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THE 
 
 DRIFT TOWARD 
 
 RELIGION 
 
 by 
 ALBERT W. PALMER 
 
 • ! t » I t •« / 
 
 
 THE PILGRIM PRESS 
 BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO 
 
Copyright 1914 
 By LUTHER H. CARY 
 
 -f 
 
 
 THE PILGRIM PRESS 
 BOSTON 
 

 To my mother on her seventieth birthday 
 and to my father in memory of evenings 
 when he read aloud many good books 
 to his small boy 
 
 397543 
 
PREFACE 
 
 President Wilson, in an address at the Greek 
 Theater at the University of California, once 
 said that the trouble with most of us is that 
 when we know enough to write one chapter we 
 insist on writing a book — filling in the other 
 chapters with other men's opinions! 
 
 The author of this book disclaims enough 
 originality for even one chapter! The whole 
 book is filled with unconscious plagiarism, with 
 other men's ideas the sources of which have 
 been forgotten, and probably the only original 
 thing about it is the order in which the ideas 
 are marshalled. It simply represents the effort 
 of a young minister to justify religion to the 
 thoughtful people of a modern western city. 
 It is not an argument so much as it is a con- 
 fession of faith — albeit a confession of faith 
 not fantastic nor irrational, but made after a 
 university education and in the full and glad 
 acceptance of the modern point of view. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER . PAGE 
 
 Preface vii 
 
 I The Drift Toward Religion .... 1 
 Manifold Evidences of the Tendency toward 
 Religion — Forces Impelling This Religious 
 Reawakening — Our Attitude toward It — 
 Practical Mysticism 
 
 II God 19 
 
 Why We Believe in God— How We Think of 
 Him — Is God Personal? — An Interpretation 
 of Prayer 
 
 III The Bible 31 
 
 Increased Study of the Bible — Its Literary 
 Form — The Personality of the Gospels — Pro- 
 gressive Inspiration of the Bible — Bible 
 Times and Modem Times — Supreme Value 
 of the Bible 
 
 IV Jesus 47 
 
 Jesus the Man — The Supreme Teacher and 
 the Supreme Example — The Tremendous 
 Personal Influence of Jesus — Jesus the 
 World's Picture of God — Humanity and the 
 Divinity of Christ— The Virgin Birth— The 
 Miracles — The Resurrection — The Atonement 
 — Essential Christianity 
 
 V Immortality 65 
 
 The Unseen — Brain and Soul — The Instinct 
 of Immortality— The Fact of Christ— The 
 Moral Integrity of the Universe — Human In- 
 completeness — Personality and the Subcon- 
 scious — Three Lives — The Judgment, Heaven 
 and Hell 
 
Contents 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 VI Religion in Daily Life 83 
 
 The Mystery of Evil— The Hebrew Solution 
 — The Solution of the Christian Scientists — 
 How to Regard Moral Evil — Pain and Suf- 
 fering — Enduring and Imagining — Suffering 
 and Character — The Example of Christ — 
 Some Spiritual Ideals for Daily Living — The 
 Test of a Life 
 
 VII The Church 101 
 
 The Early Church— The Church of the Mid- 
 dle Ages — The Reformation — Modem Prot- 
 estant Denominations — The Church of Today 
 and Its Task — The Church as a Public Serv- 
 ice Corporation — The Church of Today and 
 (1) Church Unity, (2) Youth, (3) the Social 
 Message and (4) the Lives of Men 
 
CHAPTEE I 
 THE DRIFT TOWAED RELIGION 
 
L 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 THE DRIFT TOWARD RELIGION 
 
 ESS than twenty years ago Henry Van 
 Dyke gave a course of lectures at Yale on 
 *^The Gospel for An Age of Doubf Those 
 lectures in printed form were put into my 
 hands as an undergraduate at The University 
 of California. They contained this striking 
 characterization of the age: **The questioning 
 spirit of today is severe but not bitter, restless 
 but not frivolous; it takes itself very seri- 
 ously and applies its methods of criticism, of 
 analysis, of dissolution, with a sad courtesy of 
 demeanor, to the deepest and most vital 
 truths of religion, the being of God, the reality 
 of the soul, the possibility of a future life. 
 Its coat-of-arms is an interrogation point ram- 
 pant, above three bishops dormant, and its 
 motto is Query f 
 
 A little later, in my senior year, I came across 
 a poem which seemed to express almost per- 
 fectly the spiritual mood in which I lived. It 
 was Matthew Arnold's ** Dover Beach": 
 
 "Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! 
 Only, from the long line of spray 
 Where the sea meets the moon-blanched sand, 
 Listen ! you hear the grating roar 
 
 [3] 
 
i.j'^rTJi^ b.rift Toward Religion 
 
 Of pebbles whi'cli the waves draw back, and fling, 
 At their return, up the high strand. 
 Begin and cease, and then again begin. 
 With tremulous cadence slow, and bring 
 The eternal note of sadness in. 
 
 "Sophocles long ago 
 Heard it on the -^gean, and it brought 
 Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow 
 Of human misery : we 
 Find also in the sound a thought. 
 Hearing it by this distant northern sea. 
 
 "The sea of faith 
 
 Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore 
 Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. 
 But now I only hear 
 Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, 
 Retreating, to the breath 
 Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear 
 And naked shingles of the world. 
 
 "Ah, love, let us be true 
 To one another! for the world, which seems 
 To lie before us like a land of dreams. 
 So various, so beautiful, so new. 
 Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light. 
 Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain ; 
 And we are here as on a darkling plain 
 Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, 
 Where ignorant armies clash by night." 
 
 The sentence by Van Dyke and the poem by 
 Matthew Arnold sum up the impression of 
 religion which largely colored my undergradu- 
 ate days. Religion was obsolescent, something 
 to be apologized for — ^beautiful in a way but 
 destined to early death. 
 
 [4] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 ' But now the tide has turned; the drift is to- 
 ward religion. 
 
 It is so in my own case — personal experi- 
 ence during the last ten years has deepened 
 and strengthened my own religious attitude to- 
 ward life. As I look back at my college days 
 I realize that it was a very small cargo of 
 religious faith with which I emerged on Com- 
 mencement Day. I had thrown overboard the 
 miracles, eternal punishment, the scheme of 
 salvation, the atonement, and the infallibility 
 of the Bible. I wrote to my friend the minister 
 of the church at home: **You suggest my going 
 into the ministry! Why, I am not even sure 
 I am a Christian! I don't believe in the Bible 
 or the miracles or the Virgin Birth or much 
 of anything else.*' 
 
 He wrote back to me these wise words 
 of counsel: **But you do believe in the Golden 
 Eule, the Lord's Prayer and the Sermon on the 
 Mount. Then make these your religion. Try 
 to live up to this much of Christianity and put 
 the other questions up on a high shelf and 
 wait. Maybe some day you will be able to take 
 them down and see them in a new light. In 
 the mean time you will have enough to do in 
 living up to what you can accept. ' ' 
 
 It was admirable advice and it kept me 
 from reacting utterly against religion and the 
 Church. Then in my senior year came a never- 
 to-be-forgotten course in Tennyson and Brown- 
 ing out of which I came feeling, **Well, if this 
 
 [5] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 sort of interpretation of life isn't true, it ought 
 to beP' Then came William James* essay, 
 **The Will to Believe.*' With this religious 
 equipment I graduated from the university. 
 
 In the thirteen years since then my religious 
 outlook has grown. Year by year faith has 
 deepened and sweetened. One by one I have 
 taken down some things from the high shelf, 
 reinterpreted them in the light of a larger 
 experience in life and added them to my pos- 
 sessions. There are still some things up there 
 on the shelf — but I am not worrying about them 
 any more. They help to make the future seem 
 interesting ! 
 
 I am convinced that this experience is no 
 merely personal one — it is also in part the expe- 
 rience of the age. The drift toward religion 
 is on in many departments of life. Who would 
 have been rash enough to have prophesied 
 twenty years ago, for example, that in mate- 
 rialistic Chicago a great political party would 
 be born which would spontaneously choose 
 as its marching song ** Onward, Christian 
 Soldiers ' * ? Who could then have foreseen the 
 subsequent development of Christian Science 
 and the whole New Thought Movement in an- 
 swer to spiritual hunger? For, though one 
 cannot be blind to the possibility of tragedy 
 in Christian Science and the occasional foolish- 
 ness in New Thought, an impartial observer 
 must recognize that these forms of religious ex- 
 pression have made progress not by the 
 
 [6] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 vagaries which attach to them like barnacles 
 but by the motive power of their spiritual 
 idealism. 
 
 In academic and scientific circles we find the 
 drift toward religion in the philosophies of 
 Rudolph Eucken and Henri Bergson and in the 
 utterances of Sir Oliver Lodge, while in the 
 business and commercial world it is evidenced 
 in the millions of dollars poured out to erect 
 buildings for The Young Men's and Young 
 Women's Christian Associations and in the 
 growing respect for foreign missionaries. Time 
 was when foreign missionary enterprise was 
 a mere foolish sentimentality to be tolerated 
 but despised, but in these new days even the 
 proverbial **man in the street'' has awakened 
 to the fact that, in view of recent history in 
 China and Turkey and Albania, the missionary 
 is in reality a statesman and a pioneer of all 
 that is best and noblest in civilization. 
 
 This religious quickening is apparent in the 
 fiction of today. I do not have time to read 
 many novels, but recently I have carefully 
 studied three works of fiction which are alto- 
 gether inspiring in their religious significance. 
 One was **The Fear of Living" by Henry 
 Bordeaux. This is the story of a fine, coura- 
 geous old woman, strengthened through suffer- 
 ing by her religious faith, over against a back- 
 ground of selfish pleasure-seeking people who 
 are afraid of hardship— paralyzed, as it were, 
 by ''The Fear of Living." The second novel 
 
 [7] 
 
,The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 was **The Way Home'' by Basil King, the 
 story of a man who deserted his ideals and 
 started out to live in materialism and undis- 
 guised selfishness, only to find himself driven 
 at last by the logic of life back to the ideals 
 which he thought he had parted with forever. 
 The third novel was * * The Inside of the Cup, ' ' 
 easily the most widely-discussed book of the 
 year, a frank and enthusiastic setting forth of 
 the newer thought of the day on various reli- 
 gious questions. 
 
 But even closer than the novel to the heart 
 of any age is the drama, and the religious spirit 
 of the modern drama is remarkable. Have you 
 heard and comprehended that really great al- 
 legory of modern religious life, **The Servant 
 in the House''? And do you realize that it has 
 been from every point of view one of the most 
 successful plays? Have you heard Forbes- 
 Eobertson in * ' The Passing of the Third Floor 
 Back"? Did *^The Blue Bird" bring you no 
 message from the land of the ideal? Can you 
 ever forget that great scene in ^^The Piper" 
 where the Piper himself argues with the lonely 
 man, the crucified figure of the wayside shrine, 
 and at last surrenders his will to Christ's? 
 From the revival of ** Everyman" a few years 
 ago to **The Wolf of Gubbio," published last 
 December, the modern drama is overflowing 
 with religion. How wonderfully it all contrasts 
 with the hopelessness of the lines of ** Dover 
 Beach"! 
 
 [8] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 Why? Why this drift toward religion? It is 
 altogether possible that we cannot tell. Forces 
 are at work which we cannot fully understand 
 nor anticipate. 
 
 "We cannot kindle, when we will 
 The fires that in the heart reside; 
 The spirit bloweth and is still, 
 In mystery our souls abide.'' 
 
 But so far as we can lay hold on the causes of 
 this religious reawakening it seems to me we 
 must include these three: 
 
 (1) The emergence of the modern point of 
 view in religious thought — what is sometimes 
 called **the new theology.^' We suffered fif- 
 teen years ago because our religious traditions 
 and our scientific instruction were hopelessly 
 at war with one another. Religion was so univer- 
 sal in the life of the Middle Ages partly be- 
 cause then religion and science harmonized — 
 went hand in hand. When religion and science 
 seemed to disagree it was inevitable that many 
 intelligent men should sadly but firmly consign 
 religion to the realm of outgrown even though 
 quaint and beautiful antiquities. We have all 
 met men who advised us to *^read the King 
 James Version of the Bible simply for its beau- 
 tiful English/' at the same time implying that 
 they had long since passed beyond getting out 
 of it anything more vital than a pure English 
 style. 
 
 But there are not lacking indications that 
 
 [9] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 we are going to approximate once more the 
 condition where scientific and religious thought 
 are allies, as science and true religion must ever 
 he. For the new theology is primarily a scien- 
 tific theology, recording gladly all facts attained 
 by scientific investigation. What this modern 
 religious thought is — how it finds reinforcement 
 in modern science, how it demands no false sur- 
 renders from men and women trained in the sci- 
 entific spirit — this book seeks to set forth. 
 
 To men and women who dread and fear the 
 new theology may I offer the parable of the 
 aqueduct and the pipe line ? A city in Italy long 
 ago obtained its water, pure and clear, from 
 the mountains far away across the plain by 
 conveying it in a long aqueduct carried high 
 above the surrounding country, part of the way 
 on lofty arches. But as the centuries passed 
 these arches fell into decay — some of them were 
 faultily constructed and earthquakes shook 
 them down — and so the aqueduct was broken 
 in places and water no longer flowed through it 
 to the city. Then in our own day came men with 
 modern equipment, who laid a pipe line from 
 the city to the mountain springs. The pipe line 
 followed the same general direction as the old 
 aqueduct and it drew its water from the same 
 source, and when at length it was completed 
 the water poured through it into the city and 
 was distributed, clear and sparkling, in a hun- 
 dred fountains. 
 
 For the great majority of college-trained 
 [10] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 men and women the traditional theology is a 
 broken aqueduct, interesting, picturesque, not 
 altogether unloved, but broken at certain vital 
 points and therefore no longer capable of bring- 
 ing water into the modern world to quench its 
 spiritual thirst. If we had to choose between 
 the traditional theology of our childhood and 
 agnosticism, we should sadly but of necessity 
 become agnostics. But no such sad necessity is 
 upon us. God fulfills himself in various ways 
 and the new theology is the inevitable accom- 
 paniment of the new science and the new learn- 
 ing. By it men are simply seeking along more 
 modern lines to tap the great mountain 
 reservoirs of spiritual truth and bring to the 
 thirsty fountains of our spiritual city the same 
 water of eternal life and inspiration which in 
 other days flowed in the aqueduct. 
 
 (2) A second force setting in motion this 
 drift toward religion is undoubtedly the modern 
 emphasis upon the social message of Chris- 
 tianity. Books like Peabody 's * ' Social Message 
 of Jesus*' and Eauschenbusch's ''Christianity 
 and the Social Crisis,'' to mention only two 
 where many could be cited, are in part results 
 and in part causes of this awakening of social 
 religion. 
 
 This social emphasis has given to religion 
 what it sorely needed— a larger and more ade- 
 quate conception of salvation. The old salva- 
 tion which we were told about in Sunday school 
 and to which the revivalists invited us was a 
 
 [11] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 narrow and selfish thing. But here comes the 
 great vision of social salvation — nothing petty 
 or selfish about it — calling for all of a man's 
 reserves of power and consecration to bring 
 it even partially to pass in the coromunity of 
 which he is a citizen. The man who goes forth 
 to meet the gigantic social problems of city life 
 — or of country life either, for that matter — 
 soon comes to realize his need of every possible 
 reinforcement both for the cause he would ad- 
 vance and for his own personal renewal. Hence 
 the rediscovery of religion as a social force and 
 a secret of personal power and inspiration. It 
 is no accident that by far the most popular and 
 successful department of The Men and Religion 
 Movement was that of social service, that So- 
 cialism is becoming distinctly more religious, 
 that such a magazine as * * The Survey ' ' is edited 
 by religious people in a spirit sympathetic to- 
 ward the church and that the Y. M. C. A. was 
 chosen by the government to care for its wel- 
 fare work for employees in the Canal Zone. The 
 very size and menace of certain social prob- 
 lems, the high-minded courageous service they 
 require, the challenge they present to idealism 
 and to faith, all combine to drive men and 
 women who are socially minded back to some 
 vital religious life. To set forth what such 
 a socially-sensitive and not merely individualis- 
 tic religion might be is one of the objects of 
 this book. 
 
 (3) The third and deepest cause of this mod- 
 [12] 
 
The Drift Toward Eeligio 
 
 n 
 
 ern drift toward religion is the unquenchable 
 nature of the religious instinct. The philos- 
 ophy of Bergson has given us a new respect 
 for instincts: they have cosmic significance; 
 they reveal the presence of mighty forces. You 
 may lose yourself for a while in the solution of 
 physical problems — in digging deep and build- 
 ing high — you may even lose yourself in the 
 material luxuries which come as a reward for 
 the solving of such physical problems, but ul- 
 timately you will come back again to the haunt- 
 ing questions of religion. 
 
 "When the mind is mapped as streets are — ^row on row; 
 "When the heart is tamed from Love's unreasoning throe; 
 When the poet's winged fancy 
 Is an outgrown necromancy; 
 When the rain of inspiration turns to snow: 
 What then? 
 
