 fountain head, when it claims the name of Chris- 
 tian . " — Martineau. 
 
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A 
 CHURCH AND A SECT 
 
 That there is 'an important and far-reach- 
 ing distinction to be drawn between a church 
 and a sect has not hitherto received proper 
 recognition. Rehgious sects of every descrip- 
 tion have flourished in our midst and each has 
 called itself a church. In this country alone, 
 according to a recent estimate, there are 
 one hundred and forty different branches 
 of the church, or denominations, most of which 
 have more or less the character of a sect. So 
 little insight, in fact, has characterized our 
 thinking in this respect that sectarianism has 
 been generally accepted as a substitute for 
 a church life. 
 
 The time is manifestly ripe for a rediscus- 
 sion of this whole subject. To discerning 
 minds it is evident that sectarianism has nearly 
 run its course. There are many indications 
 both within and without the various religious 
 bodies which clearly show that a church life 
 is slowly but surely rising to take the place 
 of the sects. 
 
 Broadly speaking, the purpose of the church 
 is to give organized expression to the religious 
 life that has its source in the Christian revela- 
 tion. The character of the church, therefore, 
 is necessarily determined by the character of 
 
 1 
 
g'*' ' 'tlfiffi* COMING CREED 
 
 the revelation in which it originates. So far 
 as any religious body shares the scope and 
 aims of the Christian revelation and gives 
 expression to its essential spirit it may be 
 said to be a church. When, however, the spirit 
 of Christ is narrowed down, when conditions 
 of membership are imposed by a religious 
 organization that limit the manifest scope and 
 intentions of Jesus, it has the character of 
 a sect. 
 
 The most impressive thing about the religion 
 of Jesus is its note of universality. There is 
 nothing about it that is merely local. It be- 
 longs to no particular time, place, or people, 
 because it belongs to all times, places, and 
 peoples. It bursts through all barriers and 
 limitations. It divests itself of all temporal 
 and local color. It can neither be said to be 
 ancient nor modem. It is not Greek, Jewish, 
 Galilean, Asiatic or European. It strikes 
 the note of universality, by adapting itself to 
 every sort of environment without losing its 
 essential character; by clothing itself with the 
 peculiar institutions, philosophies, customs and 
 points of view that have characterized the 
 different ages to which it has been addressed, 
 without becoming identified with any of these; 
 and by speaking alike to the heart of the king 
 and the servant, the philosopher and the 
 peasant, the saint and the sinner, and yet al- 
 ways remaining essentially the same in spirit. 
 
CHURCH AND SECT 3 
 
 The Christian religion is not a cult, a phi- 
 losphy, a ritual, nor a theology; it is a spirit 
 of life. As such it has to adopt the garb of 
 every age and people to which it speaks, but 
 in its real and underlying character, it is al- 
 ways different from the garb it wears. Other- 
 wise it would not be the universal religion. 
 
 Turning to almost any part of the message 
 of Jesus, we are impressed with the idea of 
 comprehensiveness. Take, for example. His 
 habitual representation of God as Father, and 
 what other conception of the Deity is so 
 wonderfully suited to the needs of all classes 
 and conditions of men? Fatherhood is uni- 
 versal, and although not always awakening the 
 same tender and reverent feelings the concep- 
 tion, nevertheless, is sufficiently understood to 
 bring God within the angle of each man's vision 
 and to offer a proper basis for a worthy inter- 
 pretation of His character. Take also the 
 ideas of sin and forgiveness and note how 
 they are presented by Jesus in the terms of 
 universal experience. The sublime picture 
 drawn with such skillful touch in the parable 
 of the prodigal spoke not only to the heart 
 of the Jew of Palestine, who lived in the age 
 of Jesus, but it speaks to the sinner and 
 the outcast of every race and age. Take 
 Christ's word about sympathy and service as 
 presented in the story of the good Samaritan, 
 
4 THE COMING CREED 
 
 about purity of heart, about relief from weari- 
 ness, worry and care, about the duty and 
 the joy of self-sacrifice, or about the endless 
 life, and how marvelously they all appeal to 
 the instincts and needs of the common heart! 
 These elements and principles of Christ's 
 teaching, selected merely at random, make it 
 evident to all who will stop to reflect upon 
 them that the Christian message in its essential 
 and underlying character is universal. As 
 the right key fits all the wards of the most 
 complicated lock, so does the Gospel of Jesus 
 satisfy all the manifold needs of human nature. 
 To all alike He says, — " Come unto Me, all ye 
 that labor and are heavy laden and I will 
 give you rest. Take My yoke upon you, and 
 learn of Me ; for I am meek and lowly in heart ; 
 and ye shall find rest unto your souls." The 
 marvel of it is that His yoke or His way of 
 life is suited to all, irrespective of tempera- 
 ment, point of view, race or class. 
 
 Have the followers of Jesus maintained the 
 catholicity of His spirit? It is the failure of 
 organized religion at this point that accounts 
 for the sects. That which Christ made broad 
 enough to fit all men, has frequently been 
 narrowed down to fit a particular kind of men. 
 Some interpretation of His message that is 
 local, racial, limited, has been seized upon, 
 exalted and regarded as fundamental. The 
 
CHURCH AND SECT 6 
 
 outer garb has been thought of more import- 
 ance than the spirit within. There has been 
 failure to realize that the religion of Jesus 
 may express itself in a thousand different 
 forms, and that "just as the roof of some 
 splendid mansion unites a hundred rooms of 
 different size and shape, and just as the one 
 blue sky overarches and unites mountains, 
 pastures, and vineyards, so the spirit of Jesus 
 should unite disciples of every temperament, 
 shade of belief, and point of view." 
 
 Sectarianism is of many different forms and 
 types. In the case of not a few religious 
 bodies at the present time it is manifestly that 
 of an antiquated and impossible creed. Con- 
 ceptions of God and man, and ideas of the 
 life in God that are repellent to the educated 
 mind, are made the conditions of fellowship, 
 and views of nature and interpretations of 
 history that are plainly opposed to the find- 
 ings of science are insisted upon. Of the one 
 hundred and forty different branches of the 
 church that exist in this country alone, by 
 far the larger number, including many of the 
 leading bodies, are hampered by a sectarianism 
 of this kind. While rendering valuable service 
 to society, and while thoroughly Christian in 
 many ways, their usefulness is limited and they 
 are shut out from the character of a true 
 church by an antiquated and impossible creed. 
 
6 THE COMING CREED 
 
 In certain cases it is insistance upon the 
 value of the literal observance of certain 
 symbolic rites, and the failure to exalt the 
 inner spirit above the outer form that makes 
 the condition wherein the sectarianism lies. In 
 still other cases it is the over emphasis of a 
 peculiar phase of emotional experience, the 
 constant iteration of a single issue to the exclu- 
 sion of other equally important claims, a 
 narrow range of emotional sympathies, or an 
 inability to appreciate the value of other points 
 of view, that makes of this or that religious 
 body a sect. It may be said, indeed, that any 
 branch of the church becomes a sect when as 
 a condition of fellowship it demands assent to 
 a dogmatic statement, no matter what the form, 
 or insists upon any peculiarity of practice, 
 or upon the observance of any symbolic rite 
 and thereby excludes from membership other 
 equally earnest people who desire to follow 
 Christ, and who are loyal to His spirit. 
 
 The true church life that is slowly but surely 
 rising up to take the place of the sects will 
 be as comprehensive as the spirit of Christ. It 
 will conserve the good of all the sects while 
 avoiding the limitations of each. It will have 
 the intellectual freedom of Unitarianism with- 
 out its emotional poverty; the large hopeful- 
 ness of Universalism without its insistance 
 upon a single issue to the exclusion of other 
 
CHURCH AND SECT 7 
 
 equally important claims; the warmth and 
 devotion of Methodism without its disposition 
 to over-emphasize a peculiar phase of emo- 
 tional experience; the earnest zeal of the 
 Baptists without their tendency to subordinate 
 the Christian spirit to the practice of a sym- 
 bolic rite; the calm dignity of Presbyterianism 
 without its inability to unbend; the democratic 
 idea of Congregationalism without the care- 
 free methods and the impotence to which it so 
 often leads ; the wonderful sagacity of Roman 
 Catholicism without its disposition to ignore 
 the intellectual claims ; and the sweet mysticism 
 of Quakerism without its extreme distrust of 
 all outward forms. In short, the good of all 
 while avoiding the limitations of each. 
 
 In the coming Church there will still be 
 variety of individual preference and taste, and 
 men will be left free to exercise the same. 
 Christ gave no teaching in regard to millinery. 
 He leaves each teacher to decide for himself 
 whether he shall wear a long white robe or 
 a short black one. He chose water as a symbol 
 of the cleansing grace of God, but He ex- 
 pressed no preference as to whether men should 
 be baptized with much water or with little. If 
 a man is benefited by fasting Friday and feast- 
 ing Saturday, or if he is helped by the tink- 
 ling of bells and the burning of incense, and 
 finds that the perfumed clouds passing through 
 
8 THE COMING CREED 
 
 the open windows and rising heavenward have 
 become chariots that lift his aspirations to 
 the skies, then such an one is left free to bum 
 his incense or to tinkle his bells. What Christ 
 insists upon is that his disciples shall keep 
 the " unity of the spirit in the bond of peace." 
 It may be said in brief that the belief of 
 the coming church will be an instinct and a 
 spirit of life and not merely a definition. Its 
 fellowship will be that of faith, love and service. 
 Its compulsion will be a judgment faculty 
 in each man's soul, and not a dogma or a 
 system. It will exist for help and cheer and 
 not for external authority. Its forces will be 
 precisely those that filled the first disciples, 
 the forces of a great love, and an immortal 
 hope. Its level will be the high possibilities 
 of humanity. Its progress will be measured 
 by that of the race. It will include all who 
 seek truth and yearn for goodness, and it will 
 shut out none except those who shut them- 
 selves out from the truth they cannot see and 
 the love they cannot feel. 
 
n 
 
 THE MORAL QUALITY OF BELIEF 
 
" He that believeth and is baptized shall be 
 saved, but he that disbelieveth shall be con- 
 
 i^^^- " -Jesus. 
 
 " When we have put our belief into our char- 
 acter, into our deed of kindness, into our hero 
 sacrifice, there will be no room for arguing. And 
 what of our creed cannot be expressed in these 
 ways, what of it remains as mere words untran- 
 slatable into things, may well be left out. '* 
 
 — J. Brierly. 
 
