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 351 
 
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 ur Total Christianity 
 
 CHARLES REYNOLDS BROWN 
 
Our Totai Christianity 
 
 BY 
 
 CHARLES REYNOLDS BROWN 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 FAITH AND HEALTH, THE YOUNG MAN-S AFFAIRS, THE SOCIAL 
 MESSAGE OF THE MODERN PULPIT, THE MAIN POINTS, ETC. 
 
 This series of seven sermons was delivered 
 on seven Sunday evenings in the First 
 Congregational Church, Oakland, California. 
 
 WOOD & COWDREY 
 
 Publishers 
 876 Broadway, Oakland, Cal. 
 
 PROGRESS PRESS PRINT 
 
 March, 1910 
 

 
 
 
 . , 
 
 
 . 
 
When these addresses were given in the First 
 Congregational Church of Oakland, California, 
 the three hymns sung at each service were 
 selected from hymn writers belonging to the 
 particular denomination to be considered that 
 evening. 
 
 It is an interesting and significant fact for 
 the cause of Christian unity that these many 
 hymns, written by members of these different 
 communions, were all contained in the "Ply- 
 mouth Hymnal' ' in use in the church where the 
 addresses were given as indeed they would be 
 found in almost any standard hymnal. Doc- 
 trinal discussions may divide us, but we all 
 come together in prayer and in praise. 
 
 The list of these various hymns may be of 
 interest to those who read this book. 
 
 3GOG13 
 
BAPTIST. 
 
 Softly fades the twilight ray. 
 I need Thee every hour. 
 Blest be the tie that binds. 
 
 EPISCOPAL. 
 
 little town of Bethlehem. 
 The Church's one foundation. 
 
 For all the saints who from their labors 
 rest. 
 
 METHODIST. 
 
 Love divine all love excelling. 
 Jesus lover of my soul. 
 A charge to keep I have. 
 
 PRESBYTERIAN. 
 
 1 heard the voice of Jesus say. 
 Go labor on, spend and be spent. 
 Stand up, stand up for Jesus. 
 
 ROMAN CATHOLIC. 
 
 Lead Kindly Light. 
 
 Jesus. Thou joy of loving hearts. 
 
 Jerusalem the golden. 
 
 UNITARIAN. 
 
 Again as evening's shadow falls. 
 In the Cross of Christ I glory. 
 Nearer my God to Thee. 
 
 CONGREGATIONAL. 
 
 My faith looks up to Thee. 
 
 I love thy kingdom, Lord. 
 
 Master let me walk with Thee. 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 I. THE BAPTIST PART 
 
 II. THE EPISCOPAL PART 
 
 III. THE METHODIST PART 
 
 IV. THE PRESBYTERIAN PART 
 
 V. THE ROMAN CATHOLIC PART 
 
 VI. THE UNITARIAN PART 
 
 VII. THE CONGREGATIONAL PART 
 
THE BAPTIST PART 
 
 O 
 
 UR total Christianity is a very large affair. 
 "Like a mighty army moves the church of 
 God." It is not all Infantry, nor all Artil- 
 lery, nor all Cavalry, nor all Red Cross,- 
 each one of these arms of a common service is useful 
 in its own way. 
 
 And because Christianity is large and diversified 
 it is good now and then for a man to move out of 
 his own particular corner of the field and take a look 
 at the army as a whole. It is good for him to get 
 something of the swing and movement of these far- 
 flung and variously formulated efforts to have right- 
 eousness and peace and joy bear rule. It will have 
 a tendency to lift him out of the pettiness and 
 meagerness into which the best of us sometimes fall 
 and to bestow upon him some of the breadth and 
 bigness, some of the sympathy and catholicity of 
 spirit which belong to citizenship in the Kingdom 
 of God. 
 
 It is well for an individual Christian to occasional- 
 ly take another man's gait. There are bodies of 
 Christians who move always in a regular and digni- 
 fied walk the Presbyterians, for example, in the 
 
8 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 general quality of their church life have learned to 
 "walk and not faint.' There are others who oc- 
 casionally strike a round trot, and others, less con- 
 ventional in their methods, are accustomed to pace, 
 while some even break into a splendid gallop. Well 
 and good if they are only headed right, God be 
 praised for this variety of movement ! And for the 
 man who, on the whole, prefers his own gait, it is de- 
 sirable that for an hour he should catch some other 
 man's mood and movement he will come back to 
 his own place in the procession a more limber and a 
 more useful Christian. 
 
 The purpose of this series of addresses is not con- 
 troversial. If I could not find anything to speak about 
 for seven Sunday evenings except to make a series 
 of attacks upon my fellow Christians in those other 
 camps, I should certainly stop preaching and under- 
 take to earn my living in some more reputable way. 
 In the newspapers much is made oftentimes of "the 
 divisions of Christendom,' but these jokers know 
 not what they say. The divisions on the face of them 
 are many, but the agreements are more numerous 
 and more significant. And the deeper meaning of 
 these divisions lies in the fact that each group of 
 Christians which has any right to be, has made some 
 special and characteristic contribution to the total 
 Christianity. 
 
 There are bigots and sectarians who do not view 
 the matter in this way. They are so taken up with 
 the beauties of their ow r n little cob-houses of doc- 
 
THE BAPTIST PART 9 
 
 trine and polity and ritual that they have no ad- 
 miration left for anything outside. They have no 
 admiration for the great cathedral-like structure of 
 Christian faith and worship and life with its nave 
 and choir, its added transepts and out-reaching 
 chapels representing a long and varied process of 
 growth. But there are not many of these precious 
 bigots left and they do not count for much even 
 in their own denominations. The theology, the 
 polity and the worship of one branch of the church 
 are not roomy enough to include all the facts of 
 human nature, to say nothing of drawing a com- 
 plete circle around the divine love. We wish to 
 stand for these evenings in the presence of that 
 larger Christianity which shall more completely com- 
 mand the admiration and allegiance of our hearts. 
 In this series of addresses then I will ask vou to 
 
 *> 
 
 look at seven of the leading branches of the Christian 
 Church, the Baptist, Episcopal, Methodist, Presby- 
 terian, Roman Catholic, Unitarian and Congregation- 
 al churches. I have simply arranged them in alpha- 
 betical order, except that I have left my own to the 
 last. There are other branches of the church which 
 are larger numerically than some that I have named. 
 The Campbellite, or Christian denomination, for 
 example, is much larger than three of the ones named 
 -but it is so much like the Baptist Church in its 
 general methods that it did not seem to demand 
 separate consideration. The Lutheran Church is a 
 large body, but its general position is so much like 
 
10 OUK TOTAL CHK1STIANITY 
 
 that of the Presbyterian Church that its contribu- 
 tion will easily be considered under that head. I 
 have selected these seven because they are the best 
 known and because each one in my judgment has 
 made some distinctive contribution to our total Chris- 
 tianity. If in the spirit of intellectual hospitality 
 we may undertake this consideration, we shall bring 
 back bits of information, stirrings of sympathy, 
 wiser judgments and refreshing breezes from other 
 quarters of the infinite heaven of spiritual forces 
 which will inevitably broaden and inspire us all to 
 a finer and fuller service of our common Lord. 
 
 The name "Baptist" dates back to about the year 
 1G64. It is applied to a certain body of Christians 
 because of the peculiar emphasis they lay upon the 
 mode and upon the proper subjects of bap- 
 tism. They insist that the literal meaning 
 of the Greek word Baptize is "to dip,' and 
 that inasmuch as baptism by the immersion 
 of the whole body in water was common, 
 if not universal in Christ's day, this mode is the 
 one acceptable mode of administering that sacra- 
 ment. They also insist that the church should be 
 composed only of regenerate believers ; and that only 
 people sufficiently mature to make conscious ac- 
 ceptance of Christ as their Savior can therefore 
 rightly be admitted to the church through the ordi- 
 of baptism They therefore do not practice 
 
THE BAPTIST PART 11 
 
 the baptism of children as is done in the larger part 
 of the Church of Christ. 
 
 I shall not discuss either of these claims. There 
 are many of us who believe as Dean Stanley did 
 that the mode of baptism in the first century was 
 commonly if not universally by immersion, and who 
 believe also that the departure from that mode, 
 which occurred very early and which has come to 
 prevail so widely, represents for colder regions 
 where different styles of dress obtain, "the triumph 
 of convenience and good taste over a literal attach- 
 ment to ancient custom.' But I am not here to 
 argue the differing claims as to the mode or the 
 subjects of baptism, but to undertake rather to 
 indicate the distinctive contribution made by this 
 body of Christians to our total Christianity. 
 
 These seem to me to lie in three directions first, 
 in their intense loyalty to personal conviction. Our 
 good friends in the Baptist Church believe that Jesus 
 Christ was baptized by immersion in the river Jor- 
 dan. They believe that the early Christians were 
 thus baptized by the apostles. They believe it is 
 essential that in this far-off land and time every 
 believing Christian should be baptized in the same 
 way. Because of their loyalty to this conviction 
 they are ready to make all necessary sacrifices in 
 maintaing that mode. 
 
 This loyalty to conviction becomes oftentimes a 
 serious handicap. In a warm country like Palestine 
 where most of the people lived near running streams, 
 
12 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 where the loose outer garments could be readily laid 
 aside without unseemliness or immodesty, the custom 
 of immersion was one thing. In colder countries 
 where water must be artifically heated in tanks or 
 where people in the country must go to ponds or 
 to streams and in the winter season cut holes through 
 the ice in order to perform this rite in that way, and 
 where the style of dress is such as to involve much 
 inconvenience and discomfort, immersion is quite 
 another thing. "Well and good,' the Baptists say 
 -"even though we find ourselves in many cases 
 compelled to overcome a measure of reluctance on 
 the part of thousands of people to that mode of 
 baptism, we believe it to be right and we gladly 
 accept that difficulty.' 
 
 However, the rest of the Christian world may 
 differ with them as to the importance of that par- 
 ticular mode of baptism, we cannot but admire their 
 intense loyalty to conviction. I have been present, 
 as no doubt many of you have been, at baptisms 
 in country places where candidates for baptism were 
 driven several miles from their homes in the coldest 
 weather, where a hole had been cut through the 
 ice and where believers were immersed in freezing 
 water and were then compelled to drive several miles 
 to the nearest house to secure a change of clothing. 
 And the physical discomfort was accepted as a mat- 
 ter of course in no spirit of complaint but as an op- 
 portunity for bearing witness to their faith in Christ. 
 Let that loyalty to conviction, that tenacity of pur- 
 
THE BAPTIST PART 13 
 
 pose extend to matters which seem to us more vital 
 than the mode of baptism, as indeed it has in large 
 measure extended among the Christians of that faith, 
 and one can see what a power for good it may be- 
 come ! Let loyalty to conviction be directed to the 
 consecration of one's powers to Christian service, 
 to the devotion of one's means to benevolence and 
 to the development of a sincere attachment to the 
 church of one's choice and it will become a mighty 
 influence for good! 
 
 Great emphasis is laid among the Baptists upon 
 the sacredness of the individual conscience. This 
 lies at the root of their refusal to baptize children. 
 The helpless child must not be carried into the 
 church and there baptized by sprinkling, or by im- 
 mersion for that matter this Avould equally offend 
 their sense of right. We must wait until the con- 
 scious moral life of this child has taken shape and 
 has made its own choice as to the mode of baptism, 
 until it has made a personal decision as to the whole 
 question of Christian worship and service. "Every- 
 one of us shall give an account of himself to God, ' 
 is a favorite text with the Baptists, and their very 
 insistence upon the right and obligation of individ- 
 ual judgment in all matters of religion has helped 
 to develop that intense loyalty to personal convic- 
 tion. 
 
 The second contribution may be found in the 
 simplicity of their creed. For more than a century 
 they had no formulated creed at all. They simply 
 
14 OUB TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 referred believers to the Bible. Even now they have 
 no authoritative creed statements or symbols. What is 
 known as the ' * New Hampshire Confession of Faith ' 
 is widely published throughout the north, and an- 
 other known as the "Philadelphia Confession of 
 Faith' is current through the south. But these 
 statements are for instruction rather than for en- 
 forcement. They are not binding in the sense that 
 the Thirty-nine Articles of the Episcopal church or 
 the Twenty-five Articles of the Methodist Church 
 or the Westminster Confession in the Presbyterian 
 Church are binding upon the teachers of religion in 
 these bodies. The creed of the Baptists is the Bible, 
 and they have not undertaken to formulate its teach- 
 ings in any authoritative creed statements. 
 
 Two of the points which come in for special em- 
 phasis in this church are indicated in their favorite 
 text "He that believeth and is baptized shall be 
 saved.' He that believes, not certain creed state- 
 ments contained in the Thirty-nine Articles or in the 
 Westminster Confession; he that believes on Christ, 
 in His gospel, in His purposes for the world, and is 
 ready to bear witness to that belief in baptism, shall 
 be saved. The inner attitude of the moral nature 
 toward Christ and the open confession of that atti- 
 tude in baptism are the two essentials for salvatiou. 
 As compared with the elaborate dogmas of some 
 branches of the Christian church, there is among the 
 Baptists great simplicity of creed. 
 
 The very simplicity and comprehensiveness of this 
 
THE BAPTIST PART 15 
 
 basis has given them a certain facility in securing 
 and utilizing men of striking personality and of un- 
 conventional methods as ministers of their faith. 
 Take five men, well known to our own generation- 
 Charles H. Spurgeon of London, George C. Lorimer 
 of Boston, Russell H. Conwell of Philadelphia, P. S. 
 Henson of Chicago and Robert J. Burdette of Los 
 Angeles. All extraordinary men, and all useful 
 Baptist preachers! 
 
 Spurgeon preached to more people than any 
 other man of the Nineteenth Century. He preached 
 to seven thousand of them Sunday after Sunday in 
 his own Tabernacle, there in South London. His 
 sermons were printed in pamphlets and in book 
 form, and are being printed yet, although he has 
 been dead nearly twent}^ years, and the circulation 
 of them has extended into millions of copies. He 
 was in no sense a scholar* he knew nothing of the 
 Bible critically, nor of church history, nor of philos- 
 ophy. But "he believed what he believed, and for 
 the man whose main business it is to produce faith 
 in other men this is more valuable than all technical 
 scholarship.' He proclaimed Christ and Him cru- 
 cified with wonderful effect. He was unconvention- 
 al he would joke in the pulpit; he would shock the 
 taste of his hearers ; when preaching about hell and 
 certain other doctrines he would indulge in language 
 so extravagant that we would scarcely credit it did 
 we not find it in print in volumes published under 
 his own supervision. But he knew the common peo- 
 
16 OUK TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 pie and they knew him. He won thousands of them 
 to Christian life and service. He accomplished re- 
 sults in which every thoughtful Christian rejoices. 
 His later life was somewhat clouded by the fact that 
 he felt the Baptist denomination was becoming too 
 liberal in its views on the fall of man, the atonement, 
 the inspiration of the Bible and the fate of the 
 wicked, and consequently he withdrew from the Bap- 
 tist Union. During the latter part of his ministry 
 he and his church stood alone, but his bow abode in 
 strength, and his power of appeal w r as mighty. 
 
 George C. Lorimer, for many years pastor of Tre- 
 rnont Temple Baptist Church in Boston, was an Irish- 
 man, a little over five feet high, with a voice like 
 the filing of a hand-saw. He was equally unconven- 
 tional but he gained for himself a wide hearing, 
 especially from the non-church going public. His 
 message was direct and it found response in the 
 hearts of men. He had an immense influence for 
 good among those who were untouched by the more 
 conventional methods of religious effort. 
 
 Russell H. Conwell, whose lecture on "Acres of 
 Diamonds' has been given some eight thousand 
 times, earning for him a large amount of money, 
 which he has promptly put back into the philan- 
 thropic work of his own church, is one of the most 
 striking figures in the modern pulpit, His work in 
 the Temple Baptist Church in Philadelphia, especially 
 in the educational and social facilities offered to 
 
THE BAPTIST PART 17 
 
 young men and young women unable to go to college, 
 has been greatly blessed. 
 
 P. S. Henson of Chicago built up a tremendous 
 congregation and by his exceptional powers of 
 speech, which remained with him until he was almost 
 eighty years of age, successfully occupied a large 
 field of usefulness in that busy city. 
 
 And "Bob Burdett" in Los Angeles, widely known 
 as a newspaper man and a humorist, has consecrated 
 his abilities in these later years to the work of the 
 ministry at the Temple Auditorium and thus became 
 an effective preacher of the gospel in that southern 
 city. The very simplicity and breadth of their creed 
 basis has given the Baptists special facility in en- 
 listing men of striking personality. 
 
 The third contribution has been in their strong 
 insistence upon the entire separation of church and 
 state. This separation of civil and religious author- 
 ity may seem to many people in this country like 
 one of those things which goes without saying, but 
 it has not always been so and it is not so now in 
 other lands. "Render unto Caesar the things which 
 are Caesar's" but only the things which are Caesar's 
 -this has been the steady contention of the Baptist 
 in all lainds and in all times. 
 
 Roger Williams, one of the early Baptist heroes 
 in this country, was, not driven out of Massachus- 
 etts because he was the apostle of religious tolerance 
 or because of any special religious tenets he held. At 
 that time he was not even a Baptist for he was 
 
18 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 immersed after he went to Ehode Island. He was 
 driven out because of his extreme individualism in 
 insisting upon the separation of church and state. 
 As soon as he landed he stirred up trouble by urging 
 that the Christians of Massachusetts should join in 
 an act of public repentance for having communed 
 with the Church of England, which was a state 
 church. He wrote against the Massachusetts Patent 
 claiming the King of England had no right to grant 
 land to the colonists. He censured the Colony for 
 requiring oaths from citizens on the ground that to 
 exact an oath from an unregenerate person involved 
 the sin of taking G-od's name in vain. He denied 
 any power to the civil magistrate in matters of re- 
 ligious faith. This was not acceptable to the people 
 of Massachusetts Bay at that time. They still main- 
 tained a close relation between church and state. 
 Thus Koger Williams was unacceptable to them and 
 he was invited to leave as a troublesome agitator. He 
 went to Providence, was immersed, became a Baptist 
 and founded Rhode Island, the first state in the 
 Union to guarantee entire religious freedom. 
 
 It was a protest sorely needed in that day. Mas- 
 sachusetts had passed laws against Baptists because 
 of their attitude touching these matters in 1644, had 
 imprisoned them in 1651 and banished them in 1669. 
 This was religious persecution by civil authority, 
 which the Baptists have always opposed. New York 
 did the same thing and so did Virginia. The Pro- 
 testant churches of Zurich, Switzerland, having just 
 
THE BAPTIST PART 19 
 
 won their own liberty and still in dread of Rome, 
 nevertheless passed an ordinance that any minister 
 administering the rite of baptism by immersion 
 should be drowned with some idea of poetic jus- 
 tice perhaps, making the punishment fit the crime. 
 And they actually executed that sentence against 
 one Felix Mantz, a Baptist minister, by drowning 
 him in the lake. 
 