 "When all doubts and fears alike are backward cast; 
 When the dream of world-wide Brotherhood is past; 
 When the prophet's radiant vision 
 Is too futile for derision ; 
 When the soul is but a formula at last: 
 What then? 
 
 "When the fierce machine has conquered flesh and blood; 
 When the labor-power is belt and wheel and rod; 
 When the unfit nations wonder 
 At the gold we stagger under; 
 When the world is but an economic clod: 
 What then?" 
 
 It is a part of the object of this book to jus- 
 tify this religious instinct and to make it easier 
 
 [13] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 for thoughtful men and women to respond to 
 it and guide it instead of striving vainly to 
 quench or disown it. 
 
 Since the drift toward religion is on — what 
 then? How shall we respond to this tendency 
 of our age? 
 
 Well, first of all, let us rejoice in it. Let 
 us cease to be apologetic for religion or the 
 Church. The ** go-to-church Sunday'' which 
 has recently become so popular is an indication 
 of a better attitude on the part of the general 
 public. Eeligion is a part of life — historically 
 and psychologically. Let that man be ashamed 
 and apologetic who does not share in this great 
 human experience! 
 
 In the second place, let us be tolerant. It 
 would be a sad thing if the drift toward religion 
 meant any drift back into the odium theologi- 
 cum, into the denominational warfare and 
 theological strife which have disgraced the 
 past. Let us give to every man the utmost 
 freedom of thought and expression in his reli- 
 gious life. After all, the real gulf is not be- 
 tween those who hold one religious belief and 
 those who defend another — ^between those who 
 believe in the Virgin Birth and those who do 
 not, between those who hold to the Apostolic 
 Succession and those who do not. Such differ- 
 ences as these are mere surface grooves when 
 compared to the real gulf which exists between 
 all those who seek to live the life of the spirit 
 and those who regard life with a brutal selfish- 
 
 [14] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 ness and a cynical disregard for all ideals. Some 
 one has said of foreign missions: **It is hard 
 to discuss forms of baptism in the presence of 
 a man engaged in worshipping a cow. ' ' Let us 
 not waste energy in unbrotherly controversy in 
 the face of the cynical materialism which is a 
 foe to all religion and all ideals. 
 
 Finally, let us be open-minded in this glad 
 new day of religious quickening. It is alto- 
 gether probable that new light is already break- 
 ing across the hills. Let us be ready to receive 
 it. From Socialism, from Christian Science, 
 from psychology, from modern thinkers like 
 Tolstoy, Ibsen and Maeterlinck, from the fem- 
 inist movement, from the life of Japan and the 
 thought of India — from all the word of God 
 in all places of his creation who shall say what 
 new light may not break forth for us! Let 
 us not be either credulous like children or hide- 
 bound like bigots, but let us be open-minded, 
 ready to find profitable every writing inspired 
 of God. 
 
 A new type of religious leader is about to 
 stand forth. I like to call him the practical 
 mystic. 
 
 Each age has produced that type of religious 
 life best suited to its needs: the first century 
 stands revealed in St. Paul the missionary, the 
 centuries following contribute the martyrs to 
 our wealth of Christian heroism, the Middle 
 Ages make their gift in crusaders like St. 
 Louis and in St. Francis, the little poor man 
 
 [15] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 of Assisi, who sang to the sun and the birds 
 and ministered to the poor and the outcast. 
 Out of the awakening of the Renaissance come 
 the great reformers — Wyclif , Huss, Savonarola 
 and Luther — and out of the reconstruction 
 period come the theologians from Calvin and 
 Grotius to Jonathan Edwards and Horace 
 Bushnell. The nineteenth century as its pecu- 
 liar gift brings the evangelists — Finney, Moody, 
 Drummond. 
 
 And now comes the new day in which we 
 live — a day of social reconstruction and spir- 
 itual quickening. The typical Christian of 
 this new day will be the practical mystic. He 
 will be a mystic — sensitive to the spiritual 
 values of life and its deepest music — but he 
 will be also a man of practical power — facing 
 the social problems of the age and contributing 
 to their solution. He will be like Moses, who 
 * ^ endured as seeing Him that is invisible. ' ' The 
 vision is essential to the endurance! Behind 
 Moses the deliverer forever stands Moses the 
 poet, finding the desert bush aflame with God, 
 and behind Moses the lawgiver and civic organ- 
 izer stands Moses the mystic, coming down 
 from Sinai with the divine light shining on his 
 face. 
 
 The meaning of the drift toward religion is 
 that the practical men of our age are feeling 
 out, oftentimes blindly, for the power of mys- 
 ticism. The meaning of the new emphasis on 
 social Christianity is that the mysticism of to- 
 
 [16] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 day is ready to link itself to the great practical 
 tasks of life. Men like Dr. Grenfell and Pro- 
 fessor Rauschenbush, to go no farther, admi- 
 rably illustrate what I mean by the term 
 * * practical mystic. ' ' 
 
 This book is written primarily to help prac- 
 tical people to be mystics also and to gain from 
 religion, vision, comfort, and reserve power. 
 
 [17] 
 
CHAPTER n 
 GOD 
 
CHAPTER II 
 GOD 
 
 "A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot! 
 Rose plot, 
 Fringed pool, 
 Fern'd grot — 
 The veriest school 
 Of Peace; and yet the fool 
 Contends that God is not — 
 Not God! in gardens I when the eve is cool? 
 Nay, but I have a sign; 
 'Tis very sure God walks in mine." 
 
 I CANNOT hope to persuade you of the exist- 
 ence of God if you have not already some- 
 times found him walking in the garden of your 
 life. But if you have found him there, the fol- 
 lowing considerations may help to clarify your 
 vision of him and make your faith more uni- 
 form and constant. 
 
 Doubtless most of us believe in God a great 
 deal more than we realize. The trouble is that 
 we do not carry our belief up into the higher 
 levels; we stop short of the goal. We believe 
 quite readily in the Power which controls and 
 unifies physical forces — the God, if you please, 
 of chemistry and physics — ^but we often fail 
 to recognize the no less inevitable Power be- 
 hind consciousness, behind artistic and moral 
 
 [21] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 impulses — the God of personality ! As a matter 
 of fact, I believe we are on the verge of a great 
 awakening to the presence of God. The old 
 conception of God as an anthropomorphic being 
 who made the world as a watchmaker might 
 make a watch, and then sat outside of it seeing 
 the wheels go round and breaking in upon the 
 machinery only occasionally to work a miracle — 
 to clean a pivot or adjust a spring — this 
 conception of an absentee deity who can 
 be conducted to the edge of the universe and 
 politely bowed out has passed away for most 
 modern men. With this passing there has also 
 passed, in too many cases, any potent faith in 
 any God at all. 
 
 But there are not lacking signs that this tran- 
 sition period during which we have been 
 
 "Wandering between two worlds, one dead, 
 The other powerless to be bom," 
 
 to use the sad, reluctant words of Matthew 
 Arnold in **The Grande Chartreuse,'* has prac- 
 tically ended. The new era is already born, and 
 humanity is about to rediscover God, to find 
 him close at hand calling to its deepest nature, 
 even as long ago in the garden Mary heard 
 the voice that called her by her name. For 
 the God of today is not some huge artificer who 
 built the world from without; he is rather the 
 great Soul of the Universe who is ever creat- 
 ing and recreating it from within. You do 
 not demonstrate his existence by appeals to a 
 
 [22] 
 
God 
 
 supernatural book coming down from antiquity, 
 though that book may be part of the evidence, 
 nor by a record of miracles worked long ago 
 on the shores of other seas, though those 
 miracles, too, may be very interesting bits of 
 evidence. But you find this God of today here 
 in the world around you. Your primary 
 evidence is not centuries old; it is new every 
 hour. The greatest miracles have never been 
 written; they are here in the blossoming of 
 the rose and the yet more marvellous blossom- 
 ing of childhood and youth. Miracles? The 
 world is full of them and every common bush 
 is aflame with God! If you do not see and 
 stand in awe at the miracles going on all 
 around you, what you think about the miracles 
 of the Bible is a comparatively insignificant 
 detail. 
 
 Let us look out into the universe in which 
 we live and see what we find. In the first place, 
 wherever we go we find ourselves in the pres- 
 ence of stupendous energy and power. Even 
 so-called dead matter proves to be very much 
 alive, permeated by mighty forces which we 
 call gravitation. If I let loose the pencil in 
 my hand it promptly drops to the floor, 
 demonstrating a marvellous invisible con- 
 nection between it and the total mass of the 
 earth. 
 
 This * infinite and eternal energy'^ in the 
 presence of which we live is fortunately for us 
 no lawless, undependable affair. It works along 
 
 [23] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 certain definite lines and we can depend upon 
 its habits. It seems to act in a rational way 
 and as far as we can push our scientific inves- 
 tigations into it we bring back formulas and 
 reports of rational procedure. Apparently 
 this universe is made up not of mere happy-go- 
 lucky, aimless energy, but of energy which 
 operates along lines laid down by intelligence. 
 How large the supply of this intelligence is we 
 have no way of knowing, but it seems to be 
 sufficient to provide endless material for all the 
 scientific investigators of the world. No man 
 can look out at the vast spectacle of ordered 
 life as reported in astronomy and geology, in 
 chemistry, botany and zoology, in the habits 
 of the bees and the instincts of the animals, and 
 not pause reverently in the presence not of 
 mere wayward power and occasional gleams 
 of rationality, but in the presence of a great, 
 unifying Intelligent Energy. That Intelligent 
 Energy is God! As a matter of fact we all 
 believe in God thus far and base our daily lives 
 upon the fact of such a wise, dependable and 
 unifying power at the heart of the universe. 
 
 "There is no unbelief: 
 Whoever plants a seed beneath the sod 
 And waits to see it push away the clod — 
 
 He trusts in God." 
 
 But we have not exhausted all we know 
 about the universe in which we live. The story 
 of evolution claims our attention and suggests 
 
 [24] 
 
God 
 
 a great purpose, a certain dramatic quality, in 
 the creation. This marvellous Intelligent En- 
 ergy seems to be going somewhere. Only think, 
 
 "Out of this nothingness arose our thought I 
 This blank abysmal nought 
 
 Woke and brought forth that lighted city street; 
 Those towers, that armored fleet!" 
 
 The religious implications of evolution are 
 tremendous. Instead of making God unneces- 
 sary it simply means that we have discovered 
 him at work! All our scientific investigation, 
 which once seemed to put God farther and 
 farther away, now turns out to have been really 
 bringing him closer to us. We can hear the 
 very ringing music of his craftsmanship and 
 catch hints of the perfect craft and tricks of the 
 tools ' true play. 
 
 "We seem to hear a heavenly friend 
 And through thick veils to apprehend 
 A labor working to an end." 
 
 But our knowledge of the Intelligent Energy, 
 in the presence of which we are ever found and 
 from which there is no escape, is not limited 
 by what science has to tell us of natural law or 
 of evolution. Man, too, is a part of the universe 
 and we have a right to judge this Power whose 
 activities are all about us by its highest as well 
 as its lower manifestations. Wherever we find 
 man we find a sense of right and wrong and 
 an obligation to do right. Kant said that there 
 
 [25] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 were two things which filled his soul with awe: 
 the spectacle of the starry heavens above and 
 the moral law within the heart of man. Men 
 may not agree as to what is right and what 
 is wrong, but the sense of moral obligation is 
 universal. With the capacity for morality 
 there develops an appreciation of beauty. The 
 earliest specimens of human craftsmanship 
 which we possess have ornamentation on them, 
 and the last boatload of babies from the land 
 of the unborn children will soon be gathering 
 buttercups and daisies with joyous apprecia- 
 tion. With morality and beauty goes love, the 
 third great human quality. It may have come 
 to us as Drummond and John Fiske suggest — 
 along the road of the lengthening period of in- 
 fancy and the increasing and appealing help- 
 lessness of human childhood, so that only those 
 races survived that learned to protect mothers 
 and love and care for children. But, however 
 it came, love is here as one of the great radiant 
 facts of human life. 
 
 Now these human characteristics are not 
 merely human characteristics. We have the 
 right to project them back into that mighty 
 Energy which thrills through the universe and 
 of which man is the noblest and highest mani- 
 festation. Is God personal? Assuredly he can- 
 not be less than personal, for he cannot be less 
 than that which reveals his presence and mani- 
 fests his character. An Intelligent Power, 
 characterized by a progressive purpose and a 
 
 [26] 
 
God 
 
 sense of morality, beauty and love comes pretty 
 near to being a definition of personality ! 
 
 But we must be careful not to limit God's 
 personality by our own. We cannot measure 
 the ocean in a tin dipper! God's personality 
 must be all that ours is — and then vastly more. 
 As Herbert Spencer once said, **It is not a 
 question between a personal God and something 
 less, but between a personal God and something 
 more!" Properly interpreted, that is pro- 
 foundly true. 
 
 After all, it is not difficult to see that God's 
 personality must include all that personality 
 means to us and then more, for we see grada- 
 tions of personality every day in the world 
 around us. Here is a tree: we played under 
 it in childhood; we loved it with an instinctive 
 revival of primitive nature worship; we can 
 close our eyes today and see the red berries 
 and smell the fragrance of that old tree — it 
 has an individuality all its own. But here is 
 a dog. In him personality has reached a higher 
 level — we have much more in common with him 
 than with the tree. Not long ago a friend and 
 I climbed Mount St. Helena. The friendly col- 
 lie at the toll house accompanied us with eager 
 enthusiasm. The freshness of the morning 
 and the joy of muscular exertion were com- 
 mon sources of delight to him and to us. At 
 the summit we drank some water from the can- 
 teen. That action appealed to him, too, as he 
 lolled out his long red tongue, panting fever- 
 
 [27] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 ishly and appealing to us with his big brown 
 eyes. I laid my hat on the rocks, made a dent 
 in the top of it to hold some water and he 
 drank with hearty appreciation. So far our per- 
 sonalities had traveled similar roads. But now 
 we read the tablet on the mountain top telling 
 how it had first been climbed by a Russian 
 party from Fort Ross in 1841. The dog was not 
 interested. We spread a map on the ground, 
 and he did not even pause to wonder what the 
 little black lines meant. We pointed to the 
 great white cone of Shasta, clearly visible 
 nearly two hundred miles away, but Shasta 
 meant nothing to him. Our human personali- 
 ties had passed out into regions where his dog 
 life could never go. 
 
 Even so I believe God is personal, not merely 
 in the limited way in which we are, but in 
 depths of being and richness of apprehension 
 of reality which are simply beyond the depths 
 of our human understanding. May not the 
 great value of the doctrine of the Trinity be 
 just here — that it emphasizes the richness and 
 depth and superhuman quality of the person- 
 ality of God? 
 
 I like to think of our relationship to God as 
 being not like the relation of a completed statue 
 to the sculptor who has made it, but more in- 
 timate, like the relation of the leaves to the 
 tree. No leaf thinks for a moment that it is 
 the tree, but each leaf gathers sunshine for the 
 tree and receives from all the rest of the tree 
 
 [28] 
 
God 
 
 the vital forces which give it life. Or, better 
 still, I like to think of our lives as being related 
 to God somewhat as the great bay out yonder 
 is related to the ocean beyond. The bay is not 
 the ocean. It knows its shallows and its limi- 
 tations. The bay is forever distinct. There 
 is no possible confusion between San Francisco 
 Bay, for example, and Puget Sound or San 
 Diego Bay. Yet bay and ocean are vitally con- 
 nected: the same water fills them both and 
 twice in every twenty-four hours the bay sends 
 its ebb tides far out to sea and again twice in 
 every twenty-four hours the great flood tides 
 from the ocean crowd in and fill the bay to 
 every nook and cranny, lifting it to higher 
 levels. 
 
 How such a conception of our relationship 
 to God transforms our conception of prayer! 
 Prayer becomes no mere formula of words cast 
 into the air to find wings and arise to heaven. 
 If you have grace to receive it, God does not 
 hear prayer — he feels it I The yearnings of our 
 souls reach directly into the life of God. The 
 connection between our lives and his is as real 
 and immediate as that between two wireless sta- 
 tions tuned to receive each other's messages. 
 The directions in which we protect our lives, 
 the ways we put forth our energies, the work 
 we do, the ends we seek with a whole souPs 
 tasking— these are our real prayers. If they 
 agree with our spoken prayers, well and good. 
 But if they disagree with the prayers we utter 
 
 [29] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 with our lips in church on Sunday morning — 
 why, then we must only grieve the heart of God. 
 But I must guard this. Some one will say: 
 **Then you don^t believe in verbal prayer!'* 
 Indeed I do ! What makes a patriot ! Singing 
 ** America '* or contributing a clean, honest 
 life and sharing in all civic work? And yet 
 we believe true citizens will want to sing 
 * ' America. ' ' What makes a good mother ? The 
 kissing and fondling of her baby or ceaseless, 
 watchful care for its physical growth and moral 
 development? And yet we believe no mother 
 can help caressing her child. Here is an artist. 
 Essentially he is made an artist by his per- 
 ception of beauty. But because he is an artist 
 he will try to interpret into color or poetry or 
 music the sunset that thrills him with its 
 beauty. So prayer in its deepest meaning is 
 invisible and inaudible — a motion of the spirit — 
 but prayer also demands expression in your 
 own words, in the classic English of * ^ The Book 
 of Common Prayer, *' in the beautiful **Vaili- 
 ma Prayers '* of Robert Louis Stevenson or 
 in those virile, warm-hearted, contemporary 
 * * Prayers of the Social Awakening, ' ' by Walter 
 Rauschenbusch. 
 