THE MORAL QUALITY OF BELIEF 
 
 There can be no doubt that Jesus put be- 
 lief in the very forefront of His teaching. He 
 began His ministry by urging men to believe, 
 and in the upper room on the last night of 
 His earthly life, the greatest word on His lips 
 was the word " believe." " These things have 
 I said unto you that you may believe." He 
 was always looking for belief and there was 
 no question that He asked with so much 
 earnestness as the question, "Do you believe.'^" 
 When he found belief in men He was greatly 
 exalted and broke forth into exlaimations of 
 joy, and on the other hand He was greatly 
 saddened and hindered by the presence of unbe- 
 lief. The New Testament statement relative 
 to His ministry in Nazareth, that " He did 
 not many works there because of their unbe- 
 lief," is a pathetic revelation of his dependence 
 upon an atmosphere of sympathy and respon- 
 siveness, and when it was wanting His efforts 
 were chilled and paralyzed. It was apparently 
 the thought of Jesus that through belief man 
 becomes possessed of a new principle of life 
 in virtue of which he enters on a higher scale 
 of being. He therefore entrusted to His 
 disciples the principle of belief as the great 
 secret that He had come to communicate, and 
 He sent them forth into all the world to declare 
 11 
 
12 THE COMING CREED 
 
 the message that "he that believeth shall be 
 saved, and he that believeth not shall be con- 
 demned." 
 
 Manifestly the first question to be asked is 
 what Jesus meant by the use of this term, and 
 this question is all the more urgent because 
 of the evident confusion of many in respect to 
 this great matter. That belief of some sort 
 is all important, that it is the watchword of 
 true religion, that it is the root of all Christian 
 devotion and heroism, the followers of Christ 
 are universally agreed, but when it comes to 
 the question of what belief is they are by no 
 means so clear. Other generations, in deal- 
 ing with this conception were no less at sea 
 than we are, and the result of their uncertainty 
 as to what it means to believe has been to be- 
 queath us an inheritance of misconceptions that 
 constitutes, perhaps the chief difficulty of our 
 problem. 
 
 A great source of trouble has been an in- 
 discriminate mixing together of matters which 
 are scientific and historical with those which 
 are purely moral and spiritual, and the failure 
 to realize that it is in reference to the latter 
 that Christ used the word " believe." The 
 unfortunate outcome of this lack of discrimina- 
 tion has been that Christian belief has become 
 identified in many minds with views of nature 
 and history, which belong to an immature and 
 
MORAL QUALITY OF BELIEF 13 
 
 uncritical period of our development, and 
 which have necessarily been discredited with 
 the advance of the scientific spirit. 
 
 It was the general failure at this point, until 
 within comparatively recent years that opened 
 the way for such attacks upon the Christian 
 faith as were made by men like Thomas Paine, 
 Robert IngersoU and William Draper, who 
 spread the idea far and wide that belief 
 in the Christian sense is synonymous with 
 credulity, that it will not bear the light, that 
 if men are intelligent they cannot be devout, 
 and that if they are devout they cannot be 
 intelligent. It was this failure that opened 
 the way also for such attacks as were made 
 by Mr. Huxley, who selected certain miracles 
 from the Bible, held them up to ridicule and 
 sought to make them the test of the credibility 
 of Christianity, and as were made more re- 
 cently by Mr. Cotter Morrison, an English 
 writer, who selected from the book of Genesis 
 the story of the fall, and then declared that 
 man has not fallen but risen, and that being 
 so, the whole theory of redemption is disproved. 
 
 That such attacks upon the Christian faith 
 have helped to create a prejudice against it, 
 that greatly hinders the advance of essential 
 Christianity can hardly be called into question, 
 and the fact that very many Christians are 
 still confusing what is scientific and historical 
 
14 THE COMING CREED 
 
 with what is purely moral and spiritual, and 
 insisting in the name of belief upon views of 
 nature and history which have been thoroughly 
 discredited and disproved, is making it exceed- 
 ingly difficult in many quarters to remove that 
 prejudice. " We need for our time to have 
 it made very clear what belief is and what it 
 is not, to note the different forms of it and 
 their value, and the mistaken conceptions of 
 it that have come to us from other years." 
 
 Turning to the teaching of Jesus it becomes 
 evident upon the most casual inquiry that His 
 insistence upon belief was by no means an ap- 
 peal against reason. On the contrary the whole 
 method of Jesus, as shown by the parables, the 
 sermon on the mount, and all His recorded ut- 
 terances, makes it clear that belief as conceived 
 by Jesus is not the suppression of the reason, 
 but its highest and divinest expression. Neither 
 was His summons to believe an appeal against 
 the truths of science and history. It is not, in- 
 deed, in this sphere that the emphasis of his 
 thought lies. Whether the fall of man was a fall 
 up or a fall down, whether the miracles cited by 
 Mr. Huxley ever really occurred or whether 
 they did not occur, whether certain books of 
 the Bible are of a single or a composite author- 
 ship, and whether they are to be regarded as 
 a fact or interpreted as fiction is for scientific 
 research, and not for religious faith to decide. 
 
MORAL QUALITY OF BELIEF 15 
 
 Whatever the ultimate verdict of science upon 
 the matters belonging to its own sphere may 
 be, it will have to be accepted as final, and 
 what we need to realize is that it may be 
 accepted with entire confidence that it will not 
 jeopardize the real interests, ideals and aims 
 of faith. 
 
 The simple fact is that Jesus made His 
 appeal to the moral and spiritual intuitions 
 of men, and to the truth that is evident to 
 the moral sense. The whole method of his 
 teaching shows this. " The silences and omis- 
 sions of Jesus," as some one has put it, " are 
 truly remarkable," He never attempts to 
 prove the existence of God, but simply takes 
 God for granted. He offers no argument to 
 show the reality of the soul, the unseen 
 spiritual world, or the extension of human 
 destiny beyond. He drew the picture of a 
 publican at prayer, and that was His way of 
 declaring the existence of the soul. He drew 
 a picture of Dives and Lazarus and that was 
 His way of declaring the immortal destinies of 
 men, and their relation to an unseen world. 
 Why did he not offer arguments in order to 
 reinforce these great convictions? It was be- 
 cause he realized that no argument would give 
 them cogency. They are witnessed to by the 
 moral and spiritual intuitions of the race, and 
 it was to this witness that Jesus made His 
 appeal. 
 
16 THE COMING CREED 
 
 It is in this light that we are able to see 
 what Jesus meant by belief. To His mind 
 it was fidelity to the moral and spiritual intui- 
 tions, and to the truth that is evident to the 
 moral sense, and unbelief to Him was faithless- 
 ness. By His own fidelity He discovered the 
 path that leads to the heart of God and to 
 the assurance of immortal worth. Having 
 learned for Himself the secret of the gentle, 
 generous, confident, and joyous life. He sum- 
 moned every one to know and to share it with 
 Him. It was not simply a venture of thought 
 that He asked, but a venture of conduct, it 
 was the choice and the direction of the life 
 in a certain way. Merely to stand in the 
 presence of Christ's goodness, and to think 
 of His ideals is to be convinced of their ever- 
 lasting worth, and to trust this conviction and 
 to act upon it is what Christ meant by be- 
 lief. The fundamental failure of our Chris- 
 tianity lies in the fact that belief is construed 
 simply as the assent of the intellect to certain 
 ideas rather than the choice and direction of 
 the life in a certain way. Men are willing to 
 make the venture of thought but they are not 
 willing to make the venture of conduct. It 
 is not so difficult to persuade the average man 
 that he has a soul, but it is often very difficult 
 to persuade him to live as if he had a soul. 
 This, however, and nothing less is what Christ 
 meant by belief. 
 
MORAL QUALITY OF BELIEF 17 
 
 " He that believeth shall be saved, and he 
 that disbelieveth shall be condemned." It is 
 not merely because of the decision of some 
 arbitrary tribunal that this is so, it is the 
 verdict of all human experience. He who be- 
 lieves in high things in the sense of respond- 
 ing to them and basing his conduct upon them 
 is saved from the tyranny of low things. He 
 who believes in the spiritual and eternal is 
 saved from the degradation of the material 
 and the temporal. " He that disbelieveth is 
 condemned." He condemns himself at the bar 
 of his own higher nature; by consigning him- 
 self to a low, poor, mean, starved, and perhaps 
 wicked life, and this is faithlessness. 
 
 If we take, for example, the vision of God 
 that Jesus brought, how evident it is that the 
 man who believes in that in the sense of re- 
 sponding to it and making it the governing 
 principle of his life, is saved. He is saved 
 from selfishness because Jesus said, " God is 
 love," and for man to believe in God is for 
 him to become love also; he is saved from 
 wickedness, because Jesus said, " God is 
 righteous," and for man to believe in God is 
 for him to become righteous also; it is to be 
 saved from impurity, because Jesus said, " God 
 is pure," and for man to believe in God is for 
 him to become pure also; and he is saved from 
 resentment and injustice, because Jesus said, 
 
18 THE COMING CREED 
 
 " God is forgiving," and for man to believe in 
 God is for him also to become^T'orgiving. 
 
 If we take once more the vision of the soul 
 that Jesus brought, how evident it is that he 
 who believes in that is saved. He is saved 
 from materialism which is our greatest foe, 
 because he "lives not after the flesh but after 
 the spirit;" he is saved from the evil that stul- 
 tifies life by the awakening of a true self -rever- 
 ence; and he is saved from the fear of the 
 grave through the experience of an immortal 
 life on this side of the grave. 
 
 " Lord, I believe, help Thou mine unbelief." 
 That is a prayer for moral and spiritual faith- 
 fulness. Many a man has need to realize that 
 opinions which command only the consent of 
 the intellect amount to little, and no one has 
 a right to call himself a Christian simply be- 
 cause of these. " I am sick of opinions," said 
 John Wesley, " I am weary to bear them ; my 
 soul loathes the frothy food. Give me solid 
 substantial religion; give me a humble, gentle 
 lover of God and man, a man full of mercy 
 and good faith, a man laying himself out in 
 the work of faith, the patience of hope, the 
 labor of love. Let my soul be with those 
 Christians wheresoever they be, and whatso- 
 ever opinions they are of." The belief en- 
 joined by Christ makes its appeal to the whole 
 nature, it means faithfulness, and no man needs 
 
MORAL QUALITY OF BELIEF 19 
 
 to be told when he has been faithless. He that 
 believeth shall be saved and the church or 
 people who believe shall be saved. He that 
 believeth not shall be condemned. He con- 
 demns himself by consigning himself to a low 
 and unworthy life when he might have life 
 above measure. 
 
m 
 
 GOD AS INFINITE AND UNFAILING 
 LOVE 
 
** God is love ; and he that abideth in love abi- 
 deth in God, and God abideth in him. *' 
 
 — John. 
 
 ** The career open to love is infinite. It is the 
 life of the Father, which each conscious child of 
 his is permitted to share. No proof less than 
 the actual experience of this life of love could 
 reveal God to any man. Yet every man who has 
 this experience is as sure of divine life in the 
 world as he is of his own existence. The filial 
 experience has made the Father manifest. '* 
 
 — President Hyde. 
 
GOD AS INFINITE AND UNFAILING 
 LOVE 
 
 The average man has not yet begun to grasp 
 the all important fact that the conception of 
 God is for us a continual growth in conscious- 
 ness. In recent years the idea of God has 
 been carefully and painfully traced in its evolu- 
 tion from the notion of primitive savages. It 
 has been shown that at every stage of his 
 development man has created his God in his 
 own image, and this in not a few cases has 
 been confidently offered as a refutation of 
 theistic belief. A good many have accepted 
 the reasoning, and have jumped to the con- 
 clusion that the whole question has been closed, 
 and that there is nothing more to be said. This 
 process of reasoning, however, really proves 
 that in every generation man's conception of 
 God is just as great as he can grasp and 
 nothing more. Our conception of the Infinite 
 Reality must ever depend upon our organ of 
 vision and understanding. 
 
