UC-NRLF 
 
EX LIBRIS 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 FROM THE FUND 
 ESTABLISHED AT YALE 
 
 IN 1927 BY 
 WILLIAM H. CROCKER 
 
 OF THE CLASS OF 1882 
 
 SHEFFIELD SCIENTIFIC SCHOOL 
 
 YALE UNIVERSITY 
 
OTHER BOOKS BY THE 
 SAME AUTHOR 
 
 The Creed of Jesus and Other 
 Sermons 
 
 Social Aspects of the Cross 
 
 Hymns of the Kingdom of God 
 Edited by H. S. COFFIN and A. W. VERNON 
 
 The Same, for use in Baptist Churches 
 REV. CHARLES W. GILKEY, Co-editor 
 
 University Sermons 
 
 The Ten Commandments With a Christian 
 Application to Present Conditions 
 
 Some Christian Convictions 
 
IN A DAY OF 
 SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
I DO not envy those who have to fight 
 the battle of Christianity in the twen- 
 tieth century. Yes, perhaps I do, but 
 it will be a stiff fight. 
 
 MARCUS DODS, 
 
 Later Letters, March 30, 1906. 
 
IN A DAY OF 
 SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 LECTURES ON THE MINISTRY 
 OF THE CHURCH 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY SLOANE COFFIN 
 
 MINISTER IN THE MADISON AVENUE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH AND 
 
 ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR IN THE UNION THEOLOGICAL 
 
 SEMINARY. NEW YORK CITY 
 
 THE FORTY-FOURTH SERIES OF THE 
 
 LYMAN BEECHER LECTURESHIP ON PREACHING 
 
 IN YALE UNIVERSITY 
 
 NEW HAVEN 
 
 YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 LONDON HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 MDCCCCXIX 
 
X///-3/ 
 
 M&r ^ QuM^L^ 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY 
 YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 First published, April, 1918. 
 
 Second printing, January, 1919. 
 
 Third printing, October, 1919. 
 
THE LYMAN BEECHER 
 LECTURESHIP FOUNDATION 
 
 THE Lyman Beecher Fund in the School of Religion, Yale Uni- 
 versity, was established May 2, 1872, by a gift of ten thousand 
 dollars from Henry W. Sage, Esq., then of Brooklyn, New York, 
 in memory of Lyman Beecher, of the Class of 1797, Yale College, 
 who died January 10, 1863. In accordance with the wishes of 
 the donor, this gift was devoted by the Yale Corporation to the 
 establishment of a Foundation "to be designated as 'The Lyman 
 Beecher Lectureship on Preaching,' to be filled from time to time, 
 upon the appointment of the Corporation, by a minister of the 
 Gospel, of any evangelical denomination, who has been markedly 
 successful in the special work of the Christian ministry." With 
 the authorization of the donor, the Corporation, in May, 1882, 
 voted "that henceforth the Lyman Beecher Lecturer shall be 
 invited to lecture on a branch of pastoral theology or on any 
 other topic appropriate to the work of the Christian ministry." 
 In December, 1893, the donor authorized the Corporation "if at 
 any time they should deem it desirable to do so, to appoint a 
 layman instead of a minister to deliver the course of lectures on 
 the Lyman Beecher Foundation." 
 
TO THE MEMORY 
 
 OF AN ENDEARING TEACHER AND 
 ENLIGHTENING FRIEND, NOW WITH GOD, 
 
 MARCUS DODS, 
 
 sometime Principal of New College, Edinburgh, 
 who taught his students to read widely, to face 
 questions with an open mind, to despise cant and 
 be ashamed of laziness, to seek them that are without 
 rather than to please them that are within, to be 
 careful for nothing but loyalty to Christ ; and who 
 saw in his friends excellencies, neither they nor 
 others saw, and which for his sake they would fain 
 attain. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 LECTURE I PAGE 
 