 [30] 
 
CHAPTER in 
 THE BIBLE 
 
CHAPTER III 
 THE BIBLE 
 
 WE live in a world of things made new. 
 We have a new medicine, transformed 
 by the discovery of anesthetics and antiseptic 
 surgery, of antitoxin for diphtheria and of 
 the elimination of the mosquito-spread 
 malaria and yellow fever. We live in a 
 world of new building construction, rein- 
 forced concrete and steel frames replacing 
 the old stone walls. Our day is the day of a 
 new biology with its emphasis upon evolution 
 as the master key to all sorts of problems; of 
 the new psychology with its discovery of the 
 powers of suggestion and mental health ; and — 
 let us hope — of a new penology, replacing with 
 its reform and moral regeneration the crude 
 vengeance meted out to criminals for hundreds 
 of generations. 
 
 The great spirit of scientific investigation 
 and mental alertness to which we owe this re- 
 interpretation of so many departments of life 
 has not neglected the Bible. More lives of 
 Christ have been written in the last forty years 
 than in all the Christian centuries before. Such 
 books as Hastings' ** Bible Dictionary,'' the 
 **Encyclop£edia Biblica," *'The Dictionary of 
 
 [33] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 Christ and the Gospels/' the Schaff-Herzog 
 ** Encyclopaedia, of Religious Knowledge,*' 
 **The International Critical Commentary'' and 
 **The Expositor's Bible" — both in many 
 volumes — and works like Schurer's ** Jewish 
 People in the Time of Christ," Kent's *^ Stu- 
 dents' Old Testament," the volumes of **The 
 International Theological Library," Moffat's 
 **New Testament," together with innumerable 
 single volumes, bear witness to the vast amount 
 of scholarly study of the Bible in Germany, 
 Great Britain and the United States. 
 
 The result is that we have a new and better 
 Bible. Many ideas that prejudiced men against 
 the Bible, that clouded its interpretation and 
 dishonored the God revealed to us by Jesus 
 have passed away forever. 
 
 What is the Bible? Well— first of all— what- 
 ever else it may be, it is a great literature — the 
 sifted and chosen literature of the Hebrew peo- 
 ple. It represents those books which had suffi- 
 cient vitality to live down through the centuries. 
 In some way they so ministered to the needs 
 of humanity that men would not let them die. 
 
 The Bible is not a book. It comes nearer 
 to being a library. If you were to take Green's 
 ** History of England," ** Pilgrim's Progress," 
 the ** Idylls of the King," a hymn-book, the 
 Constitution and the common law, Phillips 
 Brooks' sermons, **Poor Richard's Almanac," 
 the letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, * * Richard 
 Carvel," the life of Abraham Lincoln, Bacon's 
 
 [34] 
 
The Bible 
 
 ** Essays,'* ** Paradise Lost'* and Shakespeare's 
 plays and bind them all in one volume, you 
 would have in English literature something that 
 would be comparable in scope and variety to 
 the Bible. Only you would have to print these 
 books solidly — without sentence, paragraph or 
 chapter divisions. You would have to print 
 the poetry as prose and the plays without any 
 indications of scenes or speakers. Then have 
 this solid mass chopped up into chapters and 
 verses — not very intelligently but often cutting 
 right across the middle of a poem or interrupt- 
 ing the development of an idea. Then bind the 
 book in limp black leather, put it on the center 
 table where it can be easily dusted and educate 
 people to believe that it is all Bible, all prose, 
 all to be taken literally, all of equal authority 
 as the infallible word of God — the drollery of 
 one of Shakespeare's fools to be taken just as 
 seriously as Lincoln's Gettysburg Address — 
 and you have for English literature something 
 equivalent in form, matter and meaning to what 
 our Bibles are in relation to the literature of 
 the Hebrews. 
 
 As a matter of fact we have in the Bible 
 many different literary forms. The Books of 
 Samuel and Kings and the Book of Acts rep- 
 resent history; the early chapters of Genesis 
 represent early traditions not dissimilar in 
 quality to the stories of King Arthur; bits of 
 allegory are scattered through the Old and New 
 Testament; the Book of Psalms is the hymn- 
 
 [35] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 book of the Second Temple; Deuteronomy and 
 Leviticus represent the common law; Amos, 
 Isaiah and the other prophets present one of 
 the world's greatest collections of sermons and 
 orations; the Book of Proverbs represents the 
 practical wisdom of the Hebrew race; Ec- 
 clesiastes sometimes parallels the Rubaiyat in 
 pessimism ; Esther and Daniel probably partake 
 of the character of historical romances not dis- 
 similar to ** Richard CarveP'; we have a col- 
 lection of letters in the Epistles of St. Paul, and 
 an approach to dramatic literature in the Book 
 of Job, while the four most precious biographies 
 in the world are the Gospels. 
 
 Why do I emphasize the fact that the Bible 
 is literature? First: Because an appreciation 
 of this fact helps us really to understand the 
 different books. We read poetry in one mood, 
 history in another, drama in yet another, and 
 the common law in quite another. When you 
 approach the Bible it is worth while to ask 
 yourself: **What form of literature am I read- 
 ing?" When, for example, you read in your 
 English history that on a certain day in 1066 
 William the Conqueror landed on the English 
 coast you take the matter seriously and as a 
 statement of prosaic fact, but what would you 
 think of a man who, reading **Gareth and 
 Lynette,'' came to these lines: 
 
 "Seeing the city is built 
 To music, therefore never built at all, 
 And therefore built forever^' 
 
 [36] 
 
The Bible 
 
 and said: ** That's stuff and nonsense! Cities 
 aren't built to music. They are built to blue- 
 prints, bond issues and the demands of com- 
 merce. ' ' You would simply say to him : * * Why, 
 you don't understand what you are reading. 
 This is poetry and the city is a symbol of the 
 ideal." Yet, we have in the past constantly 
 done violence to our Bibles by failing to recog- 
 nize the different types of literature they 
 contain. 
 
 A prosaic race, quite failing to understand 
 the poetic Oriental temperament, has exhausted 
 its wits to explain how Joshua could have 
 stopped the earth from revolving on its axis, 
 utterly missing the poetry in which the incident 
 is narrated. And yet, are we entirely lacking 
 in poetry? Do we not sing in our national 
 anthem : 
 
 "Let mortal tongues awake, 
 Let all that breathe partake, 
 Let rocks their silence break, 
 The sound prolong"? 
 
 Should we not be slightly amazed to wake up 
 two thousand years from now to find people 
 solemnly claiming that rocks in our day were 
 possessed of human speech when in the lines 
 in question we were only trying to make a 
 poetical reference to the echo? 
 
 **This is the tragedy of the Book of Jonah,'' 
 says George Adam Smith, *'that a book which 
 is made the means of one of the most sublime 
 revelations of truth in the Old Testament 
 
 [37] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 should be known to most only for its connec- 
 tion with the whale. '^ Why! Because to most 
 people it has never been revealed that the Book 
 of Jonah is an allegory, that the important 
 thing is not the story it tells, but the message 
 it carries. If this were once clearly understood, 
 the whale would cease to worry us, and we 
 should give our attention to the great message 
 of human brotherhood and to the brooding, 
 tender love of God for the great heathen city 
 of Nineveh with its 120,000 little children too 
 small to know their right hand from their left 
 * * and also much cattle. ' ' 
 
 You have an entirely parallel situation in 
 ** Pilgrim's Progress.'' I remember noticing 
 when a boy that in the pictures of Christian 
 he had no armor on his back and I criticized 
 his inadequate equipment to my father, who 
 was reading the story to me. It was explained 
 that this was symbolical of the fact that a Chris- 
 tian is safe only when facing his foes and not 
 when running away from them. But what 
 would you think of a man who would say: **I 
 don't believe in that book they call * Pilgrim's 
 Progress'? I went to Europe last summer and 
 saw hundreds of suits of armor. Every one of 
 them went all the way around. I don't believe 
 any man ever went out to fight in a suit of 
 armor that didn't protect his back." You 
 would simply laugh at him and say he had 
 missed the point of the allegory. But if a man 
 suggests that he has doubts as to whether or 
 
 [38] 
 
The Bible 
 
 not Jonah was really swallowed by a great fish, 
 you hold a heresy trial to determine whether or 
 not he is a Christian. 
 
 It is worth while also to emphasize the liter- 
 ary character of the Bible because it brings 
 into the Bible so much of variety and therefore 
 of interest. If you have sixty-six different 
 friends, you value them because of their dis- 
 tinct individualities. You admire this man 
 for courage, and that one for his dogged 
 determination. You honor this woman for 
 her fine serenity of spirit and that one for her 
 capacity to forgive injury. This friend min- 
 isters to your life by his love of poetry and 
 this other one by his irrepressible sense of 
 humor. How terrible it would be to have sixty- 
 six friends all alike — have them answer your 
 questions in the same words and greet your 
 story with the same identical smile I When 
 we understand the literary nature of the 
 Bible its sixty-six different books become so 
 many different friends ministering to us, each 
 with its own message and fitted to meet differ- 
 ent moods and times. 
 
 To illustrate this let me outline to you some- 
 thing of the personality of the four Gospels. 
 The first one to be written was Mark. Mark was 
 Peter's secretary at Eome. After Peter had 
 given his life in martyrdom at the Circus 
 Maximus the litle group of Christian believers, 
 fearful lest what he had said of the Lord should 
 be lost, persuaded Mark to write down what 
 
 [39] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 he remembered of Peter's teachings about 
 Jesus' life. The result is the kind of book one 
 would expect to come out of such circumstances. 
 Behind it is Peter — impulsive, alert, a man of 
 action. It is addressed to the Roman people, 
 the road-builders, the law-makers of antiquity, 
 people who demanded results, who were in- 
 terested in action. Mark's Gospel, therefore, 
 contains very little discourse material, but it 
 tells a great deal about what Jesus actually 
 did. In its descriptions of his activities it is 
 the most circumstantial and vivid of the four. 
 It is Peter's Gospel, written for the Romans 
 and portraying Jesus as the Master of Men, 
 the Doer of Mighty Deeds. 
 
 The second Gospel to be written was Mat- 
 thew. Our present Matthew is a combination 
 of almost all of the narrative material of Mark 
 together with a mass of discourse material 
 which probably originally circulated indepen- 
 dently and was known as the logia of Matthew. 
 This Gospel was written in Palestine by a Jew 
 and for the Jews. Its great theme is the King- 
 dom of Heaven. It gives The Sermon on the 
 Mount as the inaugural address of that Kingdom. 
 It is constantly appealing to the Jewish scrip- 
 tures : * ' Thus it is written through the prophet ' ' 
 is a constantly recurring formula. Its great 
 purpose is to set forth to Jewish readers Jesus 
 as a fulfillment of prophecy and as the Mes- 
 sianic King. 
 
 Luke's Gospel, while containing much mate- 
 [40] 
 
The Bible 
 
 rial in common with Mark and Matthew, has 
 an independent character of its own. It is writ- 
 ten in the best Greek of the four. It abounds 
 in medical terms. Its author was probably a 
 Greek physician, a companion of St. Paul. Its 
 dominant quality is its humanitarianism. It 
 dwells with especial tenderness on Jesus* kind- 
 ness to children and women and all other neg- 
 lected and outcast classes of the day. It is a 
 social gospel, and its denunciations of wealth 
 are by no means mild. It alone of the four 
 Gospels has preserved to us the parable of the 
 Prodigal Son, the parable of the Good Samari- 
 tan and the story of Zacchaeus. It portrays 
 not Jesus the Doer of Mighty Deeds nor 
 Jesus the Messianic King, but it reveals 
 with surpassing tenderness Jesus the Great 
 Physician. 
 
 These three Gospels are photographic in 
 their character. They represent Jesus as 
 caught upon the sensitive plate of three differ- 
 ent types of mind. In the fourth Gospel we 
 have something more nearly akin to a painted 
 portrait, possibly less accurate in some details 
 and yet for that very reason having a pro- 
 founder insight into the deeper truths of char- 
 acter. I have read somewhere of a portrait 
 artist before whom some men found it unwise 
 to sit because unconsciously the artist painted 
 not only the external apearance but also the 
 inner soul of his subject. John's Gospel is such 
 a great artistic interpretation of the soul of 
 
 [41] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 Jesus. It was probably written in Ephesus by 
 a group of disciples of John who looked to 
 him as their authority and therefore bears a 
 relation to John similar to that which the Gos- 
 pel of Mark bears to Peter. It is an attempt to 
 interpret the fact of Christ into the terms of the 
 prevalent mystical philosophy of the day. It 
 sets forth Jesus the Son of God. It is the pro- 
 foundly religious Gospel which appeals to us 
 at our moments of highest exaltation and deep- 
 est need. **Let not your heart be troubled; 
 ye believe in God, believe also in me. ' ' * * In the 
 world ye shall have tribulation. Be of good 
 cheer, I have overcome the world.'* **And the 
 word became flesh and dwelt among us full 
 of grace and truth and we all beheld his 
 glory, glory as of the only begotten from the 
 Father. *' 
 
 I have said that the Bible is a great litera- 
 ture, but I cannot stop here. The Bible is not 
 only a great literature — it is the great litera- 
 ture of the spirit. It lives and endures not for 
 its sheer literary power, though that is often 
 exquisite, but because of its spiritual mes- 
 sage. God seems to have given to the Greeks 
 a genius for perception of artistic form, to the 
 Romans a genius for organization, to the Anglo- 
 Saxons for self-government, to the modern Ger- 
 mans for the application of science to problems 
 of community life, and to the ancient Hebrews a 
 genius for religion. Here in the Bible are the 
 greatest answers the world has ever heard to 
 
 [42] 
 
The Bible 
 
 those irrepressible questions of every age con- 
 cerning justice and duty, sin and punishment, 
 life and death. 
 
 Because of this fact the world has always 
 honored the Bible as inspired, and the more 
 carefully we study it the more marvellous that 
 inspiration becomes to us and the more capable 
 of inspiring us in turn. But in recognizing the 
 inspiration of the Bible we must beware that 
 we do not convey by that term the impression 
 of infallibility or of a uniform degree of inspira- 
 tion. The Bible is not a dead level. The day is 
 past when we can appeal to it with supersti- 
 tious confidence in its infallibility to settle all 
 kinds of questions like the old lady who was 
 distressed by the problem of whether to dye her 
 old dress as spring approached or simply to 
 turn it. She opened her Bible at random and 
 this verse from Isaiah settled the question for 
 her : * ^ Turn ye, turn ye, for why will ye die ? ' M 
 
 The Bible is, rather, the record of a growing 
 revelation, of a deepening insight into religious 
 truths. There are passages in it which are 
 only of value to remind us of the pit whence 
 we were digged and the rock whence we were 
 hewn. Read over again, for example, the story 
 of Jepthah's daughter in Judges. In the heat 
 of battle Jepthah vows for the sake of victory 
 to sacrifice to Jehovah the first thing which 
 comes to greet him on his return home. His 
 daughter proves to be the unwitting victim. She 
 retires into the mountains for a season to pre- 
 
 [43] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 pare for death and then returns. And the Book 
 of Judges says, without pity, without any ex- 
 pression of moral indignation, and yet with 
 commendable reserve, **And he did unto her ac- 
 cording to his vow.'* Look at it squarely in 
 the face! What is it? Human sacrifice unre- 
 proved on the pages of the Bible ! That shows 
 the depths out of which the religion of the Bible 
 came. If you want to see the heights turn to 
 the Prophet Micah and read these great verses 
 in the sixth chapter : 
 
 ** Wherewith shall I come before Jehovah, 
 and bow myself before the high God! Shall 
 I come before him with burnt-offerings, with 
 calves a year old! Will Jehovah be pleased 
 with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands 
 of rivers of oil? Shall I give my first-born for 
 my transgression, the fruit of my body for the 
 sin of my soul? He hath showed thee, man, 
 what is good; and what doth Jehovah require 
 of thee, but to do justly, and to love kindness, 
 and to walk humbly with thy God ? * ' 
 
 But some one says: ^*If the Bible is not in- 
 fallible, if it is not all equally inspired, how 
 can I tell what is authoritative and what is 
 not?*' Fortunately the Bible carries within it- 
 self its own standard and touchstone. You can 
 take the teachings of Jesus, they form a rule — 
 a golden rule — by which you can measure the 
 moral elevation of all the rest of the Bible. You 
 can do this frankly and freely because Jesus 
 himself did it. He had no false notions as to 
 
 [44] 
 
The Bible 
 
 the infallibility or permanent validity of the 
 Old Testament. He did not hesitate to call at- 
 tention to things which were written there only 
 because of the hardness of men's hearts: 
 
 **Ye have heard that it was said to them of 
 old times *Thou shalt not kill/ but I say unto 
 you that every one who is angry with his 
 brother shall be in danger of the judgment. Ye 
 have heard that it was said *Thou shalt love 
 thy neighbor and hate thy enemy,' but I say 
 love thine enemies and pray for them that per- 
 secute you." 
 