 It is at this point that the creeds of other 
 years most conspicuously failed. They did 
 not reckon upon the growth of human nature 
 and the deepening of human insight. Con- 
 ceiving God in terms of their own limitations 
 and figuring Him and His universe by the 
 institutions which they themselves had created, 
 23 
 
£4 THE COMING CREED 
 
 the men of other generations represented God 
 as a king and pictured His sovereignty as that 
 of a celestial Mikado or an infinite Caesar. 
 Such a conception very naturally gave rise 
 to ideas which are repellant to the more sen- 
 sitive feelings of men today, but which ap- 
 peared very natural even to the most cultivated 
 people in the age when they orginated. Take, 
 for example, the idea not infrequently advanced 
 by religious teaching until within compara- 
 tively recent years, that God was pleased with 
 the sufferings of people, that He had created 
 some for the express purpose of visiting his 
 wrath upon them in endless and cruel torture. 
 Take, also, the idea that God was under no 
 obligation to do anything for the salvation 
 of sinners. It is only very gradually that 
 these crude and limited ideas have been dis- 
 pelled, because it is only thus that a human 
 consciousness that is able to conceive of God 
 in other and higher terms has been evolved. 
 In the light of this self-evincing fact that 
 human nature is yet in the making, "that it 
 doth not yet appear what we shall be," and 
 that the God consciousness of men in every age 
 is the measure of their growth, the folly and 
 the futility of trying to cHng to the statements 
 of faith that were cast in other years, and 
 of trying to make them the test of faith today, 
 should be apparent to every discerning mind. 
 
GOD AS LOVE «5 
 
 The conviction that at the heart of things 
 is an Infinite and Unfailing Love, that lall 
 history, all men, and all times are in the hands 
 of such a Love, has come to be the chief postu- 
 late of intelligent religious thinking and teach- 
 ing, and without doubt it will be the funda- 
 mental postulate of the coming creed. It is 
 true that the conviction of an Infinite Love is 
 the very essence of the new Testament evangel, 
 that it is central in Christ's doctrine of the 
 Father, and that it runs through the teach- 
 ings of Apostolic Christianity. It is true, also, 
 that as a minor note it has found expression 
 all through the years. We have need, how- 
 ever, to observe at this point that the manifest 
 enlargement of the human spirit that is com* 
 ing today is giving to this great conception 
 all the force of a new revelation. When it 
 is called to mind that the men who wrote the 
 theological systems of other years, in which 
 God is pictured with the sentiments of a me- 
 diaeval baron, were also readers of the New 
 Testament, and that they were sincere and 
 devoted, the only way to account for their 
 failure to grasp this great central truth of 
 early Christianity is that their eyes were holden, 
 there was some defect in their organ of vision, 
 the mind was limited to inherited conceptions 
 that had to be outgrown. It is the height, 
 therefore, to which the religious mind of to- 
 
26 THE COMING CREED 
 
 day has risen that makes the God of the Middle 
 Ages impossible. We have come to realize that 
 energy is not of itself God, nor indeed the 
 greater part of Him. With the growth of 
 the spiritual consciousness has come the in- 
 sight that ethical reality is greater than mere 
 power, that right transcends might, that grace 
 is superior to force, that love is the supreme 
 strength. 
 
 To some minds the calamities, misfortunes, 
 inequalities and miseries of life offer serious 
 objections that stand in the way of belief in 
 God as Infinite Love. To such minds the 
 falling towers that crush, the floods and vol- 
 canic eruptions that destroy, and the cruel 
 men that kill are the convincing proof of the 
 supremacy of blind and heartless force. Nor 
 is it easy to answer this objection in a way 
 that is convincing to the objector himself, for 
 the simple but very obvious reason that the 
 great argument for the supremacy of Infinite 
 Love is an insight rather than a process of 
 logic. The intellect is indeed a proof of God, 
 but it is our poorest proof. " It is when we 
 love, suffer, labor, serve, and forgive that we 
 are surest of God, since we know Him in these 
 things as our other higher part." Men who 
 have themselves risen to the plane of true, 
 pure love, and have felt in their own hearts 
 the rising tide of sympathy that " makes the 
 
GOD AS LOVE 27 
 
 whole world kin," experience but very little 
 difficulty in believing in the Infinite Love, that 
 the mysteries of the outer world are mysteries 
 of goodness and not of evil, " that all things 
 work for good to them that are called accord- 
 ing to His purpose." It is from the emotional 
 and moral riches of his own nature that man 
 draws his chief insight into the character of 
 God. 
 
 Another objection that is frequently made 
 to the belief in God as Infinite Love, is that 
 in thus representing Him we are simply pro- 
 jecting on the sky an image of ourselves, and 
 setting up as an object of worship a gigantic 
 man of our own creation. This objection, how- 
 ever, is by no means as serious as many have 
 thought. We cannot imagine a single ray of 
 light as self-existent, but only as a revelation 
 of that fountain of splendor from which it 
 came. So it is with the mind, heart and will 
 of man. A single ray of intelligence suggests 
 an Infinite Mind; a single volition suggests 
 an Infinite Will; and one throb of affection 
 tells us that somewhere and somehow love is 
 measureless and eternal. In other words, that 
 which is imperfect in man proves the existence 
 of perfection somewhere, and that which is 
 limited in man proves the existence somewhere 
 of the unlimited. The cause must be adequate 
 to explain the effect. We cannot believe that 
 
28 THE COMING CREED 
 
 blind force is sufficient to explain the existence 
 of love. It takes a soul to touch a soul. It 
 requires love to evoke love. 
 
 It is true that in speaking of God as love 
 personality is presupposed, but that does not 
 necessarily imply that God is limited and loca- 
 lized. We cannot measure the Infinite Being 
 by our limitations. The personality that 
 reaches down to the plane of the human con- 
 sciousness is no more limited by that contact 
 than is the ocean by the petty island around 
 which its waves sweep. To say that God is a 
 person is merely to assert that He is intelli- 
 gence and will, essentially such as we know in 
 ourselves, but related to such qualities in man 
 somewhat as the universal atmosphere is re- 
 lated to a single breath. We can best think 
 of God perhaps as the spirit that pervades the 
 universe as our own spirit pervades the body, 
 so that He is manifested in every part, though 
 not identical with any part. He uses the uni- 
 verse as the spirit uses the body, but He is 
 independent of it, and transcends it as the 
 spirit is independent of and transcends the body. 
 
 Still another objection to the presentation 
 of God as love comes from the side of religious 
 belief and is offered, as is supposed, in the 
 interest of a more wholesome and invigorating 
 faith. It is said that the emphasis of this 
 idea leads those who accept it to think lightly 
 
GOD AS LOVE 29 
 
 of the demands of righteousness, and of the 
 restraints of law, and that the very founda- 
 tions of morality are thereby undermined. It 
 is no doubt true that in the widespread re- 
 action that has come against a view of the 
 Deity that represented Him as an Oriental 
 monarch, jealous of personal honor, and deter- 
 mined to vindicate it with blood, there is a 
 tendency to reduce the character of God to an 
 easy-going good nature, and to think of Him 
 as too kind to punish. It is only natural 
 that the reaction from the harsh and arbitrary 
 views of God, which were once held should lead 
 many to an opposite extreme, but the remedy 
 for this evil is not a return to the rigid and 
 repellent views that have been outgrown. It 
 is a proper enforcement of the true meaning 
 of love as a word that stands for the moral 
 completeness of God, including His holiness 
 as well as His mercy, and His justice as well 
 as His kindness. It is an undue narrowing of 
 the idea of love that leads to the fear that 
 the holiness of God will be lost to us, if we 
 maintain in its fullest and largest meaning the 
 truth that God is love. What we have to 
 realize is that love describes the moral char- 
 acter of God, and that it is not necessary for 
 Him to surrender His holiness in order to 
 be kind. His love finds expression in His 
 justice as truly as in His forgiveness, and in 
 
80 THE COMING CREED 
 
 the exercise of His discipline as truly as in 
 the exercise of His grace. 
 
 The coming creed, unlike the creeds of other 
 years, will stand for the very highest con- 
 ceivable ideal of God, and that is that, " God 
 is love." The height to which the human soul 
 has risen will permit of no other conception 
 of Him. For the Church to insist upon any 
 lower ideal can only end in disaster. The 
 coming creed will recognize that God is greater 
 than our hearts or thoughts, or than the sun 
 of all the conceivable perfections that we 
 ascribe to Him, and its doctrine of love will 
 include them all. It will recognize that love 
 as applied to God cannot be warped or 
 narrowed down, that God is pouring His love 
 upon us in order to bring us into sympathy 
 and fellowship of life with Himself, and into 
 His own moral likeness, that love is the sum 
 of all goodness, and he that " dwelleth in love 
 dwelleth in God and God in him." 
 
IV 
 
 JESUS, THE SUPREME REVELATION 
 OF DIVINE AND HUMAN LOVE 
 
But Thee, but thee, O sovereign Seer of time, 
 But Thee, O poets' Poet, Wisdom's Tongue, 
 But Thee, O man's best Man, O love's best 
 
 Love, 
 O perfect life in perfect labor writ, 
 O all men's Comrade, Servant, King, or Priest, — 
 What if or yet, what mole, what flaw, what 
 
 lapse. 
 What least defect or shadow of defect. 
 What rumor tattled by an enemy. 
 Of inference loose, what lack of grace 
 Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's, or death's. 
 Oh, what amiss may I forgive in Thee, 
 Jesus, good Paragon, thou Crystal Christ." 
 
 — Sidney Lanier. 
 
JESUS, THE SUPREME REVELATION 
 OF DIVINE AND HUMAN LOVE 
 
 Starting with the New Testament period, 
 what transformations do we behold in the 
 Church's thought of Jesus! As we pass from 
 the first to the second century we find our- 
 selves amidst the strange, and to this age 
 rather unaccountable phantasies of Gnosticism. 
 The person of Jesus is here represented simply 
 as a link of the interminable chain of shadowy 
 beings conjured up by the fevered Eastern 
 imagination. As we study them on the pages 
 of the early writers, the brain reels and we 
 become lost in the maze of gigantic unrealities. 
 Next comes the Christ who was conceived by 
 the Platonized minds and the bewildering 
 speculations that gather about the logos 
 doctrine. Later comes the Christ of the Greek 
 metaphysics and the homousian and the homo- 
 eousian doctrines. Still later as we approach 
 the Dark Ages we realize that the historic 
 Jesus has receded still farther from the view 
 of men, the compassionate Son of Man has 
 yielded place to a stern and terrible being 
 whose wrath has to be turned aside by the 
 supplication of the Virgin Mother. He is a 
 sinewy athlete, whose gianthood is matched 
 against feeble sinners in order to sweep them 
 into the fiery furnace, amidst the plaudits of 
 33 
 
34 THE COMING CREED 
 
 admiring saints, or as a mighty smith whose 
 office is to forge fetters for the sinner rather 
 than to set the prisoner free. There was in 
 fact a considerable period when the historic 
 Jesus seemed all but obliterated from the 
 popular mind. Since the Reformation, the 
 speculations that gather about the person of 
 Jesus, which for the most part have their origin 
 in the older creeds, are far too numerous to 
 mention. 
 