 In the year 1863, the new code of the State of 
 Georgia provided in Section 1376 that "it should 
 be unlawful for any church or society to license any 
 slave or free person of color to preach or exhort or 
 otherwise officiate in church meetings. ' This aroused 
 the Baptists of that state. They declared that it 
 was seizing by force the things that are God's and 
 rendering them unto Caesar. They insisted in a 
 communication to the legislature that the State of 
 Georgia was undertaking to dictate to the Almighty 
 what color his preachers should be. And they an- 
 nounced that even with such an enactment before 
 their eyes they would ordain negroes to the minis- 
 try if they were godly men. They then proceeded 
 to ordain two, and the protest of those southern 
 Baptists became so effective that the effending sec- 
 tion was at once repealed. 
 
 In England at this hour John Clifford, a Baptist 
 minister, is one of the forces to be reckoned with 
 politically. He is a great tribune of the people, a 
 voice for the non-conformist conscience of Great 
 Britain. He supported Gladstone, opposed the Boer 
 
20 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 war, fought the brewers when they lined up with 
 the Lords, opposed the Education Act, urged the 
 dis-establishment of the church. He helped in the 
 triumph of the Liberal party in 1906, the party 
 just returned to power, representing the people 
 as against the interests and the hereditary aristoc- 
 racy. When I was in England a year ago I heard 
 him speak repeatedly at great public demonstrations 
 in Hyde Park and elsewhere and I could understand 
 how in that land of tradition, of class feeling, of 
 close connection between church and state, he had 
 become a mighty influence for good by his steady 
 insistence upon this fundamental Baptist principle 
 of entire separation of civil and religious authority. 
 
 The history of the Baptist people in regard to 
 missionary effort has been a curious one. When 
 the idea of sending missionaries to foreign lands 
 was first suggested, it split the church. The anti- 
 missionary party said 'If God wants the heathen 
 converted he will convert them without our help.' 
 And because of their extreme Galvanism they said 
 that the missionary societies would be "an unjus- 
 tifiable encroachment upon the divine sovereignty/ 
 for God by his eternal decrees had determined from 
 all eternity who should be saved and who should 
 be lost. And the Baptists who held this view split off 
 arid became a separate denomination. 
 
 But the missionary spirit grew and "the mission- 
 ary Baptists' were the first in England to organize 
 a missionary society and in 1793 William Carey went 
 
THE BAPTIST PART 21 
 
 out to become one of the noblest missionaries in the 
 history of India. In 1812 Adoniram Judson, who 
 was a Congregationalist and was sent out by the 
 American Board, changed his views on baptism dur- 
 ing the voyage and reaching Calcutta became a wide- 
 ly known and honored missionary of the Baptist 
 denomination in that land. And the world-wide, 
 generous interest of the Baptist people in missionary 
 enterprises has been a leading note in their church 
 life for the last hundred years. 
 
 It was Macaulay who said " There were many 
 cultured minds during the latter part of the Seven- 
 teenth Century, but only two great creative minds, 
 one of them the author of Paradise Lost and the 
 other the author of Pilgrim's Progress.' John Bun- 
 yan, the author of Pilgrim's Progress, was a Bap- 
 tist preacher and the gospel he preached may be fitly 
 indicated in the simplicity of this phrase "He that 
 believeth and is baptized shall be saved.' Let the 
 individual attitude toward Christ be one of per- 
 sonal trust and loyalty, let that attitude bear its 
 testimony in the act of baptism and the soul will 
 find acceptance with God ! 
 
THE EPISCOPAL PART 
 
 T 
 
 I I 
 
 HE full legal title of the Episcopal Church 
 tells us something of its attitude and of 
 its history "The Protestant Episcopal 
 Church in the United States of America.' 
 This name distinguishes it from those Christians 
 who acknowledge the supremacy of the Pope at 
 Rome on the one hand and from those Christians 
 who are not governed by bishops on the other; it 
 also indicates that it is a branch of the older church, 
 the Church of England, adjusted to the needs of this 
 particular country. 
 
 The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United 
 States of America ! It is a long and somewhat awk- 
 ward title. Many efforts have been made by the 
 members of this communion to have it changed. 
 There are those who would like to call themselves 
 ' The American Church, ' ' but this has been opposed 
 by the broader-minded men among them as being 
 decidedly bigoted, for it is neither the largest, the 
 oldest nor the most useful of the various churches 
 in America. Such a title would prove an embarrass- 
 ment even as the name "The Christian Church,' 
 which was assumed by the followers of Alexander 
 Campbell, has been a hindrance to them "The 
 
THE EPISCOPAL PART 23 
 
 Christian Church," as if the other churches were not 
 Christian, but were made up of some sort of heathen. 
 No satisfactory name has been found by the Epis- 
 copalians and so the legal title of the church stands 
 as indicated above. 
 
 The three distinctive contributions made by this 
 body of Christians to our total Christianity have 
 been these they have indicated clearly the value of 
 system. "Let all things be done decently and 
 in order,' in good taste and in a systematic way! 
 Nothing is left at loose ends among them. The 
 Episcopal Church with its three orders of ministers, 
 bishops, priests and deacons; with its wardens and 
 vestrymen among the laity, and with its many care- 
 fully constituted societies, is a highly organized 
 body. 
 
 The minister is not left to work out the ill-con- 
 sidered ongoings of his own individual preferences 
 and eccentricities. The church puts into his hand 
 a 'Book of Common Prayer,' indicating what he 
 is to say when he prays. It prescribes the scripture 
 lessons which he shall read in public on each Sun- 
 day of the year. Its well-defined Church Year, with 
 the Gospel and the epistle for the clay, indicates the 
 general program for his sermons. The choir is not 
 left free to introduce as it may please any piece of 
 pious doggerel set to religious ragtime or to some 
 love song, as is done in some quarters. The Te 
 Deum, the Venite, the Benedictus and the other 
 
24 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 offices of this church hold the music up to a high 
 and dignified standard. 
 
 The church year itself, following in its lessons and 
 in the other appointments for the day the main 
 events of Christ's life, is one fine illustration of the 
 value of system. About the first of December comes 
 the season of Advent, leading the people to think 
 upon the power of scripture, the value of the ministry 
 and the preparations for the coming of Christ. Dur- 
 ing the Christmas season they think upon the nativity 
 of Christ, upon the mystery of childhood, the duty 
 of parents, and the dignity of human life, as taught 
 in the doctrine of the Incarnatiotn. Epiphany comes 
 and they follow the wise men with their gifts and 
 think upon the larger appeal of Christ's message. 
 Lent comes with its self-denial, its humiliation, its 
 separation from worldly pleasure for the deepen- 
 ing of the devotional life. Good Friday comes and 
 they stand beside the Cross, witnessing the glory 
 of sacrifice, reflecting upon the reconciliation ac- 
 complished between God and man. Easter comes, 
 speaking of the triumph of good over evil, of life 
 over death. Forty days later comes Ascension Day 
 bearing its witness to the widening influence of 
 Christian truth as it emerges from a local into a 
 universal faith. Ten days later Whitsunday com- 
 memorates the outpouring of the Spirit at Pente- 
 cost. Then Trinity Sunday and the Sundays after 
 Trinity calling upon men to worship God in the 
 fullness of His being ! Then at the end of October 
 
THE EPISCOPAL PART 25 
 
 stands All Saints, a day of general remembrance 
 for all those who having finished their course in 
 faith do now rest from their labors! 
 
 This noble outline of lessons and themes and 
 prayers helps to save the minister and the congre- 
 gation from becoming scrappy, narrow and queer. 
 It prevents the preacher from playing all his re- 
 ligious music on one stop like a bagpipe, and en- 
 courages him to be a full church organ with many 
 stops. It aids him in declaring statedly the whole 
 counsel of God instead of dwelling solely upon those 
 themes which he personally enjoys. And when we 
 see the pettiness and the limitations of many pulpits 
 and many church services, we wish some larger 
 scheme might be there introduced instead of trusting 
 everything to the subjective impulses of John Smith. 
 We feel like calling upon the House of Bishops or 
 some caucus of presiding elders or some Synod or 
 General Assembly to outline a more varied and ade- 
 quate program for the instruction, the worhip, the 
 inspiration of the people who represent many moods, 
 many temperaments, and many forms of capability. 
 
 In the Prayer Book nothing is left to chance or 
 impulse or the extemporaneous output of some man, 
 who may or may not be possessed of judgment and 
 taste. Here in black and white is printed what is to be 
 said and all that is to be said, in the baptism of a 
 child, in the confirmation of the believer, in the 
 sacrament of the Lord's Supper. Here is what is 
 to be said at a marriage ceremony, in the visitation 
 
26 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 of the sick, at the burial of the dead. Here is the 
 form for the laying of a corner stone, for the ordina- 
 tion of a minister, for the dedication of a church, or 
 for the holding of family prayer. It is all laid down 
 in systematic fashion so that everyone will know in 
 advance what is to be done, and said and sung. 
 "Decently and in order' -good taste and the value 
 of system are both strongly emphasized in this 
 branch of the church ! 
 
 Because of this emphasis upon system, the Epis- 
 copal Church does not attract or develop so many 
 men of striking personality as would be the case 
 in the Baptist or the Congregational Church. It 
 does not tend to the development of strong preach- 
 ers. Phillips Brooks, whose inheritance and early 
 training by the way were Congregational, became, 
 indeed, one of the greatest preachers of the Nine- 
 teenth Century, but he stood almost alone. There 
 was no other preacher in that denomination to be 
 named in the same connection during that period. 
 The four men who have done so much to make the 
 Episcopal Church strong and useful beyond all 
 others in the City of New York, Bishop Potter, Dr. 
 Rainsford, Dr. Huntington and Dr. Greer, were none 
 of them great preachers. They were men of extra- 
 ordinary ability in organization and administra- 
 tion. They enlisted the interest of men of means, 
 they organized a vast body of workers, they pointed 
 the way of advance with the vision of statesmen 
 along lines of noble Christian usefulness. All this 
 
THE EPISCOPAL PART 27 
 
 havs high value and it belongs naturally to that 
 branch of the Church of Christ which has placed its 
 emphasis upon administration more than upon 
 preaching. 
 
 The same idea of system extends to their creed 
 statements. In the Baptist denomination as we saw, 
 there are no authoritative creed statements the 
 New Testament is their creed and large liberty is 
 left for individual interpretation. In the Congrega- 
 tional denomination each church forms and adopts 
 its own creed. The creed in the church which I 
 serve was written by the present pastor and after 
 a few verbal amendments was adopted by the peo- 
 ple, and it stands today as the expression of our 
 theological belief. But in the Episcopal Church 
 nothing is left to the judgment of some local church 
 or some individual minister. The Thirty-nine Ar- 
 ticles of Religion, the Apostles Creed, the Nicene 
 Creed, the Catechism, where the belief of each 
 Christian is set forth in definite terms, all serve to 
 introduce and maintain the idea of system and 
 
 */ 
 
 method in religious conviction. "Let all things be 
 done in order/ this church says in worship, in 
 reading the scriptures, in shaping those convictions, 
 which are vital. It has made a distinct contribu- 
 tion in thus asserting and demonstrating the high 
 value of system. 
 
 In the second place, it has been distinctive in the 
 exaltation of good taste. Let all things be done 
 decently as well as in order. "Worship the Lord" 
 
28 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 not only in the integrity, but ' * in the beauty of holi- 
 ness!" This church has shown in all the expres- 
 ions of its life a high sense of the artistic values in 
 spiritual ministry. 
 
 And why not ? God is not indifferent to beauty- 
 He is the God of good taste as well as of righteous- 
 ness. He has filled the world with beauty, rain- 
 bows and sunsets, twinkling stars and dew drops, 
 lovely flowers as well as fruits and vegetables! In 
 that section of the world untouched by the hand of 
 man, beauty rather predominates, for there are 
 more wild flowers than there are wild fruits or wild 
 vegetables. He is a lover of beauty and He has placed 
 deep within the hearts of men the capacity for ad- 
 miration. Worship the Lord therefore in the beauty 
 of holiness ! 
 
 The Episcopal Church beyond any other stands for 
 good taste in religion, for the decorum of worship. 
 It shows this attitude in its architecture. The 
 Episcopal churches here in Oakland are not fair 
 examples they do not justly represent the general 
 method of this denomination. When we travel 
 through the country at large we ordinarily find 
 the observance of good taste in the archi- 
 tecture of their places of worship. Even where the 
 building is inexpensive it has a churchly look. And 
 the exterior as well as the interior of a church 
 should suggest the thought of worship. When peo- 
 ple see it they should know at once that it is not 
 a place to play billiards or to take a Turkish bath, 
 
THE EPISCOPAL PART 29 
 
 but a place to worship. And the habit of fitting 
 up churches with opera chairs or decorating them 
 as one might decorate a restaurant or a ladies' par- 
 lor in a fine hotel has made against the spirit of 
 reverence and aspiration. 
 
 This good taste in architecture has a profound 
 influence. Episcopalians do not go to church so 
 much to hear a sermon or to be entertained by splen- 
 did music as to worship, to bow down, to pray to 
 the Lord, their Maker. Everyone has put into his 
 hand a Prayer Book indicating that he is there not 
 merely to be preached to but to pray on his own 
 behalf. And when one enters an Episcopal church 
 any day in the week, he finds there an atmosphere 
 of reverence, of aspiration, of yearning after fellow- 
 ship with the unseen, which has high value in the 
 development of noble religious life. 
 
 The habit of good taste shows in their liturgy. 
 These aids to worship are not only systematic, cov- 
 ering almost all conceivable form of human aspira- 
 tion, they are also beautiful. I have used the Prayer 
 Book for twenty odd years and many of its prayers 
 I know by heart. Let a man open his Bible and as 
 he begins to read utter that little collect: 
 
 'Blessed Lord who hast caused all holy scriptures 
 to be written for our learning, grant that we may 
 in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn and in- 
 wardly digest them, that by patience and comfort 
 of thy Holy Word we may embrace and ever hold 
 
30 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 fast the blessed hope of everlasting life which Thou 
 hast given us in our Savior Jesus Christ.' 
 
 Let him begin the day with that collect, which 
 I often use as an invocation at the opening of our 
 own church service : 
 
 "Almighty God unto whom all hearts are open, 
 all desires known, and from whom no secrets 
 are hid; cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the 
 inspiration of thy Holy Spirit that we may perfect- 
 ly love Thee and worthily magnify thy Holy Name, 
 through Jesus Christ our Lord/ 
 
 When he gathers his family around him to offer 
 the evening prayer before they lie down to rest, 
 let him conclude his devotions with that beautiful 
 prayer of Saint Chrysostom: 
 
 ' Almighty God who hast given us grace at this 
 time with one accord to make our common supplica- 
 tion unto thee and dost promise that where two or 
 three are gathered together in thy name thou wilt 
 grant their requests, fulfill now, O Lord, the desires 
 and petitions of thy servants as may be most ex- 
 pedient for them, granting us in this world knowl- 
 edge of thy truth aind in the world to come life 
 everlasting. ' 
 
 We find in these and in other sections of their 
 beautiful liturgy the acme of good taste, the perfec- 
 tion of form, as well as a rich vein of spiritual de- 
 votion. When we hear some man praying awkwardly, 
 ungramatically perhaps, or still worse oratorically, 
 we long for the chaste simplicity of the ritual. When 
 
THE EPISCOPAL PART 31 
 
 some man begins to pray and then ceases to pray, 
 although he keeps on talking with his eyes shut 
 in a kind of general harangue to the Lord on the 
 good points of some reform or presenting an argu- 
 ment for some pet conviction of his own, losing all 
 sense of direct, devout personal address to God, 
 we wish that more men had in their hands some 
 competent guide for their public petitions. 
 
 I would not advocate the surrender of what is 
 called extempore prayer, a minister voicing the 
 needs and aspirations of those whom he would lead 
 in prayer, with words of his own choosing. Where 
 this is done thoughtfully and devoutly I believe its 
 helpfulness may rise above that of all fixed liturgies, 
 but where it is done in thoughtless or slovenly or 
 oratorical fashion it becomes an offense to taste and 
 conscience alike. 
 
 This contribution of good taste is no light matter. 
 A refined and well-mannered saint is much to be 
 preferred to one who lacks those qualities. His 
 devotion to principle and his strength of conviction 
 are all very well we must have these but if you 
 are coming into close contact with him. if you are 
 to marry him, for example, you would also like to 
 have him well-bred and refined. The Episcopal 
 Church undertakes in its whole method of nurture 
 and culture to accomplish just that. And the sat- 
 urative influence of good architecture, tasteful in- 
 teriors, good stained glass in place of those com- 
 binations of color which eat each other up, nobly 
 
32 OUE TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 framed liturgies and the spirit of decorum in wor- 
 ship, all exercise a refining influence upon even the 
 rudest nature which in the course of years registers 
 itself in qualities that have value. 
 
 This is one reason, perhaps, why the Episcopal 
 Church has more influence among the actors and 
 artists of the country than all other denominations 
 combined. The Episcopalians have no doubt been 
 more generous patrons of the theater and of the 
 arts than have the other groups of Christians, but 
 their mode of worship and their general method 
 has also been attractive to those who are constantly 
 striving for the artistic. The Actors' Church League 
 has been an influence for good in a much needed 
 quarter by promoting higher standards of conduct 
 upon the stage. Let all things be done decently, 
 beautifully, artistically, as well as righteously and 
 in order ! Along the line of good taste this branch 
 of the Christian church has made an important con- 
 tribution to our total Christianity. 
 
 In the third place the Episcopal Church has main- 
 tained a high sense of historic values. The word 
 Episcopal comes from the Greek word, episcopos, one 
 who overlooks, oversees a bishop. The Episcopal 
 Church is ruled by bishops. They attach great impor- 
 tance to what they call "the Historic Episcopate,' 
 believing that they can trace their title deeds clear 
 back to the time of the Apostles. Each minister is or- 
 dained by some bishop, who in turn was ordained 
 by another bishop, and he by another, and so on 
 
THE EPISCOPAL PART 33 
 
 back to the earliest periods of Christian history. 
 Some of these men who are poets rather than exact 
 historians, like to think that a mysterious grace has 
 come down directly from Christ through his apostles, 
 and has been handed down through this long line 
 of bishops to the ministers of this church, which is 
 governed by bishops. 
 