 The Day and the Church . . . .13 
 
 LECTURE II 
 
 The Ministry of Reconciliation . . . .33 
 
 LECTURE III 
 
 The Ministry of Evangelism ..... 53 
 
 LECTURE IV 
 
 The Ministry of Worship ..... 73 
 
 LECTURE V 
 
 The Ministry of Teaching ..... 93 
 
 LECTURE VI 
 
 The Ministry of Organization . . . .113 
 
 LECTURE VII 
 
 The Ministry of Friendship ..... 134 
 
 LECTURE VIII 
 
 Ministers for the Day ...... 154 
 
LECTURE I 
 THE DAY AND THE CHURCH 
 
 IN a sermon, preached on the llth of January, 1852, Frederick 
 W. Robertson uttered a memorable prophecy. He was discussing 
 the various attempts which the human race had made to construct 
 itself into a family by the sword, by an ecclesiastical system, 
 and finally by trade. Britain was then in the heyday of its com- 
 mercial expansion, and had glorified the contemporary advances 
 of civilization in the great exhibition at the Crystal Palace dur- 
 ing the previous months. The political economy which Carlyle 
 fitly called "the dismal science" was in almost universal vogue, 
 and an individualistic piety was the exclusive concern of the 
 churches. Robertson said: "We are told that that which chivalry 
 and honor could not do, personal interest will do. Trade is to 
 bind men together into one family. When they feel it their 
 interest to be one, they will be brothers." Then he prophesied: 
 "Brethren, that which is built on selfishness cannot stand. The 
 system of personal interest must be shivered into atoms. There- 
 fore, we, who have observed the ways of God in the past, are 
 waiting in quiet but awful expectation until He shall confound 
 this system as He has confounded those which have gone before. 
 And it may be effected by convulsions more terrible and more 
 bloody than the world has yet seen. While men are talking of 
 peace, and of the great progress of civi!i7fit:Vn, there is heard in 
 the distance the noise of armies gathering rank on rank; east 
 and west, north and south, are rolling towards us the crushing 
 thunders of universal war." No Hebrew seer ever spoke words 
 
14 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 that have been more strikingly fulfilled. We stand in a world 
 that has been "shivered to atoms." 
 
 And there are some decided advantages in starting out upon 
 one's life work in a day when so clean a sweep has been made 
 of things that were doomed to perish. As men whose task it is 
 to interpret the ways of God to men, you and I may be happy 
 that He has given the reductio ad absurdum to many fallacies 
 that hindered the Church's efforts to shape a Christian world. 
 You will not have to listen to the commonplaces of commercial- 
 istic philosophy that competition is the life of trade and enlight- 
 ened self-interest the path to wisdom. Competition in trade 
 between nations has been a principal cause of ruin and death, and 
 very enlightened self-interest has led to the most colossal blunder 
 in history. You are not likely to hear progress talked of as 
 though there were some principle resident in men and things that 
 fated them to improve and to work out right a view of life that 
 excludes judgment and redemption. We know that we live in a 
 vastly more tragic world than we had supposed, where things 
 that are wrong, if unchecked, get worse and work out to hideous 
 catastrophes. The world moves in no steadily advancing evolu- 
 tion ; sin brings on inevitable doom ; unless redemptive forces pro- 
 duce radical changes, nothing remains but a certain fearful 
 looking for of judgment. You will probably not be faced with 
 the bogie which haunted many minds a decade ago of the destruc- 
 tion of the social order by a bloody uprising of the toiling masses. 
 That destruction has come ; but the destroyers were the financially 
 prosperous. It is noteworthy that in almost every warring land 
 the working classes were the most loth to fight, while those in 
 control of capital were readiest to embark in the enterprise of 
 slaughter. Incidentally the war itself has compelled transforma- 
 tions in industry and commerce that go a long distance towards 
 establishing social control in the economic order. You will not, 
 for a while at least, have to contend with a listless indifference 
 to wrong. The hideous and hateful iniquities which have been 
 
THE DAY AND THE CHURCH 15 
 
 perpetrated by German and Turk have roused men to a hot 
 indignation. It is yours to keep that holy wrath ablaze, and to 
 direct it to the destruction, both abroad and at home, of those 
 things which mar human brotherhood. You will not be told (let 
 us hope) that adequate military preparedness is the surest safe- 
 guard of peace. The entire system of preserving international 
 equilibrium by mutual fear has been discredited. The huge arma- 
 ments of the nations have demonstrably proved provocatives of 
 war. 
 