 In view of the transcendent influence of 
 Jesus it is scarcely to be wondered at that the 
 problem of His person has attracted such at- 
 tention, and that in every generation men have 
 striven with such earnestness to frame a defini- 
 tion of Him that will fit in with their philoso- 
 phical systems. Such efforts have not been 
 without value, but the conviction is growing 
 that the person of Jesus is greater than all 
 our systems and that it is not possible to frame 
 a definition that will adequately represent Him. 
 
 " Our little systems have their day, 
 They have their day and cease to be, 
 
 They are but broken lights of Thee, 
 
 And Thou, Oh Lord, art more than they. " 
 
 The psychological interest of recent years is 
 bringing us to realize that all personality is 
 a mystery. We cannot even define our own 
 personality. We know that we are related in 
 
JESUS 35 
 
 some way to the Infinite Reality, but just 
 how, is a matter that we find it very difficult 
 to express. We say that we are human and 
 that Christ was divine, but where the divine 
 begins and the human leaves off is a problem 
 that confounds even the greatest intellects. 
 That Christ shared our nature to the fullest, 
 that He was all that we are and something 
 more we may confidently believe, but imtil 
 human nature itself is better understood, and 
 until we comprehend more fully how all finite 
 life is related to God, we cannot have an 
 explanation of the person of Jesus that will be 
 conclusive or satisfactory. It is not, in fact, 
 essential that we should have such a definition. 
 The speculative interest in the person of Jesus, 
 however important, is only secondary. If the 
 worth of what Jesus offers to humanity is 
 made to depend upon certainty at this point, 
 it is evident that it means the death of faith 
 to an ever increasing number of people. 
 
 Turning to the New Testament it soon be- 
 comes evident that the speculative interest in 
 the person of Jesus, that is so prominent in 
 history, is by no means uppermost in the minds 
 of these early writers. It is true that there 
 are some traces here, notably in the Gospel 
 of John, the Epistles of Paul and in the Epistle 
 to the Hebrews, of the speculative interest that 
 had even then begun, but that which concerned 
 
36 THE COMING CREED 
 
 the first disciples most, and which they were 
 most eager to communicate was the new vision 
 of love that had been opened to them by their 
 contact with Jesus, and the incomparable 
 spiritual reinforcement that He had brought 
 to them. They felt that they had tasted the 
 purest joy that a human soul can know, which 
 is contact with a perfect love. The portrait 
 of Jesus drawn in the New Testament is that 
 of one whose spirit is devoid of all selfishness, 
 and -whose every motive was inspired by love. 
 It is the portrait of one who was so convinced 
 that love is the master law of life that He 
 dared to base His conduct wholly upon it, 
 and to accept cheerfully all the risks that 
 were implied. In His refusal to make use of 
 His abilities for private ends, which has been 
 the common principle of social life since society 
 began; in the wealth of service that He poured 
 out upon inferior persons who did not com- 
 prehend a tithe of what He said or did; in 
 His willingness to admit to His intimacy all 
 who would come to Him and His refusal to 
 discriminate in His friendships ; in His patience 
 with those who mistook His spirit and who 
 libeled His character; in His suffering of in- 
 jury without retaliation, and His willingness 
 to forgive until seventy times seven; and in 
 a hundred similar ways we have the evidence 
 that He considered love the only thing worth 
 
JESUS 37 
 
 living for, and upon it he based His life. The 
 portrait of Jesus in the Gospels is that of 
 one who " offered himself everywhere without 
 expectation of return, who lent himself freely, 
 hoping for nothing in payment." 
 
 It was in the perfect love that was radiated 
 by Jesus, kindling their own hearts to love 
 and filling them with an unspeakable joy, that 
 the first disciples found the divinity of their 
 Master and His eternal gift. They felt in- 
 stiQctively that the perfect love of Jesus was 
 the outshining of on Infinite Love that is at 
 the heart of things, and in trying to express 
 this fact, they almost exhausted the vocabulary 
 of their age. They called Him "the impress" 
 or the " image of God," " the first born" or 
 "only begotten son of God," " the out-shin- 
 ing of the divine majesty," "the word," "the 
 self-expression," " the uttered reason of God ;" 
 and they declared that He was filled with "all 
 the fullness of God." They did not invent 
 these terms, they took them from the current 
 Jewish and Alexandrien thought of the times, 
 but they gave to them a new meaning and 
 filled them with a new divine significance. 
 
 It is evident also that the conviction of the 
 disciples that the perfect love of Jesus was 
 the outshining of the Infinite Love was in 
 harmony with the Master's own consciousness. 
 It was in the love that welled up in his own 
 
38 THE COMING CREED 
 
 soul that Jesus found the surety of the Father's 
 love, and knew himself to be one in spirit, 
 sympathy and intention with the Father. It 
 is an interesting fact that Jesus never offered 
 any proof of God, other than his own con- 
 viction, and that of those to whom he addressed 
 Himself, and He never offered any proof of 
 God's love, except to draw the picture of the 
 waiting Father in the parable. It was pri- 
 marily in His own experience that Jesus found 
 His evidence of God. Looking out upon 
 nature and human life He saw in the beauty 
 of the lillies, the color of the grass, the feed- 
 ing of the sparrows, the rain and sunshine 
 falling upon the just and the unjust, the 
 providence that watches over the unthankful 
 and the evil, the faithful shepherd caring for 
 his sheep, the good Samaritan nursing the 
 wounded stranger, the kind father giving good 
 gifts to his children, and welcoming with robe, 
 ring, feast and dance the returning prodigal, 
 a great beneficence working itself out on a 
 universal scale that was kindred to his own 
 experience, and with which he felt himself in 
 accord. He spoke of this Infinite Beneficence 
 by the tender human name of Father, He 
 offered Himself as the revelation of the Father, 
 and told His disciples that if they knew Him 
 and understood His motives and character, 
 they would know the Father. " He that hath 
 seen Me hath seen the Father." 
 
JESUS 39 
 
 The coming creed will return to the self- 
 consciousness of Jesus, and for the mere specu- 
 lative interest in His person that has over- 
 shadowed Christian teaching it will substitute 
 a moral interest. In place of the metaphysi- 
 cal sonship of the dogmas it will put the ethical 
 sonship of the Gospels. In the perfect love 
 of Jesus it will find the supreme revelation 
 of the Infinite Love. It will recognize, as the 
 theories of other years utterly failed to re- 
 cognize, that Jesus translated into terms of 
 human personality the very essence of the 
 nature of God. Since He lived there is no 
 longer need that we should discover each for 
 himself the scattered evidence of Divine Love. 
 They are brought to a focus in His character 
 and therefore the knowledge of God can be at- 
 tained most easily and completely through 
 His reflection in Jesus. 
 
 In the coming creed, the perfect love of 
 Jesus will also be recognized as the highest 
 expression of human love, and as the supreme 
 ideal for all who through Him learn to love. 
 In teaching His disciples, to put themselves 
 into the same filial relation to God as He did, 
 Jesus revealed His desire to give to all the 
 weary and the burdened that which He had 
 within Himself, to share with them the riches 
 of His own inner life, to help them experience 
 what He experienced, and to love as He loved, 
 
40 THE COMING CREED 
 
 without condition or reserve. Hence the true 
 disciple of Jesus is the person who is learn- 
 ing that love is the only thing worth living 
 for, and through the practice of love is enter- 
 ing into the riches of the life of God. The 
 church that Jesus founded is a confraternity 
 of those who are learning to love as He loved, 
 and the society that He designated as the 
 kingdom of God is a society permeated by His 
 spirit and bringing all the affairs of life to 
 the test of His love. " It was as a bridegroom 
 that Jesus came, anointed with all the perfumes 
 of a dedicated love, and until the last bitter 
 hour of His rejection He moved with such 
 lyric joyousness across the earth that life be- 
 came festive in his presence. It is as a bride 
 that the church exists upon earth, and if no 
 festive smiles are awakened by His presence 
 and no gracious unsealing of the fount of love 
 in human hearts, then it is not His church, for 
 He has passed elsewhere with another company 
 to the marriage feast." 
 
V 
 
 SALVATION AS A CHARACTER OF 
 LOVE 
 
"At the root of our conception of salvation 
 lies the idea of God as essentially self-imparting. 
 To Christian faith God is not simply the sover- 
 eign who commands^ but the Father who loves, 
 and who, because He loves, gives. Between Him 
 and His human child there exists a kinship, which 
 even sin cannot completely obscure, and which 
 makes possible the divine indwelling in humanity. 
 — ^William Adams Brown. 
 
SALVATION AS A CHARACTER OF 
 LOVE 
 
 There is nothing that is so suggestive of 
 the changes which have overtaken our religious 
 life, and that of the society to which we be- 
 long, as the significance we attach to certain 
 words. The words themselves are the same, 
 they stand in our vocabulary now just as they 
 stood there centuries and ages ago, but new 
 meanings have crept into them, old meanings 
 have dropped out, and they have a very dif- 
 ferent effect upon us from that which they 
 had upon the men of other years. 
 
 The statement applies to our religious 
 phraseology as a whole, but to none of it with 
 greater force than to the word with which we 
 have here especially to deal. The word sal- 
 vation has been all through history an integral 
 and vital part of religion's vocabulary, but 
 does it mean now the same that it meant in 
 other generations? Does the effect that the 
 word produces upon us correspond to that 
 which it produced upon our fathers? Does 
 it mean more or less to us than it meant to 
 them? Does our conception of it represent an 
 increase or a decrease of spiritual insight. 
 
 In the early stages of history the mental 
 outlook of man was necessarily very different 
 from what it is today. The forces of nature 
 
44 THE COMING CREED 
 
 were not understood, and the operation of 
 natural causes was undiscovered. When such 
 causes were not recognized it was the universal 
 law of the primitive mind to attribute events 
 of every kind to the action of wills like its 
 own. Thus there grew in the early world a 
 great fear that ruled men's actions, created 
 much of their religion, and determined to a 
 very considerable extent their idea of salva- 
 tion. The primitive man in his ignorance felt 
 that he was in the presence of an unknown and 
 hostile power. The darkened sky, the 
 thunder's roar, the lightning's gleam, the 
 volcano's eruption, sickness, pain, and death 
 appeared to him but the anger of some malig- 
 nant personal agency. Hence to appease the 
 wrath of the gods and to purchase their favor 
 was a notion that figured prominently in the 
 religion of early man and in his conception 
 of salvation. By means of certain rites that 
 were supposed to have a magical power, he 
 endeavored to soothe the Deity, and by means 
 of animal sacrifices he sought to obtain His 
 favor. It is no doubt true that in all these 
 sacrifices, even the rudest of them, there was 
 an element of true religion. To the better 
 minds they gradually came to mean an inter- 
 course of giving and receiving between God 
 and man, but at the outset, at least, this 
 element had little if any recognition. Sacri- 
 
SALVATION 45 
 
 fices were but the means of appeasing the 
 wrath of the Deity and of insuring personal 
 safety. 
 