 I will not discuss this claim, for as already indi- 
 cated, the purpose of this series of addresses is not 
 controversial. I have never been able to find 
 much about bishops in the New Testament, nor have 
 I been able to see any exceptional usefulness attach- 
 ing to a man merely because he was ordained by a 
 bishop. His usefulness as a minister of Christ de- 
 pends upon his physical, his mental, and his moral 
 make-up, together with the measure of his consecra- 
 tion to God and his ready sympathy with the needs 
 of his fellows. The question of his efficiency turns 
 upon his possession of these qualities rather than 
 upon the fact of his having been ordained by a 
 bishop or conversely by a group of elders. But 
 while there seems to be very little in the Bible about 
 bishops, they appeared early in the history of the 
 church, as was almost inevitable. The world was 
 ruled by kings and nobles, and a church governed 
 from above by a Pope and by bishops, rather than 
 by the vote of the congregation from beneath, was 
 natural to those periods which had made little pro- 
 gress in the spirit of democracy. The Episcopal 
 
34 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Church is devoted to ancient custom and attaches 
 considerable importance to these historic forms. 
 
 The Episcopal Church of America stands closely 
 related to the Anglican Church. Its bishops attend 
 the Lambeth Conference of Bishops in London; its 
 first bishops were consecrated by English bishops. 
 The Anglican Church has historic relations with the 
 Roman Catholic Church it broke away from it in 
 the time of Henry the Eighth, mainly because of 
 Henry's quarrel with the Pope over the question of 
 divorcing his wife Catherine, in order to marry Anne 
 Boleyn. Henry resolved to throw off the rule of 
 the papacy, and the Church of England then became 
 independent of the authority at Rome. And back 
 through these title deeds, seemly and unseemly, this 
 church traces its connection with ancient Christian- 
 ity and thus maintains this sense of historic rela- 
 tions. 
 
 The same sense of historic values is to be found 
 in the prayer book. Here are the Psalms of Israel, 
 the finest expressions of the devotional spirit in the 
 ancient Jewish church ! Here are the words of 
 Christ and of His apostles in the gospel and the 
 epistle for the day! Here are the liturgic forms 
 of the ancient church, the prayer of Saint Chrys- 
 ostom and all the rest ! Here are prayers and col- 
 lects taken from the Greek and Latin churches of 
 mediaeval times ! Here are choice bits of liturgic 
 expression from the early English church! The 
 
THE EPISCOPAL PART 35 
 
 Prayer Book is a great cathedral, reaching back to 
 the time of Solomon's Temple and to the Songs of 
 David, carding with it the contributions and en- 
 largements made in all those succeeding periods of 
 religious development. And it has become a choice 
 collection of fine phraseology, of deep piety, of fer- 
 vency of spirit, and of exalted expression. We join 
 with ancient saints, with the churches throughout 
 the world and with an innumerable company of fel- 
 low believers in humbly and heartily voicing our 
 worship to Almighty God. 
 
 Because of this high sense of historic values the 
 Episcopal Church has been ready to go all reasonable 
 lengths in avoiding any division in its ranks. At the 
 time of the Civil War the Methodist Church of the 
 United States was divided into two sections the 
 "Methodist Episcopal Church" and the "Methodist 
 Episcopal Church South" are identical in polity, in 
 their articles of religion and in the general spirit 
 and method of their work, yet they stand apart be- 
 cause of the questions which almost divided our 
 nation in 1861. The Baptist Church and the Pres- 
 byterian Church were similarly divided over the 
 question of slavery. But the Episcopal Church, 
 while the meetings of the General Convention were 
 interrupted during the Civil War, was never divided. 
 The General Convention met again in 18S5, in Phila- 
 delphia, the City of Brotherly Love, and the southern 
 bishops took their places, and everything went on 
 as before. 
 
36 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 This was due in some measure to the fact that 
 the Episcopal Church had not been very outspoken 
 in its condemnation of slavery. Members of that 
 communion were not disciplined for holding slaves 
 as they were in the Methodist, in the Congregational, 
 and in several other churches. The Episcopal 
 Church shows considerable tolerance on many such 
 questions, temperance, civic reform and other cur- 
 rent issues. It is generally understood that the rec- 
 tor of an important church in San Francisco lost 
 his place recently because he had been too outspoken 
 touching the recent graft prosecution. And the 
 quiescent attitude of the Episcopal Church toward 
 slavery had something to do with the avoidance of 
 disruption. This is all true, but still the deep sense 
 of their historic past, which brought all sections of 
 this communion together promptly at the close of 
 the war, is a bulwark at all times against the spirit 
 of schism. 
 
 In emphasizing the value of system, in promoting 
 the spirit of good taste in religious worship, and in 
 relating present day Christianity to a noble and 
 an inspiring past, they have rendered splendid 
 service. We can never forget that in the hour of 
 our country's peril, Abraham Lincoln sent two men 
 to England to influence public sentiment there in 
 favor of the Union cause. He sent Henry Ward 
 Beecher, the leading orator of the Christian pulpit 
 in America, a Congregationalist, and Bishop Mc- 
 Ilvaine of Ohio, representing the Episcopal Church. 
 
THE EPISCOPAL PART 37 
 
 While Beecher addressed and won the masses in 
 Birmingham and Manchester, in Liverpool and Lon- 
 don, Bishop Mcllvaine went quietly among the nobil- 
 ity and the ecclesiastics, as his position enabled him 
 to do, helping to produce that public sentiment 
 which turned the tide in England in favor of liberty 
 and the Union. All honor and gratitude to that 
 branch of the Christian church which, doing all 
 things decently and in order, has made its royal 
 contribution to the total Christianity of the land. 
 
THE METHODIST PART 
 
 I 
 
 N PRACTICAL efficiency few religious lead- 
 ers since the time of Paul have been 
 equal to John Wesley. He came of 
 virile stock his grandfather had twenty- 
 five children, and his own mother gave birth 
 to nineteen, John Wesley being the fifteenth. He 
 was a man of culture and scholarship as well as a 
 flaming evangelist. He was a graduate of Oxford 
 and a fellow of Lincoln College. He read the Latin 
 and Greek classics at sight and spoke French, Ger- 
 man, Italian and a little Spanish. He was indefati- 
 gable in his labors in his evangelistic tours he trav- 
 elled over two hundred and fifty thousand miles, far 
 enough to have taken him around the globe ten 
 times. He preached over forty thousand sermons. 
 He arose at four o'clock in the morning and was 
 busy all day, oftentimes far into the night. He lived 
 this strenuous life up to his eighty-fifth year, and 
 when he passed away at eighty-eight he had been 
 preaching with all his accustomed zeal until six days 
 before his death. That is the kind of a Methodist 
 Brother Wesley was, and he has bequeathed a gen- 
 erous portion of his spirit to the largest Protestant 
 denomination in this country. 
 
THE METHODIST PART 39 
 
 He had also his limitations. He shared in many 
 of the superstitions of his time. He believed in 
 witchcraft. He believed that hysteria was demoniacal 
 possession. He was accustomed to decide questions 
 by opening the Bible at random and taking the top 
 verse on the page. He preached a rousing sermon, 
 a copy of which I have in my library, on * ' The Cause 
 and Cure of Earthquakes/ -if his diagnosis were 
 correct and his claims verifiable it would have had 
 great value for this community a few years back. 
 
 He felt that a large number of the events in his 
 life were the direct results of miraculous interven- 
 tion, from the stopping of a headache to the cessa- 
 tion of a rain storm, that he might preach. His 
 familiarity with the Bible was in no sense critical ; 
 he had rather a popular or homiletic knowledge of 
 it. But he flung himself into the task of inducing 
 men to forsake their sins and to accept salvation 
 through Jesus Christ beyond any man of his age. 
 He did it with a magnificent success, in which the 
 hearts of all Christian people rejoice. And although 
 he never severed his own relations with the Church 
 of England, he started Methodism upon its world- 
 wide career of Christian usefulness. 
 
 "The Methodist Episcopal Church" is the full 
 name of this branch of Christ's church. The term 
 'Methodist' was at first a nickname. It was given 
 derisively to a group of Oxford students, John and 
 Charles Yfesley among the number, because in their 
 determination to deepen their Christian life they 
 
40 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 lived methodically. They read the scriptures and 
 prayed and took communion, they visited the sick, 
 the poor, the imprisoned, and performed other acts 
 of Christian service, according to a settled rule and 
 program. They were so exact and conscientious in 
 it that their fellow students called them " Metho- 
 dists.' They accepted the title, and it has come to 
 be the honorable designation of this great branch of 
 the church. 
 
 The "Methodist Episcopal" Church, because it too 
 is ruled by bishops, as is the Protestant Episcopal 
 Church ! The Episcopalians deny the validity of the 
 ordination of the Methodist bishops because the first 
 one was not ordained by a. bishop who stood in the 
 line of what they like to call "The Apostolic Suc- 
 cession.' But the Roman Catholics turn round and 
 deny the validity of the ordination of the Episcopal 
 bishops and their clergy, so the honors are even. 
 The origin of this "historic episcopate' is so lost 
 in the twilight of fable as not to occasion any serious 
 disturbance either in the minds of those who think 
 they have it, or in the minds of those who are per- 
 fectly content to be without it. But whatever meas- 
 ure of practical value or ancient sanction may be- 
 long to the office of a bishop, the Methodist Church, 
 with several others, possesses it, because it too is 
 governed by bishops. 
 
 The three characteristic contributions made by the 
 Methodist Church to our total Christianity would 
 seem to be these : first, its splendid Christian xeal. 
 
THE METHODIST PART 41 
 
 The Methodist Church shows an earnestness and 
 enthusiasm for the conversion of men, for the en- 
 listment of believers in active service and for the 
 extension of the Kingdom of God in frontier and 
 needy communities beyond any other church. When 
 an ignorant woman heard John Wesley preach she 
 reported to her neighbors, "He preaches as if he 
 was just dyin' to have ye converted.' It was the 
 earnest desire of Wesley to reach the hearts of men 
 and lead them to Christ which led him to break away 
 from the little religious essay common to the Angli- 
 can pulpit in his day, and to preach without notes 
 in the language of the people, that he might move 
 them by his message. It is that same quality of 
 earnestness which gives fervor and directness to 
 the preaching of the Methodist pulpit to this hour. 
 The church stands as a splendid fulfillment of the 
 Apostolic injunction, "Preach the word; be instant 
 in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort.' 
 It was their zeal which led them to utilize lay 
 preachers and other untrained men so largely in 
 their early history. Wesley and his followers 
 licensed local preachers and sent them to needy 
 places, where it was impossible to furnish theologic- 
 ally trained clergymen. And their labors have been 
 abundantly blessed. The old circuit rider who went 
 from place to place, preaching in school houses, in 
 the homes of the people, in tents or out of doors, 
 wherever a congregation could be gathered, often 
 had little theological training or literary equipment. 
 
42 OUK TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 He carried a Bible, a hymn book, a copy of the Meth- 
 odist discipline, and perhaps a volume of Wesley's 
 notes in his saddle bags, placing his main reliance 
 upon the sincerity and fervor of his own heart as 
 he called upon men to forsake their evil ways and 
 follow Christ. It was a time when books were not 
 common as they are now, when newspapers and 
 magazines were not in general circulation, and these 
 unschooled men found ready acceptance for their 
 message, and they rendered a noble service in laying 
 the foundations of the Kingdom of God out on the 
 frontiers and in thousands of neglected communities. 
 When I speak of "zeal' ' I do not mean mere noise, 
 although many thorough-going Methodists have 
 learned to observe the injunction of the psalmist- 
 "Make a joyful noise unto the Lord.' I do not 
 mean mere excitement and hysteria, which are often- 
 times symptoms of disease rather than of health. I 
 mean that measure of spiritual warmth and desire 
 which shows itself effective in moving and chang- 
 ing the hearts of men. This genuine zeal has borne 
 solid and verifiable fruit. It was one of England's 
 reliable historians who said that in his judgment 
 John Wesley and the Methodist revival did more 
 to save England from the horrors and excesses of 
 the French revolution, which worked destruction 
 as well as renewal among their neighbors across the 
 Channel, than any other single influence which could 
 be named. And in our own country it is universally 
 believed that the work of those circuit riders and 
 
THE METHODIST PART 43 
 
 pioneer preachers, pushing out into all parts of our 
 land and establishing there the institutions of re- 
 ligion, had much to do with the development of 
 that moral fiber which made our country equal to 
 the exacting demands upon it in the struggles of 
 the Civil War. Lincoln said one day to a group 
 of Methodist preachers who called at the White 
 House to pay their respects to the head of the na- 
 tion, "The Methodist Church has sent more prayers 
 to heaven for the Union cause and more men into 
 the field than any other branch of Christ's church.' 
 It has been a "zeal according to knowledge' -a 
 knowledge of the human heart and its needs and 
 it has borne splendid moral fruitage throughout the 
 English speaking world. 
 
 This quality of zeal has tended to elicit the preach- 
 ing ability in the constituency of this body. The 
 Methodist Church has developed a great number of 
 effective preachers. Some of these have been 
 notable in the history of the country, Stephen 
 Olin and John P. Durbin, Bishop Matthew Simpson 
 and Bishop Randolph S. Foster, Bishop Thoburn of 
 India and Bishop William Taylor, a street preacher 
 in San Francisco in '49 and afterward conspicuous 
 for his missionary labors in South America, in India 
 and last of all in Africa. And of men not sufficiently 
 famous to be noticed in history, this church has de- 
 veloped a great number of useful preachers, who, 
 perhaps lacking in the finest literary finish and in 
 the fuller measure of scholarship, have shown, never- 
 
44 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 theless, by their practical efficiency in interpreting 
 the scripture and in bringing help to men, the power 
 of direct and influential address. 
 
 The Methodist Church has trusted to the zeal of 
 its clergy, and to the warmth and reality of its own 
 spiritual life, for the maintenance of evangelical 
 faith rather than to any elaborate creed statements 
 or standards of belief. John Wesley abridged the 
 Thirty-nine Articles of Religion of the English 
 Church into twentj'-five and these briefer articles 
 have constitiited the creed statement of the Method- 
 ists since the year 1784. They have never been 
 changed in all the one hundred and twenty-six years 
 and by vote of the General Conference in 1832 it 
 was made unconstitutional to thenceforth propose 
 any change in the Articles of Religion. The fact 
 that this creed statement contains only simple and 
 general references to the fundamental articles of 
 religious faith has saved it from being an embarrass- 
 ment to this body of Christians. 
 
 The Methodist Church has been troubled very 
 little by heresy trials. The earnestness and zeal of 
 the clergy leave them little time for that purely 
 speculative discussion which often engenders heresy 
 and strife. And it is one of the significant facts of 
 modern church history, that while their standards 
 are broad and simple the Methodist Church through- 
 out the world is in substantial agreement with it- 
 self in the substance of its message, and it has re- 
 
THE METHODIST PART 45 
 
 mained, through all these one hundred and twenty- 
 six years, profoundly evangelical in tone. 
 
 The second contribution lies in its large utiliza- 
 tion of the emotional nature in the formation of 
 Christian character. "With the heart man be- 
 lieveth unto righteousness/ more than with the 
 head ! The main appeal, therefore, should be to the 
 feelings because people, taking them by and large, 
 do what they feel like doing. They may not have 
 reasoned it all out; they may not make it a matter 
 of strict conscience, but they do certain things or 
 fail to do them because they feel that way. Not a 
 closely reasoned argument on the appropriateness 
 and desirability of Christian life, but the direct 
 appeal to the affections becomes the most useful 
 instrument in the hands of men who would lead 
 others to Christ. 
 
 We find this emphasis on the emotional life in the 
 general quality of their preaching. We find it in the 
 greater prominence given to feeling in the hymns 
 of Charles Wesley and other Methodist hymn 
 writers. We find it in the heartiness of their con- 
 gregational singing, which is better than that of any 
 other church in America the people who sing are 
 the people who feel. We find it in the hearty 
 responses in the shape of round "Amens' which 
 sometimes come back from the pew when the 
 speaker has made a telling point. 
 
 We find it also in their emphasis upon the doc- 
 trine, which they call "the witness of the Spirit.' 
 
46 OUR TOTAL, CHRISTIANITY 
 
 How is a man to know that he is saved, that he has 
 found acceptance with God? "The church will tell 
 him" one group of Christian people say, let 
 him accept the testimony of the church on that point 
 as given from the lips of its priest.' "The Bible 
 will tell him," another group replies "let him 
 stand on the promises of the Lord as made in His 
 own Holy Word.' "Let his own reason tell him,' 
 others answer; "if he has met the conditions of 
 salvation, then as a logical result he has found ac- 
 ceptance with God.' No one of these replies would 
 be satisfactory to the followers of "Wesley. "He 
 need not ask the church, or the Bible, or his reason, ' 
 the Methodist asserts. "God will tell him in his own 
 heart. He will feel it. The Spirit Himself beareth 
 witness with our spirits that we are the children of 
 God.' And the joy of being saved and of knowing 
 it and of being able to tell it has been a leading 
 note in the religious life of this branch of the church. 
 It was a beautiful and a blessed message to bring 
 to that despondent age to which Wesley preached. It 
 was a time when the full rigor of Calvinism was in 
 the saddle and it rode the patient people to their 
 hurt. It was believed that God by His immutable 
 decrees had from all eternity determined who should 
 be saved and who should be lost, and that nothing 
 that man could do would change those decrees. 
 This was a comforting doctrine to those who by their 
 own spiritual conceit perhaps had concluded that 
 they belonged to "the elect," but as the great major- 
 
THE METHODIST PART 47 
 
 ity of people were either too ignorant or too modest 
 to believe that about themselves it was also a de- 
 pressing doctrine. They had an old hymn they used 
 to sing : 
 
 ' ' Tis a point I long to know 
 
 Oft it causes anxious thought, 
 
 Do I love the Lord or no 
 
 Am I His or am I not.' 
 
 It all depended upon those eternal decrees which 
 had been established from all eternity. 
 
 It meant everything then to have men go about 
 asserting that, "The elect are whosoever will and 
 the non-elect are whosoever won't.' They had not 
 reasoned it all out. They did not undertake to 
 combat on philosophical grounds \vhat the theo- 
 logians called "predestination,' what the man on 
 the street calls "fate,' what the scientist calls 
 "determinism.' But out of the fullness of their 
 own experience of God's loving mercy, of Christ's 
 offered redemption and of the Spirit's witness to 
 their acceptance in their own hearts, they went 
 about preaching the good news of salvation. "The 
 Spirit and the Bride say, Come. Let him that is 
 athirst, Come. And whosoever will, let him take 
 the water of life freely.' This joyous message 
 touched, and moved, and renewed the hearts of the 
 people, the Methodist Church grew by leaps and 
 bounds. The joy of their songs, their testimonies, 
 their inner satisfactions became a mighty influence 
 in extending that branch of the church. "We have 
 
48 OUK TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 not received the spirit of bondage again to fear,' 
 they cried, "we have received the spirit of adoption, 
 whereby we cry, Abba, Father.' 
 