 There is one last word which I wish to say 
 about the Bible — possibly the most important 
 word of all. When I was a boy I was taught 
 to think of the history of the world as divided 
 into two dispensations — one back in Bible 
 times, when God was in the world working 
 miracles, speaking to men in dreams and vi- 
 sions, personally guiding and inspiring them, 
 and the other the time in which we lived, when 
 God seemed to have gone away and left the 
 world to run itself. He was no longer expected 
 to work miracles, and if we wished to come into 
 communication with him we must read the 
 letter which he had written to us and left be- 
 hind in the Bible. God's messages no longer 
 came to us in living, vital touch upon our souls. 
 To know his will we had to travel back across 
 the centuries and rely on the experiences which 
 other men had had. I no longer feel that way 
 about it. I believe there is only one dispen- 
 
 [45] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 sation — that God is just as much in the world 
 as he ever was; that there are just as many 
 miracles, just as many angels, just as many vi- 
 sions as there ever were; that his presence 
 broods across the hills beside this western sea 
 just as truly as it did at Bethel ; and that great 
 figures of our own age like Tennyson and 
 Browning, like Tolstoy and Lincoln, like Jane 
 Addams and Helen Keller are also among the 
 prophets ! 
 
 The great thing which the Bible can do for 
 our religious life is not to present to us an 
 artificially preserved message from God to 
 which we can go to learn his will. It is rather 
 so to present to us the spectacle of other men 
 in other days hearing his voice and finding help 
 in his presence that we shall be inspired to 
 follow their example and open our lives to the 
 indwelling of his spirit. We also are to be 
 responsive to his still, small voice and go out 
 into our world to find every common bush 
 aflame with God. The supreme value of the 
 Bible is not merely to find God there, but to 
 'gain inspiration to find him here. Each age 
 must renew for itself something akin to the 
 experience recorded in the Bible. 
 
 [46] 
 
CHAPTER ly 
 JESUS 
 
I 
 
 CHAPTER rV 
 JESUS 
 
 REMEMBER reading as a boy a little book 
 which told of a preacher who noticed in 
 his congregation one Sunday a man of peculiar 
 winsomeness and responsiveness, so that he felt 
 himself inspired by his presence to change his 
 sermon here and there — making it more simple, 
 more deeply spiritual. After the congregation 
 had gone out he found himself alone with the 
 man and lo ! the man was Jesus ! I would speak 
 and I would have you listen as though Jesus 
 himself sat here listening. I would not enter 
 into any controversy about Jesus. I only desire, 
 as effectively as I may, to bear witness as to 
 what I find in him. 
 
 What I have to say is intensely personal. I 
 am a Congregationalist, but this is no authori- 
 tative pronouncement of Congregational views, 
 for in the nature of the case each Congrega- 
 tional minister is independent and can speak 
 only for himself. I am a graduate of the Uni- 
 versity of California and of Yale Divinity 
 School, but what I say is no mere parrot-like 
 repetition of the teaching of any school. It is 
 rather an attempt to set forth a personal an- 
 swer to this question: **What may Jesus mean 
 to a man who was reared in a Christian home, 
 
 [49] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 who has spent seven years in study at two 
 typical modern universities and who has lived 
 eagerly and sympathetically in the full current 
 of modern civic life for ten years more ? ' ' 
 
 To begin with, I think it is beyond question 
 that the distinguishing characteristic of the 
 modern point of view in everything is the use 
 of the inductive method. That man is a 
 medievalist who starts with a dogma and mar- 
 shall s arguments in its support. The dogma 
 may be true, the arguments may be valid, but 
 the method is medieval. That man is a modern- 
 ist who starts with the facts, sits down humbly 
 before them and seeks to understand them, and 
 is willing to follow where the facts lead, regard- 
 less of all dogmas, prejudices or preconceived 
 ideas. For men trained in the scientific atmos- 
 phere of modern life the most helpful approach 
 to Christ will be the approach not by way of 
 dogma, but along the line of the inductive 
 method. And surely he who said to his disci- 
 ples **Come and ye shall see*' will welcome our 
 approach to him in this spirit of scientific 
 humility. 
 
 As I have reconstructed for myself during the 
 last seventeen years the meaning of Christ I 
 therefore begin here : Whatever else Jesus was 
 or was not he was certainly a man. The record 
 of the Gospels as I read them reveals to me a 
 genuine human being. He lived and felt as a 
 man. He ** increased in wisdom and stature 
 and in favor with God and man.'* He faced 
 
 [50] 
 
Jesus 
 
 temptation. He often sat wearied by the well- 
 curb of life. He knew defeat and failure. He 
 longed for human companionship and he also 
 sought for divine companionship in prayer. He 
 wept at the tomb of Lazarus. He cried out on 
 the cross in anguish of body and of spirit. 
 
 To realize the genuine humanity of Jesus is 
 a great gain. As a boy in Sunday school I did 
 not get this conception of him. The Christ 
 presented to me then was not a man. He was 
 only masquerading as a man. In reality he was 
 a supernatural being with unlimited knowledge 
 and power who was rather thinly disguised in 
 garments of humanity. He was really a being 
 apart from me or my possible experience. Now 
 all this is changed and Jesus has for me a 
 greater reality and a higher personal value be- 
 cause I believe firmly in the genuineness of his 
 humanity. It puts new power into texts like 
 **And the word became flesh and dwelt among 
 us full of grace and truth ^' and ** being found 
 in fashion as a man he humbled himself, becom- 
 ing obedient even unto death'' and **As the 
 Father hath sent me into the world, even so 
 send I you. ' ' 
 
 But Jesus was no ordinary man. There are 
 certain facts about him which have, it seems to 
 me, tremendous significance. First of all is 
 this: Not only was he recognized as a great 
 teacher in his own day but since his day it has 
 developed that he is indeed the supreme teacher 
 of humanity in matters of conduct and religion. 
 
 [51] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 His ethical standards have conquered the world 
 — not yet in actual attainment, sad to say — ^but 
 as unchallenged expressions of the ideal. Men 
 who profess no religious faith, men bitterly op- 
 posed to organized religion, yet find in him the 
 world *s supreme teacher of ethics. 
 
 But you cannot detach the teacher from the 
 man himself. Jesus gave to the world not only 
 its supreme teaching, but its supreme example 
 of the incorporation of the teaching into daily 
 life. He lived his message. So far as we can 
 see he bears no shadow upon his character. 
 There is no stain upon his garments. Nor is 
 this purity external only. It seems to be an 
 inner fact, for nowhere does he betray con- 
 sciousness of sin. He stands as the world's 
 sinless, unstained human life. You probably 
 remember how Sidney Lanier in his poem * * The 
 Crystal' ' reviews the great figures of history, 
 finding in each much inspiration, but also some 
 limitation, until at last he comes to Christ, 
 when he bursts forth in these great words : 
 
 "But Thee, but Thee, sovereign Seer of time, 
 But Thee, O poet's Poet, Wisdom's Tongue, 
 But Thee, man's best Man, love's best Love, 
 perfect life in perfect labor writ, 
 all man's Comrade, Servant, King and Priest, — 
 What 'if or 'yet,' what mole, what flaw, what lapse, 
 What least defect or shadow of defect. 
 What rumor, tattled by an enemy. 
 Or inference loose, what lack of grace 
 Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's or death's — 
 Oh, what amiss may I forgive in Thee, 
 Jesus, good Paragon, thou Crystal Christ?" 
 [52] 
 
J esus 
 
 No man can contemplate the fact of Christ 
 without being struck by the tremendous influ- 
 ence which he has wielded in the world. His 
 *4ine is gone out through all the earth.*' He 
 wrote no books ; yet thousands of books owe to 
 him their inspiration. He painted no pictures ; 
 yet the whole world of painting, sculpture, 
 music, even architecture, has been changed by 
 him. He held no official position; yet his influ- 
 ence has changed and is today changing more 
 vitally than ever the whole social order, reprov- 
 ing greed and inhumanity and calling men to 
 social brotherhood and human service. 
 
 Nor is this influence a mere vague, persua- 
 sive, indefinite something — it is very intimate 
 and personal. Thousands of men and women 
 through the centuries rise up to make confes- 
 sion that he has been the dominant power with- 
 in their lives — that they are what they are 
 because of his presence. Here is something 
 deeper than the influence of his teaching or his 
 example. It is more like the influence of a 
 mother over her son, to use a splendid illustra- 
 tion which has only recently come to my atten- 
 tion from the paper of a theological student. 
 The mother instructs her boy on points of honor 
 and morality. She tells him the perils of dis- 
 honesty and the tragedy of unchastity. In time 
 the boy finds himself away from home in a 
 great city. In his poverty and loneliness temp- 
 tation comes to him. What is it saves him? His 
 mother's sound advice? Not that alone. Her 
 
 [53] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 beautiful and pure life ? Not even that alone. It 
 is the feeling of personal love and responsibility 
 that he has toward her which makes her advice 
 and example dynamic in his life. He does not 
 want to be unworthy of her love and trust. It 
 has been even so with Christ down through the 
 ages. He has been the great redemptive per- 
 sonality of the world. Men have been saved, 
 not by the cold word of his teaching, not by 
 the distant spectacle of his example, but by 
 warm personal love and loyalty to him. 
 
 There is a great scene in **The Piper'' by 
 Josephine Preston Peabody in which the Piper 
 argues with * * the lonely man, ' ' the Christ on the 
 cross of the wayside shrine. The Piper pleads 
 to be allowed to keep for his very own the chil- 
 dren of Hamelin Town, but at last he cannot — 
 he surrenders his will to Christ's. Just out- 
 side of Trinity Church, Boston, there stands 
 a statue of Phillips Brooks — erect, manly, joy- 
 ous — preaching with radiant power. But be- 
 hind him stands the veiled figure of the Christ, 
 who reaches one hand forward, resting it as in 
 benediction on the shoulder of the great 
 preacher. These things are but typical of hu- 
 man experience with Christ. His personal in- 
 fluence, his redemptive power, have been simply 
 tremendous in the world — and never more so 
 than at this very hour. 
 
 One fact more about Christ crowns all that 
 goes before. He has become for the world its 
 noblest picture of God. How he has illumi- 
 
 [54] 
 
Jesus 
 
 nated our conception of God! *^Who is GodT* 
 we ask — and we hear his words: *'God is a 
 Spirit and they that worship him must wor- 
 ship in spirit and in truth.'' *'But where is 
 God?" we ask. *'Here," says Jesus; ^^here in 
 the rain which he causes to fall on the just and 
 the unjust; here in the sparrows, not one of 
 which falls without his notice; here in the 
 lilies of the field, which are clothed by his love 
 and wisdom." *^But what is God's attitude to- 
 ward men?" we ask. And his words are like 
 music in our ears as he tells us the parable of 
 the Prodigal Son. * * God is like that, ' ' he says ; 
 **God is a loving Father; when ye pray say: 
 *Our Father.' " *^But we crave for more," 
 our hearts cry out, **Show us the Father" — 
 and his answer peals forth, **He that hath seen 
 me hath seen the Father." 
 
 And, explain it as you will, this has actually 
 come to pass. Jesus has become for the world 
 its picture of God. *^ After Jesus it is his reli- 
 gion or no religion," says a great German 
 scholar. The fact is that the world today thinks 
 of God in terms of Jesus Christ. God cannot 
 be less than Jesus; he must be like Jesus — 
 and more. Our God is an infinite Christ ! 
 
 Behind all this there lies the marvellous self- 
 consciousness of Jesus. He had a realization 
 of his relationship with God, and the overflow- 
 ing power which resulted from it is central in 
 his life. Upon the lips of what other character 
 in history can you put such words as these: 
 
 [55] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 '*I am the light of the world: he that followeth 
 me shall not walk in darkness, ' ' * * Come unto me 
 all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will 
 give you rest, take my yoke upon you and learn 
 of me for I am meek and lowly in heart and 
 ye shall find rest unto your souls''! Yet 
 these words do not sound immodest or pre- 
 sumptuous on the lips of Jesus — they sim- 
 I)ly express the experience of humanity with 
 him. 
 
 What shall we say concerning such a life as 
 this? What answer shall we make to such a 
 remarkable and cumulative series of facts! 
 How shall we classify such a personality? 
 What else can we say than that he was divine, 
 that in Jesus God revealed himself in terms of 
 humanity, that he is the supreme expression in 
 human form of the life and character of God? 
 **God was in him reconciling the world unto 
 himself.'* **And so the Word became flesh and 
 dwelt among us full of grace and truth and we 
 behold his glory, glory as of the only begotten 
 of the Father." 
 
 But along with this sense of the divinity of 
 Christ there goes a great inspiration, a vision 
 which may well make us all pause and tremble. 
 Divinity is not something apart from humanity 
 — the divine life which dwelt in Jesus in all 
 its fulness dwells also in you and me. Our lives 
 too are a part of the life of God. That electric 
 current which in Jesus became incandescent, 
 to borrow Winston Churchill's figure, thrills 
 
 [56] 
 
J esus 
 
 through us also. He was given to us to show 
 us what a divine humanity might be. We are 
 to attain *'unto the fulness of the stature of 
 Chrisf He is at last to be *'The first born 
 among many brethren.*' What Jesus is hu- 
 manity shall at last become I 
 
 You have noticed, doubtless, that I have said 
 nothing about the virgin birth. There is very 
 little that needs to be said. It has no bearing 
 on my faith in the divinity of Christ. He was 
 divine because of his character, his personality 
 — not because of the origin of his physical 
 body. Did he have two human parents! Did 
 he have only one? Settle it for yourselves ac- 
 cording to the evidence. It is purely a his- 
 torical question and has no bearing on the 
 authority of Jesus. You might be able to prove 
 beyond possibility of questioning that he was 
 born without any human parents at all — and 
 yet we would not worship him unless he had 
 also been all that he was in his character and 
 teaching. You may decide that the evidence for 
 the virgin birth is so slender that it is impera- 
 tive for you to think of Jesus as born like all 
 the rest of us, of two human parents. Per- 
 sonally, I should welcome that conclusion, for 
 it would only the more definitely make his 
 divinity a moral and spiritual thing. It would 
 make the fact of the incarnation only more 
 genuine and thoroughgoing. It would bring him 
 closer to our common humanity in his origin, 
 and therefore make the possibility of following 
 
 [57] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 him up the heights all the stronger. But at the 
 same time it seems only reasonable to feel that 
 so remarkable a life may well have come into 
 the world in a remarkable way, and I believe 
 that in the annunciation we have an echo of a 
 wonderful experience which came to Mary and 
 which ought to become the experience of every 
 mother — '*For lo the Holy Spirit shall come 
 upon thee and the power of the Most High shall 
 overshadow thee.*' When we look at things 
 with clear eyes we shall see that a birth by two 
 parents is just as miraculous — involves the 
 presence and power of God just as truly — as 
 would a birth by only one human parent. The 
 world can easily afford to dispense with the idea 
 that Jesus had a physical birth different from 
 ours, if in return it can gain potentially for 
 every mother the experience of Mary of the 
 nearness and presence of God in the great mir- 
 acle of bringing a new life and personality into 
 the world. 
 
 You have doubtless noticed also that I have 
 said nothing about the miracles of Jesus. This 
 has been a deliberate omission because I do 
 not regard them as primary evidence for his 
 divinity. I believe that unusual events, which 
 we call miracles, accompanied the life of Jesus. 
 Given so remarkable a personality, the miracles 
 become only the inevitable overflow of its in- 
 fluence in the world. A little boy learns to play 
 a violin — becomes proficient enough to play, let 
 us say, HandePs ** Largo'* with fair accuracy. 
 
 [58] 
 
J esus 
 
 The time is correct, the notes are true. We 
 compliment the performance. But let a great 
 master of the violin appear. Let Kubelik or 
 Ysaye play HandePs ** Largo.'* What hap- 
 pens? *^ Tears are in our eyes and in our ears 
 the murmur of a thousand years!*' We see 
 a great river rolling to the sea, we feel anew 
 the nobility of life, our experience is one of 
 spiritual renewal and we come back to the con- 
 cert hall when the last note dies away as those 
 who have returned from a far country. Our 
 ordinary human lives are like a little boy play- 
 ing his violin. The results are very modest and 
 limited. But Jesus was a master of life. From 
 him no such meager results could possibly be 
 expected. The miracles are exactly what we 
 should expect. 
 