 This feeling, so characteristic of the early 
 mind, that the universe is hostile, that we are 
 beset by a malignant power, has clung to men 
 with great persistence, and we have not yet 
 wholly succeeded in freeing ourselves from it. 
 " In the subconscious regions of the soul, the 
 past still lingers to persuade us that ours is 
 a demon-haunted world, where, instead of God, 
 the Devil rules." It is not therefore surpris- 
 ing that religion, through all the centuries, 
 has been colored with the notion that salva- 
 tion is escape from God's displeasure and from 
 the torment that his wrath has prepared. 
 
 The theories of atonement, for example, that 
 have been given such prominence in Christian 
 teaching, that represented man as utterly cut 
 off from God and from the life of heaven be- 
 cause of sin, and as being able to find escape 
 only because the Son of God in pure mercy suf- 
 fered an equivalent for what man should have 
 suffered, thereby paying man's debt and making 
 possible his escape from God's wrath, had some- 
 thing, manifestly, of this primitive conception 
 of God at its background. The idea of church 
 membership also, that found expression in the 
 dictum, — " Outside the church is no salvation," 
 was built upon this conception of the primitive 
 
46 THE COMING CREED 
 
 mind. It is said of the author of " Lead, Kindly 
 Light," that when upon the verge of turning 
 from the Anglican to the Roman Catholic 
 Church, the question that bothered him most 
 was whether, in case he should die in his earlier 
 faith, he would be saved. That Newman was 
 sincere in his questionings we cannot doubt, and 
 yet we are filled with wonder that he could hold 
 to a view of Grod that conceived Him capable 
 of damning a man to eternal torment upon the 
 score of the difference that exists between two 
 branches of the Church. 
 
 The change in our conception of salvation 
 from that which was held in other years results 
 from the fact that we have come into a new 
 state of mind concerning the Unseen. We have 
 begun at last to be convinced that God is not 
 malevolent; that we have not to escape from 
 Him or to purchase His favor; that "He is 
 the spirit of love, brooding alike over the right- 
 eous and the unrighteous"; that the chief end 
 of life is to allow ourselves in childlike trust to 
 be ruled to the uttermost by that same spirit of 
 love; that salvation means first and last the 
 union of our poor self with a greater and bet- 
 ter self, a finding of that Highest, "whose wit- 
 ness has ever been in us, and who has been im- 
 ceasingly our refuge and strength!" 
 
 Coming directly to the heart of the matter, 
 it may be said that for us salvation means es- 
 
SALVATION 47 
 
 cape from self rather than from God. It means, 
 to begin with, escape from ignorance into truth. 
 We have begun to realize that the evils which 
 crush us are exceedingly varied; they are phy- 
 sical, mental, moral, social, and to a very con- 
 siderable extent they are the result of ignor- 
 ance. We must know the laws of body in order 
 that we may be well, and the laws of mind in 
 order that we may avoid mistakes, and the laws 
 of character that we may have moral soundness, 
 and the laws of social life that we may dwell 
 together sweetly, helpfully and peaceably. The 
 discovery of knowledge along all these lines is 
 what is meant by truth, and salvation is escape 
 from ignorance into truth. 
 
 It is also escape from unrighteousness into 
 right. We have come to realize that men have 
 to be right in order to be safe ; that salvation is 
 rightness toward God and His laws, and that 
 there is no substitute for this attitude. If an 
 instrument is out of tune it must be made right, 
 according to its laws, before it will produce 
 melodious sounds, and there is no possible cere- 
 mony that can be performed over it that will 
 dispense with this requirement. What is true 
 of the instrument is also true of ourselves. 
 Men in large numbers have begun to perceive 
 at last that to be saved is to become right ; that 
 religious forms and symbols have worth only to 
 the extent that they help toward this end, and 
 
48 THE COMING CREED 
 
 that when it is attained all laws and forces are 
 servants, ministering to our needs in the most 
 tender and wonderful ways, and the universe in 
 all of its operations is a friend. 
 
 It is merely putting this matter in another 
 and in a higher form, to remark that salvation 
 is escape from selfishness into love. The deep- 
 est word about salvation that was ever uttered 
 is the New Testament statement that " Every 
 one that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth 
 God. He that loveth not knoweth not God ; for 
 God is love." The selfish theories of salvation 
 which have allowed men to become absorbed in 
 the thought of saving their own soul while 
 treating other souls with neglect, have had their 
 origin in a wrong conception of the character 
 of God, and of the spirit of Christ's ministry. 
 " Do I love the Lord or no, am I saved or am 
 I not," may be the crude expression of a real 
 religious experience, but it does not express the 
 Christian idea of salvation. The coming creed 
 will recognize, as the creeds of other years have 
 failed to recognize, that we cannot have salva- 
 tion independently of our fellows ; that he who 
 would take it on such terms is not worthy of it, 
 and is not capable of receiving it ; that he alone 
 whose spirit is so wrapped up in the welfare of 
 others that he would rather suff^er with them 
 than to know the bliss of heaven without them 
 ever really discovers the secret of salvation, 
 either in this world or in the hereafter. 
 
SALVATION 49 
 
 The greatest force under God to bring us 
 into the character of love, which is salvation, is 
 the message and spirit of Jesus. It has been 
 urged by not a few in recent years that the love 
 of God is self -evincing ; that it needs no proof; 
 that it is written both over nature and in the 
 thoughts of man that God is immanent in His 
 world, and that He wells up in the hearts of 
 His children. It must be remembered, however, 
 that it is the Christian who has discovered that 
 the love of God wells up in human souls, and 
 those who are most deeply conscious of the im- 
 manent love of God are those who have come 
 most closely to the teaching and spirit of Jesus. 
 
 The love of Jesus is truly the most wonderful 
 revelation of the heart of God that earth has 
 ever witnessed, and hence it is the greatest force 
 under God to bring men into the character of 
 love. His love was not only constant and un- 
 failing, sympathetic and comforting, but it pos- 
 sessed a peculiar quality as well. It was re- 
 demptive; it transformed its objects; it raised 
 them into a new Divine character. 
 
 The love of Jesus! So vast was that love 
 that He craved the whole world of His brothers 
 and sisters to love, and God gave Him the 
 world. Salvation! What is it but to escape 
 out of ignorance, unrighteousness and selfish- 
 ness, into a character that is like that of Jesus. 
 It is not enough that we should talk about that 
 
50 THE COMING CREED 
 
 love, or that we should love Him simply for His 
 love to us. We must leam from Him to love as 
 He loved, manifesting the same gracious spirit 
 in word and deed, forbearance and forgiveness, 
 in consecration and service. 
 
 So tender was His love to us 
 
 We had not learned to love before, 
 
 That we grow like to Him, and thus 
 
 Men sought His grace in us once more." 
 
VI 
 
 THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS THE SWAY 
 OF LOVE 
 
" What then is the service rendered to the 
 world by Christianity ? The proclamation of 
 "good news." And what is this good news? The 
 pardon of sin. The God of holiness loving the 
 world and reconciling it to himself in Jesus, in 
 order to establish the Kingdom of God, the city 
 of souls, the life of heaven upon earth. There 
 you have the whole of it; but in this is a revolu- 
 
 *^°°- " — Amiel. 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS THE SWAY 
 OF LOVE 
 
 One of the words most frequently upon the 
 lips of Jesus was the word kingdom. It was 
 the keynote of His most important teachings. 
 In the first three Gospels, which probably repre- 
 sent most nearly the Master's point of view, 
 the allusions to the " kingdom of God " or the 
 " kingdom of heaven " find constant repetition. 
 It is said that Jesus began His ministry by de- 
 daring that the " kingdom of God is at hand," 
 and He is reported to have traveled throughout 
 the villages and cities of Palestine preaching 
 the good news of the kingdom. His parables, 
 which are the pictures of the New Testament, 
 were spoken largely for the purpose of illus- 
 trating the spirit of the kingdom. The word 
 evidently was intended to signify a corporate 
 union of individuals such as is covered by our 
 word society. There was no other word at that 
 time which so well expressed the idea that He 
 wished to convey. He might with equal accu- 
 racy have spoken of the republic or the com- 
 monwealth of God. The word kingdom is 
 used because there was no other idea of society 
 that was current among those whom He ad- 
 dressed. 
 
 The importance which He attached to the 
 idea is shown by the fact that He urged His 
 53 
 
64 THE COMING CREED 
 
 disciples to seek first the " kingdom of God." 
 There is perhaps no other point at which 
 Christian teaching has so signally failed as in 
 the way it has dealt with this fundamental 
 truth of the Christian message. It is hardly 
 too much to claim that the greatest triumph 
 of the coming creed will be the rediscovery and 
 reinterpretation of the mind of Christ in refer- 
 ence to the " kingdom of God." 
 
 We have to observe at the outset how this 
 teaching of Jesus has been understood by His 
 disciples, and how it has been represented by 
 the church. For centuries after the death of 
 Jesus the chief thought of His disciples was 
 that He would come again in a visible way and 
 with power, and that by miracle He would de- 
 stroy the unbelieving world and establish the 
 kingdom of God. The "day of the Lord" 
 when Christ would appear in the clouds to con- 
 found and to overthrow the unbelieving world, 
 and to inaugurate the kingdom was the great 
 note of early Christian expectation. However, 
 as the long centuries wore themselves out and 
 this hope was not realized another idea began 
 to emerge and to find a place in Christian 
 thought. It was the idea that the main busi- 
 ness of the church is to get men ready to die, 
 and to prepare them for the life of heaven. 
 This thought gradually gathered force, and 
 for centuries it has been uppermost in the 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD 55 
 
 Christian mind. The organization and direc- 
 tion of Christian activity have proceeded very 
 largely upon this assumption. The world has 
 been esteemed a wreck and Christian service has 
 had for its object to save as many as possible 
 therefrom. 
 
 That this "other worldliness" which has 
 characterized the Christian body has issued in- 
 directly in many good results to society can 
 hardly be questioned. It has been a splendid 
 protest against excessive devotion to this world, 
 and it has been accompanied by tidal waves of 
 sympathy which have done much to enrich hu- 
 man lives in countless ways. The fact cannot 
 be overlooked that Christian teaching, in spite 
 of its extreme emphasis upon the life to come, 
 has done much to alleviate the condition of the 
 weak and unfortunate, to bestow honor upon 
 womanhood, to bring safety to little children, 
 to fill the hearts of men with trust, and to com- 
 fort them in trouble, failure and misfortune. 
 Yet in view of the social conditions that still 
 prevail, even in the so-called Christian coun- 
 tries, it is a fair question whether the failure 
 of Christian teaching to properly interpret and 
 emphasize Christ's ideal of the kingdom has 
 not proved a serious hindrance to the work of 
 social reclamation and reconstruction. 
 