 It would be easy to carry the emotional element 
 in religion to excess where it might result in a use- 
 less and unseemly form of self-indulgence. If we 
 fix the attention solely upon the raptures and ferv- 
 ors of people it is not always easy to distinguish 
 sham from reality. Jumping up and down or shout- 
 ing so that one can be heard in the next block has 
 no particular value even where it is done in a relig- 
 ious meeting, unless it leads to something. The final 
 test of anything, feeling, ritual or belief, is life, con- 
 duct, service. The Methodist leaders have shown 
 great wisdom in undertaking to speedily harness 
 these floods of emotion to some form of practical ef- 
 fort. When this is done the fervor may have great 
 significance. The heart ha-s its rights as well as the 
 the head. And in that section of human interest 
 where the two great commandments are not "Thou 
 shalt know" or "Thou shall do," but "Thou shalt 
 love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thou 
 shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,' this emphasis 
 upon the emotional life has shown good statesman- 
 ship. 
 
 The third contribution lies in the value of their 
 organization. I believe the polity of the Methodist 
 Church is the best in the world, not even excepting 
 the Roman Catholic. The Catholic Church makes 
 entirely inadequate provision for the growing spirit 
 
THE METHODIST PART 49 
 
 of democracy, which it is compelled to reckon with 
 in this country, and must reckon with increasingly 
 in all countries. The Methodists combine monarch- 
 ical authority, which is entrusted to its general 
 superintendents or bishops, with the spirit of democ- 
 racy in making large provision for the influence and 
 activity of the laity. It is therefore able to offer 
 what seems to me the most effective form of church 
 polity in the field. 
 
 Take this single instance of it the organization 
 of their ministers into conferences under what is 
 known as the ''itinerant system.' Every preacher 
 ready for service belongs to some annual conference 
 which covers a certain geographical area. Here in 
 California we have two conferences the California 
 and the Southern California covering the entire 
 state. Once a year all these preachers meet togther 
 in conference with the Presiding Bishop, and the 
 Bishop appoints them to the places where they shall 
 preach for the next year. He has absolute power 
 to do this. He could, if he were a man without 
 sense or conscience, entirely override the wishes of 
 any preacher or any congregation. He may receive 
 information and advice from whatever source may 
 offer, but the final decision rests solely with him. 
 In early days pastorates were limited to one year; 
 then the time limit was extended to two years, then 
 to three, then to five. Now it has been removed 
 altogether, so that a minister may be reappointed 
 to the same church indefinitely, but always for a 
 
50 OUK TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 period of oue year. No Methodist minister is ever 
 invited or appointed to the pastorate of any church 
 indefinitely, as would be the case in a Presbyterian 
 or a Congregational church. 
 
 Such a system does sometimes work disappoint- 
 ment and hardship. A church may not always secure 
 the pastor it wants, or the pastor who would be best 
 for it. The minister may not always go where he 
 would like to go and could go. The bishops are not 
 omniscient, but they desire the peace and prosperity 
 of the churches, and they desire the highest use- 
 fulness of the ministers. They listen to the repre- 
 sentations of the laymen who represent the various 
 congregations, they listen to the wishes of the 
 preachers themselves, and then make such appoint- 
 ments as seem wise and right. And as a matter of 
 fact the system works well. Every Methodist church 
 in the United States has a pastor all the time, and 
 every Methodist pastor has a church all the time. 
 There are no discouraging and disintegrating per- 
 iods when the church is without a minister. 
 
 The changes are also made on tjie whole with very 
 little friction. The task of getting rid of a minister 
 who has come to be unacceptable to the majority of 
 his cpngregatiofn is in other communions oftentimes 
 an unhappy experience for him and for them. It 
 r may be as painful as having all one's teeth pulled. 
 But under the Methodist polity when the Annual 
 Conference comes the change can be made quietly, 
 without splitting the church into factions, and with- 
 
THE METHODIST PART 51 
 
 out painful embarrassment to the minister. When 
 the Sunday after conference arrives, every church 
 has its own pastor and every pastor is preaching in 
 his own church. It is a system which works/ and 
 that after all is the best test of any method. 
 
 The limiting of the pastorate to short periods in 
 the early history of the Methodist Church enabled 
 it to use large numbers of untrained men, and men 
 of moderate resources, to the glory of God and for 
 the good of society. There is no reason in the nature 
 of the case why a man's ministry in any church 
 should be of a certain length, five years, or ten 
 years, or twenty years it all depends on the length 
 of the man. There are men who are preached out at. 
 the end of a year or two, and both preacher and con- 
 gregation need what the farmers call a "rotation 
 of crops.' It is an exacting demand which the,,pas- 
 torate of ten or twenty years makes upon a man, 
 standing as he does in the same place twice a week 
 to speak to many of the same people, touching the 
 truths of religion. The wise men of the Methodist 
 Church knew that in the rapid growth of their work 
 and in the absence *of a srfficient number of 
 thoroughly trained men, they would be able to use 
 ministers of fewer resources with splendid effect 
 under their itinerant system. 
 
 They have shown a genius for organization. Not 
 content with building up strong churches they have 
 been fertile in the promotion of more extended ef- 
 forts. The Chautauqua movement is non-sectarian, 
 
52 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 but Bishop Vincent of the Methodist Church was 
 the founder of it, and that church has furnished its 
 largest support. The Freedmen's Aid Society for the 
 education and evangelization of the released slaves 
 has rendered a magnificent service to the nation. 
 The Epworth League, which ranks almost with the 
 Christian Endeavor Society, as a movement for the 
 training of young people in Christian life and serv- 
 ice, is exclusively a Methodist body. The Order 
 of Deaconesses and the Methodist Hospitals in most 
 of the large cities have given evidence of the same 
 spirit of practical efficiency in this branch of the 
 church. 
 
 By their splendid enthusiasm and zeal, by their wise 
 and wide use of the emotional element in human 
 nature, and by their practical, efficient organization 
 they have made large and rapid growth in member- 
 ship until the Methodist Church is the largest Protes- 
 tant denomination in our country. It was John 
 Wesley who said, ''The world is my parish.' He 
 meant it intensively, as well as extensively, desir- 
 ing that the religion of Christ should ally itself 
 with every human interest, as well as spread into all 
 lands. And that body of Christians who revere him 
 as the founder of their branch of the church has 
 moved ahead in splendid fulfillment of that great 
 hope. 
 
THE PRESBYTERIAN PART 
 
 I 
 
 T IS scarcely too much to say that the 
 Presbyterian Church represents more 
 money, more brains and more piety than 
 any other one church in America. It has no 
 more money per capita perhaps than the Episcopal 
 Church, but it is a large church, numbering almost 
 two millions of members, while the Episcopal 
 Church is one of the smaller churches. It has no 
 more brains per capita than have the Congrega- 
 tionalists, but the whole Congregational body only 
 numbers some seven hundred thousand communi- 
 cants. It ranks well with any denomination in its 
 sense of duty, its attachment to high ideals, its 
 adherence to principle and its consciousness of the 
 spiritual world. When we come to add up its material, 
 its intellectual and its spiritual resources, it may 
 be said to make a larger showing than any other 
 branch of the Christian church in this country. 
 The word Presbyterian comes from the Greek 
 
 word presbuteros, which means "an elder.' It is 
 a church ruled by elders. The ordained ministers 
 
 are "teaching elders,' and in each congregation 
 there are laymen elected as "ruling elders.' The 
 pastor with the elders and the deacons compose 
 the Session, which is the ruling body of the local 
 
54 OUK TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 church. A number of churches conveniently 
 located are organized into a Presbytery, which is 
 made up of all teaching elders resident within its 
 borders and a ruling elder from each congregation. 
 These Presbyteries are organized into Synods, which 
 sometimes comprise entire states and above these 
 Synods stands the General Assembly, made up of 
 ministers and ruling elders in equal proportions, 
 representing all the Presbyteries of the church. The 
 Presbyterian Church stands closely related to the 
 Reformed Churches of Germany, of Holland and of 
 PYance, both in doctrine and polity. It holds a 
 position midway between the monarchical form of 
 church government by bishops, and the pure de- 
 mocracy of the congregational polity. 
 
 The four distinctive contributions made by this 
 branch of the church to our total Christianity seem 
 to be these* first, its habit of conservatism. It is 
 a cautious, deliberate church. It does not readily 
 lose its head. It is never easy to stampede a com- 
 pany of Presbyterians. They are ready in their 
 own good time to "prove all things,' but they are 
 strongly bent on "holding fast that which is good.' 
 
 Its three main standards of doctrine are the 
 Shorter Catechism, the Larger Catechism and tfhe 
 Westminster Confession of Faith. This remarkable 
 Confession was wrought out by an assembly con- 
 vened in England's most famous place of worship, 
 Westminster Abbey, in 1643. This assembly was 
 made up of one hundred and twenty-one Doctors 
 
THE PKESBYTEBIAN PART 55 
 
 of Divinity, eleven Lords, twenty Commoners and 
 seven commissioners from Scotland. It continued 
 in session for five years and a half and held some 
 twelve thousand meetings. They met every day 
 in the week except Saturday, and sat from nine 
 o'clock until two. Each session was opened and 
 closed with prayer and one day in each month was 
 set apart for prayer, when they came together and 
 continued for four hours in continuous supplication. 
 The Westminster Confession thus issued from an 
 atmosphere of earnest devotion. 
 
 It w r as in the time of Bacon and Shakespeare. 
 The King James version of the Bible had just been 
 published. It was a period when the English lan- 
 guage was at its best. It was also a time when 
 men were not satisfied with easy-going standards 
 or superficial statements. The age demanded a 
 creed which would be an impregnable statement 
 of religious truth, to serve as a bulwark against 
 the errors of Romanism, as a basis of ecclesiastical 
 fellowship and as an effective instrument for the 
 religious instruction of the people of God and their 
 children. The Westminster Confession came forth 
 in response to that demand. 
 
 It is no milk-and-water affair. It undertakes to 
 be the most logical, fundamental and explicit setting 
 forth of man's relations to his Maker anywhere 
 contained in the creeds of Christendom. And when 
 you read it with an open mind you realize at once 
 that it is designed to build up a massive and mas- 
 
56 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 culine type of piety in the lives of those who give 
 it their adherence. 
 
 It is the great digest of Calvinism, the system 
 of that man of iron, who stood forth as a theo- 
 logian and a reformer in Geneva. It plants itself 
 firmly on the five points of Calvinism. Human 
 depravity man is hopelessly corrupt and has no 
 power in himself for moral recovery. Uncondi- 
 tional election God from all eternity has, by His 
 immutable decrees, determined that certain men 
 should be saved. A limited atonement Christ died 
 for the elect ; He did not die for the nun-elect, for 
 that would have been shedding His blood in vain. 
 Irresistible grace in order to make God's decrees 
 of election effective there must proceed from Him 
 a moral influnce which cannot be successfully op- 
 posed. The final perserverance of the saints- 
 'once in grace, always in grace' -for if a man 
 once renewed and numbered among the elect should 
 fall away into sin it would negative one of those 
 eternal decrees. And upon this theological state- 
 ment, heading up in the Divine sovereignly and 
 dependent for its action not upon the moral choice 
 of the individual, but upon the assertion of an In- 
 finite Will, the Presbyterian Churches of England 
 and America take their stand. 
 
 It would be easy to poke fun at or to pour scorn 
 upon some of the statements of belief included in 
 such thoroughgoing Calvinism popular novelists, 
 sensational preachers and the secular press have 
 
THE PRESBYTERIAN PART 57 
 
 all taken their turn at this interesting diversion. 
 But by their fruits we must judge statements of 
 belief and these great convictions have nerved men 
 and women to live nobly and to die heroically be- 
 yond those of any other single religious creed which 
 can be named. When spiritual tyrrany showed its 
 ugly head in England and in Scotland, in Ger- 
 many, in France and in Switzerland, men and 
 women of heroic build, fed upon the great convic- 
 tions of Calvin, stood up to resist and they present a 
 magnificient array of martyrs, who sealed their 
 testimony in their own blood. 
 
 It was John Morley, a careful and critical his- 
 torian, an outspoken agnostic in his own religious 
 attitude, who said: ''Calvinism has inspired incom- 
 parable energy, concentration, resolution. It has 
 exalted its votaries to a pitch of heroic moral 
 strength that has never been surpassed. They have 
 exhibited an active courage, a resolute endurance, 
 a cheerful self-restraint, and an exulting self-sacri- 
 fice which men count among the highest glories of 
 the human conscience.' It is impossible for any 
 man to dismiss such a system with a sneer. 
 
 It was John Fiske, the philosophical historian, 
 standing himself on the borders between Unitarian- 
 ism and agnosticism, who paid this tribute to the 
 sturdy influence of Calvinism upon the cause of 
 human freedom: 
 
 "It would be hard to overrate the debt which 
 mankind owes to Calvin. The spiritual father of 
 
58 OUK TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Coligny, of William the Silent, and of Cromwell 
 must occupy a foremost rank among the champions 
 of modern democracy. Perhaps not one of the 
 mediaeval popes was more despotic in temper than 
 Calvin; but it is not the less true that the promul- 
 gation of his theology was one of the longest steps 
 that mankind has taken toward personal freedom. 
 Calvinism left the individual man alone in the pres- 
 ence of his God. His salvation could not be wrought 
 by priestly ritual, but only by the grace of God 
 abounding in his own soul ; and wretched creature 
 that he felt himself to be, through the intense moral 
 awakening of which this stern theolog}^ was in part 
 the expression, his soul was nevertheless of infinite 
 value, and the possession of it was the subject of 
 an everlasting struggle between the powers of 
 heaven and the powers of hell.' 
 
 'In the presence of the awful responsibility of 
 life, all distinctions of rank and fortune vanished ; 
 prince and pauper were alike the helpless creatures 
 of Jehovah and suppliants for his grace. Calvin 
 did not originate these doctrines ; in announcing them 
 he was but setting forth, as he said, the Institutes 
 of the Christian religion; but in emphasizing this 
 aspect of Christianity, in engraving it upon men's 
 minds with that keen-edged logic which he used 
 with such unrivalled skill, Calvin made them feel, 
 as it had perhaps never been felt before, the dig- 
 nity and importance of the individual human soul. 
 It was a religion fit to inspire men who were to be 
 
THE PRESBYTERIAN PART 59 
 
 called upon to fight for freedom, whether in the 
 marshes of the Netherlands, or on the moors of Scot- 
 land." 
 
 Now the Presbyterian Church has taken that theo- 
 logical system known as Calvinism and has held 
 on to it with a tenacity which amazed the Nine- 
 teenth Century, and will amaze this light-hearted 
 Twentieth Century accustomed as it is to say that 
 it does not care what a man believes, if he is only 
 sincere. The Presbyterian Church cares. It is a doc- 
 trinal church, doctrinal in its preaching, doctrinal 
 in the tone of its periodicals, doctrinal in requiring 
 theological soundness in its office bearers. From 
 candidates for admission to the membership of the 
 church it requires nothing but repentance for sin, 
 faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and the consecration 
 of the life to God it is exceedingly simple and 
 broad as to its doctrinal requirement. But from 
 its ministers and ruling elders it has required until 
 recently assent to the entire Westminster Confession, 
 and even now its demands are more rigorous than 
 those of any other Protestant denomination. 
 
 It stands ready to accept whatever odium or 
 hardship may come with this conservative habit of 
 mind. Men may declaim against the positions of 
 Calvinism as being incredible to reason, as being 
 unscriptural, as dishonoring to God, as intolerable 
 to men, but until it believes that, from the teachings 
 of the apostles and of Christ himself, it has been dis- 
 
60 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 lodged from these positions the Presbyterian Church 
 does not propose to change front. 
 
 The most famous heresy trials of the Nineteenth 
 Century have naturally occurred in the Presbyterian 
 Church. Robertson Smith of the Universitv of 
 
 i 
 
 Aberdeen in Scotland, one of the most gifted 
 students of the Old Testament in modern times, was 
 deposed from his chair for heresy. David Swing 
 of Chicago, one of the most popular preachers in 
 that busy city, was compelled to leave the Presby- 
 terian Church because of heresy. Professor Charles 
 A. Briggs of Union Seminary was expelled from the 
 Presbyterian Church for teachings which seemed to 
 conflict with the Westminster Confession. Pro- 
 fessor Hemy Preserved Smith of Lane Seminary, 
 Cincinnati, was similarly deposed, and the agita- 
 tion regarding Professor A. C. McGiffert, the lead- 
 ing church historian in this country, made it seem 
 appropriate to him to voluntarily withdraw from 
 the Presbyterian denomination. 
 
 Now where conservatism does not spring from 
 any narrow-minded bigotry or from sheer pig-head- 
 edness, we honor it. Personally I could no more 
 hold up my hand and swear that I believed all the 
 theological statements in the Westminster Confes- 
 sion than I could swear that I believed two and two 
 might make five. But here is a large, thoughful, 
 conscientious body of Christian men and women, 
 who do believe that these statements are true and 
 because of their loyalty to conviction they are pre- 
 
THE PKESBYTEKIAN PAKT 61 
 
 pared to accept whatever hardship or odium may 
 attach to insistence upon these standards. 
 
 We need the conservatives no less than the liberals 
 and the radicals in the everlasting struggle for 
 human progress. We need those men who. by their 
 very habit of mind, will be sure not to abandon 
 anything that has value. We need those, who rever- 
 ing the great accomplishments of the past, are 
 ready to bring out of their treasures things new 
 and old the old as well as the new. And in these 
 days when great numbers of people do not know 
 what they believe or why they should believe any- 
 thing, it is of great significance that we have this 
 sturdy, faithful, conscientious body of Christians 
 bent on holding fast all that has shown itself good. 
 
 In the second place the Presbyterian Church has 
 kept alive a profound sense of the enormity and 
 the ill-desert of sin. This church takes the moral 
 life of the race seriously. It has never fallen into 
 the way of thinking of evil as only good in the mak- 
 ing or of saying that wickedness is a kind of im- 
 mature, half-baked goodness. It would have no 
 sympathy with R. J. Campbell of London in his 
 claim that "the drunkard reeling through the 
 streets in brutal fashion is after all only engaged in 
 a mistaken quest for God.' It does not believe that 
 the sinner will naturally and easily grow up out 
 of his sin into the goodness of a saint by a process 
 of evolution. It believes as the apostle did that 
 "men have given themselves up to uncleanness 
 
62 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 through the lusts of their hearts; that they have 
 become vain in their imaginations and their minds 
 have become darkened; that they have changed the 
 truth of God into a lie and that the wrath of God 
 is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and 
 unrighteousness.' The Presbyterian Church has 
 the sense of sin. 
 