 We still have judgment here; that we but teach 
 Bloody instructions, which being taught return 
 To plague the inventor. 
 
 The state of mind that produces and maintains a vast navy and 
 an army recruited by the enforced service of every young man 
 capable of bearing arms is an utterly unchristian confidence in 
 superior might. While one nation remains of that mind, the rest 
 are terrorized from dropping a burden only less costly and less 
 hampering to all constructive social advance than war itself. 
 Intimidating force as a keeper of an orderly world is in well- 
 deserved disrepute. You will not be at the disadvantage of sum- 
 moning to sacrifice those who hardly know what the word means. 
 Men limited their liabilities and gave a fractional allegiance to 
 the cause of Christ ; but a generation which has seen the nation's 
 most promising sons pour out their blood for an unselfish cause, 
 and whole peoples willingly impoverish themselves for a world's 
 deliverance, understands the terms on which Jesus Christ asks 
 their enlistment for the Kingdom of God that their purse, their 
 person, their extremest means must "lie all unlock'd to its 
 occasions." You will not hear the easy-going spectator's com- 
 ment on life that "it takes all kinds of people to make a world." 
 Some kinds manifestly unmake it; and no man dare seat himself 
 comfortably in an observer's chair and watch the varied types 
 of men and women play their parts ; some are setting the whole 
 
16 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 building on fire. If disaster is to be averted, a man, however 
 tolerant, must bestir himself to prevent some roles from being 
 enacted, and to put a new heart and a right spirit into the actors. 
 Yes, greed, shallow optimism, distrust of the lowly, easy tolerance 
 of wrong, pride of power, unfamiliarity with sacrifice, and the 
 self-amusing enjoyment of life as one finds it the subtlest and 
 toughest opponents of the cause of Christ have been exposed 
 and condemned. You begin your ministry in a world that has 
 been "delivered unto Satan" (to employ a New Testament idea) 
 that it might be taught what not to trust. You receive it fresh 
 from graduation in that school, with its lessons thoroughly 
 impressed upon its mind; for we must give the devil his due and 
 account him an expert instructor in those branches in which he 
 is himself proficient. 
 
 But the apostle who placed Hymenaeus and Alexander under 
 such tuition only expected negative results the unlearning of 
 undesirable habits ; all constructive education must be had under 
 another Master. And as leaders in the Christian Church we face 
 certain serious difficulties in the way of bringing our immediate 
 contemporaries into the school of Christ. 
 
 One is the feeling that the Church itself has been shown to be 
 powerless to build a social order that will hold together. "If 
 the foundations be destroyed, what hath the righteous wrought?" 
 We must freely and penitently admit that the Church in the 
 immediate past has been tried in the balance and found wanting. 
 But so, too, have education that should have taught men the 
 irrationality of war, and international law with its covenants 
 torn to "scraps of paper," and social idealism which was so confi- 
 dent that the workers of the world had reached a sense of brother- 
 hood that ensured them against slaying each other. And we go 
 on to point out that the social order which has crumbled to bits 
 was to a very slight degree of the Church's construction. The 
 chief criticism of the Church in the years preceding the war was 
 the insignificance of its influence upon social relations. While 
 
THE DAY AND THE CHURCH 17 
 
 there was much talk of the social gospel, the fact remained that 
 many of the most socially minded men and women had ceased to 
 look to the Christian Church as a source of inspiration. A recent 
 novel, notable for its accurate pictures of certain aspects of New 
 York life, shows us a woman, the head of a large public school 
 and the chief factor for social betterment in an industrial neigh- 
 borhood, going with her father to a concert in Carnegie Hall on 
 a Sunday afternoon. The father cannot help recalling the Sun- 
 day customs of a few years before church-going as a matter of 
 course and the family and their visitors spending the evening 
 about a piano singing hymns. "He could almost hear from some- 
 where," comments the novelist, "the echoes of 'Abide with me.' ' 
 But in that most socially devoted daughter's thought the Church 
 and the Church's religion have ceased to occupy a place. To her 
 and to many like her the Church is negligible. 
 