 That Christ was not thinking primarily of 
 the life after death by his oft-repeated refer- 
 
56 THE COMING CREED 
 
 ence to the "kingdom of God" or the "king- 
 dom of heaven " is shown by His declarations 
 that the " kingdom is at hand," and that it is 
 here in the midst of the world. What He evi- 
 dently meant thereby was the sway of God 
 here and now. When He told the disciples that 
 they were to seek the " kingdom of God," He 
 meant that they were to seek the enthronement 
 of God's truth and right. He meant that they 
 were to seek the re-establishment of the social 
 life upon a basis of mutual sympathy and ser- 
 vice rather than upon a basis of self-interest; 
 the creation of a brotherhood in which all men 
 should be united in Godly fear, in brotherly 
 hopes and aims, in the effort to convert society 
 into a great fraternity, and to innoculate all 
 human conditions with the spirit of good will. 
 
 Love even your enemies. He said to the first 
 disciples ; " bless them that curse you, do good 
 to them that hate you, and pray for them that 
 despitefuUy use you, and persecute you; that 
 ye may be children of your Father which is in 
 heaven; for He maketh His sun to rise upon 
 the evil and the good, and sendeth His rain upon 
 the just and the unjust." In other words, the 
 great determining law of the kingdom is love. 
 Not in the sense, perhaps, in which we often 
 use the term, but in the sense of good will. This 
 attitude toward others does not, of course, pre- 
 clude the disciple from those personal intima- 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD 67 
 
 cies which constitute so much of life. Every 
 man, for example, is not called upon to love his 
 neighbor's child in the same way that he loves 
 his own. What Christ really demands is that 
 each one shall recognize his kinship with all 
 the rest of the Father's children, and that he 
 shall endeavor to do for each the real best, 
 although it may not always be what his brother 
 thinks is best, and wherever this is done the 
 kingdom of God has come. 
 
 It is commonly assumed that the great evil 
 of life is sin, but that was not Christ's view. 
 To Him the great evil is want of love. He 
 reached down to the fundamental truth that 
 sin at its bottom is selfishness, and that all the 
 disturbing evils of the world spring from the 
 same fundamental source. The cure that. 
 Christ offered for selfishness, and for Him there 
 is no other cure, is love. 
 
 To promote the sway of good will, and to re- 
 organize the social order upon it, was the es- 
 sential mission of Jesus. His method was to 
 make disciples by talking with people, by im- 
 pressing upon them His own spirit, and by 
 sending them forth to make disciples of their 
 fellows. Jesus reckoned upon the fact that 
 goodness is contagious, that love tends to dif- 
 fuse itself, and that men cannot possess it with- 
 out imparting it. He knew that when men had 
 come to share His spirit, and had felt the thrill 
 
58 ^ THE COMING CREED 
 
 of His love, they would do as He did, and that 
 they would go to others with the message of 
 life, and He trusted to this alone to establish 
 at last the sway of love. 
 
 There are not a few to-day to whom it seems 
 that the Christian ideal has proved inadequate, 
 but it is perhaps nearer the truth to say that it 
 has not yet been put to the crucial test. To 
 the complaint that as a force to redeem society 
 Christianity has failed, it may fairly be an- 
 swered that on the contrary it has never yet 
 been tried. The failure of the Christian body 
 to make the sway of love its great objective, 
 and the substitution of institutionalism for the 
 personal and vital methods of Jesus have un- 
 doubtedly stood in the way of a thorough-going 
 application of the Christian ideal. What is 
 manifestly needed at the present moment is for 
 each congregation of Christian disciples to be- 
 gin in its own humble sphere and way to exalt 
 the social ideals of Jesus, and to create the at- 
 mosphere of the kingdom. Instead of seeking 
 primarily to increase the size of the church roll, 
 and to get people ready to die, the first effort 
 of those who follow Jesus should be to create 
 an atmosphere of good will, brotherly sympa- 
 thy and mutual service. Love should be made 
 the watchword of the Christian fellowship, and 
 the relations of men in the Christian body 
 should be made so kindly, so gracious, so free 
 
THE KINGDOM OF GOD 59 
 
 from harsh words and criticisms that the spirit 
 of Jesus may find ever a more perfect channel 
 of expression. 
 
 That a great movement has set in that 
 means the ultimate recovery of Christ's great 
 ideal there can hardly be any doubt. It is shown 
 by the constancy with which the Fatherly idea 
 of God is being set forth to-day in nearly every 
 branch of the Church, and by the consequent 
 emphasis that is given, either consciously or 
 unconsciously, to the principle of brotherhood. 
 
 It is shown by the growing willingness on the 
 part of Christian people to recognize that all 
 who are working to make the world better are 
 laborers with Christ in His work of salvation; 
 that every movement for righteousness is a 
 movement of God; that in making it possible 
 for humanity to live better, by doing away with 
 ignorance, sickness, intemperance, poverty and 
 injustice, the Christ spirit is finding expression 
 and the " kingdom " is being advanced. 
 
 It is shown by the new missionary interest 
 that has come to the Church, and especially by 
 the motive that is so evidently inspiring that in- 
 terest, the motive to bring home to the Father's 
 house and love the children who do not know 
 that they have a Father and have never heard 
 of the inheritance that is waiting for them. 
 Slowly but surely the point of view has changed. 
 Instead of the idea that without the knowledge 
 
60 THE COMING CREED 
 
 of the historic Jesus the heathen are forever 
 lost unless the missionary is sent, there has 
 come the feeling that the service of the weak and 
 the ignorant is the duty that love owes, and the 
 opportunity that love craves, and the result is 
 a new missionary impulse that promises much 
 for the " kingdom of God." 
 
 Finally, in the growing appreciation of the 
 fact that all who have caught the spirit of 
 Jesus are missionaries, is shown the movement 
 for the recovery of the Christian ideal. The 
 feeling of responsibility for the conversion of 
 individuals may not be as strong as it once was, 
 but the consciousness of obligation to do some- 
 thing to make the world better is growing day 
 by day. More and more the conviction is find- 
 ing expression that conditions must be created 
 that will make it easy and natural for men to 
 do right, conditions which will impel the 
 thoughts and hearts of men to rise toward the 
 highest things as the growing plant rises 
 toward the sun. 
 
vn 
 
 LOVE ATTESTED BY SACRIFICE 
 
" With the conception of God as one whose 
 very nature it is to express himself in humanity, 
 there is given a profounder conception of the 
 atonement. The sufferings and death which were 
 the inevitable result of Jesus' life of fidelity and 
 love are seen to be the expression in humanity of 
 that abiding pain which the sins of his children 
 have ever caused the Divine Father. The cross 
 of Calvary becomes at the same time the revela- 
 tion of the heart of God. *' 
 
 — William Adams Brown. 
 
LOVE ATTESTED BY SACRIFICE 
 
 That the death of Jesus is somehow related 
 to the higher life of humanity and to the pur- 
 pose of God in securing it has been the convic- 
 tion of all the Christian generations, and of 
 this generation no less than of previous ones. 
 Beginning with the first disciples Christian 
 teaching has found in the cross its most ab- 
 sorbing theme. No one can read the New Tes- 
 tament without the feeling that its central and 
 most conspicuous fact is the cross. In the four 
 Gospels over one-third of all the space is occu- 
 pied with the story of the crucifixion. Many 
 other interesting events of Christ's career are 
 passed over with slight notice, a thousand dis- 
 courses are never mentioned, but His death 
 upon the cross is described with such fulness 
 and variety of detail as to make it clear that in 
 the minds of these writers it was regarded as 
 of transcending importance. The letters, also, 
 which make up the second half of the New Tes- 
 tament are permeated with the pathos of the 
 cross and with the thought of its everlasting 
 import for the human race. Is it not very re- 
 markable that an event which at the outset, at 
 least in the minds of its participators, was re- 
 garded merely as an execution and the carrying 
 out of a legal sentence, in less than a generation 
 should have come to be viewed with the utmost 
 63 
 
64. THE COMING CREED 
 
 reverence by a vast multitude, and that this 
 feeling should have been transmitted without 
 abatement from century to century and from 
 age to age. 
 
 The explanation of this marvel is to be found 
 in the great underlying fact that in the death 
 of Jesus there broke upon the understanding 
 of men a truth that for ages had been strug- 
 gling for recognition. It was the truth of an 
 Infinite Love that suffers and gives itself for us. 
 Through their own experience and the soul's 
 inward workings a few choice souls had long 
 since begun to feel that sacrifice is the condition 
 of all human progress, and that somehow this 
 element is rooted in the nature of things and in 
 the heart of God. The sunlight falls upon the 
 mountain peaks before it reaches the valleys. 
 So likewise the illuminations of God are caught 
 by the greater souls before they are manifest 
 to the race at large. In the later history of 
 Israel the conviction that vicarious sacrifice is 
 the condition of human progress found beauti- 
 ful expression, notably in the picture of the 
 suffering servant of Jehovah, as depicted in the 
 fifty-third chapter of Isaiah : " He was wound- 
 ed for our transgressions ; He was bruised for 
 our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace 
 was upon Him, and with His stripes we are 
 healed." Whether the author of this splendid 
 passage was referring to some individual, or 
 
LOVE AND SACRIFICE 65 
 
 to the suffering of the nation in captivity, or 
 whether he was merely expressing an ideal, is 
 not made clear. In any case it may be re- 
 garded as a foregleam of Calvary and its inex- 
 pressible light. This truth that the poets and 
 seers had beheld in their visions, and which had 
 been struggling for recognition, in the perfect 
 consecration and self-giving of Jesus was fully 
 vindicated, and its worth for the life of the soul 
 was forever revealed. 
 
 It is not implied that the devotion of Jesus 
 was a conscious display of the sacrificial spirit 
 in order that men would see it and be impressed 
 by it, any more than the devotion of a mother 
 to the interests of a disobedient child is such a 
 display. It is not of the nature of self-effacing 
 love to indulge in such calculating prudence. 
 Love gives because it is its nature to do so, and 
 because it esteems it supremely blessed to give. 
 Such also was the spirit of Jesus. Rightly con- 
 strued the New Testament affords no warrant 
 for the idea that Jesus was actuated by any 
 other motive than that of passionate yearning 
 for human good, and His suffering and death 
 were the offering that love freely and gladly 
 made. 
 
 Loving men supremely, and conscious that 
 His love was rooted in the heart of God, and 
 reflected the will of God, He consecrated Him- 
 self absolutely to the work of revealing God to 
 
66 THE COMING CREED 
 
 men, as He knew Him. He determined to es- 
 tablish a kingdom of God based wholly upon 
 love, and employing neither force nor fear for 
 its support. He determined to magnify and 
 enthrone in the hearts of men the holy require- 
 ments of God, to teach them that it is vain to 
 worship God with gifts and sacrifices while af- 
 fronting Him with pride, selfishness and hate, 
 to show men what God is that they might un- 
 derstand what He requires, and to unveil to 
 men their secret sins that they might be led to 
 seek the Divine mercy. For these ends He pur- 
 posed to live, and, if need be, to suffer; to la- 
 bor, and, if need be, to die. The supposition 
 that the death of Jesus upon the cross was the 
 chief object of His whole mission upon the 
 earth has no basis in the Master's own con- 
 sciousness. His great object was to found the 
 kingdom of God, and He gave His life in the 
 effort to realize this end, because in the struggle 
 to carry out His life plan He had to deal with 
 conditions that could not otherwise be over- 
 come. Such was the mind of Jesus with refer- 
 ence to His life work. 
 