 It may be questioned if any more terrible bat- 
 teries have ever been turned upon the wrong-doing 
 of the world than those of Calvinism. When certain 
 branches of the church were granting indulgences 
 on easy terms, allowing men to clear up their moral 
 accounts by private arrangements with their con- 
 fessors; when others were insisting that the waters 
 of baptism would instantly wash away whatever 
 stain or corruption might cling to the moral nature ; 
 \vhen others were speaking gently of the evil in 
 the world as a kind of childish aberration, ' ' a grow- 
 ing pain/ the Presbyterian churches have been 
 steadily insisting that sin is an act of rebellion 
 against rightful authority ; that it is an insult and 
 an outrage to the love of a holy Father ; that it is 
 a heinous and fatal corruption of the nature, to be 
 cured only by supernatural grace and divine re- 
 demption. The chief end of man, as they view it, 
 is not to have a good time or to cultivate his own 
 powers or to ' ' evolute ' ' into his own completer self- 
 'the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy 
 Him forever.' And as the beginning of that life 
 which is riot self-centered, but finds its center in 
 
THE PRESBYTERIAN PART 63 
 
 the Divine glory, there must come a recognition 
 of the fault and the corruption of the individual 
 life. 
 
 And is there not cause ! We have put rubber 
 tires on our consciences and upon the words we 
 apply to evil in these comfortable days, lest any 
 malefactor should receive shock or jar. Lying is 
 only "prevarication!' Stealing is "an unfortunate 
 kleptomania!' Lust is only "the unschooled throb- 
 bin gs of nature" according to many a problem play 
 and modern novel. Graft, of the Patrick Calhoim 
 type, is not civic treachery and crime as it once was 
 -it is only "one of the exigencies of business life 
 under the intricate conditions of modern industry.' 
 
 So on down the list ! If we keep on mixing our 
 icolors, by and by nothing will be wrong ! And 
 when nothing is wrong, when the power of hating 
 evil is lost, then the race will be morally bankrupt. 
 All honor to that branch of the Christian church 
 which has maintained its keen sense of the ill- 
 desert, the enormity and the infamy of sin against 
 God in all its ugly forms ! 
 
 The wholesome effect of this attitude has been 
 witnessed on many fields. You may recall, for 
 example, the austere morality of Cromwell's Army, 
 which is unparalleled in the military annals of the 
 world. Army life is often a school of vice ; it be- 
 comes the crucial test of morals and religion. But 
 the army of Ironsides became the wonder of the 
 world for its moral purity no less than for its in- 
 
64 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 trepid valor. They marched against the most re- 
 nowned battalions of Europe, chanting their psalms 
 and relying upon the Unseen God and somehow 
 they seemed never to fail in destroying whatever op- 
 posed them. It is the testimony of Macaulay, of 
 Goldwin Smith, of Morley and of all the historians 
 who touch upon that period of history that no army 
 has ever so combined heroism and purity. 'In that 
 camp no oath was heard, no drunkenness witnessed, 
 110 gambling seen. The property of man and the 
 honor of woman were alike safe. No servant girl 
 was compelled to mourn by the rough gallantry of 
 these red-coats. Not an ounce of plate was stolen 
 from the shops of the goldsmiths.' All this from 
 Macaulay's "History of England," and Taine adds, 
 'They raised the national morality even as they 
 had saved the national liberty!' And this was an 
 army of Calvinists, taking scripture texts for their 
 watch-words and countersigns, singing the hymns of 
 the faith as their battle cries ! They cherished a 
 profound sense of the malignity and the hatefulness 
 of sin, and thus they trampled temptation under 
 their feet even as they put their enemies to flight. 
 The third contribution of the Presbyterian 
 Church has been its devotion to the Bible. No 
 other denomination has equalled it in attributing, 
 as the result of painstaking scholarship, such unique 
 and final authority to the Bible. The head and 
 front of Dr. Briggs' offending was not so much 
 that he taught that the Pentateuch was composed 
 
THE PRESBYTERIAN PART 65 
 
 of manv and sometimes conflicting documents, or 
 
 / 
 
 that the book of Isaiah was the work of more than 
 one man ! It was that he claimed in his celebrated 
 address that there were three sources of authority 
 in religion the Bible, which was the classic utter- 
 ance of the mind of the Lord in literature ; the 
 Church as the utterance of the Divine Spirit to be 
 found in the great consensus of human experience 
 and testimony throughout the ages of Christian 
 history ; and Keason, the noblest faculty in man act- 
 ing at its best in pronouncing upon the validity of 
 the claims of religion. The Bible, the Church and 
 Reason were concurrent sources of authority ac- 
 cording to Dr. Briggs, and this exaltation of two 
 other sources of instruction to the place where they 
 would share in the unique honor attributed to the 
 Bible became to a large majority in the Presby- 
 terian Church insupportable. 
 
 This exaltation of the Bible by the Presbyterians 
 has not been like the position of Salvation Army 
 officers, or other earnest mission workers, voicing 
 merely a traditional and sentimental attitude. The 
 Presbyterian Church has been distinguished from 
 the first for painstaking and profound scholarship. 
 The Westminster Confession is not made up of a 
 lot of pious, well-meaning, but ill-considered plati- 
 tudes it is painfully and rigidly learned. The Pres- 
 byterian Church has had great doctors of the faith 
 -the Hodges and the Alexanders of Princeton, 
 Shedd and Schaff, James McCosh and Francis L. 
 
66 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Patton, Roswell D. Hitchcock and Marvin R. Vin- 
 cent, Francis Brown and B. B. Warfield. They were 
 men who had studied the subject; they were com- 
 petent to speak. They knew exactly what they be- 
 lieved and why they believed it, and were not to 
 to be badgered out of it by the flourishes of a few 
 popular novelists or the flings of some newspaper 
 reporters, who, theologically speaking, did not know 
 their right hands from their left. And out of their 
 scholarship these scholars came with one accord to 
 exalt the Bible for its inspiration, its final authority, 
 its inerrancy. 
 
 Now we may not hold with these men in all their 
 views I for one cannot hold with them but that 
 attitude has given an impetus to Bible study. It 
 lay at the root of the strong insistence of the Pres- 
 byterians upon high standards of ministerial educa- 
 tion. One reason why the Presbyterian Church 
 stands third today in this country in point of num- 
 bers is that it was not ready to utilize men without 
 college or seminary training as were the Baptists 
 and Methodists in their frontier work. This exal- 
 tation of the Bible has promoted a thorough and 
 systematic study of the scriptures in their Sunday 
 Schools and in the homes of their people. It has 
 encouraged all the members of the church to be- 
 come competent to understand and rightly divide 
 these words of truth which are the final source of 
 authority in all matters of faith and practice. And 
 in these days, when critical study and the purely 
 
THE PRESBYTERIAN PART 67 
 
 literary treatment of the Bible have been unsettling 
 the faith of many and have been lowering the Bible 
 in the estimation of others, this supreme honor 
 placed upon the word of God by this branch of the 
 church has been of inestimable worth. 
 
 In the fourth place, the Presbyterian Church has 
 stood strongly for the value of an intelligent Chris- 
 tian nurture. You might indicate a certain difference 
 here by the words "crisis' and "process.' The 
 sacramental idea of religion makes much of the 
 crisis the unbaptized individual is unregenerate, but 
 holy water in the hands of an officiating priest ap- 
 plied to the child or to the believing adult will cause 
 him to pass instantly from death unto life. The 
 emotional type of religion makes much of the crisis 
 -if there can only come an overturning, an over- 
 whelming crisis in the feelings of the individual 
 then in that hour he may enter upon a regenerate 
 life. 
 
 But, according to the other view, religion is 
 phrased rather in terms of domestic life, the Father 
 bringing up his children gradually into conscious, 
 obedient, joyous fellowship with himself; or it may 
 be phrased in terms of education, the Master of our 
 spirits leading 'his disciples, pupils, learners out 
 into self-realization by self-expression in wor- 
 ship, in service and in fellowship with Him. Here 
 salvation is a moral process, conducted by the Spirit 
 of God in the hearts of teachable men. 
 
 The Presbyterian churches have made much of this. 
 
68 OUK TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 By thorough religious instruction in the homes 
 oil its people it has aimed to hold its own children 
 within the power of Christian nurture. It main- 
 tains that the ideal is for the child never to know 
 the hour when he does not live in the love and the 
 service of God. Family discipline, family prayer, the 
 instruction of children in the catechism and the 
 maintenance of the offices of Christian culture in 
 the home have been of unspeakable advantage to 
 this branch of the church. Its course of action 
 has been a lesson and an example to Christian peo- 
 ple of all communions. In recent years the Pres- 
 byterian Church has shown more interest in revivals, 
 putting its strength behind J. Wilbur Chapman and 
 other evangelists, but formerly it held aloof from 
 the sudden and startling modes of awakening re- 
 ligious interest. It placed its emphasis upon the 
 quieter and in the long run the more reliable modes 
 oi Christian nurture for the extension of the King- 
 dom. 
 
 This church has rendered noble service in the his- 
 tory of our country. It has had great preachers 
 of the gospel of Christ John Hall and Theodore 
 Cuyler, Howard Crosby and Charles H. Parkhurst, 
 Herrick Johnson and Henry Van Dyke! By their 
 strong, winsome and effective presentation of the 
 truths of religion they have made us all their 
 debtors. It has written a noble record in the work 
 of Home and Foreign Missions Jessup and Thomp- 
 son in Syria. John G. Pat ton in the New Hebrides 
 
THE PRESBYTERIAN PAKT 69 
 
 and Sheldon Jackson in Alaska, Arthur T. Pierson, 
 one of the most useful writers on missions in our 
 century, and other men honored in the field of Chris- 
 tian effort. It has reared up a splendid body of 
 intelligent, conscientious and influential laymen. 
 When we call the roll of Presbyterian presidents, 
 senators and jurists, we find it a long- and worthy 
 roll of honor. By its conservative temper, by its 
 sense of the awfulness of wrong-doing, by its de- 
 votion to the Bible, and by its emphasis on the Chris- 
 tian nurture of the child, it has made a distinct and 
 valuable contribution to our total Christianity. 
 
THE ROMAN CATHOLIC PART 
 
 T 
 
 HERE is not and never was on this earth 
 a work of human policy so well deserv- 
 ing of examination as the Roman Catholic 
 
 Church. The history of that church joins 
 
 together the two great ages of human civiliza- 
 tion. No other institution is left standing which 
 carries the mind back to the times when the smoke 
 of sacrifice arose from the Pantheon and leopards 
 and tigers leaped upon their victims in the Coliseum 
 at Rome. The proudest royal houses are but of 
 yesterday when compared with the long line of 
 Supreme Pontiffs in the Vatican. The Roman Cath- 
 olic Church was great and respected before the 
 Saxon set foot in Britain, before the Frank had 
 passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flour- 
 ished in Antioch and idols were worshipped in the 
 temple at Mecca. And she may still exist in undim- 
 inished vigor when some traveller from New Zea- 
 land shall in the midst of a great solitude take his 
 stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch 
 the ruins of St. Paul.' 
 
 Thus spoke Macauley, one of the most widely 
 read historians of the English speaking race, in his 
 celebrated essay on Von Ranke's "Lives of the 
 
THE ROMAN CATHOLIC PART 71 
 
 Popes.' Make all due allowance, as we must, for 
 the superabundant rhetoric and enthusiasm which 
 rendered him more admirable as a brilliant essayist 
 than as an accurate historian, and we still have a 
 judgmeint which causes men to reflect. It directs 
 the mind toward a subject which must be taken 
 into serious consideration by everyone interested in 
 human progress. The Roman Catholic Church, how- 
 ever we may disagree with many of its dogmas or 
 condemn great sections of its history, is not only 
 ajncient and august, it is a world-wide and tremend- 
 ously significant fact. 
 
 I have not time to sketch its history, whole 
 periods of which are so dark as to have utterly 
 destroyed the influence of any institution less pa- 
 tient or less resilient. I have not time to discuss 
 its various doctrines, of which it has more, and 
 more incredible ones, than any other branch of the 
 Christian church. I have not time to indicate all of 
 the points at which I dissent radically from its posi- 
 tions touching questions of education, civil author- 
 ity and intellectual outlook. It would take at least 
 seven sermons cm this one church alone for me to do 
 that with anything approaching seriousness or 
 thoroughness. 
 
 I am not of those who either fear or hope that it 
 will at last swallow us all up. In the last three hun- 
 dred years it has been far from holding its own in 
 the world at large, either in numbers, in influence 
 or in vitality. Within the last two months a notable 
 
72 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 volume has appeared on "The Leakage of Catholi- 
 cism,' basing its calculations upon the figures and 
 statements, the estimates and opinions of Romatn 
 Catholic authorities. A well-known Roman Catholic 
 bishop had shown that by the natural increase of 
 their share of the population and by the immense 
 gains through immigration from Catholic countries, 
 the adherents of that communiotn in this country 
 should number today at least thirty-tw r o millions, 
 whereas, they only number about eleven millions. 
 It was the judgment of this writer based upon Ro- 
 man Catholic testimony that the total leakage from 
 that church during the Nineteenth Century 
 amounted to at least eighty millions of communi- 
 cants. These people did not all become Protestants 
 -alas, the great majority of them became nothing 
 at all ; they became unbelieving, irreligious, spirit- 
 ually indifferent, if not scornful toward all religion. 
 It was James Anthony Froude, Professor of His- 
 tory iln Oxford University, who said, "During the 
 last three hundred years the Roman Catholic Church 
 has lost her hold on nine-tenths of the educated 
 laymen in her own communion ; she has compelled 
 every Catholic government to take from her the last 
 fiber of secular and civil authority, depriving her 
 even of her control over education.' Her oftce 
 world-wide temporal authority is now limited to a 
 single building in a single city, the Vatican at Rome. 
 The Pope, once elected and consecrated, in order to 
 keep up his vain pretence of temporal authority. 
 
THE ROMAN CATHOLIC PART 73 
 
 never leaves the walls of the Vatican, for by doing 
 so he would become at once a subject of the secular 
 government of Italy. 
 
 "In the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries the 
 the Roman Catholic Church destroyed by fagot and 
 sword the lives of hundreds of thousands of men 
 and women in the effort to recover that former 
 dominion. But today if it should attempt that, if 
 it should lay hands upon a single 'heretic and dis- 
 pose of him as it used to do at the stake ; if one 
 helpless man should now be burned at Rome for his 
 Protestant heresy, every sane man believes that the 
 whole ecclesiastical fabric, mighty and imposing as 
 it is, would be torn to shreds by the moral indigna- 
 tion of the race.' No, the world moves, even in the 
 Vatican at Rome, and when we take the wider view 
 we see that there is no danger that the old preten- 
 sions, which once struck terror to the hearts of the 
 nations, should again become anything but the sen- 
 timental mutterings of an impotent bigotry. 
 
 But as I have indicated repeatedly, the main pur- 
 pose of this course is not controversial, and I wish 
 to ask what positive and distinctive contributions 
 the Roman Catholic Church has made to our total 
 Christianity. The first one lies in their inculcation 
 of the habit of worship. All church people worship, 
 but Catholics we may say, not irreverently, have 
 the habit beyond any others. Little children as soon 
 as they are able to toddle up the aisle of the church 
 and cross themselves with holy water and bow be- 
 
74 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 fore the pictures and statues they find there, are 
 steeped in the habit of worship. When they be- 
 come men and women they still feel strangely moved 
 to statedly visit the church and kneel before the 
 Lord their Maker, offering unto Him the adoration, 
 the trust and the allegiance of their hearts. Every 
 Catholic Church stands open every day in the week,, 
 inviting the passerby to come in and worship. No 
 service of any kind may be in progress, but there 
 are the symbols of his faith, there is the atmosphere 
 of reverence and devotion, and there he will ever 
 find a number of fellow beings seeking to unburden 
 and refresh their hearts in personal worship. 
 
 I remember once entering the great Cathedral at 
 Milan early in the morning, when it was scarcely 
 light. As I passed in, I saw by the door a dozen 
 or more huge, rough market baskets, some con- 
 taining produce, others articles of clothing and oth- 
 ers such trinkets as are sold on the street. As I 
 moved up reverently near the altar there were a 
 number of peasant women to whom these baskets 
 belonged. Their faces were bronzed, wrinkled, and 
 scarred by hard work, age and exposure. They had 
 stopped for a few moments on their way to their 
 work to worship in that magnificent cathedral, that 
 famous shrine visited every year by thousands of 
 people from every part of the world, who come to 
 stand awe-struck and silent before the dignity and 
 beauty of its architecture. And the rough, shab- 
 bily dressed old market women were perfectly at 
 
THE KOMAN CATHOLIC PART 75 
 
 home there in their simple devotions, no one 
 except an American Protestant would have thought 
 of giving them a single curious glance. And when 
 they rose from their knees and passed out, they had 
 gained some feeling of spiritual refreshment, some 
 new consciousness of the sacredness of human life, 
 even under its rudest conditions, some added sense 
 of kinship with the Unseen One in Whose honor 
 this mighty temple of worship was reared. The 
 habit of worship firmly established in the sentiments 
 and practices of the two hundred millions of people 
 in that communion, how wonderful and how beauti- 
 ful it all is ! 
 
 The second contribution lies in their habit of 
 obedience to authority. 'Poverty, chastity, obedi- 
 ence,' these are the three VOW T S taken by an army 
 of devoted men and women of that faith. Renounc- 
 ing all right or claim to private property, and re- 
 ceiving only a bare support, they "belong to the 
 church' in a very vital sense, to be used by it as 
 may seem good. For the sake of the service, which 
 according to their belief can be better rendered by 
 those who are free from any domestic responsibility 
 and thus at liberty to go and come as their superiors 
 may direct, they refuse the sweet joys of family life. 
 And obedience immediate, unquestioning and un- 
 limited to the head of the Order, this becomes for 
 them the rule of life ! This example has its influence 
 upon the entire body of Catholics until obedience to 
 authority becomes a leading note in their religious 
 
76 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 life. Private judgment and personal inclination are 
 trained to submit themselves to spiritual direction 
 and authority. 
 
 I am fully aware how deadly the habit of obedi- 
 ence to unworthy authority may become in its ulti- 
 mate influence. And for the development of the 
 freer, braver type of person ality this whole attitude 
 of unquestioning obedience may not be the most 
 promising. This may be one reason why for three 
 centuries none of the leading men of letters in all 
 the world owe anything to the patronage of the 
 Roman Catholic Church. It is one reason why in 
 all the centuries only one of the great poets, Dante, 
 has come from the Catholic Church, although it out- 
 fciumbers all the other churches put together 
 Shakespeare, Milton and Goethe, Wordsworth and 
 Byron, Browning and Tennyson were all of them 
 Protestant poets. This whole habit of obedience to 
 authority has to reckon with the growing spirit of 
 democracy and with the advance of popular intel- 
 ligelnce in this country more than in some of the 
 countries of the old world, and it will have to reckon 
 with all that everywhere in larger measure during 
 the Twentieth Century. But after making full al- 
 lowance for all this, the habit of obedience to author- 
 ity for great numbers of men and women in their 
 present stage of development has tremendous sig- 
 nificance and value. 
 
 When I say my prayers I thank God for the Eo- 
 man Catholic Church. I could not belong to it. 
 