 But while I believe the miracles of healing, 
 I do not base my faith in the divinity of Christ 
 upon them. His power to achieve results be- 
 yond ordinary human experience does not guar- 
 antee his divinity, for if he had worked miracles 
 ten times greater than any recorded in the New 
 Testament and had not been at the same time 
 a good man, we should not build churches in his 
 name or worship him today! It is not power 
 that commands the allegiance of thoughtful 
 men; it is the moral and spiritual principles 
 which direct the use of whatever measure of 
 power may be given. 
 
 One miracle, however, deserves special men- 
 tion — the resurrection. In some way after the 
 
 [59] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 death on Calvary Jesus came back to his dis- 
 ciples, who were scattered, discouraged, beaten, 
 and convinced them that he was not holden of 
 death but was still alive. The accounts of the 
 resurrection are not clear nor harmonious. 
 Some of them emphasize a reanimation of his 
 physical body, yet he did not resume the old 
 physical life. Through the stories runs an- 
 other tendency which has always appealed to 
 me more strongly than the emphasis on his 
 physical body — the emphasis on his spiritual 
 body — the emphasis on his spiritual presence. 
 Mary suddenly finds him with her in the Gar- 
 den, the two on the Emmaus road find them- 
 selves not alone but walking with him, Paul 
 meets him on the desert road leading to Damas- 
 cus. This experience with Jesus was the most 
 conspicuous element in very early Christian 
 preaching. Explain the resurrection how you 
 will, the fact remains that the supreme effect 
 that Jesus had upon his disciples was to con- 
 vince them that he had risen from the dead and 
 was alive again f orevermore. 
 
 One important subject, inseparably connected 
 with our thought of Christ, has been deliber- 
 ately left to the last — the atonement. Why did 
 Jesus die upon the cross! Various answers 
 have been given at different times in the his- 
 tory of the Church. The earliest disciples 
 simply pointed to the great fifty-third chapter 
 of Isaiah with its picture of the suffering serv- 
 ant of Jehovah and said that Jesus died in 
 
 [60] 
 
J esus 
 
 fulfillment of prophecy. Later other explana- 
 tions arose: that he died to pay humanity's 
 debt to God incurred by Adam's sin; that he 
 died to satisfy the divine justice by receiving 
 on himself the punishment due the sin of the 
 world. God, having received payment, having 
 exacted justice, was then, men said, in a posi- 
 tion to forgive men and reconciliation between 
 God and man became possible. 
 
 None of these theories appeals to the modern 
 point of view. They are too legalistic. They 
 seem to concern a God who is an immense Shy- 
 lock or an implacable judge interested in ab- 
 stract laws, rather than God the Father of his 
 children as revealed by Jesus. What then? 
 Shall we take the crosses from off our churches 
 and cease to sing 
 
 "In the Cross of Christ I glory- 
 Towering o'er the wrecks of time?" 
 
 Not SO. Such a sacrifice would be as pathetic as 
 it is needless. 
 
 Behind every great doctrine of the past, how- 
 ever crudely or even repulsively stated, there 
 lurks a great idea — a truth dear and necessary 
 to humanity. The atonement is true; it only 
 requires a modern interpretation to release 
 once more in the world the tremendous power 
 which it holds. What is that interpretation? 
 Something like this : Jesus' death on the cross 
 is not an isolated event; it is rather the sym- 
 bolic and supreme expression of the ever-pres- 
 
 [61] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 ent and dominant spirit of his life — of service 
 for humanity in a spirit of absolute love and 
 self-sacrifice. That spirit came to its final 
 dramatic climax in the laying do^vn of his own 
 life. That act and all that lies behind it in the 
 years of patient self-giving in Galilean villages 
 and on the streets of Jerusalem do effect a rec- 
 onciliation between man and God. But howl 
 By changing the mind of God? Not in the 
 least ! God 's mind did not need to be changed. 
 He has always loved and sought his wandering 
 children. How then? By changing our mind. 
 Jesus died not to make God good but to make 
 us good ! 
 
 **But,'' some one asks, *^how does the spec- 
 tacle of Jesus' life of self-sacrifice culminat- 
 ing on Calvary make us good?'* Only by 
 touching our lives with a divine purpose to live 
 in the same spirit of self-sacrifice and join Jesus 
 in his search for and service to God's lost chil- 
 dren. The world is not to be saved by Jesus 
 alone, not by his three hours' agony on the 
 cross merely, but by the thousands of men and 
 women who themselves become saviors and give 
 themselves unselfishly even as did he. This 
 young medical student in London is to hear the 
 call of the deep-sea fishermen and give his life 
 to the people on the coast of Labrador. This 
 young woman is to respond to the need of the 
 great city, and spend her life in the nineteenth 
 ward in Chicago as a friend and helper of the 
 foreigner and the forgotten. This young Scotch 
 
 [62] 
 
Jesus 
 
 weaver is to die on his knees in the little Afri- 
 can village, that slavery may cease and brother- 
 hood be born. Thousands of nameless and 
 humble souls shall in the spirit of the cross 
 give themselves not to selfish ends but to un- 
 selfish service in cottages and hospitals and 
 workshops. And so Christ shall be redupli- 
 cated in a myriad of saviors and the world be 
 reconciled to the God who is a God of love. Thus 
 the atonement — the * ^ at-one-ment ' ' — is continu- 
 ally and eternally in process. 
 
 All this ought to make it quite clear to us in 
 what essential Christianity consists. It is not a 
 matter of theories about the person of Jesus 
 nor speculations as to the mystery of the rela- 
 tion of his soul to the all-enfolding life of God. 
 Speculation is interesting and has its place. 
 But a man is not made a Christian by coming 
 to any particular intellectual convictions as to 
 the nature of Christ. Christianity is rather a 
 matter of personal devotion and loyalty to 
 Christ and his interpretation of life and duty. 
 If only one is sincere in his love for Jesus and 
 his desire to reproduce his life in the world, 
 we need not fear that such a one will hold un- 
 worthy views of his Lord. Continued experi- 
 ence with Christ will lead him to profounder 
 insight and greater reverence. 
 
 "If Jesus Christ is a man, 
 And only a man — I say 
 That of ali mankind I will cleave to him 
 And to him will I cleave alway." 
 [63] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 You may begin there! But to love and serve 
 and follow Christ will, I believe, inevitably lead 
 you on to the second stanza of the poem: 
 
 "If Jesus Christ is a God — 
 
 And the only God — I swear 
 I will follow him through heaven and hell 
 The Earth, the Sea, and the Airl" 
 
 [64] 
 
CHAPTER V 
 IMMORTALITY 
 
T 
 
 CHAPTEB V 
 
 IMMORTALITY 
 
 HERE are certain difficulties in the 
 way of believing in inunortality. The 
 most obvious one lies in the fact that 
 in our experience no one has returned 
 from the life after death to tell us about 
 it. In this statement I am assuming that, 
 in spite of the remarkably interesting data 
 collected by the Society for Psychical Research, 
 the evidence is still insufficient to prove beyond 
 any doubt the reality of spirit communication. 
 I believe we should be open-minded on the sub- 
 ject, and it is not at all impossible that 
 evidence may yet be forthcoming in this de- 
 partment of investigation which shall be con- 
 clusive. But for the present let us assume what 
 is practically true for all of us in our individual 
 experience — that no one has come back to us 
 from beyond the grave to assure us of his con- 
 tinued existence. What then? 
 
 This difficulty does not seem to me so over- 
 whelming as it used to be in the days before I 
 realized how imperfect is our apparatus of 
 senses for perceiving reality and how frag- 
 mentary is even our best knowledge of the 
 universe. The world is simply full of things 
 
 [67] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 that we have no sense organs to perceive. For 
 example : vibrations which come at a given rate 
 of speed are interpreted by our eyes in terms 
 of light and other vibrations which come at a 
 very much lower intensity are interpreted by 
 our ears in terms of sound, but it is quite cer- 
 tain that there are colors which we cannot see 
 simply because our eyes cannot interpret light 
 vibrations above or below a certain rate of 
 speed, and so also there are sounds which are 
 pitched too high or too low for us to hear at 
 all simply because our ears are not equipped 
 to receive them. This means that our percep- 
 tion of the universe is only a fragment of the 
 whole. If the total of reality be represented 
 by a circle we compass it with our sense organs 
 only by a few small arcs here and there on the 
 circumference. The fact, therefore, that we 
 do not see nor hear our friends after they die 
 is not final by any means. There is abundant 
 room in the universe for life of a higher and 
 more complex character to go on right about 
 us all the time without our perceiving it. And 
 it is altogether probable that to be set free from 
 the limitations of the flesh is of necessity to 
 cease from fleshly means of communication. 
 
 There is an illustration from nature which 
 throws some light on this point. I once read 
 a story of some larvae at the bottom of a pond 
 holding a discussion as to why from time to time 
 members of their company that had climbed 
 up a water-lily stem to the surface of the 
 
 [68] 
 
Immortality 
 
 pond had never returned. These dwellers at 
 the bottom finally made a solemn compact that 
 the next one to disappear beyond the surface 
 should return to tell his friends all about it. 
 Then one of the chief spokesmen began to feel 
 an irresistible desire to climb up the water-lily 
 stem and, in a few moments, he found himself 
 safe and sound on top of the water-lily pad dry- 
 ing in the sun. Then a wonderful thing hap- 
 pened. He passed through a transformation 
 the possibility of which he had never dreamed, 
 and before long found himself a dragon-fly 
 skimming over the surface of the pond, his 
 beautiful gauzy wings iridescent in the sun- 
 shine. As he looked down into the dark sur- 
 face of the pond it came over him how utterly 
 impossible it was that he should ever penetrate 
 its depths again and tell the larvae in the mud 
 at the bottom how glorious was the life above. 
 The second difficulty which has almost 
 paralyzed the faith of many men and women in 
 immortality is the apparent dependence of 
 thought upon the brain. Modern physiological 
 psychology has made this dependence very clear 
 and evident. It has even localized in the brain 
 different departments of mental activity, so 
 that by injuring certain convolutions you can 
 destroy, for example, the memory for words. 
 The memory for faces, for tunes, for locations 
 still remains, but the memory for words is gone. 
 The materialism of the age from which we are 
 just emerging did not hesitate to say that the 
 
 [69] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile 
 and the salivary glands secrete saliva. A 
 speaker holding this point of view once said to 
 a group of people in a room **Give me an axe 
 and in a few moments I can put this piano out 
 of commission so that no more tunes will ever 
 come from it, ^ ^ and the inference was that with 
 equal facility the more delicate instrument of 
 the brain could be destroyed and with it the 
 music of life. But an answer was given that 
 same evening by another speaker who said that 
 even though the piano be destroyed the pianist 
 jet remained, and there was no reason why he 
 might not be given another piano in another 
 room and produce even more wonderful music 
 than before. 
 
 This is, to my mind, a truer point of view — 
 the physical brain is merely the instrument 
 upon which the soul plays its music. Surely that 
 Wisdom and Power which gave to the soul 
 this instrument can be trusted to provide a 
 better instrument when this one is no longer re- 
 sponsive to the touch. After all, to say that 
 the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes 
 bile is utterly linscientific, for thought and bile 
 are not in the same category. One is the physi- 
 cal product of a physical organ and to make 
 the parallel hold true the actual physical 
 product of brain action would have to be put 
 in the fourth place in the equation instead of 
 the thought, which is merely a concomitant of 
 brain activity. 
 
 [70] 
 
Immortality 
 
 Let us turn from the negative to the positive 
 side of the question and set forth the reasons 
 that may impel thoughtful men and women to 
 a faith in immortality. 
 
 First of all, I am impressed with the univer- 
 sality of this conviction of a continued life after 
 death. Wherever you go around the world, 
 even in darkest Africa, you find some kind of 
 conception of immortality, and as far back as 
 you can go into history, even to the mute testi- 
 mony dug up from the graves of prehistoric 
 man, you find this same faith in life after 
 death. 
 
 The conviction of immortality is like laughter 
 — a distinctly human characteristic setting us 
 apart from all other beings. It attains to the 
 dignity of an instinct. "We are coming to realize 
 in this day that instincts are not to be despised, 
 but that they may be profound witnesses to 
 the presence of mighty forces and the working 
 of an unseen hand. 
 
 John Fiske in one of his books gives a telling 
 illustration of the way in which certain human 
 capacities have developed in response to reali- 
 ties in the outer world which called them forth. 
 There was a time in the evolutionary process 
 when life upon this planet was blind, but light 
 played upon it and, because there were things to 
 see, living creatures developed pigmented 
 spots sensitive to light and then imperfect eyes 
 and finally the human eye with its capacity to 
 see the beauty of the dawn and to trace the 
 
 [71] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 courses of the planets. So, too, there was a time 
 when all living forms were deaf, but, because 
 later there were sounds to hear, there developed 
 in the process of evolution sense organs which 
 could interpret sound and music and human 
 voices. 
 
 The suggestion seems to me to be a powerful 
 one that this world-wide instinct for immor- 
 tality, this great craving of the human spirit, 
 has not developed aimlessly and foolishly but 
 is a response sent forth to a great reality out- 
 side which is calling to us so that some day we 
 shall not only hear the birds and see the stars 
 but shall also perceive the eternal life. 
 
 A second thing which helps me in my faith 
 in immortality is the fact of Christ. Not only 
 does humanity at large and on the average be- 
 lieve in immortality, but the supreme human 
 spirit of all the world believed in it too. When 
 Jesus came he incorporated into his teachings 
 a clear consciousness of the life eternal : * * Lay 
 not up treasures on earth,'' he said; **lay up 
 your treasure in heaven where moth and rust 
 do not corrupt nor thieves break through and 
 steal.'' **Let not your heart be troubled," he 
 said; *'in my Father's house are many rooms. 
 I go to prepare a place for you." 
 
 And, after they had crucified him, in some 
 mysterious way he came back to his disciples 
 and convinced them he was still alive. As to 
 the method of the resurrection I am entirely in 
 the dark, but as to the fact of it I see no ground 
 
 [72] 
 
Immortality 
 
 for reasonable doubt. Something changed this 
 little group of broken-hearted and discouraged 
 men; something happened which transformed 
 their cowardice and sent them out into the great 
 pagan Koman world conquering and to conquer. 
 They said from the very beginning with the ut- 
 most emphasis that it was because Jesus was 
 not holden of death, but had appeared to 
 them and that they knew he was living for- 
 evermore. I cannot but believe they were right, 
 and all this contributes no small reinforce- 
 ment to my faith that 
 
 "Life is ever lord of death 
 And Love can never lose its own." 
 
 A third reason for believing in immortality 
 grows out of our instinctive and ineradicable 
 faith in the moral integrity of the universe. The 
 great fact of conscience is a testimony to a con- 
 viction as wide as the race that there is a 
 difference between right and wrong and that 
 fundamentally and ultimately the forces of the 
 universe are on the side of right. But, as a 
 matter of fact, we do not see right or wrong 
 meeting their just deserts in the lives of many 
 of the men around about us. We have on one 
 hand the spectacle of men seeking their own 
 selfish aims, cynically and brutally treading 
 into the mire the lives of their fellow beings, 
 outraging the most fundamental laws of hon- 
 esty and fair play and then living prosperously 
 all their lives and dying quietly and pain- 
 
 [731 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 lessly in bed; and we see other men who have 
 * * followed the gleam, ' * who have put their lives 
 in harmony with the highest dictates of moral 
 integrity, beaten down by disease, by defeat, 
 by treachery, in the very prime of their man- 
 hood. We see Henry Drummond wasting the 
 last years of his life in a losing fight against an 
 obscure and painful illness and Robert Louis 
 Stevenson banished to Samoa and finally cut 
 ofT in the very prime of his productive power. 
 Our faith in the moral integrity of the universe 
 seems to demand a day beyond tomorrow. 
 
 As Washington Gladden puts it: **For the 
 wrongs that never are righted here, there is 
 recompense hereafter: the rogues that go un- 
 whipped, the hypocrites that stalk abroad un- 
 suspected, the giant oppressors who gather by 
 tribute a wealth of continents and build their 
 fortunes on the ruins of homes, — for all these 
 surely retribution is coming; the mills of the 
 Gods grind slowly but no malefactor is done 
 with them when man screws down his coffin lid. 
 Do not distrust that sense of justice in your 
 breast which cries out against the honor and 
 power and fame which come to greedy, unscru- 
 pulous, cruel men. There is a day after today. " 
 
 I have a feeling that there is a reason for be- 
 lieving in immortality in the very incomplete- 
 ness of our own lives. William James has a 
 humorous passage in which he sets forth the 
 different possibilities which he realizes to be 
 latent within his life. How he might have been 
 
 [74] 
 
Immortality 
 
 many kinds of man, from a soldier or an Arctic 
 explorer to a fop and a ^ Uady killer, ' ' and has 
 ended up by being a gray, dry-as-dust professor. 
 We all of us share this experience. Person- 
 ally, my earliest ambition was to be a pirate! 
 As the disadvantages of piracy as a life-work 
 became evident I decided to be a naval officer. 
 This in time was given up for civil engineering, 
 and behold me now far from all such adventur- 
 ous careers — an obscure sky-pilot who only 
 now and then from his front windows looks 
 longingly out to the great ships as they pass 
 through the Golden Gate out to the Pacific. 
 