 Here, then, is the real significance to hu- 
 manity of the Cross of Christ. The cross in 
 Christian thought does not stand for a piece of 
 wood of some particular shape. It is a symbol 
 of His sacrificial love. Here, too, is the real 
 meaning of the atonement that Jesus wrought 
 
LOVE AND SACRIFICE 67 
 
 by the cross. It was never His thought that 
 God had to be atoned into love. The teaching 
 that represents the cross as in some way appeas- 
 ing and placating the Divine wrath, thereby 
 enabling God to be merciful, as He could not 
 otherwise have been, is the clearest violation of 
 the consciousness of Christ. To the thought 
 of Jesus, God is everywhere and always the 
 embodiment of tender love. What man of you 
 having a hundred sheep, if he loses one, does 
 not leave the ninety and nine and go after the 
 one that is lost, and when he has found it he 
 lays it on his shoulder and comes home rejoic- 
 ing? That is a picture of God. What woman, 
 if she has ten pieces of silver and loses one 
 piece, will not light the candle and get a broom 
 and sweep the house and search diligently until 
 she has found it.? That is a picture of God^ 
 A man has two sons, and one of them leaves the 
 father's house and goes into a far country. He 
 wastes his substance in riotous living, and at 
 last, after many har ships, he decides to re- 
 turn home. While he is yet a great way off the 
 father sees him, because his eyes have been fixed 
 on the horizon all the while, and he goes forth 
 to meet him, and falls upon his neck, kisses and 
 welcomes him home. That is a picture of God. 
 In the light of these teachings it is clear that to 
 the mind of Jesus there was no need that God 
 should be atoned into love. The great need was 
 that God's love should be revealed. 
 
68 THE COMING CREED 
 
 Knowing God, and feeling in His own soul 
 the throb of Infinite Love, Jesus lived and died 
 that He might reveal God; that all men might 
 come to know Grod as He knew Him, and that 
 they might share in the wealth of His own inner 
 life. By His passionate devotion He tried to 
 make real and living the compassionate love 
 and holy requirements of God. His atoning 
 work consisted not in doing something to ena- 
 ble God to be merciful, as He could not other- 
 wise have been, but in revealing and interpret- 
 ing the heart of God. 
 
 It can scarcely be doubted that the real signifi- 
 cance and glory of the cross have been greatly 
 obscured by the grotesque and impossible 
 theories of it which have been so universally and 
 persistently held, and which still linger in the 
 thought and speech of Christian men. Think 
 what it means that for nearly a thousand years 
 the idea held its ground, and at times completely 
 dominated the thought of the Church, that the 
 death of Jesus was a ransom paid to the devil, 
 and that the resurrection was a kind of a trick 
 by which Satan was finally defrauded. Think 
 what it means that for nearly a thousand years 
 more the idea prevailed in some form that the 
 death of Christ was to pay an exact equivalent 
 in suffering for human guilt, and thus to sat- 
 isfy the claims of God's justice, and offended 
 honor. Indeed, it may be said that the theories 
 
LOVE AND SACRIFICE 69 
 
 of the cross that have followed each other 
 through the centuries have for the most part 
 been of a character to obscure and to nullify 
 the very truth about God that Jesus gave His 
 life to reveal. The doctrine of the cross, how- 
 ever, is one thing and the religion of the cross 
 is another. In spite of the theories there were 
 many in every generation who caught the spirit 
 of the cross and gave it beautiful expression in 
 a devoted life of self-giving. It was these who 
 kept the Church alive and who gave it whatever 
 real power it has ever possessed. Yet how much 
 it would have meant to the Church and to the 
 cause of the higher life, if the spirit of the 
 cross could have been coupled to a teaching that 
 was adequate to express the truth that it repre- 
 sents. 
 
 It must be recognized that at best the inter- 
 pretation of the cross is only an imperfect 
 striving after a Divine mystery, but the coming 
 creed will differ from the creeds of other years 
 in that it will take its cue from the conscious- 
 ness of Christ. It will interpret the cross as a 
 revelation of the spirit of Him who lives and 
 reigns at the heart of things, and it will see in 
 every manifestation of sacrificial love the un- 
 veiling of God. God was in Christ giving the 
 law of life to the world. So, also. He is in the 
 True Parent giving the law of life to the fam- 
 ily; He is in the True Teacher giving the law 
 
70 THE COMING CREED 
 
 of life to the pupil ; He is in the True Prophet 
 giving the law of life to the community ; and He 
 is in the generous devotion of all those whose 
 lives are laid freely upon the altar of service, 
 who are bearing heavy burdens, drudging at 
 wearisome tasks, and enduring the strain that 
 cuts into life with cruel strokes that others may 
 live. 
 
 " A picket frozen on duty, 
 
 A mother starved for her brood, 
 Socrates drinking the hemlock, 
 
 And Jesus on the rood. 
 And millions who humble and nameless 
 
 The straight hard pathway trod. 
 Some call it consecration, 
 
 And others call it God. " 
 
 In brief, it may be said that the coming 
 creed will stand for the truth that sacrifice is 
 an eternal law of the spiritual life ; that its root 
 is in the heart of God ; that its expression is the 
 religious history of man; that starting in the 
 lowest forms it reaches its supreme glory in the 
 cross. It will stand for the truth, also, that in 
 " drinking the bitter sweet of this cup the soul 
 finds its uttermost self; that along this path is 
 achieved all inner progress; that all the hero- 
 isms of life draw from here their inspiration; 
 that from this source flows the power that re- 
 deems the world." 
 
VIII 
 LOVE AND IMMORTALITY 
 
** For Love is stronger than death. " 
 
 — H. M. Alden. 
 
 He who from zone to zone. 
 
 Guides through the boundless sky thy cer- 
 tain flight. 
 In the long way that I must tread alone 
 Will lead my steps aright. " 
 
 — Bryant. 
 
LOVE AND IMMORTALITY 
 
 The most familiar and yet the most unfa- 
 miliar fact of human experience is death. We 
 all are agreed that we must die, but we are by 
 no means agreed as to what death is. Multi- 
 tudes in every generation who have lived their 
 whole lives in the belief that death meant ex- 
 tinction have had, perhaps, as next door neigh- 
 bors those who have been entirely filled with the 
 thought of an existence beyond. On the one 
 hand, we have the infinitely mournful strains 
 of an Omar Khayyam: 
 
 " One thing is certain 
 
 And the rest is hes. 
 The flower that once is blown 
 Forever dies. " 
 
 And on the other hand we have the serene 
 and beautiful faith of a Tennyson: 
 
 " That nothing walks with aimless feet; 
 That not one life shall be destroyed 
 Or cast as rubbish to the void. 
 
 When God hath made the pile complete. *' 
 
 In view of the tremendous evidence of the 
 outward appearance it is not at all surprising 
 that the attitude of many toward the life be- 
 yond should be frankly negative. "As far 8is 
 73 
 
74. THE COMING CREED 
 
 we are able to take account of the soul it grows 
 with the growth of the body, matures as the 
 body matures, and decays as the body decays. 
 Why then should we not say that it dies when 
 the body dies? Life gives overwhelming evi- 
 dence of the mutual dependence of body and 
 mind. An injury to the brain will produce an 
 entire change in the mental and the moral life. 
 What then is more reasonable than to suppose 
 that if the brain is not merely injured, but 
 destroyed, the inner consciousness will be de- 
 stroyed also?" There are very few who have 
 not at times been influenced by such reflections, 
 and in every generation many have been com- 
 pletely overwhelmed by them. It is true indeed 
 that this negative mood has lain heavily upon 
 the modem world. Many cultured people in 
 every land have come to feel that this life is all, 
 or at least that the odds are very much against 
 there being another. The tremendous breaking 
 up of traditional beliefs which has character- 
 ized this generation is responsible, to a very 
 great extent, for this feeling. A wide-spread 
 loss of faith in religious ideas once universally 
 held has left the minds of men open to the as- 
 sault of appearance, and the average man sees 
 nothing to rebut it. 
 
 To the evidence of appearance the New Tes- 
 tament opposes not an argument but an expe- 
 rience. Its answer to the doubt about the fu- 
 
LOVE AND IMMORTALITY 75 
 
 ture is a summons to live the life immortal 
 here and now. According to its ideal the dif- 
 ference between the mortal and the immortal 
 is not made by death, but by an inner quality 
 of life. Jesus, when hanging apparently help- 
 less upon the cross was just as immortal as when 
 he arose from the grave. He had some inner 
 quality that death could not grasp or hold, 
 and the assurance of the New Testament is that 
 those who share the Master's kind of life are 
 deathless. The promise of the New Testa- 
 ment is not that if we die we shall live again, 
 but that if we live in Christ we shall never 
 die. The teaching of the New Testament is 
 that all life has its laws. The liaws of the inner 
 life are as real and as insistent as the laws of 
 the outer life. Those who obey the laws of 
 health have a right to health, and other things 
 being equal they find health. Those, too, who 
 obey the laws of the spirit have a right to spir- 
 itual life, and they find spiritual life. They 
 find it on this side of death no less truly than 
 in the great beyond. In his life of perfect de- 
 votion and self -giving, as well as in his teach- 
 ing, Jesus revealed both the nature of spiritual 
 obedience, and the quality of life that flows 
 therefrom. To share with him his obedience, 
 says the New Testament, is to share with him 
 the fruits of obedience. To practice with him 
 the life immortal is to have as he had the cer- 
 
76 THE COMING CREED 
 
 tainty of immortality. To the rich man who 
 came with the question, "What shall I do to in- 
 herit eternal Hfe?" Jesus replied, "Sell what- 
 soever thou hast and give to the poor, and come 
 take up the cross and follow me." Devote 
 yourself, in other words, to love. Give your- 
 self, your days, and your strength to the claims 
 of love. That is the practice of immortality. 
 Love is of God, it is rooted in the Infinite Heart. 
 He who loves abides in God and God in him, 
 and his life is as deathless as the life of God. 
 