THE ROMAN CATHOLIC PART 77 
 
 Some of its doctrinal positions, the infallibility of 
 the Pope, the power of priestly absolution from sin, 
 the notion of the sacrifice of Christ ijn the Mass, its 
 belief as to the real presence of the body and blood 
 of Christ in the bread and wine at Communion, the 
 doctrine of purgatory, are not only incredible to 
 me, they seem impossible to any discriminat- 
 ing mind. I shrink with horror from some of the 
 pages of history this church has written under papal 
 sanction and for which no word of disapproval or 
 regret has ever been uttered by its official repre- 
 sentatives. I would be ready to oppose with all my 
 might some of its pretensions to temporal authority 
 and some of its encroachments upon the work of 
 public education if it ever undertook to assert those 
 pretensions in this country as they have been as- 
 serted in other countries in former centuries. 
 
 And yet with all this I thank God for the Roman 
 Catholic Church. We have not so many moral forces 
 these days that we can afford to boycott any of 
 them. "Un a great house there are not only vessels 
 of gold and of silver, but also of wood and of earth.' 
 And with all its limitations which seem to us so 
 serious the Catholic Church does stand, and stand 
 effectively through the habit of obedience on the 
 part of its members, for reverence towards God, for 
 righteousness of life and for the prevalence of spirit- 
 ual ideals. 
 
 It has at this moment under its direction vast 
 numbers of utntaught men and women in Italy and 
 
78 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 in Spain, in Austria and in South America, that we 
 would not know what to do with if they suddenly 
 threw off their loyalty to the Catholic Church and 
 undertook to become Protestants. We have in this 
 more enlightened land great numbers of people in 
 all our cities who are better cared for in their pres- 
 ent stage of spiritual development and with the 
 temperaments it has pleased God to give them, in 
 the Eoman Catholic Church than they would be by 
 the Presbyterian Church or the Congregational 
 Church. 
 
 My good friend and neighbor, Father McNally, 
 himself ain abstainer, goes about in West Oakland 
 urging the claims of his Father Mathew Temper- 
 ance Society upon many a rough man who, by his 
 inheritance and surroundings, is in danger of being 
 overcome by the habit of drink, and by virtue of 
 that authority which belongs to the Catholic priest 
 the good Father accomplishes what no Protestant 
 clergyman could at present accomplish. And this 
 is a single illustration of a single virtue in a single 
 field. In keeping alive the sense of the unseen 
 world, in promoting the feeling of moral obligation, 
 in causing men to know that there is open to us a 
 divine source of moral strength to aid us in our 
 struggle, the unique authority of the parish priest 
 among his people has a value which we are not 
 ready to relinquish from the moral forces of the 
 community. 
 
 In mediaeval times it was this spiritual despotism 
 
THE KOMAN CATHOLIC PART 79 
 
 which alone showed itself mighty enough to con- 
 trol and subdue the turbulent elements of society, 
 to put the yoke on military tyrants and to infuse 
 some measure of the spirit of mercy in those who 
 otherwise would have been the cruel oppressors of 
 their weaker fellows. And today in great sections 
 of modern society the same result in other terms 
 and under other conditions is being wrought out,- 
 spiritual despotism is holding in check certain evil 
 forces before which less autocratic methods might 
 find themselves helpless. 
 
 Over against a materialism which is no closet 
 theory but a base manner of life, over against a 
 revolutionary type of social agitation which would 
 burn and slay to accomplish its desires, over against 
 the spirit of unchecked self-indulgence and wild 
 Bohemianism which fears neither God, man nor 
 devil, the Roman Catholic Church stands with a 
 brave front, and lifts before the people in picture 
 and statue, in anthem and prayer, in sermon and 
 in the personal word of the confessor, the nobler 
 ideals of the Son of Man. We are not far enough 
 along toward the millennium to turn round and 
 seek to break in pieces that vessel of honor, even 
 though it seems to us to contain so much of wood 
 and of earth. 
 
 The letogth to which this spirit of obedience will 
 go, almost passes belief. The story of the Jesuits, 
 the great order founded by Ignatius Loyola to offset 
 the Protestant Reformation, reads like a romance. 
 
80 OUK TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 The spiritual forces of Protestantism have been 
 compared to local militia, useful in cases of inva- 
 sion but incapable of being sent abroad for spiritual 
 conquest. Rome has her militia, but she has also 
 her standing army, made up of forces disposable at 
 a moment's (notice for any foreign service, however 
 distant or disagreeable or dangerous. If it is be- 
 lieved at headquarters that a certain Jesuit in 
 England or in America would, because of his talents 
 or character, be valuable among the Hottentots of 
 Africa or the Bushmen of Australia, or the Es- 
 quimaux of the frozen North, the next week he will 
 be sailing to that quarter of the world, and in a 
 mointh's time he will be preaching, catechising and 
 holding mass amid those strange surroundings. The 
 Roman Catholic Church encourages and is able to 
 command a measure of obedience to authority which 
 is both a menace, where it is unworthily used, and 
 a mighty prophecy of spiritual achievement where 
 it is directed to noble ends. "Whatsoever he saith 
 unto you, do it,' -this was the word uttered at 
 Cana of Galilee aind in that atmosphere of com- 
 plete and unquestioning obedience the water of life 
 was turned into wine. 
 
 The third contribution lies in their promotion of 
 the spirit of trust. The Roman Catholic Church 
 meets the human soul at the very threshhold of 
 life and offers to provide some satisfying measure 
 of moral consecration and spiritual direction for 
 every important crisis. This is the meaning of the 
 
THE ROMAN CATHOLIC PART 81 
 
 seven sacraments of that church. Here is Baptism 
 for the new born babe, the recognition of its spirit- 
 ual kinship with the great body of aspiring souls 
 in the church, and of its kinship with the Father, 
 Son and Holy Spirit, ijnto whose Triune name the 
 child is baptised. Here is Confirmation for the 
 child when he reaches the age of moral decision and 
 is ready to stand before the world as a professing 
 Christian, prepared to take his first communion. 
 Here is the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, the 
 bread and wine transformed into the veritable body 
 and blood of the Savior according to their belief, 
 that the inner life may feed upon Him and become 
 indeed like Him. Here is Penance, where the bur- 
 dened soul in the confessional, seeking to relieve 
 itself by breathing the story of its moral failure into 
 the ear of a* trusted and merciful friend, gaining 
 in the assurance of human forgivness a deeper con- 
 fidence in the divine forgivness, has prescribed for 
 it certain acts of devotion or service to be rendered 
 as an offset to the wrong done. Here is the sacra- 
 ment of Orders, the formal setting apart of one 
 man to become a priestly mediator on behalf of his 
 fellows. Here is the sacrament of Marriage, the 
 union of one man and one woman for life, and all 
 honor to the Roman Catholic Church for its steady 
 opposition to the inroads which easy and hasty 
 divorce has been making upon the integrity of 
 the home a copy of the mystic union of Christ and 
 His church. And then at the very end of one's 
 
82 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 career here is the sacrament of Extreme Unction, 
 when the soul is finally prepared for its solemn and 
 mysterious journey into the unseen world of eternal 
 values. 
 
 All these become to the devout Catholic outward 
 and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace. At 
 all the important crises of his life and touching all 
 its vital interests, the church places these symbols 
 of an unseen economy of mercy and helpfulness ; 
 and by the perpetual recurrence of these rites in 
 the appointments of his church the believer is main- 
 tained in that attitude of trust which bestows the 
 sense of peace. 
 
 In these practical days, when so many people fall 
 into the way of believing only in those things which 
 can be seen with the eyes, hajndled with the hands 
 and purchased with gold, when the things which are 
 seen and temporal expel from their consideration 
 those unseen things that are eternal, it is good to 
 have one great branch of the church inculcating 
 steadily, by methods which have shown themselves 
 effective, the spirit of trust itn those intangible aids 
 which mean so much in the gaining of the more 
 abundant life. 
 
 No church has made so much of that manifesta- 
 tion of the divine mercy and sacrifice for sin wit- 
 nessed on Calvary. Catholics go to Mass and the 
 Mass is to them a visible enactment and repetition 
 of the sacrifice on Calvary offered in atonement for 
 sin. ''The hosts of people hurrying through the 
 
THE ROMAN CATHOLIC PART 83 
 
 streets in every city of Christendom at early dawn 
 on Sunday morning are not going to hear some bril- 
 liant man discuss an interesting problem or to hear 
 a few gifted singers sing; they are going to cele- 
 brate the death of the Savior of the world and to 
 confide afresh in the great mystery of divine re- 
 demption there proclaimed.' On every altar, and in 
 many a home, is the crucifix. The Stations of the 
 Cross are stages in Christ's progress toward Cal- 
 vary. The divine mercy revealed on Calvary may 
 be as the apostle said, "to the Jews a stumbling 
 block, and to the Greeks foolishness,' but it is the 
 power of God unto salvation to every soul that 
 trusts. And the Catholic Church, beyond all others, 
 has awakened within man the feeling of trust in the 
 great fundamental offers of the Christian gospel. 
 
 In the fourth place, they have shown a wonder- 
 ful readiness for personal sacrifice. This quality 
 is present in all Christian churches, but I believe the 
 Roman Catholic Church can show a larger measure 
 of it than any other single church. It faces every 
 man who would rise to a position of influence in the 
 organization with a strong demand for self-sacri- 
 fice. The Pope has a palace and the priests have 
 their clergy houses, but not a man among them has 
 a home, -it takes a woman, a wife and a mother, to 
 make a home. Making all necessary allowance for 
 unfaithful priests, there remains a great body of 
 pure and true men who have met that demand for 
 self-sacrifice. It is the very jewel and crown of a 
 woman's life to love and to be loved by her hus- 
 
84 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 band and her children, and to busy herself with the 
 furnishing and the maintenance of a home. But 
 here a vast company of women, Sisters of Mercy, 
 Sisters of Charity, Little Sisters of the Poor, teach- 
 ers of youth and friends of the aged, the sick and 
 the outcast, surrender those joys, and go about the 
 streets, sweet-faced, quiet-voiced, pure hearted mes- 
 sengers of the Divine purpose in self-sacrificing serv- 
 ice. You cannot go through any city with an open 
 mind and not recognize that this church has repro- 
 duced in generous measure the spirit of Him who 
 went about not to be ministered unto but to minister 
 and to give His life a ransom for many. 
 
 Its noble self-sacrifice on many a mission field has 
 written a record as full of romance and heroism 
 as the story of apostolic Christianity. Father 
 Damien among the lepers of Hawaii, Pere Marquette 
 among the Indians of our own Northwest, Juniper o 
 Serra in his mission work in California! "I, if I 
 be lifted up, will draw all mein unto Me," said One 
 of old who knew what was in man. It was the 
 sober estimate of the Son of God upon the power of 
 sincere love for the souls of men and the habit 
 of uncomplaining sacrifice on their behalf. And 
 with all the errors of its long and checkered career, 
 the Roman Catholic Church does make a splendid 
 showing in its display of heroic and beautiful self- 
 sacrifice. 
 
 I join with you in profound regret that an insti- 
 tution so ancient, so extended, so wonderful, is dis- 
 figured by faults so serious and menacing. That 
 
THE ROMAN CATHOLIC PART 85 
 
 intolerance toward the rest of us as being unchristian 
 and without hope of heaven because we are outside 
 its pale seems altogether inexcusable. That intol- 
 erance of which we had a fresh illustration in the 
 recent action of the Pope withdrawing his permis- 
 sion for Vice-President Fairbanks to visit him be- 
 cause the Sunday before Mr. Fairbanks, himself a 
 Methodist, had spoken at a Methodist Church in 
 Kome, is a moral blot on its escutcheon. That big- 
 otry which makes friendly association between that 
 branch of the church and the other branches almost 
 impossible, which renders marriages between Cath- 
 olic and Protestant almost uniformly productive of 
 friction and trouble, is a thing to be deplored ! Its 
 attitude toward the public schools is un-American 
 and it seems to us unchristian. Its assumption of 
 the right of temporal authority would be intolerable 
 if the church attempted to enforce it. Its readiness 
 to cover up its own faults in the past and its pres- 
 ent unwillingness to confess them or correct them 
 is a matter of profound regret. Its unfriendly feel- 
 ing for modern knowledge and for many of the 
 modern movements which make for progress 
 occasions sorrow to us all. But with all these off- 
 sets we recognize that by its habit of worship, by 
 its spirit of obedience to authority, by its profound 
 feeling of trust in the unseen and by the readiness 
 of large numbers of its adherents for self-sacrifice, 
 it has made a great and distinctive contribution to 
 our total Christianity. 
 
THE UNITARIAN PART 
 
 T 
 
 HE doctrine of the Unity of God is much 
 older than William Ellery Channing. It 
 is much older than the Arians of the 
 Fourth Century who stood up to resist the 
 stout orthodoxy of Athanasius in the Nicene Coun- 
 cil. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Moses, David and 
 Isaiah were all Unitarians in their thought of God. 
 The vast Moslem world, whose faith at its incep- 
 tion was a stern protest against the weak idolatry 
 of the Orient, is to this hour a world of Unitarians 
 -"There is no God but Allah, and Mahomet is 
 His prophet.' The whole array of Old Testament 
 saints, of Moslem believers and of a great company 
 of thoughtful men in all lands and in all periods 
 of religious history, might stand together in saying, 
 'To us, there is but one God, the Father.' 
 
 But Unitarianism as we ordinarily use that term 
 in its more restricted sense, applying it to a certain 
 branch of the Christian Church, dates back in this 
 country to about the year 1815. One hundred and 
 twenty Congregational churches of New England 
 at that time separated themselves from the Ortho- 
 dox wing of the denomination which still held to 
 the general system of belief known as Evangelical. 
 
THE UNITARIAN PART 87 
 
 In Boston every Congregational Church except the 
 "Old South" joined in this new departure. They re- 
 tained the Congregational form of polity and in most 
 cases retained the historic names and the property 
 which had belonged to those churches in the days 
 when they still gave their adherence to orthodoxy. 
 
 The ' ' Half-way Covenant, ' ' in vogue in New Eng- 
 land, an arrangement by which men who were not 
 ready to profess themselves full-fledged Christians 
 might, at least, sustain that relation to the Church 
 which was demanded at that time for participation 
 in civil affairs, had brought into the churches many 
 to whom Calvinism had been unacceptable. There was 
 a thoughtful and conscientious reaction against some 
 of the excessess and some of the preaching connected 
 with ' * the Great Awakening. ' Reason and conscience 
 alike were uttering substantial protests against 
 such teaching as that found in Jonathan Edwards' 
 terrible sermon on "Sinners in the Hands of An 
 Angry God.' The time was ripe for some radical 
 modification of the religious teaching which had 
 become traditional with the orthodoxy of New Eng- 
 land and the Unitarian movement was the clearest 
 and most influential expression of that demand. 
 
 The liberal party was not very large numerically. 
 The Unitarian denomination today is still one of 
 the smallest of the sects, numbering, in this country, 
 only some seventy-five thousand members. It is 
 a party to be weighed rather than counted. But 
 it has registered a profound and wholesome im- 
 
88 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 press upon the religious belief, upon the literature, 
 upon the philanthropy and upon the civic purposes 
 of the Nation. No one who understands its early 
 
 / 
 
 history and the real quality of the men who gave 
 direction to its development in those days will 
 ever speak scornfully or even slightingly of the 
 Unitarian Church. 
 
 The main contributions which it has made to our 
 total Christianity seem to me to be : First, its steady 
 insistence upon a reasonable faith. In those early 
 days when the most rigorous form of Calvinism 
 was to the fore the Unitarian movement had also 
 its 'five points/ and very different points they 
 were from the five points of Calvinism. 
 
 It stood for the real and universal Fatherhood 
 of God. "To us there is but one God, the Father," 
 they said, and all these legal, forensic, mediatorial 
 schemes of salvation must either square themselves 
 with that fundamental fact or they must stand 
 aside to give men the open vision of the Father. 
 
 It stood for the actual humanity of Christ. In 
 their insistence upon his divinity the orthodox party 
 had obscured the fact that whatever else Christ 
 may be He was a man, born of a woman, tempted 
 in all points like as we are, subject to the laws of 
 growth, of pain and of death. The Unitarian stood 
 for the actual humanity of Christ, not a mask, or 
 a pretense, but a genuine humanity which tasted the 
 human situation to the full for every man. 
 
 It insisted on the function of historv, not onlv 
 
THE UNITARIAN PAET 89 
 
 Hebrew history, but all history, as a revelation 
 of God. The Unitarians boldly affirmed that God 
 had not left himself without witness in any land 
 or in any age. 
 
 It placed the Bible at the center of a vaster reve- 
 lation of the mind of the Lord through literature 
 the relation of the Bible to other books of spiritual 
 worth being germinal rather than exclusive of their 
 claims to some measure of inspiration. 
 
 It insisted that salvation is a moral process con- 
 ducted by the spirit of God in the lives of 
 thoughtful, obedient and aspiring men a moral 
 process not a legal or mechanical arrangement im- 
 puting man's guilt to an atoning Savior or imputing 
 the righteousness of Christ to unrighteous men by 
 some sort of theological shuffle. It was a moral pro- 
 cess in which the spirit of the living God was utiliz- 
 ing not only dogma and sacrament but many other 
 competent agencies which could be made to con- 
 tribute to moral growth. 
 
 Here are five points the Fatherhood of God, the 
 humanity of Jesus, the function of history as a reve- 
 lation of God, the germinal relation of the Bible 
 to a vaster body of sacred literature and the con- 
 ception of salvation as a moral process all of them 
 reasonable, all of them scriptural, all of them help- 
 ful ! They have been so far accepted by all the 
 more intelligent and open-minded branches of the 
 church as to seem to many of us commonplace, but 
 time was when it cost many a man the affection and 
 
90 OUK TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 confidence of his associates in Christian effort to 
 openly insist upon these five points of a reasonable 
 faith. 
 
 It was a protest sorely needed. The Unitarians 
 of that day stood out against a doctrine of the 
 Trinity, which meant practically three distinct Gods. 
 They opposed a view of Christ which altogether 
 slighted his humanity in the interests of a certain 
 plan of salvation. They condemned that narrower 
 view of history which left great sections of human 
 interest, past and present, quite outside the pale of 
 God's love and care. They put their strength against 
 that conception of salvation, which represented it 
 as something outward, legal, mechanical. They re- 
 fused to set religion in conflict with the intelligence 
 and moral wealth of the world where these were 
 found not allying themselves with the theological 
 positions of Calvinism. And as Dr. George A. Gor- 
 don of the Old South Chuch, Boston, has pointed 
 out, their protest at these points was ''Tremendous, 
 magnificent, wholesome.' It was reason and con- 
 science in such wise and godly men as Channing 
 and Dewey, Theodore Parker and James Freeman 
 Clarke, William C. Gannett and William H. Furness 
 arraying themselves against certain theological 
 claims which were neither reasonable nor moral. 
 