 Even in the line which we at last choose as 
 our own no one of us reaches completion. 
 Though we live to be a hundred years old 
 our lives are still bafflingly incomplete. You 
 have probably heard the story of the old Ger- " 
 man professor, a philologist, who had spe- 
 cialized on the alphabet. He was dying. His 
 students gathered around him and said, **Our 
 dear Herr Professor, your life has been blame- 
 less, one of scholarly rectitude. You have be- 
 come the world's greatest authority on the 
 alphabet. You surely have no regrets.'' And 
 the old Professor said, ''My young friends, I 
 feel that my life has been terribly misspent. I 
 have tried to master the alphabet. I have been 
 too superficial. If I had life to live over J 
 again, I would concentrate on the letter A!" / 
 
 Why this incompleteness of life? Why does 
 it stretch out so lavishly and beckon to us in 
 
 [75] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 every direction we turn? Why are our achieve- 
 ments but little fragments of the boundless pos- 
 sibilities which we see around us? Personally, 
 I believe that this very incompleteness of life 
 is God^s pledge to us of a continued life where 
 we shall go on to do the things that here we 
 longed to do and did not, where the dreams 
 at last come true. After all 
 
 "A man's reach should exceed his grasp 
 Or what^s a heaven for?" 
 
 Our faith in immortality receives confirma- 
 tion and reinforcement also from the modern 
 emphasis upon personality. In the last anal- 
 ysis the one thing which we know most 
 surely in the world is our own self-conscious 
 existence. Descartes, you will remember, 
 started out to doubt everything that he could, 
 but finally struck bottom with this proposition 
 **Dubito, ergo sum'' — **I doubt, therefore I 
 am.*' The one thing beneath which he could 
 not go was his own personal existence. A book 
 like Professor Bowne's essay on **Person- 
 alism" is wonderfully strengthening to one's 
 faith in immortality and helps to deliver from 
 the nightmare of materialism. After all, this 
 apparently solid and substantial thing which 
 we call matter requires only a change of pres- 
 sure or temperature to transform it into liquids, 
 gases, heat, light or some other form of energy. 
 And when you think the thing through you find 
 that we know energy only in relation to per- 
 
 [76] 
 
Immortality 
 
 sonality. If we believe in the conservation of 
 energy, how much more reasonable to believe 
 in the conservation of personality. It seems 
 to be the noblest and most mysterious form of 
 energy. 
 
 Moreover, the nature of the human person- 
 ality, as it is being revealed by modern psy- 
 chology, brings many hopeful suggestions. We 
 have recently been hearing a great deal about 
 the subconscious, and have been learning that 
 our personalities are vastly larger than the 
 cross-section of our waking consciousness at 
 any given moment. In this subconscious mind 
 are many marvellous things. One of them is a 
 well-nigh perfect memory. I once attended a 
 class in hypnotism with a group of medical 
 men. A young man before being hypnotized 
 was asked if he remembered any sermon he had 
 ever heard. Being a normal young man, he did 
 not! After he was hypnotized the operator 
 asked him the same question and he said, ^^Yes, 
 I remember the sermon Bishop Potter preached 
 when I was confirmed.'' *' Repeat what you 
 remember of it,'' said the operator. The young 
 man stood up, announced the text, and began 
 the sermon. I had heard Bishop Potter preach 
 myself, and the resemblances in voice and man- 
 nerism were so striking that the experience was 
 positively uncanny. 
 
 This subconscious mind is also endowed with 
 a remarkable perception of natural law. Most 
 of us have worked on problems until we have 
 
 [77] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 been tired out, have thrown our book in a cor- 
 ner, and gone to sleep to wake up the next 
 morning and find the whole matter cleared up. 
 Many a minister has worked at a sermon, un- 
 able to arrange it satisfactorily, only to have an 
 entirely new arrangement of the argument, log- 
 ical and effective, occur to him after a night ^s 
 sleep. 
 
 Students of hypnotism tell us that not only 
 has the subconscious mind a high perception of 
 natural law, but it has also a high moral sense 
 and often remains more true and sensitive than 
 the waking consciousness. We have no more 
 than a fragmentary knowledge of telepathy, but 
 this marvellous capacity — developed only in ab- 
 normal people now — is doubtless also one of the 
 functions of the subconscious. In this obscure 
 region also lie marvellous reserves of energy 
 and a great store of instincts and intuitions. 
 
 All these revelations concerning the marvel- 
 lous quality of the personality help us to think 
 nobly of the soul and in no wise encourage us to 
 believe in its extinction. Many of its capacities 
 are entirely latent or put to only the most occa- 
 sional and trifling use in this life. Is not the 
 argument advanced by Hudson a cogent one — 
 that these unused capacities are prophetic of 
 some future life where they shall come fully 
 into action? 
 
 Dr. Worcester gives a beautiful and striking 
 illustration in his book, * * The Living Word, ' ' in 
 which he suggests that, after all, we live three 
 
 [78] 
 
Immortality 
 
 lives. Let me condense this illustration and 
 give it in my own words. The first is a narrow 
 and restricted pre-natal life which the child 
 lives within the body of its mother. Here in 
 this dark world eyes develop, though there is 
 nothing to see. Here in the silence ears de- 
 velop, though there is nothing to hear. Little 
 hands develop, though there is nothing to han- 
 dle, and feet for which there are no paths on 
 which to walk. Then comes the great day of 
 birth and the child emerges out into this won- 
 derful world in which we live, where there is 
 beauty for the eyes to see and music for the 
 ears to hear, where there are deeds of helpful- 
 ness for the hands to do, and great roads of 
 service on which the feet may go. Once more, 
 in this world, great longings are developed 
 which are impossible of fulfillment here, * ^fan- 
 cies that break through language and escape,'' 
 marvellous powers and capacities that seem to 
 have no adequate use or expression here. What 
 then? There comes at last another day of birth 
 — which men in their blindness call death — 
 when we pass out of this dark and narrow 
 world of the flesh into the great freedom of the 
 spirit, into that still larger and more untram- 
 melled life where all the aspirations and capaci- 
 ties which have developed more or less blindlv 
 here shall come to their proper use and high 
 fulfillment. 
 
 And now, in closing, may I say a few words 
 about the judgment, and heaven and hell. The 
 
 [79] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 best way to think about the judgment — it seems 
 to me — is to think of it as something automatic 
 and continuous. Every day is a judgment day. 
 The choices we make, the directions in which w^e 
 send forth our energy, the causes we support, 
 the people we love — these things register them- 
 selves, moment by moment, in the fabric of our 
 lives. When we were little boys we used to hear 
 about the Recording Angel, who sat up in 
 heaven writing in a great book the awful deeds 
 of naughty little boys. We secretly hoped that 
 some of ours would get past him unobserved. 
 But how terrible and relentless is the Recording 
 Angel of the new psychology — not seated up in 
 heaven at a safe distance, but seated in the 
 inner citadel of our own lives in the person of 
 this marvellous subconscious memory. Well for 
 a man if he hangs no pictures upon the wall of 
 that memory which he is not willing to have 
 look down upon him forever ! * * Judge not that 
 ye be not judged,*' said Jesus. He did not 
 mean by that that we should stop making 
 choices or decisions, but he did mean that 
 the very judgments we make react upon us 
 automatically. 
 
 From this conception of the judgment comes 
 a conception of heaven and hell which makes 
 these words stand for something less fantastic 
 and more impressive. Heaven and hell are not 
 places: they are states of mind. A man does 
 not have to wait until he dies, and then wake 
 up again in the life beyond the grave and pinch 
 
 [80] 
 
Immortality 
 
 himself and say, **Ali, me, let me look about and 
 see whether I am in heaven or hell at last.'' 
 Heaven and hell begin here. There are men 
 walking the streets of your city and mine today 
 who are in hell, and we have all known men and 
 women who in this world had nevertheless al- 
 ready claimed their citizenship in heaven. 
 
 It will be a great advance, it seems to me, if 
 we can get rid of the idea that death necessarily 
 crystallizes our lives — that at that moment they 
 become set like a plaster-of-Paris cast, inca- 
 pable of future development or alteration. I 
 believe there is every reason to trust that the 
 world to come is characterized by eternal prog- 
 ress and eternal love. Possibly the new penol- 
 ogy has something to say about the doctrine of 
 eternal punishment. If parents punish children 
 only to correct them, if the school principal is 
 allowed to punish his pupils only to reform 
 them, if the judge of the Juvenile Court is not 
 so much concerned to vindicate the law as to 
 save and restore the youthful law-breaker, if 
 the ultimate goal of all legal punishment is only 
 to protect society and the only complete protec- 
 tion of society lies in the reformation of the 
 criminal, then the great possibility suggests it- 
 self that this highest human conception of crime 
 and punishment cannot be higher than God's 
 and the doctrine of eternal punishment--contin- 
 uing forever and achieving nothing— is made 
 simply impossible in the face of the new penol- 
 ogy. That the hell which begins in this life will 
 
 [81] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 continue in the life to come is altogether prob- 
 able, though we must make great allowance for 
 the fact that in the life to come we shall be free 
 from these physical bodies which are the source 
 of so much of our trouble. But if hell continues 
 God^s love will also continue, and I do not be- 
 lieve that that love can be eternally set aside, 
 but that somehow, sometime, every soul in the 
 far country will come to itself in deep repent- 
 ance and return to the Father *s house. 
 
 Dr. J. H. Williams, of Redlands, used to tell 
 this story: A revivalist once came to a New 
 England town and swept all before him. The 
 last night he preached vigorously on hell and 
 invited all who wished to go to heaven with him 
 to stand up. All arose except the village phi- 
 lanthropist, a rather eccentric old gentleman, 
 who was unknown to the revivalist. The ex- 
 horter pointed his finger at him and said with- 
 eringly: **My dear friend, what do you expect 
 to do when you go to the other place?'' The 
 reply, spoken in a quiet drawl, was distinctly 
 audible throughout the room. **Well, after 
 what you have been saying about it tonight, I 
 calculate to start in and try to make a few 
 improvements ! ' ' 
 
 Let us have faith to believe that there is no 
 corner in God 's universe where he will not eter- 
 nally be trying to make improvements! 
 
 [82] 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 RELIGION IN DAILY LIFE 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 RELIGION IN DAILY LIFE 
 
 THE darkest problem of life is the mystery 
 of evil. If there is a God, and if he is good, 
 why does he permit a world to exist with the 
 pain and suffering, the sin and sorrow of this 
 dark world in which we live? Does it not seem 
 sometimes * * as if some lesser God had made the 
 world *^? Are there not moments in all our lives 
 when the terrible spectacle of war, immorality 
 and greed, of man's inhumanity to man, the 
 cries of pain and anguish, the mute appeals 
 from the eyes of those who suffer, call us to re- 
 bellion against a world in which such things are 
 Ijossible ? Do we not cry out with Omar : 
 
 "Ah, Love I could you and I with Him conspire 
 To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, 
 Would not we shatter it to bits — and then 
 Remould it nearer to the Heart's desire!" 
 
 To this dark problem two solutions have been 
 proposed which deserve attention. The first is 
 the ancient Hebrew solution. It had the merit 
 of great simplicity: the suffering and pain 
 which come into your life, come as the punish- 
 ment for the sins you have committed. If you 
 lived a perfectly righteous life none of these 
 
 [85] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 terrible things could happen to you. This was 
 the orthodoxy against which the Book of Job 
 protested. That great drama of the inner life 
 tells the story of Job, a God-fearing, evil-hating 
 man upon whom fell terrible calamities in swift 
 succession. His friends hasten to advise him 
 that all these must be in punishment for some 
 hideous secret sin which he has kept from the 
 rest of the world. Job protests his innocence 
 of any crime worthy of so overwhelming chas- 
 tisement and in the great oath of clearing he 
 maintains the integrity of his ways before 
 God. 
 
 To this protest of the Book of Job Jesus 
 added the weight of his teaching when he asked 
 the Pharisees of his day if they counted those 
 on whom the tower of Siloam fell or the Gali- 
 leans whose blood Pilate mingled with the sac- 
 rifices as sinners above other men. Yet this 
 idea that all suffering is punishment for sin had 
 a curious revival at the time of the San Fran- 
 cisco earthquake and fire, when I actually heard 
 people in the Southern California city where I 
 then lived announce that this disaster was a 
 judgment on San Francisco for its wickedness ! 
 Now it is true, doubtless, that honesty is the 
 best policy and that, by and large, the loyalty 
 of any man to moral standards makes in the 
 direction of comfort and prosperity. It is ulti- 
 mately true, of course, that the way of the 
 transgressor is hard. But it is no longer toler- 
 able for modern men and women to turn the 
 
 [86] 
 
Religion in Daily Life 
 
 text around and assure everyone who finds the 
 way hard before him that he is but receiving 
 the just punishment of his transgression. The 
 old orthodox Hebrew explanation of the pres- 
 ence of pain and sorrow does not meet our 
 needs. 
 
 Over against this ancient solution there is a 
 new one, fresh and crisp, with the paint still 
 gleaming on it. It is the solution presented by 
 our Christian Science friends : There is no evil, 
 no pain, no disease, no suffering. God is all and 
 in all. God cannot know or behold these things. 
 Hence they have no real existence; they are 
 mere errors of mortal mind. This solution is 
 even simpler than the old Hebrew orthodoxy, 
 but it has a very painful defect — what you 
 drive out at the door comes promptly back in at 
 the window. ** A rose by any other name would 
 smell as sweet," and if all the evil, pain, disease 
 and sorrow in the world are mere errors of 
 mortal mind we have only to change the form 
 of our original question and it still haunts us 
 as before : If God is good and all in all, if pain 
 and disease and evil have no real existence, why 
 did he not create a world also free from these 
 errors of mortal mind? I don't care whether 
 you call wife-beating a sin or merely an error 
 of mortal mind, the problem of what to do with 
 the wife-beater is still before the court. The 
 disease that laid low Eobert Louis Stevenson 
 may be tuberculosis or it may be merely an 
 error of mortal mind, but in either case the 
 
 [87] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 problem is not essentially different — Stevenson 
 is gone in the very prime of his powers. 
 
 I confess that I have no completely satisfac- 
 tory solution to this dark question, nor have I 
 been able to discover one in my reading. But 
 there are some considerations which it seems 
 to me point in the direction of a solution, and 
 there are some practical helps for actually 
 meeting the concrete problem in daily life which 
 are of comfort and which I can set forth to you. 
 There is light enough to travel by, even here. 
 
 Let us take up the problem of moral evil. The 
 possibility of doing wrong seems to be abso- 
 lutely essential to any rugged or vigorous mo- 
 rality. Goodness can only achieve the grandeur 
 of moral character when it is not automatic, but 
 freely chosen in the face of evil. Of course, as 
 John Fiske long ago pointed out, it is easy to 
 ask, * * Just how much evil, then, do you think is 
 necessary I ' ' But the question can be squarely 
 met: **Not a bit of evil is necessary; only the 
 possibility of it. ' ' As a matter of fact, I believe 
 that evil is not eternal, and that ultimately it 
 shall cease to be, not because it is impossible 
 but because it is not chosen. 
 
 A capital illustration may be found in the dif- 
 ference between a mechanical orchestrion and 
 a symphony orchestra. The orchestrion is a 
 clever mechanical device. A roll of perforated 
 paper is fed over a series of openings commu- 
 nicating by means of air pressure with vari- 
 ous sets of musical instruments — piano, flute, 
 
 [88] 
 
Religion in Daily Life 
 
 drums, cymbals, etc. If the record has been 
 correctly perforated the tempo of the resulting 
 music is mathematically exact; if the instru- 
 ments are first correctly tuned the harmony is 
 equally perfect. A fine orchestrion is worth lis- 
 tening to. In an orchestra the situation is dif- 
 ferent. Here you have fifty or sixty different 
 players. Each artist has to learn how to tune 
 up his instrument, how to play it, how to read 
 the score, how to interpret and respond to the 
 conductor's signals. The tuning up of an or- 
 chestra is an ear-torturing experience. An 
 orchestra rehearsal with the violins coming in 
 half a beat late, or the trombone four beats too 
 soon, is filled with considerable error of mortal 
 mind. But in the end, when your orchestra is 
 trained, you have music which is flexible and 
 expressive, which can interpret shades of mean- 
 ing and heights of aspiration forever out of 
 range of the orchestrion ; for behind the orches- 
 tra are living human spirits responding to the 
 interpretative genius of the leader. 
 