 Thus from the standpoint of the New Testa- 
 ment immortality is not something that is be- 
 stowed from without, as one man bestows a gift 
 upon another; it is something, rather, that is 
 developed from within. In modem engineering 
 it has become a familiar feat to remove an old 
 and outworn structure, such as a railroad 
 bridge, without interfering in the least with the 
 traffic or hindering the trains for a single hour. 
 It is said that a few years ago a great building 
 which was occupied by a daily paper was re- 
 placed by a modern fire-proof structure with- 
 out suspending a single issue of the journal. 
 While the daily work of publication was going 
 on, the walls of the new building were rising, 
 constructed to endure. Little by little the old 
 and unsubstantial gave place to the new and 
 permanent. So it is with the life immortal. 
 Here in the midst of the years, in the midst of 
 
LOVE AND IMMORTALITY 77 
 
 life's occupations, pursuits and interests, while 
 we work and play, while we rejoice and sorrow, 
 little by little we may develop within ourselves 
 the elements that endure. The body is always 
 dying, it is ever in a process of decay, but by 
 devotion to Christlike ideals and ends we may 
 develop a quality within that is above time and 
 change, that is not subject to a process of de- 
 cay, and when at last the body is outworn it 
 will be laid aside as we discard a garment. "If 
 the earthly house of our tabernacle be dissolved, 
 we have a building from God, a house not made 
 with hands, eternal in the heavens." The inner 
 consciousness, however, the real self has not 
 been changed; it has simply been transferred. 
 "Just as the estuary is a part of the sea and 
 leads out to the sea, and we sail through the 
 land-locked portion of it by day, looking out 
 upon the land that is visible on every side, and 
 then we go to sleep and awake to find ourselves 
 in the midst of the ocean, so the earthly life 
 that is lived for love is but a part of the great 
 eternal sea. Sailing along today we look out 
 and behold the land on every side, and then we 
 go to sleep and awake just as naturally as in 
 the morning, and we find ourselves upon the 
 boundless ocean." 
 
 Such is the Christian view of death. Instead 
 of the dread tyrant, which art has pictured as 
 a hideous fiend who advances brandishing his 
 
78 THE COMING CREED 
 
 ghastly spear, or as one of the Fates whose 
 remorseless shears cut the threads of life, the 
 New Testament pictures death as a servant, 
 whose entrance upon the scene can be discerned, 
 but whose departure when his work is done may 
 be predicted. Curiously enough this view is re- 
 ceiving wonderful confirmation today from the 
 very quarter which in other years was supposed 
 to supply the evidence for its refutation. The 
 further observations of science, by demonstrat- 
 ing the continuity of force have shattered the 
 premises upon which the old materialistic argu- 
 ments for the destruction of consciousness were 
 based. If we can turn heat into motion, motion 
 into electricity, and electricity into light, but 
 can by no process reduce them to nothingness, 
 what is there in the nature of things or in hu- 
 man experience to justify the inference that 
 character or soul force can meet with such a 
 fate? The broad hint of science here is that 
 spirit can be transmuted but that it cannot be 
 destroyed. 
 
 Likewise in showing the universal validity of 
 instinct science has done much to confirm the 
 Christian view of death. It has shown that 
 instinct is everywhere the prophecy of nature. 
 Through this wonderful power the young ani- 
 mal is able to guard itself against a thousand 
 dangers and to come at last to maturity. Each 
 insect and bird carries with it some instinct 
 
LOVE AND IMMORTALITY 79 
 
 that enables it to meet nature's need. The 
 young lark following its instinct commits itself 
 to the soft air and it finds itself borne up by 
 the receiving medium. The robin following its 
 migratory instinct reaches the sunny clime that 
 was in this way foretold. So the poet defining 
 death as the summons of a heaven-born in- 
 stinct beautifully sings, 
 
 " I go to prove my soul ; 
 I see my way as the birds their trackless way. 
 I shall arrive! What time, what circuit first, 
 I ask not; but unless God sends His hail 
 Or blinding fireballs, sleet or stifling snow. 
 In good time, His good time, I shall arrive. 
 He guides me and the bird in His good time. ** 
 
 Is it credible that nature in dealing with the 
 animal world has shown such skill, but that in 
 dealing with man she is a bungler, or that the 
 Infinite Creator whispers truth to wasps and 
 spiders, but that in speaking to man He seeks 
 to mislead? 
 
 It may be said indeed that what science here 
 offers, does not, after all, amount to much, 
 and it would not if it stood alone, but it comes 
 as a reinforcement of the New Testament con- 
 viction that true character is stronger than 
 death, and that the development of inner worth 
 is the safeguard against the power of death. 
 It may be that on this side of the grave man 
 will never gain a physical demonstration of 
 
80 THE COMING CREED 
 
 what is beyond, but somehow the conviction is 
 unavoidable that in his perfect devotion and 
 self -giving Jesus revealed the secret of what lies 
 beyond. It is impossible to come into contact 
 with a really beautiful and noble personality 
 without the feeling that it breathes the atmos- 
 phere of immortality and is inexplicable with- 
 out it, that while lived under human conditions 
 it manifests relations to another and higher 
 sphere, and that while absorbed in the interests 
 and occupations of earth it nevertheless reveals 
 an order of existence that is not of the earth. 
 It was once said of a distinguished man who 
 recently died that no one could think of his 
 spirit, nature and career without thinking of 
 immortality. That was pre-eminently the char- 
 acteristic of Jesus. As men stood before him 
 they felt the presence of something immortal 
 that issued from him, and that was inherent in 
 him. It is because of the life that he lived, 
 more than the historical proof that is offered, 
 that we believe in his resurrection. We cannot 
 escape the conviction that such a life is beyond 
 the reach of death. 
 
 Those who live self-centered and self-satis- 
 fied lives until forced by some bitter experience 
 to think of death, are sometimes wont to ask 
 for some book to read, or for some argument 
 that will prove immortality, but we have to 
 realize that immortality cannot be proved as a 
 
LOVE AND IMMORTALITY 81 
 
 problem in mathematics is proved. "Life comes 
 before belief just as the stars come before as- 
 tronomy, the flowers before botany, and religion 
 before theology. We must live the life immor- 
 tal in order to believe in immortality. If we 
 would have a right to the tree of life and if we 
 would have a right to know that there is a tree 
 of life, we must seek the immortal life here and 
 seek it from the God who is here, and seek it 
 through the channels that He opens for us." 
 
 "Add to your faith virtue," says the New 
 Testament, "and to virtue knowledge; and to 
 knowledge temperance; and to temperance pa- 
 tience ; and to patience brotherly kindness ; and 
 to brotherly kindness love." That is the prac- 
 tice of immortality, and it is from this that the 
 sure conviction of immortality flows. 
 
IX 
 A SUGGESTED CREED 
 
** Therefore, come what may, hold fast to love. 
 We win by tenderness, we conquer by forgiveness. 
 O, strive to enter into something of that large 
 celestial charity which, meek, enduring, unretaU- 
 ating, and which even the overbearing world can- 
 not withstand forever. Learn the first command- 
 ment of the Son of God. Not to love merely, but 
 to love as He loved. 
 
 — F. W. Robertson. 
 
A SUGGESTED CREED 
 
 We believe in God as the source of all love, 
 in the sense that He wills the good of all, and 
 that wherever love is there God is. 
 
 We believe in Jesus as the supreme embodi- 
 ment and revelation of love, and therefore the 
 perfect Ideal and Lord, for all who through 
 Him learn to love. 
 
 We believe in the Bible as the book that most 
 perfectly sets forth the love of God as the guide 
 to conduct and as the secret of blessedness, and 
 we cherish as sacred all writings in the propor- 
 tion that they do the same. 
 
 We believe that the great fundamental evil 
 of life, and the great disturbing force of the 
 world is want of love, and that salvation both 
 for the individual and for society is escape out 
 of selfishness into love. 
 
 We believe in the latent good in evil men, and 
 that it is our duty to show God's love (that is, 
 good will) to them even when we rebuke their 
 selfishness and lack of good will. 
 
 We believe in the church as the association 
 of those who love, for the purpose of extending 
 the sway of love, and that none should be ex- 
 cluded from the church except those who ex- 
 clude themselves by the truth they cannot see 
 and the love they cannot feel. 
 
 We believe in the kingdom of God as the 
 85 
 
86 THE COMING CREED 
 
 sway of God's love, and that to seek the king- 
 dom of God is to work for healthfulness, 
 beauty, intelligence, and morality for all men, 
 to seek justice for the needy and oppressed, 
 the overworked and underpaid, and to endeavor 
 as far as possible to reduce the terrible miseries 
 and inequalities of the world. 
 
 We believe that love is immortal, that those 
 who love abide in God and that God abides in 
 them. 
 
 This creed is not offered as something to be 
 chanted, recited, or imposed as a test. If the 
 foregoing chapters have not made this clear 
 they have failed in their fundamental purpose. 
 It is meant rather as a statement of the princi- 
 ples and spirit which underlie and condition a 
 true church life. What the laws of navigation 
 are to the sailor, what the laws of music are 
 to the musician, or the laws of mechanics are to 
 the engineer, the creed should be to the church. 
 Note how the "engineer in planning and build- 
 ing a bridge makes use of his creed. He does not 
 sing it, shout it, or subscribe his name to it, but 
 he builds it into his work. His entire working 
 belief is put there, his convictions about cur- 
 rents, wind pressures, leverages and arches are 
 embedded in his work. If the work is found to 
 be good the creed is declared sound." 
 
 Thus it is that the church must put its creed 
 into its life and work. Whatever cannot thus 
 
A SUGGESTED^ CKEEDi ' i. > \ i SM : /' 
 
 be expressed must be thrown out. It is here 
 especially that the creeds of other years fail. 
 They are largely speculative in character. They 
 represent a plan by which to think, rather than 
 a plan by which to live and work. They could 
 not be expressed in terms of life, because for 
 the most part they had but little bearing upon 
 life. 
 
 To many earnest Christians it seems a terri- 
 ble menace to the church to remove the dogmatic 
 conditions which have hitherto been insisted 
 upon, and to make the church life a fellowship 
 of love. There is need, however, that such peo- 
 ple should realize that dogmatic fences, like 
 the Apostles' Creed, and similar statements, 
 with which the churches have been hedged about 
 and protected, have been restrictions which have 
 been imposed upon the Christ himself. They 
 have operated to shut the Christ out because 
 they have shut out a great many sincere posses- 
 sors of His spirit. There is need also that such 
 people should realize that dogma is always di- 
 visive, while love is constructive and unifying. 
 It draws the souls of men together. Sectarian 
 differences will not long continue when the 
 churches have become re-established upon a basis 
 of love, when they stand pre-eminently for 
 brotherhood and service. 
 
 Many churches have already taken a long 
 stride in this direction. They are inviting into 
 
8$>fX^ THE COMING CREED 
 
 their fellowship all honest believers in goodness 
 and fraternity who find in the historic Jesus so 
 perfect a manifestation of these principles that 
 they are willing to confess Him as their spir- 
 itual master. 
 
 This is a long step from the theological in- 
 quisition that used to be the test of church mem- 
 bership. However, it is in absolute consonance 
 with Christ's significant parable of the last 
 judgment, and it seems not unlikely that we 
 have reached a point where the movement in 
 this direction will begin to spread with great 
 rapidity. 
 
 For a church with such a spirit and with 
 such a programme many earnest souls are wait- 
 ing. Good men do not stand aloof from the 
 organization because it is too religious, but be- 
 cause it is not religious enough. They see it 
 uncertain and hesitating in its message, con- 
 cerning itself with what seems unreal and non- 
 essential, weakened by its divisions and rival- 
 ries, and they cannot fully respect it. Many 
 who are now without the church would greet 
 with ardor a church life that offered them the 
 full and abiding love of Christ, that took no 
 thought for itself, that dared to stand fairly 
 and squarely upon the principle of Jesus, "he 
 that loseth his life shall find it," and without 
 pretense or equivocation was a fellowship of 
 love and service. 
 
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