 It was therefore an ethical no less than an intel- 
 lectual protest. It would be difficult to name two 
 men in the Nineteenth Century in whom the moral 
 sense was more keenly alive than in William Ellery 
 
THE UNITARIAN PART 91 
 
 Clianning and James Martineau. It was the spirit- 
 ual passion of their own great, warm hearts which 
 moved them to defend the character of God against 
 the unworthy implications put upon it by some of 
 the orthodoxy of that day. 
 
 Certain theories of the Atonement represented 
 God as only allowing His anger against faulty men 
 to be appeased by the sufferings of Christ, upon 
 whom the full penalty of the guilt of the whole 
 world was visited it was a frightful doctrine and 
 there is no shred of it in the Four Gospels. The 
 claim was made that God in determining from all 
 eternity by an unconditional election that certain 
 men should be saved was under no obligation to 
 respect our rights or interests it was a doctrine 
 as immoral as would be the claim that adultery is 
 not sin. Go back and read some of the current 
 religious literature in the last half of the Eigh- 
 teenth Century and you will understand how some 
 of the choicest spirits this country has ever pro- 
 duced went out from the larger orthodox body of 
 Christian believers, impelled, indeed, by reason 
 and by a truer knowledge of what the Bible actually 
 teaches, but impelled still more by their own honest 
 hearts and faithful consciences. 
 
 It was a protest overdone in many instances 
 when the pendulum swings it sometimes swings too 
 far. In the minds of many people God the Father 
 became grandfatherly, the thought of moral rigor 
 and disciplinary purpose in His attitude toward us 
 
92 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 was obscured. In some minds ' * the dignity of human 
 nature' ' was such that man did not need a Saviour, 
 did not need forgiveness, renewal, strengthened 
 purpose in order to attain. To certain light-hearted 
 people today all literature is so full oC what they 
 are pleased to term 'inspiration' that it does not 
 matter whether men's minds are ever fed on the 
 great conceptions and aspirations of David and 
 Isaiah, of John and Paul, or of our Lord Himself- 
 Emerson and Hegel, Shelley and Walt Whitman 
 will be quite enough. These friends, as a rule, 
 speedily reveal the fact that they have been reared 
 on spiritual gruel altogether too thin to make them 
 morally robust. But the Unitarian movement is not 
 to be judged by its worst nor altogether by its 
 best, but by the main trend and drift of its influ- 
 ence upon the religious life of the Nineteenth Cen- 
 tury. It was at its inception an emergency move- 
 ment shaped up with reference to the necessities of 
 a specific historic situation it has continued until 
 in a very substantial and wholesome way it has 
 made good its protest in the more reasonable and 
 scriptural positions held by all the churches of 
 Christ. 
 
 And when we come to view it as a movement of 
 thought and life, rather than a single denomination, 
 we find that Unitarianism represents today and has 
 represented straight along not so much a body of 
 churches as 'an individual way of looking at the 
 facts of life and its problems." It is sometimes 
 
THE UNITAKIAN PAKT 93 
 
 said by the uncircumcised that Boston is not a place 
 on the map it is " a state of mind. ' There is a great 
 deal more truth than humor in that epigram. If we 
 had some sort of chemical analysis by which we 
 could detect the "traces' of the wide influence of 
 those men and women who for the last two hundred 
 and fifty years have been speaking, writing and 
 acting in and around Boston, we might all agree 
 that Boston is a very noble and useful state of mind. 
 And in similar fashion Unitarianism is not so much 
 certain columns of figures in the Year Book where 
 religious statistics are compiled Unitarianism is " a 
 state of mind, ' ' an individual way of looking at the 
 problems of life which is characterized by reason- 
 ableness. 
 
 And the influence of this way of looking at things 
 can be discovered in the entire religious life of this 
 nation. Hundreds of thousands of people who 
 walked in darkness have seen a great light. Only 
 a small percentage of them have been enrolled as 
 Unitarians, but the more winsome, reasonable and 
 creditable message of religion, to which the influ- 
 ence of this small denomination has so largely con- 
 tributed, has won their hearts to an open allegiance 
 to Jesus Christ. Even the Salvation Army, with 
 all its "blood and fire' methods and theology, is a 
 nobler institution to-day, because it lives and works 
 in a land where Emerson and Channing, Lowell and 
 Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant and Oliver Wen- 
 dell Holmes, all of them Unitarians, have spoken 
 
94 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 to the mind and conscience of the nation. The king- 
 dom of heaven in some of its manifestations is "like 
 a grain of mustard seed,' the outward, visible, or- 
 ganized expression of a finer quality of life. The 
 kingdom of heaven is also "like leaven,' silent, 
 pervasive, contagious but gradually leavening the 
 whole mass of which it is an inconsiderable part, 
 thereby rendering it more palatable and useful in 
 meeting human need. The emphasis of the Uni- 
 tarian upon the reasonableness of his religious faith 
 has been like leaven. 
 
 The second contribution made by this denomina- 
 tion lies in the breadth of its culture. When it in- 
 sisted that all history had a function as a revelation 
 from God, it summoned the devotion as well as the 
 intelligence of the race to stand in the presence 
 of all lands and of all ages as on holy ground, put- 
 ting the shoes from off its feet as it listened every- 
 where for additional accents of the divine voice. 
 When the Unitarian insisted that the Bible was pre- 
 eminently the sacred book, but that all literature 
 worthy of the name might have indeed some breath 
 of the divine and share in that wider sacredness, he 
 gave a new impetus to the interest thoughtful and 
 devout men and women might feel in the best that 
 had been thought and said in literature. And it has 
 been characteristic of this branch of the church 
 throughout to stand for a noble breadth of culture. 
 
 As a consequence it has produced men of letters 
 in numbers out of all proportion to the size of the 
 
THE UNITARIAN PART 95 
 
 denomination. "Thou Bethlehem of Judea art not 
 least among the provinces,' for out of thee has 
 come a movement of mind which has exercised a 
 renewing and controlling influence upon the thought 
 of our entire country! How many of our noblest 
 names in literature are the names of Unitarians. 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson was the pastor of a Unitarian 
 church in Boston. Lowell and Longfellow, Bryant 
 and Holmes, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frances Park- 
 man and George Bancroft, William H. Prescott, 
 John Lothrop Motley and John Fiske, Charles Eliot 
 Norton and Thomas Wentworth Higginson were all 
 Unitarians. 
 
 In the year 1823 Lyman Beecher, himself a war- 
 horse of orthodoxy, wrote as follows- 'All the lit- 
 erary men of Massachusetts are Unitarians. All the 
 trustees and professors of Harvard College are Uni- 
 tarians. All the elite of wealth and fashion in Bos- 
 ton crowd the Unitarian churches.' They have, in 
 the last hundred years, produced a royal company 
 of seers and of singers whose messages of spiritual 
 insight and moral uplift have made us all their 
 debtors. It would indeed be difficult to name any 
 other single influence upon our youth, emanating 
 from an American mind, which has counted more or 
 counted for better things than the writings of Ralph 
 Waldo Emerson. 
 
 Unitarianism is seen at its best in Massachusetts, 
 ciid to this day more than half of its total strength 
 is to be found in that one small state. In the Mid- 
 
96 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 die West it makes only a meager showing. In the 
 South it is scarcely in evidence at all. Here on the 
 Pacific Coast the Unitarian church often lacks the 
 distinctive notes which belong to it in its home- 
 it may be made up in large measure of people re- 
 ligiously disaffected or from a company of religious 
 nondescripts who do not know what they believe 
 or whether they believe anything, and so decide 
 that they must be Unitarians. All this is an un- 
 worthy travesty upon the true character of this 
 branch of Christ's church. 
 
 The First Unitarian Church here in Oakland suf- 
 fered in this way under the leadership of a man who 
 was once wildly unreasonable in his flaming ortho- 
 doxy as a popular evangelist, then at a later period 
 of his career equally unreasonable in some of his 
 erratic heresies. But we have had also under other 
 pastors noble illustrations of those positive quali- 
 ties for which the Unitarian church stands. Charles 
 W. Wendte, insistent upon a faith which seemed to 
 him reasonable, actively and intelligently interested 
 in the charities and philanthropies of the commu- 
 nity, the founder of the Starr King Fraternity, and 
 a helpful lecturer on literature, on music, on his- 
 tory, seeking ever to relate his church in some help- 
 ful way to the broader culture of the community- 
 in Charles W. Wendte we had an illustration of 
 those qualities for which the real Unitarian Church 
 undertakes to stand ! 
 
 It was a Unitarian who founded the "Lowell 
 
THE UNITARIAN PART 97 
 
 Institute' in Boston, an endowed lectureship so 
 well maintained that from fifty to one hundred lec- 
 tures are offered free every winter, delivered by 
 the most eminent men in this country, and oftentimes 
 by men from Europe. In my college days there I 
 heard James Russell Lowell give six lectures on the 
 "Early English Dramatists,' and George Kennan 
 give his course of lectures on Siberia, when he first 
 returned from his trip through Russia. I heard 
 Richard S. Storrs lecture in his matchless way on 
 Bernard of Clairvaux, and Theodore Roosevelt lec- 
 ture on Civic Reform. The service of this nobly 
 endowed lectureship to the community can scarcely 
 be overestimated. 
 
 It was a Unitarian who generously endowed the 
 " Boston Symphony Orchestra/' which by his ample 
 provision became the first organization in this coun- 
 try to present, in a manner which ranks with the 
 best in Europe, the great musical compositions of 
 the masters of melody and harmony. 
 
 It was a Unitarian who founded "Cooper Insti- 
 tute,' in New York, which through its popular ap- 
 peal and the variety of its activities has become one 
 of the most useful institutions in that mighty city 
 in leading the thoughts of the plain people to higher 
 things. It has been characteristic of the Unitarian 
 denomination to stand for breadth of culture, be- 
 lieving that into the redeemed life of the race, and 
 as far as might be into the life of the individual, 
 "the kings of the earth,' the leaders and masters 
 
98 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 in every field of human values, should "bring their 
 glory and their honor' as into a city that lieth 
 four-square. 
 
 In the third place, the Unitarian Church has been 
 conspicuous for its contribution of a wise interest 
 in philanthropic effort. This has been no mere 
 cold-hearted, technical skill in dissecting the prob- 
 lems of poverty and crime, of civic wrong and so- 
 cial injustice. Some of the mightiest of the reform- 
 ers have sprung from this branch of Christ's church, 
 bearing with them the moral passion no less than 
 the wise judgment which belongs to this denomina- 
 tion at its best. 
 
 The men and the women who waged the earliest 
 and the hottest battles for the abolition of human 
 slavery recruited their ranks in large measure from 
 the Unitarian churches. Channing himself, and 
 Theodore Parker, who made Music Hall in Boston 
 a modern Forurn for the voicing of the public con- 
 science; Charles Sumner and Wendell Phillips, Ger- 
 ritt Smith, Samuel J. May, and Julia Ward Howe 
 were all of them Unitarians. 
 
 And in more recent times, in dealing with vice 
 and crime, in meeting the demands which the chari- 
 ties and the corrections of the country are making 
 upon brain and heart, there are few more honored 
 names than those of Edward Everett Hale and 
 Samuel J. Barrows. I was a visitor for the Asso- 
 ciated Charities in Boston twenty years ago, and at 
 that time more than half the money and a great 
 
THE UNITARIAN PART 99 
 
 deal more than half the time and wisdom and love 
 spent in personal service came from that denomina- 
 tion, although it was one of the smaller branches 
 of the Christian church If one should measure the 
 Christianity of any group of people by the showing 
 they make in embodying in their lives the teach- 
 ings of the parable of the Good Samaritan and of 
 the noble utterance of Christ in that judgment scene 
 portrayed in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew- 
 
 ' Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of 
 these, ye have done it unto me' -he would find 
 the Unitarians meeting that test in a most satisfac- 
 tory way. 
 
 It has been a broad-minded philanthrophy. It 
 was Dr. Samuel G. Howe who gave impetus and 
 direction to an awakening sentiment in Massachu- 
 setts for the more efficient care of the blind. The 
 Perkins Blind Asylum in South Boston, where Laura 
 Bridgman and Helen Keller received their train- 
 ing, sprang out of his efforts. It was Horace Mann 
 who led the way in broadening the scope of educa- 
 tion, making it include Manual Training for boys. 
 When he was once urging the importance of these 
 trade schools because of the influence, of the use 
 of tools and material, upon the character of a boy, 
 he said, "If it only saved one boy from vice and 
 crime it would be worth all it costs.' At the close 
 of his address the man next him whispered, "Don't 
 you think that your statement about 'one boy' was 
 
AGO OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 extravagant?" "Not if it was my boy," he re- 
 plied. 
 
 It is Edwin D. Mead who, more than any other 
 single man in our country, is arousing and educat- 
 ing that sentiment which will oppose increased arma- 
 ments and urge the reference of international dif- 
 ferences to properly constituted international 
 courts as a substitute for the barbarous and bur- 
 densome habit of war. It is Charles F. Dole, who 
 is a leader in the work of scientific temperance agi- 
 tation, bringing to bear upon the menacing evil of 
 the rum shop, the best judgment and largest ex- 
 perience of the nation to replace the inefficient and 
 intemperate zeal of certain reformers who only 
 serve to cloud the issue. It was George Angel 
 James who aroused the pity of the country for dumb 
 animals and led the movement which resulted in 
 the organization of a society for the prevention of 
 cruelty. In every form of philanthropic effort you 
 will find the intelligent heads and the warm hearts 
 of Unitarians bearing an honorable part in these 
 efforts which make for some just solution. 
 
 In civic affairs the Unitarians have also rendered 
 notable service. The people of California can never 
 forget the debt of gratitude they owe to Thomas 
 Starr King, pastor of the First Unitarian Church, 
 San Francisco, for the far-reaching influence he 
 exerted in helping to save California to the Union, 
 and enlisting her on the side of the struggle for the 
 liberty of all men. Some of the noblest men we 
 
THE UNITARIAN PART 101 
 
 have had in the councils of our nation have been 
 men of that faith Charles Sumner and Senator 
 Hoar, John Hay, John D. Long, and many others 
 whose names would fill a worthy roll of honor. The 
 movement for Civil Service Reform was greatly in- 
 debted for the advancement of its interests to in- 
 dividual members of this church and to the organ- 
 ized utterance of the church itself along that line. 
 George William Curtis, Thomas Wentworth Hig- 
 ginson and many another honored citizen stood up 
 to resist the idea that "to the victor belongs the 
 spoils' -they insisted steadily that a public office 
 is a public trust. 
 
 Piety and patriotism should ever go hand in 
 hand. When the intelligent Jews prayed for the 
 peace of Jerusalem, they did it both as citizens 
 and as churchmen, for Jerusalem was the capital 
 of their country, as well as the site of the temple 
 of God. And in the Unitarian branch of Christ's 
 church there has been throughout an intelligent 
 insistence upon the sacredness of civic life and the 
 importance of those duties which belong to citizen- 
 ship in the republic. 
 
 "One God, the Father' -ours no less than theirs! 
 They have not been able to accept certain interpre- 
 tations of the eternal mystery which we accept. We 
 cannot receive their estimate upon the person of 
 Christ, nor agree with certain views they hold, touch- 
 ing other matters which seem to us vital. With all 
 the gratitude I feel for the service they have ren- 
 
102 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 dered, I personally could not be a Unitarian. But 
 even here, though the distance between ourselves 
 and them seems greater than that between us and 
 some of the other branches of the Christian church, 
 we still rejoice that the agreements are more signifi- 
 cant than the differences. And we have been told 
 upon the highest authority that the vital thing is 
 not the ability or the inability to say, "Lord, Lord!' 
 but the doing of the will of the Father who is in 
 heaven. In that day many obedient, aspiring souls, 
 who have differed widely in their intellectual in- 
 terpretations, will come, moved by one common de- 
 sire to live in the vision and service of the best they 
 saw, and sit down with Abraham and Isaac and 
 Jacob in the kingdom of God. 
 
THE CONGREGATIONAL PART 
 
 T 
 
 HE Congregational body takes its name 
 from the fact that all power is vested in 
 the "congregation' of the local church. 
 Any company of Christian believers asso- 
 ciating themselves together for the worship of God 
 and the service of man constitute, according to this 
 view, a complete church. This single congregation 
 standing alone, acknowledging only Christ as the 
 head of all the churches, is competent to formulate 
 its own creed, to arrange its own mode of worship, 
 to elect and set apart its own officers, pastor, dea- 
 cons and the like, to manage its own affairs as to 
 sacraments, benevolences and other matters of 
 church life, as may seem good. It receives and dis- 
 misses members by the vote of the congregation, 
 and does all this looking to no outside authority 
 whatsoever, bishops, presbyteries, conferences or 
 assemblies, but only to such guidance as may come 
 by the Spirit of the unseen Head of the church. All 
 earthly authority inheres in the congregation, and 
 consequently such a church is called a " Congrega- 
 tional Church.' 
 
 The four main contributions which this branch 
 of Christ's church seems to have made to our total 
 Christianity are these first, its high confidence in 
 
104 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 a pure democracy. It trusts the people. It trusts 
 any group of Christian people anywhere, large or 
 small, rural or urban, simple or cultured, who have 
 been led to organize themselves under the leader- 
 ship of Christ into a Christian church. 
 
 The whole idea of dependence upon some set of 
 officers placed over them to tell them what they 
 shall believe in their creeds, what they shall say in 
 their prayers and their other forms of worship, who 
 their pastor shall be and how he shall be set apart 
 to that office, is foreign to their methods. They 
 would no more accept it than they w r ould accept 
 the idea that domestic life needs some such official 
 supervision. We are a family in the Lord, they 
 :say "One is our Master, even Christ, and all we 
 are brethren.' We acknowledge no other authority 
 in questions of creed, ritual, ministry or service. 
 al] these matters are to be determined by each 
 church family for itself. 
 
 "From within outward, from beneath upward, 
 is the direction of life' as Dr. Storrs has 
 pointed out. "in the spiritual no less than 
 in the physical world. To undertake to re- 
 verse this process in church life seems to us as 
 unreasonable as trying to set a growing tree on its 
 
 branches instead of its roots.' Power goes up, not 
 down ; it is derived immediately from the consent 
 
 of the governed. 
 
 You can readily understand how such a form of 
 
 w 
 
 church government came to be. It was a protest 
 
THE CONGREGATIONAL PART 
 
 105 
 
 against the monarchical spirit in religion. The prin- 
 cipal of local self-government indicated that the 
 unit of sovereignty in religious matters should be 
 the local congregation of believers. The Congrega- 
 tional polity, therefore, is not monarchical in that 
 it refuses to be governed by bishops. It is not a 
 representative form of government in that it de- 
 clines the rule of elders. It is a pure democracy 
 in that it commits all power directly into the hands 
 of the people. 
 