 So I believe it is with the world. God might 
 have made us all incapable of doing wrong- 
 mere pipes in a mechanical orchestrion. But 
 God has not made that kind of world. He is 
 making a world which is more like a great or- 
 chestra, where each one of us must tune his own 
 instrument and learn to play the score and re- 
 spond to the signals of the Leader. We are in 
 the tuning-up period now. But be patient, mas- 
 ter your own instrument, learn the score and 
 
 [89] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 gradually the perfect music will emerge, even 
 as the Pilgrims' Chorus emerges from the Ve- 
 nusberg music in Tannhauser, 
 
 From the problem of moral evil let us turn 
 now to the pain and suffering, often unde- 
 served, often so utterly irreconciliable with the 
 way in which we should order the world were 
 we in supreme control. Here is a mother bear- 
 ing six or eight children, doing heroic service 
 in the world, and passing her last years not in 
 peaceful enjoyment of work well done but 
 racked with disease and pain. Here is a father 
 who has tried to be a good father to his chil- 
 dren, only to find at last that they do not all 
 rise up to call him blessed, but that the son who 
 bears his name has dragged it in the dirt, and 
 that all the last feeble years of life must be 
 spent in unremitting toil to pay his obligations 
 and save him from the penitentiary. Here is a 
 working man, who wanted to work for an honest 
 living, breaking down with disease in an unsani- 
 tary factory and seeing his half -grown children 
 forced into the mill. If these are the ways of 
 God, how can they be justified! 
 
 Probably they cannot be justified with our 
 present incomplete knowledge of the entire 
 scheme of things and our limited outlook into 
 this vast, sounding house of labor. We can only 
 trust 
 
 "That nothing walks with aimless feet; 
 That not one life shall be destroyed, 
 Or cast as rubbish to the void, 
 When God hath made the pile complete." 
 [90] 
 
Religion in Daily Life 
 
 But in the meantime here are some considera- 
 tions which should not be left out of the ac- 
 count; For one thing, we need to guard our 
 imaginations. Through the wonderful power 
 of the imagination we can gather all the sor- 
 rows of the world together and so concentrate 
 them upon ourselves that the burden is abso- 
 lutely overwhelming. But as a matter of fact, 
 the burden is not so concentrated. In our own 
 daily life, when we come to think of it, we have 
 always found sufficient courage to meet the 
 trials that have come to us. Indeed, there seem 
 to be latent powers of endurance and resist- 
 ance, the depth of which we little dream of until 
 some great emergency calls them up. In the 
 hour of our darkest trouble we have not really 
 desired pity. We have been too busy fighting 
 to stop and feel sorry for ourselves. When in 
 our imaginations we gather together all the pain 
 of the world, we ought to gather together also 
 all the world's store of courage, all the latent 
 resources with which to meet this pain. It is 
 also worth remembering that there are certain 
 natural anesthetics which come into play. Be- 
 yond certain limits suffering ceases and uncon- 
 sciousness begins. It is the power of the 
 imagination which makes railroad accidents 
 and steamship wrecks seem so terrible. Deaths 
 which take place one by one, suffering which 
 goes on all through the city in isolated individ- 
 uals—these things do not appal our imagina- 
 tions as do a hundred deaths in a wreck or 
 
 [91] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 some other accident. Yet the problem is not 
 essentially different. 
 
 There is a consideration of prime impor- 
 tance, also, in the effect which suffering, defeat 
 and loss may have on character. If we receive 
 these things in the right spirit they may ripen 
 and mellow our lives. Certainly we turn in 
 hours of need not to those who have escaped all 
 fires of suffering and trial and have lived a but- 
 terfly existence in the world, flitting from one 
 pleasure to another, but rather to those who 
 have been down into the shadows and who have 
 emerged with a new light of sympathy in their 
 eyes and with hands quicker unto good. There 
 is a vast deal of truth in Stephen Phillip's 
 poem, **Marpessa'': 
 
 "Yet I, being human, human sorrow miss, 
 The half of music, I have heard men say, 
 Is to have grieved. 
 
 Out of our sadness have we made this world 
 
 So beautiful; Tlie sea sighs in our brain 
 
 And in our heart that yearning of the moon. 
 
 To all this sorrow was I born, and since 
 
 Out of a human womb I came, I am 
 
 Not eager to forego it ; I would scorn 
 
 To elude the heaviness and take the joy, 
 
 For pain came with the sap, pangs with the bloom.'* 
 
 Possibly there is some ground for faith that, if 
 out of suffering such spiritual fruitage may 
 come, suffering itself is not wholly meaningless 
 or evil. 
 This opens the way for a further considera- 
 
 [92] 
 
Religion in Daily Life 
 
 tion which must ever be a powerful one with 
 Christian men and women — the fact of the suf- 
 ferings of Jesus. It means much to us that he 
 was '*a man of sorrows and acquainted with 
 grief. ' ' If we cannot fully unravel the mystery 
 of suffering we can at least bear it quietly and 
 bravely, as did he. I was much impressed a few 
 years ago by reading of the hospital experience 
 of a man who was stricken down in a strange 
 city, taken to a Roman Catholic hospital and 
 operated on. As he came out of the anesthetic 
 he saw hanging on the wall at the foot of his 
 bed a crucifix. It brought to him this inspira- 
 tion, that strengthened him through all the days 
 of pain that followed : * * He bore his suffering. 
 I can bear mine!'* If **it behooved Christ to 
 suffer these things and to enter into his glory*' 
 then our faith is not groundless that suffering 
 is not the irrational thing it sometimes seems. 
 
 But, after all, the important thing is not to 
 explain defeat and suffering, but to meet these 
 things — to conquer them and not be gently- 
 complaining victims. Whether we like the 
 world or not we are in it, and we had better 
 make the best of it. You remember Margaret 
 Fuller said, **I accept the Universe," and Car- 
 lyle commented, **Egad! she'd better!" The 
 function of religion is not merely to suggest 
 theoretical solutions, but to help men and 
 women to meet in a practical and efficient way 
 the buffetings of daily life. 
 
 Here are some practical suggestions for the 
 
 [93] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 application of religion to the every-day situa- 
 tions and difficulties of our lives. How to live 
 above the power of evil and of sorrow may 
 be even more important than a philosophical 
 explanation. 
 
 First: Believe in God, 
 
 This was the answer that came to Job out of 
 the whirlwind: 
 
 "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the 
 earth 
 When the morning stars sang together, 
 And all the sons of God shouted for joyt" 
 
 The world all about you is wonderful beyond 
 your finding out, filled with intelligence and 
 power. Think of the wisdom that guides the 
 stars, that operates in light and snow and ice, 
 that teaches the wild oxen their ways and the 
 eagle to build her nest. Can you not trust that 
 this wisdom which so marvellously permeates 
 and guides the universe has not fallen short in 
 your daily life? Can you not believe that even 
 here, in spite of seeming contradiction, there is 
 a Divine Wisdom which rules and a Love which 
 watches over all? Is it probable that your little 
 corner of the universe has been overlooked by 
 ihe Supreme Intelligence? Bryant, watching 
 a lonely waterfowl sailing south against a gray 
 autumn sky, is moved to say : 
 
 "He who from zone to zone 
 Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight, 
 In the long way that I must tread alone 
 Will lead my steps aright." 
 [94] 
 
Religion in Daily Life 
 
 And Browning puts it even more nobly when 
 he says : 
 
 "If I stoop 
 Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud, 
 It is but for a time; I press God's lamp 
 Close to my breast: its splendor, soon or late, 
 Will pierce the gloom: I shall emerge one day." 
 
 Second: Believe in Yourself. 
 
 Believe in yourself as God^s child, as vitally 
 related to him, even as the leaves are related to 
 the tree or the bay out yonder to the great ocean 
 beyond. Believe that your life has not been 
 flung meaningless to the void, but that God has 
 sent you here for some high purpose. Say to 
 yourself with Whitman : 
 
 * * No longer do I seek good fortune — ^I myself 
 am good fortune.'* 
 
 Believe that whatever happens to you hap- 
 pens because it bears you some message you 
 need to hear. **Do not pray for easy lives! 
 Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for 
 tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers 
 equal to your tasks ! Then the doing of your 
 work shall be no miracle. But you shall be a 
 miracle. Every day you shall wonder at your- 
 self, at the richness of life which has come in 
 you by the grace of God.'' 
 
 Third: Replace Fear hy Trust, 
 
 We all know what fear does— it paralyzes 
 people both physically and mentally. A fright- 
 ened army is an army half conquered. Fear 
 
 [95] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 can upset almost all the functions of the body. 
 No person in the grip of fear can have either 
 physical health or mental poise and effi- 
 ciency. What the great fears do the little fears 
 do also in more subtle ways. We know the little 
 fears under the name of worry. Worry im- 
 pedes all the processes of digestion. It reduces 
 the size of the capillary arteries and impedes 
 the circulation of the blood and consequently 
 the removal of waste tissue from the body. A 
 prominent physician said to me: **When a man 
 comes into my office complaining that his stom- 
 ach is all upset and he can't digest his food, I 
 make him sit down in that chair and I look him 
 square in the eye and say: *See here, you are 
 worrying about something. The first thing to 
 do is to stop that worry.* '' 
 
 If we could replace fear and worry by a trust- 
 ful attitude of mind we should remove a large 
 part of the suffering in the world and prepare 
 ourselves to meet with double courage and effi- 
 ciency whatever might yet remain. But howl 
 By the practical application of religion to life. 
 Here is a method worth trying. I don't know 
 altogether where it came from — it grew. But 
 I know it will work. Every night as you go to 
 sleep make it a practice to relax all your mus- 
 cles and then quietly and peacefully repeat to 
 yourself some such little formula as this : **I am 
 God's child. He loves me. Underneath are the 
 everlasting arms and round about me is his 
 great love. As the day is even so shall my 
 
 [96] 
 
Religion in Daily Life 
 
 strength be. There is nothing in all the world 
 of which I need to be afraid. Because I am 
 God^s child these are the words that are going 
 to govern my life ; bravely, quietly, calmly, pa- 
 tiently, lovingly, trustfully and with perfect 
 serenity and self-control.'' 
 
 Fourth: Replace Hatred by Love. 
 
 The physiological and mental effects of ha- 
 tred are akin to those of fear. ** Green-eyed 
 jealousy'' is not mere poetry — it represents the 
 ultimate physiological effect of hatred and jeal- 
 ousy. Hatred will draw ugly lines on your face 
 and on your soul. If we could eliminate from 
 the world hatred, the holding of grudges, the 
 spirit of revenge, how much of the world's bur- 
 den of sorrow would be lifted! You can put 
 away your share. **I have never willingly 
 planted a thorn in any man's bosom," said Lin- 
 coln. Make that the standard of your attitude 
 toward men and then go further and say, 
 ** Neither have I permitted any man to plant a 
 thorn in my bosom. ' ' 
 
 Fifth: Work! 
 
 Work because you at least want to pull your 
 own weight in the world, but, deeper than that, 
 work because work is one of the world's great- 
 est sacraments. Many a man borne down with 
 his own sorrows or oppressed with the burdens 
 of the world has turned with a kind of blind 
 instinct to bury himself in his work. And as he 
 worked dumbly in the darkness there came 
 
 [97] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 gradually light and comfort and understanding. 
 Why? Because work is sacramental and 
 through it we enter into living fellowship with 
 the Father who **worketh even until now!'* 
 
 Sixth: Resolutely Cultivate Good Cheer, 
 
 Count it a deep disgrace to be grouchy and 
 resolve to consume your own smoke and show a 
 shining, happy face to the world. 
 
 "A naked house^ a naked moor, 
 A shivering pool before the door; 
 A garden bare of flowers and fruit 
 And poplars at the garden foot; 
 Such is the house that I live in 
 Bleak without and bare within." 
 
 Your house of life may be no more attractive 
 than that at first glance. 
 
 "Yet shall your ragged moor receive 
 The incomparable pomp of eve, 
 And the cold glories of the dawn 
 Behind your shivering trees be drawn; 
 And when the wind from place to place 
 Doth the unmoored cloud galleons chase, 
 Your garden gloom and gleam again 
 With leaping sun and glancing rain; 
 Here shall the wizard moon ascend 
 The heavens in the crimson end 
 Of day's declining splendor; here 
 The army of the stars appear I" 
 
 Good cheer is largely a matter of will-power, of 
 conquering our moods, of resolutely treading 
 down self-pity and cleaving ever to the sunnier 
 
 [98] 
 
Religion in Daiijif\\LfffO\'\'i'-^ 
 
 side of doubt. You doubtless remember Alice 
 Freeman Palmer's experience with the little 
 tenement children in the Boston vacation school. 
 ^^Tell us/' they cried — these children of the 
 tenements — *Hell us how to be happy I'' And 
 the answer was filled with wisdom : * * See some- 
 thing beautiful every day; learn something 
 beautiful every day; help somebody every 
 day. ' ' Eead the story and you will see that the 
 prescription worked well in the Boston tene- 
 ments. It will work in other places equally well ! 
 Suppose one orders his life according to 
 these spiritual ideals — what will happen? I 
 cannot guarantee that pain and suffering will 
 cease for you, nor that if you are exposed to 
 smallpox or yellow fever or typhoid you may 
 not have to battle with disease; nor that dis- 
 aster may not come to your business ; nor that 
 death may not step within the circle of those 
 who are near and dear to you. No one can 
 guarantee these things. Those who pretend to 
 do so simply delude themselves. But this can 
 be guaranteed without equivocation: If any 
 man will order his life according to these high 
 spiritual principles he shall not be left a help- 
 less victim before whatever trial may beat upon 
 him. He shall have in these ideals, and in all 
 they have contributed to his life as he has stead- 
 fastly held to them, a refuge, a source of 
 strength in the hour of need, an equipment of 
 weapons with which to fight a good fight in the 
 day of battle. 
 
 [99] 
 
''iyriP':hel^tifp Toward Religion 
 
 After all, the test of life is old age. There 
 are men who as they grow old grow hard, dis- 
 illusioned, embittered, rebellious. The things 
 to which they have given their energies have 
 gone with youth and old age is empty and 
 lonely. But to any man or woman who cher- 
 ishes these spiritual ideals old age shall be not 
 something to be dreaded, but something to be 
 welcomed serenely. To grow old with these 
 ideals is to mellow, to find life ever more inter- 
 esting, to face death with 
 
 " ... in my heart 
 Some late lark singing — 
 The sundown splendid and serene." 
 
 Those on the Atlantic Coast who looked into the 
 face of Edward Everett Hale and those on the 
 Pacific Coast who loved John Knox McLean 
 know how serene the faces and how beautiful 
 the wisdom of old men may be. 
 
 [100] 
 

 CHAPTER VII 
 THE CHUECH 
 
J 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 THE CHURCH 
 
 ESUS said very little about the Church but 
 a great deal about the Kingdom of God. 
 He was more interested in establishing the 
 rulership of God in the lives of men than in set- 
 ting forth any husks of organization. He wrote 
 no creed, established no ritual, ordained no 
 bishops. He left his followers free to organize 
 as might prove wise in each day and generation 
 to hasten the coming of the Kingdom. The 
 Church of each age must be judged by its effi- 
 ciency in getting done in the world the things 
 Jesus sought to accomplish. 
 
 But to understand the Church of today and to 
 be delivered from taking certain ecclesiastical 
 pretensions too seriously we need to know 
 something of its history. The Christian Church 
 began with the immediate followers of Jesus 
 who considered themselves regular members of 
 the Jewish Church, but believed that they were 
 especially enlightened by their conviction that 
 the Messiah had come. These first Christians 
 had no intention of separating from Judaism — 
 they were simply good Jews drawn together by 
 common loyalty to Christ. They looked to his 
 inner group of the twelve for leadership, and 
 [103] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 they appointed seven other men to serve tables 
 and to distribute ahns to the poor of their num- 
 ber — who were by no means few. They gave 
 generously to the common funds, some contrib- 
 uting all they possessed, though this was not 
 compulsory. 
 
 But as Christianity overflowed Judaism into 
 the Graeco-Eoman world and churches com- 
 posed largely of Gentiles sprang up in the track 
 of St. Paul and other missionaries the Church 
 took on slightly more elaborate forms of organ- 
 ization. Local officers seem to have been the 
 ^'episkopos'' or ** bishop,'* a Greek term mean- 
 ing overseer and practically corresponding in 
 secular organizations of that day to our term 
 president, and the *'preshuteroi,'* or elders, 
 whose offices were probably derived from the 
 organization of the synagogue. Besides these 
 there were deacons to look after the poor, and 
 apostles, teachers, and prophets — many of them 
 practically itinerant evangelists. The early 
 churches seem to have been self-governing and 
 were composed largely of slaves. It must be 
 remembered that almost all school teachers and 
 even physicians of the period were slaves. Slav- 
 ery implied social misfortune, but not neces- 
 sarily ignorance. The meetings of these early 
 churches were held at night and at private 
 houses — Whence the Pauline salutation, **to the 
 church in thy house'' — and the services were 
 exceedingly simple. They included a sort of 
 basket lunch called the love-feast. Scripture 
 
 [104] 
 
The Church 
 
 reading, prayer, singing of psalms and testi- 
 monies. Then the inquirers and all not defi- 
 nitely committed to Christianity were sent out 
 (Latin, ^'missa/' whence our word **mass** for 
 the Roman Catholic eucharist) and the group 
 of Christian believers remaining ate the sym- 
 bolic Lord 's Supper together. 
 