 Whatever is done in the Congregational Church 
 is done directly by the vote of the congregation. 
 If a pastor is to be called, if some young man is to 
 be ordained to the ministry, if a change is to be 
 made in the creed, if any innovation is desired in 
 the ritual or the forms of worship, if a new member 
 is to be received, if a member is to be dismissed to 
 some other church, if money is to be given in benev- 
 olence, if anything whatsoever which pertains to 
 church life is to be done, no outside authority has 
 anything to say in the matter. In every one of these 
 instances the initiative is taken by the congrega- 
 tion. The pastor has no authority to issue a letter of 
 transfer to a member desiring to unite with another 
 church, as would be the case in the Episcopal or the 
 Methodist Church this, too, must be done by the 
 vote of the congregation. 
 
 In the Congregational Church the pastor himself 
 does not belong to a separate class. He is not a 
 member of a conference, as is a Methodist pastor, 
 
106 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 or of a diocese as is the rector in the Episcopal 
 Church, or of a Presbytery, according to the usage 
 of that denomination. He is a member of the church 
 he serves, uniting with it by letter from the church 
 with which he was last connected, like any other 
 member. He is pastor, not because he belongs to a 
 separate priestly or preaching order, but by virtue 
 or. his election to that office by the votes of his fel- 
 low members of the congregation. 
 
 It is the idea of the New England town meeting 
 incorporated into church life. It is pure democracy, 
 in that authority is not handed down from above, 
 nor delegated to certain chosen representatives, but 
 retained throughout in the hands of the people 
 themselves. It is a form of polity which is shared 
 by the Baptist and the Unitarian churches, but the 
 Oongregationalists were the first to practice it, and 
 they have placed upon it peculiar emphasis. It is 
 their belief that the earliest churches of apostolic 
 times enjoyed this simple form of government. We 
 do not find in the New Testament any one central 
 authority controlling all the churches, but each con- 
 gregation proceeded upon its way with the words, 
 "It seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us," as 
 a sufficient sanction for its action. We find refer- 
 ences to "the church at Jerusalem," "the church 
 at Antioch," "the churches of Asia," and "the 
 churches of Cilicia,' indicating the common usage. 
 In similar fashion the Congregational people do not 
 use the term "The Congregational Church" as com- 
 
THE CONGREGATIONAL PART 107 
 
 prising all the people of their faith they speak of 
 "The Congregational Churches,' for each congre- 
 gation is a church in itself. In committing all au- 
 thority as to creed, ritual, and government into the 
 hands of the local congregation they assert their 
 confidence in the value and efficiency of pure de- 
 mocracy. 
 
 The second contribution lies in their intellectual 
 breadth. The Congregational attitude in matters of 
 belief may be indicated by these familiar words,- 
 "In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in 
 all things, charity.' We would not place a man in 
 a Congregational pulpit who was an atheist, or one 
 who denied the validity of those principles of right 
 living contained in the words of Christ, or one who 
 set at naught what are universally regarded among 
 Christians as the eternal verities of the spiritual 
 world. But upon the basis of certain great funda- 
 mentals we build a church life which is character- 
 ized by large intellectual hospitality. We have 
 among our laymen, and in our ministry, men of 
 very conservative views Joseph Cook, a kind of 
 arch-defender of an old-fashioned orthodoxy, was 
 to the day of his death a Congregational minister. 
 We have also men of exceedingly liberal and radi- 
 cal opinions Lyman Abbott, editor of the Outlook, 
 is an honored and useful Congregational minister. 
 John Robinson urged the Pilgrims when they were 
 about to sail for America, to "believe that God had 
 much more light to fall from His Holy Word, ' ' and 
 
108 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 we have sought to live with eyes and minds open for 
 that fuller life. 
 
 We find it more easy to maintain this theological 
 hospitality because we have no formulated articles 
 of religion or creed statements, which are univer- 
 sally binding as are the Articles of Religion, or the 
 Westminster Confession in the Episcopal, the Meth- 
 odist and the Presbyterian churches. Each local 
 congregation formulates its own creed. If the pas- 
 tor is in agreement with the creed of his own church, 
 and if his teaching is acceptable to that congrega- 
 tion to which he ministers, no outside authority can 
 disturb him. 
 
 Touching things fundamental, we maintain a gen- 
 eral consensus of belief among our churches, suf- 
 ficient for harmony of action, by the second prin- 
 ciple of our polity, known as "the fellowship of the 
 churches.' Each church is expected to live on 
 terms of fellowship with its sister churches. In the 
 decision of vital questions each church is en- 
 couraged to ask counsel from other churches, and in 
 turn to give such advice when it is sought by neigh- 
 boring churches. It is understood, however, 
 throughout that this relation is advisory and not 
 one of compulsion. And thus the churches living in 
 fellowship with one another maintain sufficient doc- 
 trinal agreement among themselves, each one form- 
 ulating and adopting its own particular creed, to 
 secure that harmony of action which lias been ours 
 for centuries. 
 
THE CONGREGATIONAL PART 109 
 
 We strive to exhibit this breadth, not only in 
 questions of doctrine, but in matters of Christian 
 usage. We prescribe no form of worship, as is done 
 in other branches of the church if any congrega- 
 tion should wish to adopt a full-orbed liturgical 
 service, with prayers, collects and lessons all pre- 
 scribed, it would have that privilege. If some other 
 congregation wishes to observe the utmost sim- 
 plicity, it enjoys the same liberty. We prescribe no 
 fixed form for any of the Christian rites we leave 
 the mode of baptism to the conscience of the can- 
 didate. In my own ministry I have sprinkled hun- 
 dreds of people, and I have also immersed a goodly 
 number, who preferred that mode. If any Congre- 
 gational Church should decide to limit baptism to 
 adult believers, and to baptize only by immersion, 
 it would have that right. 
 
 We build no barriers, doctrinal or otherwise, 
 around the Communion Table. We cordially invite 
 "all who love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity 
 and truth' to commune with us whatever may be 
 their church affiliations or their particular theo- 
 logical belief. In matters of doctrine we are happy 
 in having men of conservative temper among us we 
 dc not wish to make them uncomfortable because 
 or their conservatism. We are happy in having 
 liberals we believe that wherever they are sincere 
 followers of Christ the church He founded should 
 be roomy enough to make them also at home. As 
 we view it the ultimate test of Christian disciple- 
 
110 OUK TOTAL CHKISTIANITY 
 
 ship is not theological theory, but love and devo- 
 tion to the Master "By this shall all men know 
 that ye are my disciples, if ye love one another.' 
 
 The third contribution may be found in the special 
 emphasis laid upon education by Congregationalists 
 everywhere. I am not intimating that the Congre- 
 gational Church stands alone in this all branches 
 of the church stand for intellectual training, but 
 its contribution to the work of higher education 
 in this country was the earliest and has been the 
 most remarkable. The Pilgrim Fathers, a little 
 company of empty-handed people in a new and wild 
 country landed at Plymouth in 1620 and only six- 
 teen years later, in 1636, they founded Harvard Col- 
 lege, the oldest and perhaps the most influential 
 institution for higher education in America. 
 
 The Congregationalists founded Harvard and 
 Yale, Bowdoin and Dartmouth, Williams and Am- 
 herst, Oberlin and Beloit, and other colleges to 
 the number of forty-two in the United States a 
 number out of all proportion to our size as a de- 
 nomination, for we are not one of the larger sects. 
 And for the higher education of women the Con- 
 gregationalists founded Wellelsey and Smith, Mount 
 Holyoke and, here at our very doors, Mills Col- 
 lege, that women might become the intellectual com- 
 panions and associates of men in all the wider in- 
 terests of their lives. 
 
 The one man who has influenced the theological 
 thinking of experts in this country more than any 
 
THE CONGREGATIONAL PART 111 
 
 other, the man who ranked as the greatest theo- 
 logian of the Eighteenth Century in any country, 
 Jonathan Edwards, was a Congregational minister 
 at Northampton, Massachusetts. The two men who 
 did more, perhaps, than any other two who 
 could be named to influence the popular mind to 
 accept more reasonable and more helpful views of 
 Christian doctrine, Horace Bushnell, with his em- 
 phasis upon Christian nurture, and Henry Ward 
 I'eecher, in his mighty protest against the more 
 awful aspects of Calvinism, were both Congrega- 
 tional pastors. 
 
 And because of this emphasis upon the value of 
 college and seminary training this denomination, 
 although one of the smaller, has produced a splen* 
 did list of great preachers in America- -Beecher and 
 Bushnell, William M. Taylor and Richard S. Storrs, 
 Lyman Abbott and Theodore T. Munger, Washing- 
 ton Gladden and George A. Gordon, Charles E. 
 Jefferson and Amory H. Bradford, Newell Dwight 
 Hillis and F. W. Gunsaulus ! They have been great 
 preachers, reaching the ears, the minds and the 
 hearts of the many by the power of their message 
 conveyed, as it has been, through the medium of 
 trained and consecrated personality. 
 
 This church has produced a long list of noble 
 aad useful educators Mark Hopkins, of whom Gar- 
 field said ''Mark Hopkins at one end of a log and 
 myself at the other would be college enough for 
 me"; Timothy Dwight, Noah Porter and Theodore 
 
112 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Wolsey of Yale, Austin Phelps and Edwards Park of 
 Andover, Charles G. Finney of Oberlin and William 
 J. Tucker of Dartmouth, Mary Lyon of Mt. Holyoke 
 and Alice Freeman Palmer of Welles! ey all of 
 them Congregationalists. 
 
 The two most widely read religious periodicals 
 in this country, the "Outlook" and the "Independ- 
 ent, ' were both founded by Congregationalists and 
 both of them have Congregational ministers as their 
 managing editors to this hour. The same emphasis 
 on education has enabled this branch of the Church 
 to produce an unusual number of great hymn 
 writers Isaac Watts and Phillip Doddridge, who 
 set the praise of the fathers to music, were both 
 Congregationalists. And in more recent years Ray 
 Palmer, whose "My Faith Looks up to Thee' has 
 been sung everywhere, Timothy Dwight, Leonard 
 Bacon and Washington Gladden have contributed 
 hymns which now belong to the universal church. 
 Lowell Mason, who for eighty years gave his 
 strength and taste to the improvement of church 
 music in such a way as to be called "the father of 
 American church music,' was also a loyal member 
 01 the Congregational body. 
 
 It has been a teaching church and while it may 
 have lacked some of the warmth and fervor of the 
 Methodists, while it may have been less tenacious 
 of its doctrinal positions than the Presbyterian 
 Church, it has effectively construed the religious life 
 in terms of education, seeking to lead men to know 
 
THE CONGREGATIONAL PART 113 
 
 Him who is the truth, that knowing Him they might 
 be made free from all that hurts and hinders life. 
 Time would fail me to tell of all of the less famous 
 colleges and academies established by the people of 
 this church, north, south, east and west, each gather- 
 ing its pupils to confer upon them those benefits 
 which belong both to the life that now is and to the 
 life which is to come. 
 
 In the fourth place, this church has been notable 
 for its missionary spirit and zeal. The first mis- 
 sionary organization in this country to send the 
 gospel to heathen lands was the " American Board 
 of Foreign Missions, ' which resulted from the Hay 
 Stack prayer meeting at Williams College more than 
 a century ago. The largest gifts per capita for the 
 work of foreign missions are made by the Congre- 
 gationalists, excepting only that little group of 
 Christians known as Moravians, whose warm 
 and generous missionary zeal has exceeded that of 
 any other church in Christendom. 
 
 And some of the most useful and famous mission- 
 aries in the foreign field have been of this faith. 
 In many lands their work has been nothing less 
 than epoch-making John Eliot, the apostle to the 
 Indians and Cyrus Hamlin in Turkey, Hiram Bing- 
 ham of Hawaii and Robert A. Hume of India, 
 Arthur H. Smith of China and James H. de Forest 
 of Japan, men with the hearts of saints and the 
 minds of statesmen. 
 
114 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 This church was the first to organize a foreign 
 missionary society and the first also to organize a 
 home missionary society for the evangelization of 
 our own land. It was the first to undertake the 
 education of the freedmen at the close of the Civil 
 War a comparison of statistics a few years ago 
 showed that it had put more money into Christian 
 schools in the South than all the other denomina- 
 tions combined. It was the first to introduce Chris- 
 tian education in Utah, making it a potent instru- 
 ment there to offset the influence of Mormonism. 
 
 Its scholars have taken high place in making 
 translations of the scriptures into foreign languages 
 for missionary work. Hiram Bingham reduced to 
 writing the entire language of the Gilbert Islanders 
 in Micronesia and made a translation of the entire 
 Bible for their instruction. In all. twenty-seven 
 languages have been reduced to writing by mis- 
 sionaries of the American Board and one hundred 
 and eighty translations of the Bible into other 
 tongues have been made by their hands and brains 
 for the extension of: the influence oi~ the Gospel of 
 Christ, 
 
 And with all its intellectual breadth which has 
 sometimes disturbed our mora conservative breth- 
 ern, with all its apparent lack of close-knit organi- 
 zation, the missionary spirit of the Congregational 
 body has been so real and so warm that it has been 
 an evangelizing church. How many of the great 
 historic revivals and of the mighty leaders in wide- 
 
THE CONGREGATIONAL PART 115 
 
 spread religious movements have come from this 
 branch of Christ's church. Jonathan Edwards more 
 than any other man was responsible for "the great 
 awakening' in the Eighteenth Century. Charles 
 G. Finney of Oberlin was the one man who did 
 more than any other to promote the religious awak- 
 ening which came in the decades preceding the Civil 
 War. Dwight L. Moody was regarded as the most 
 successful evangelist in the last third of the Nine- 
 teenth Century. In noble evangelism it would be 
 difficult to name three men who have accom- 
 plished more for our country than Edwards, Fin- 
 ney and Moody, all of them life-long Congregation- 
 alists. 
 
 This branch of the Church has furnished other 
 widely known religious leaders Francis E. Clark, 
 founder and head of the Christian Endeavor 
 movement, has been all these years a Congregational 
 minister. R. J. Campbell of London is at the head 
 of one of the most significant religious movements 
 of the Twentieth Century, and however w T e may dis- 
 agree with his theology, or deplore some of his 
 eccentric methods, he is a force to be reckoned with. 
 And other leaders whose later work may seem less 
 satisfying illustrate the power of this branch of 
 the Church to develop leadership. Benjamin Fay 
 Mills, for many years a most successful evangelist. 
 was ordained as a Congregational minister, and was 
 for a long time a member with us. Mrs. Mary 
 Baker G. Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, 
 
116 OUR TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 was the product and in early life a member of our 
 branch of the Church. Its missionary spirit and its 
 intellectual breadth have combined to give the Con- 
 gregational body a certain genius for the develop- 
 ment of widely influential religious leaders. Its 
 men and women, strong and free, constantly com- 
 pelled to manage their own affairs have had a way 
 of moving to the front. 
 
 It has shown the same missionary zeal in all the 
 great reforms. The real beginning of the temper- 
 ance movement in America as a distinct effort dates 
 from the series of sermons preached against the evil 
 of intemperance in New England by Lyman Beecher 
 at a time when tippling was common both with the 
 ministers and the laity of the evangelical churches. 
 In the early agitation against slavery few more con- 
 spicuous figures are to be found than those of Henry 
 Ward Beecher, Leonard Bacon and Harriet Beecher 
 Stowe. The first social settlement to transplant liv- 
 ing Christianity into the less favored section of 
 a large city by sending a group of cultured men 
 and women to live there was the Andover House 
 in Boston now the South End House taking its 
 name originally from the fact that Andover Sem- 
 inary stood behind it. And one of the most useful 
 men in that work today is Graham Taylor in the 
 Chicago Commons, a professor in one of our semi- 
 naries. The earliest institutional churches to 
 achieve success along the line of varied efforts were 
 
THE CONGKEGATIONAL PAKT 117 
 
 Berkeley Temple in Boston, the Tabernacle in Jer- 
 sey City and the Fourth Congregational Church 
 of Hartford. And in every form of good work that 
 same missionary zeal, cherished and handed on, has 
 found some useful expression. 
 
 We have spent these evenings looking upon the 
 distinctive contributions made by these various 
 denominations to that larger Christianity in which 
 we all alike believe. We have been happy to find 
 in other denominations elements of strength and 
 points of excellence which are not conspicious in 
 our own. We are glad that these various notes are 
 being struck by men of different moods and tem- 
 peraments, of different tradition and training, in 
 order that the fuller, richer volume of worship and 
 of service may thereby become possible. Let every 
 man stand up in his own chosen place and say with 
 new gladness of heart "Other sheep He has which 
 are not of this fold them also He will bring.' 
 
 We have in this day a generous supply of religious 
 tolerance we are not fighting our fellow Christians 
 in the other camps but we need a fuller measure 
 of actual and effective unity. We need to exchange 
 "the poor charity of mutual forbearance" for "the 
 benign consciousness of inward sympathy and active 
 co-operation.' In the smaller communities the 
 struggling rivalry of the churches sometimes crowds 
 out the usefulness of the church. As a wise man 
 once said, "Effective blows are not struck with ex- 
 
118 OUB TOTAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 tended fingers, but with the solid fist. We may 
 threaten the devil with the Baptist finger or the 
 Episcopal finger, with the Roman Catholic finger or 
 the Methodist finger, and he faces the assault with 
 great serenity; but when our total Christianity 
 comes to make an undivided assault, he may be led 
 to meditate upon retreat.' 
 
 This finer and firmer unity will not be attained 
 by the harsh suppression of differences, but by the 
 full development of the distinctive contributions 
 which each branch of the Mighty Vine of Chris- 
 tian organization is making to the aggregate result. 
 1 'Sink deeply into the inmost life of any Christian 
 faith and you will touch the ground of them all.' 
 The city that hath foundations, is surrounded by 
 walls great and high, but they>are pierced by many 
 gates of entrance, three on every side. And when 
 we enter that city of God, we shall find that the 
 various guests of the divine bounty, though fed at 
 separate tables have all been fed upon the same 
 bread of life and their lips have all been touched 
 alike with the same wine of remembrance. 
 
 The apostle of old was in the spirit on the Lo :d's 
 Day, and he heard a voice from heaven ' saying, 
 "What thou seest, write in a book and' send it unto 
 the seven churches.' We all recognize the fact that 
 'Not to one church .alone,,, but seven 
 The voice prophetic spake from heaven 
 And unto each the promise came 
 Diversified, but still the same." 
 
THE CONGREGATIONAL PART 119 
 
 "We may in our differing tastes as to ritual and 
 polity, and in our varying interpretations of the 
 eternal mystery, be as distinct as the fingers of the 
 hand. But we may also in that suggestive and use- 
 ful variety be so knit together and held within the 
 power of a common passion for righteousness and 
 peace and joy that, in a more splendid unity of the 
 Spirit we shall go forth conquering and to conquer. 
 
 March 13, 1910. 
 
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