 In 313 Christianity became a tolerated reli- 
 gion and in 325 Constantine proclaimed it the 
 official religion of the Empire. From now on 
 the simplicity of the earlier days was gone. 
 Vast masses of people became Christians by 
 wholesale — hardly more than baptized pagans. 
 The Christian leaders also found themselves 
 with the whole machinery of organized pagan- 
 ism turned over to them. At the same time 
 Constantine transferred his capital to Constan- 
 tinople and left the bishop of Rome as the most 
 influential person in the West. Then grew up 
 feudalism with its ideal of a dual organization 
 of mankind — a Holy Roman Empire with the 
 emperor at its head and a Holy Roman Church 
 with the pope at its head. The Medieval Church 
 was the result of these events and forces. The 
 cup was denied the laity, the power and impor- 
 tance of the priesthood increased, the monastic 
 orders grew apace, the saints took the places of 
 the local gods and goddesses dear to the com- 
 mon people, Christmas and Easter were substi- 
 tuted for old pagan festivals, the bishop of 
 Rome became pontifex maximus and it looked 
 as if Christianity had conquered the Roman 
 [105] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 Empire. We now realize that it was more 
 nearly true that the Roman Empire had con- 
 quered Christianity! 
 
 Yet this great Medieval Catholic Church, half 
 pagan as it was, had its own share of beauty 
 and spiritual power. The great Gothic cathe- 
 drals still stand as witnesses of a religious life, 
 the secret depths of which we imperfectly un- 
 derstand as out of the noise of the modern 
 street we step beneath their great arches or 
 gaze reverently down their dim and silent 
 aisles. And St. Francis of Assisi, whose life 
 had so little to do with cathedrals but who lived 
 out of doors along the roadside with the birds 
 and the flowers, the lepers and beggars, the 
 Wolf of Gubbio and Brother Sun and Sister 
 Water — this little poor man of Assisi, poet, 
 philanthropist, mystic that he was — makes it 
 impossible for us to count even the Middle Ages 
 utterly **dark.'' 
 
 After the Middle Ages came the Renaissance 
 — that great awakening of the human spirit in 
 all departments of life. It expressed itself first 
 in literature, architecture and art, and later in 
 religion. Wyclif, Huss and Savonarola were 
 silenced, but Luther at last set Europe aflame 
 with a fire that could not be quenched. The 
 Reformation was a protest against the veneer 
 of Roman paganism and the dogmas of medie- 
 val scholasticism, and a rediscovery and re- 
 newal of loyalty to the simpler Christianity 
 that had existed before the days of Constantine. 
 [106] 
 
The Church 
 
 The Reformation was not uniform — indeed it 
 shows two distinct types and many variations. 
 One type was rather conservative. It parted 
 with no more of medieval forms than was abso- 
 lutely necessary. It is exemplified by the Lu- 
 theran and Episcopal Churches which, while 
 vigorously Protestant in their theology, while 
 turning the service from Latin into the common 
 tongue and banishing celibacy and the confes- 
 sional, yet retained the cross and vestments and 
 titles, the frescoed saints and stained glass win- 
 dows, the church year and the candles on the 
 altar. The sterner and more radical type was 
 led by Calvin — in its most extreme form by the 
 Anabaptists — and refused to countenance any- 
 thing that might bring back memories of Rome. 
 The vestments were replaced by the ordinary 
 scholar's gown of the educated gentleman, the 
 frescoes were whitewashed, the stained glass 
 windows broken, Christmas and Easter ban- 
 ished, bishops and priests expelled, and not only 
 were the candles taken off the altars but the 
 altars themselves were pulled away from the 
 walls and transformed into communion tables, 
 behind which stood the ministers, facing the 
 people. The old whitewashed churches of Hol- 
 land bear striking witness to the rigor of this 
 type in the Reformation. 
 
 Now out of this Reformation movement come 
 the various Protestant denominations of today. 
 The Episcopalians and Lutherans descend his- 
 torically from the more conservative wing of 
 [107] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 the Reformation party. The Calvinistic wing 
 expresses itself in the Reformed Church in Hol- 
 land and the Presbyterian Church in Scotland 
 and in the extreme Puritan party in England. 
 Out of this last have come the Baptists, the 
 English Congregationalists, and by way of Ley- 
 den, the *' Mayflower '' and Plymouth Rock, the 
 American Congregationalists. From these pri- 
 mary denominations secondary ones have 
 arisen — the Methodist as the result of a great 
 movement for religious quickening in the 
 Church of England led by the Wesleys, the 
 Unitarian as a protest against the neo- Calvin- 
 istic theology of New England Congregation- 
 alists, the Disciples or Christians out of the 
 Baptist and Presbyterian Churches of the Mid- 
 dle West, and finally the Christian Scientists 
 
 out of Boston! 
 
 Possibly it has been worth while wading 
 through all this historical outline in order to 
 realize why things are as they are today, to 
 understand how utterly anachronistic is the sur- 
 vival of some of our denominational differences, 
 and to be set free now to face the practical 
 problems which confront not some little denom- 
 ination but the great Church Universal. What 
 to us are vestments or candles or stained glass 
 windows or prayer-books or the question of ob- 
 serving Lent or Easter? In all these things 
 we are perfectly willing to give every man — or 
 church — utmost freedom to follow the way that 
 may best minister to his spiritual life. Congre- 
 
 [108] 
 
The Church 
 
 gationalists are keeping Lent and, out in Africa 
 at least, Episcopalians admit non-conformists 
 to communion. The Baptists have practically- 
 given up close communion and most Presbyte- 
 rian Churches are equipped with organs ! My 
 own pulpit is on one side of the church instead 
 of in the middle and I frequently use the 
 prayer-book prayers in the service. These 
 things are no longer of sufficient importance to 
 divide the Church of Christ as it faces its really 
 great task in the world ! 
 
 What is the task of the modern Church? To 
 serve the moral and spiritual needs of the 
 world, to do the great thing that was ever 
 nearest to the heart of Jesus — build here in the 
 earth the Kingdom of Heaven. The Church 
 should stand in the crowded ways of modern 
 life as one that serves. It should be a great 
 public servant in matters of morality and 
 religion. 
 
 In order that we may really face our own day 
 and get as far as possible from the terminology 
 of the Middle Ages, let me suggest to you this 
 parable: The Church is a great public service 
 corporation. It is strikingly like a public serv- 
 ice corporation in three ways: First of all, it 
 supplies great common necessities which every 
 man must have. The Church is a purveyor of 
 the water of life. It seeks to bring light into 
 the darkness of ignorance. It dispenses power 
 to those whose moral machinery has stopped; 
 it seeks to put men in communication with one 
 [109] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 another as brothers and with God as loyal chil- 
 dren. Its transportation service is tremendous 
 in bringing men up to the level of high ideals, 
 and its educational work is called for wherever 
 children are being trained for life. 
 
 The Church and the public service corpora- 
 tion are also bound by one common and inexo- 
 rable law: that, in the case of either, competi- 
 tion is almost criminally wasteful. Students of 
 social problems now uniformly recognize that 
 it is an economic waste to have two telephone 
 companies, two electric light companies, two 
 street car systems competing against one an- 
 other. The public pays for the duplication of 
 equipment and overhead expense. As one looks 
 at the church life of a typical city how utterly 
 foolish seem the location of the Protestant 
 churches, the failure to establish any real par- 
 ishes for which the churches shall be definitely 
 responsible and the compelling of poor neigh- 
 borhoods to be religiously starved while rich 
 neighborhoods are religiously overfed. 
 
 Again, the Church and the public service cor- 
 poration have this in common : their continued 
 existence depends absolutely on the efficiency 
 of the service they render. Wise public service 
 corporations realize this and so seek publicity 
 and maximum efficiency. They know that they 
 can put off the day of government ownership 
 only as they do the work in their field more 
 cheaply and effectively than the government 
 can. Since the advent of the parcel post the 
 
 [110] 
 
The Church 
 
 express companies have seen a great light. The 
 Church has a similar lesson to learn. It must 
 win the respect and loyalty of men, not by living 
 on its past reputation but by demonstrating its 
 power to render service today and tomorrow. 
 The world is not going to be interested in 
 theories of apostolic succession. As Winston 
 Churchill says: ^^The successors to the apostles 
 are apostles. ' ' The church that meets the twen- 
 tieth century as eagerly and hopefully as the 
 apostles met the first century is in the real suc- 
 cession. The world cares very little that this 
 Church came over in the *^ Mayflower '* — it is 
 more interested in what it can do for those 
 that are now coming over in the ^ * Vaterland, ' ' 
 the *^ Olympic,'' the *' Mongolia'' and the 
 *^Chiyo Maru." 
 
 Here are four tests which modern life uncon- 
 sciously but relentlessly requires of the Church 
 today : 
 
 (1) Is it sincerely seeking effective church 
 unity? How to unite the Christian forces of 
 America and organize them for their common 
 task is one of the supremely important issues 
 of today. Denominations which think they 
 have a monopoly of religion, so that no commu- 
 nity is complete without them, must give way to 
 a respect for the value and dignity of all Chris- 
 tian churches and must show a spirit of humil- 
 ity rather than arrogance. We must have an 
 effective working unity of all Christians of 
 whatever name before we can face the problems 
 [111] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 of present-day city life — and the need in the 
 country is, if possible, even more urgent. 
 
 How shall effective church unity cornel 
 I^irst of all, not by absorption. We shall not all 
 become Episcopalians or Baptists or even Con- 
 gregationalists. That is the ideal of Christian 
 unity denominations sometimes seem to hold — 
 we are all to accept their standards. They take 
 the attitude of the tiger in the jingle : 
 
 "There was a young lady of Niger 
 Who went for a ride on a tiger; 
 
 They returned from the ride with the lady inside — 
 And a smile on the face of the tiger I" 
 
 But church unity is not coming that way I 
 
 Then there are others who seem to think that 
 church unity may be achieved by what might be 
 called the method of the least common denomi- 
 nator. The Episcopalian shall give up his 
 prayer book, the Baptist his inunersion, the 
 Methodist his presiding elder, and at last we 
 shall get down to the elements common to all 
 denominations. 
 
 But these denominational peculiarities are 
 largely temperamental and have certain real 
 values. Abolish them and they would begin to 
 grow up again next week. In New Haven, 
 where Congregationalism is overwhelmingly in 
 the majority, the local Congregational churches 
 differ among themselves very much as the dif- 
 ferent denominations do in Western cities. 
 If not by absorption and if not by the method 
 [112] 
 
The Church 
 
 of the least common denominator, how then 
 shall a working Christian unity be achieved! 
 The answer of history seems tolerably clear — 
 by federation. How was our American nation 
 formed out of the group of jealous, highly self- 
 conscious colonies along the Atlantic seaboard 
 one hundred and fifty years ago? Not by ab- 
 sorption — Virginia did not swallow up Connect- 
 icut. Not by elimination of all points of 
 difference — Massachusetts did not make many 
 concessions to the slacker standards of New 
 York or Delaware. An effective union came by 
 federation in face of a common peril and to ac- 
 complish a common task. Each colony retained 
 local self-government, retained its customs and 
 prejudices, but each gradually learned to add 
 to these things a new element of loyalty to the 
 larger thing which became at last the nation. 
 O for some great-hearted George Washington 
 to summon our provincial religious denomina- 
 tions to rise out of their suicidal local jealousies 
 to meet the great task of Christendom! 
 
 (2) 75 it reaching youth? Here is this great 
 stream of childhood with its never-dying splen- 
 dor and its never-ending song still pouring in 
 through the gates of birth. What is the Church 
 doing to bring to every child in the world, as 
 its life expands, the great seed-thoughts of 
 Christian truth? How efficient are our Sunday 
 schools and other means of Christian educa- 
 tion! How efficient are they in our big strong 
 churches! How efficient in our little struggling 
 
 [113] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 churches I How efficient in the tenement dis- 
 tricts of our cities, where the streets swarm 
 with little children? It is more important to 
 meet this test than to be absolutely sure you 
 have been baptized in the only possibly correct 
 fashion. A parish house where the ten com- 
 mandments are taught on Sunday and where 
 during the week this same moral code is put 
 into operation in clean athletics, wholesome rec- 
 reation and good-fellowship; a social-center 
 building open every day and night, dedicated to 
 character building and providing for the youth 
 of the community a better rendezvous than the 
 saloon; even a basketball court on a vacant lot 
 supervised for the welfare of the young life of 
 the neighborhood — such activities as these very 
 properly go far to endear the Church to the gen- 
 eration in the midst of which it must do its 
 work. 
 
 (3) 75 it delivering a social message? We 
 are living in an era of social reconstruction. 
 The culmination of a great mechanical era is 
 symbolized in the completion of the Panama 
 Canal. The engineering of the future is going 
 to be social engineering. Something like the 
 same brains, energy and money that have been 
 poured into the solving of physical problems 
 are now to be turned toward our social prob- 
 lems. We are building something more beau- 
 tiful than any slender Gothic spire that ever 
 lifted itself against the sky — ^we are building a 
 better civilization of brotherly men. The emer- 
 [114] 
 
The Church 
 
 gence of the juvenile court, the Pittsburgh Sur- 
 vey, the Lloyd George budget, the modern 
 drama, such a magazine as the *^ Survey,'' the 
 growth of Socialism — all point to the awakened 
 social conscience of our day. 
 
 For this day of social reconstruction the 
 Church has a message. It is no new-fangled 
 message hurriedly improvised for the occasion, 
 but a message deeply rooted in the past, even 
 as far back as the days when Moses argued with 
 Pharaoh concerning hours of labor, wages and 
 industrial conditions on the banks of the Nile ; a 
 message inevitable from the great teachings of 
 Jesus concerning the sacredness of childhood, 
 the dignity of womanhood, the supreme value 
 of every human soul. Whatever else Jesus 
 taught or did not teach, he certainly taught 
 brotherhood, not as a beautiful sentiment but as 
 a social responsibility. That every child should 
 have a chance physically and spiritually to 
 grow up into a well-rounded manhood or wom- 
 anhood, that every man should have his just 
 share of the product of his toil, that no woman 
 should be forced into any form of slavery, that 
 reform, not vengeance, should rule our prisons, 
 that arbitration and justice rather than brute 
 force and war should rule in international rela- 
 tions — these things constitute the social mes- 
 sage of Christianity and they root deep into the 
 very center of it. If the Church is adequately 
 to serve the twentieth century, it must deliver 
 this social message. It must deliver it from 
 [115] 
 
The Drift Toward Religion 
 
 its pulpit at the morning service as of equal 
 dignity with the individual message it has 
 stressed so long. And it must incarnate its 
 message in practical service to the community 
 by so building its edifices that they shall not 
 stand cold, aloof and silent all the week, but so 
 that every day and every night they shall stand 
 open, radiant with light and vibrant with broth- 
 erhood and all appropriate forms of social serv- 
 ice. It does this on the foreign field already — 
 why not at home? 
 
 (4) Can the Church transfigure the lives of 
 men? The world cannot be saved by any merely 
 social regeneration, though that is part of the 
 whole. The supreme task of the Church is not 
 accomplished until it has brought the individual 
 soul face to face with God. The world is glad 
 Jesus was a carpenter, but at its deepest mo- 
 ments that fact merges into the greater fact 
 that he was the Son of God. It is because 
 through Jesus we come not merely to brother- 
 hood but also to God that we cleave to him. The 
 parable of the Good Samaritan does not stand 
 alone — the tenderer story of the Prodigal Son 
 must ever be bound in the same volume. 
 
 "Oft have I seen at some cathedral door 
 A laborer, pausing in the dust and heat, 
 Lay down his burden, and with reverent feet 
 
 Enter, and cross himself, and on the floor 
 
 Kneel to repeat his paternoster o'er; 
 Far off the noises of the world retreat; 
 The loud vociferations of the street 
 
 Become an undistinguishable roar. 
 
 [116] 
 
The Church 
 
 "So, as I enter here from day to day, 
 
 And leave my burden at this minster gate. 
 Kneeling in prayer, and not ashamed to pray. 
 
 The tumult of the time disconsolate 
 To inarticulate murmurs dies away, 
 WhUe the eternal ages watch and wait." 
 
 This is the last test — can the Church bring 
 men into the very presence of God so that his 
 strength may flow through their weakness and 
 round their restlessness his rest? 
 ' The church that can meet these four tests 
 shall endure and be loved and honored in the 
 world, whatever name it bears and whatever 
 liturgy it follows. 
 
 [117] 
 
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