 To be sure she was partly mistaken. There is no means of 
 estimating how much sooner the crash might have come, how 
 much more terrific it might have been, and how much worse it 
 might have left us, but for the quietly leavening ministry of the 
 Church and its kindred agencies. In our army camps, where one 
 felt how weak were the moral restraints that checked brute lusts, 
 the Christian Associations and the chaplains were turned to as 
 the only stays to bestial demoralization. And, further, whatever 
 may be said in just condemnation of the Church's futility, we 
 can point amid the scene of almost universal wreck and ruin to 
 social relations in which the principles of Christ were embodied 
 and be reassured by the fact that they stand unharmed. Wher- 
 ever in diplomacy, in industry, in family life, in the personal 
 dealings of man with man, the Spirit of Jesus has been dominant, 
 there is no sign of damage. We can challenge the world to show 
 us the instance where love like Christ's has been employed in 
 social construction and failed. True the instances are patheti- 
 cally rare, but they are none the less significant. The Church's 
 failure is not due to lack of means with which to build an enduring 
 
18 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 world-order, but to their non-employment. The disaster that has 
 ensued upon the use of other means gives us the chance to come 
 forward and ask to be accorded a fair trial, and to back up our 
 plea with a reasonable number of cases where the Spirit of Christ 
 has been applied socially and has splendidly succeeded. 
 
 A second difficulty is the widespread ignorance of the social 
 aspects of the Christian faith in a land as nominally Christian as 
 ours. Millions of our population have come from lands where 
 Christianity is identified with the forces of reaction, and they 
 never think of it in connection with their social ideals and aspira- 
 tions. Millions more have never heard it presented here save as a 
 means of individual salvation and a standard of individual con- 
 duct. Where there is genuine personal Christianity, however 
 contracted its social outlook, there is a foundation upon which 
 one can build: the Bible will be revered as an authority, and its 
 social teaching can be brought home to the conscience. But we 
 have to remember that the Bible is a practically unknown volume 
 to the great majority of our American people. Among the well- 
 to-do one generation has grown up with little religious training; 
 their parents are living on the remainders of a devouter child- 
 hood, and the heritage of the faith is more attenuated in their 
 children. Among the industrial workers our Protestant churches 
 possess a notoriously small following. The result is that there 
 are not many people so aware of the contents of the Christian 
 faith that they look eagerly to the Church for leadership in social 
 rebuilding. 
 
 A third impediment is the ill condition of the Church itself to 
 fulfil such leadership. Needless denominational divisions, rendered 
 even more ludicrously trifling by the momentous issues between 
 forces Christian and antichristian brought to light in this war, 
 make many of our churches pitifully small and weak organiza- 
 tions, whose energies are largely engrossed in the sordid struggle 
 for economic self-preservation. If by all manner of devices 
 (some of them often very undignified), they can pay their 
 
THE DAY AND THE CHURCH 19 
 
 expenses, and pathetically cheap outlays at that, they are rated 
 as successful. Such feeble institutions cannot be creative factors 
 in their communities. 
 
 And far too many of them think of maintaining themselves 
 as organizations and keeping their existing machinery in motion, 
 rather than of giving life to the society in and for which they 
 exist. One hears ministers and office-bearers discussing how to 
 secure a congregation for the second service or attendants at the 
 prayer-meeting, instead of asking what groups in the neighbor- 
 hood are not supplied with religious inspirations, and whether a 
 second service or a prayer-meeting are adapted to provide these 
 supplies. Why should there be a second service, or why not a 
 third and a fourth? Why must there be a 'prayer-meeting, or 
 why not half a dozen? No factory concerns itself chiefly with 
 keeping its machinery going, but with producing goods that are 
 wanted. No church represents the Son of man which does not 
 invariably think of itself as not to be ministered unto but to 
 minister, and adjust itself to fill the needs of all who can be 
 served by it. 
 
 Further, nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand 
 of our churches minister to constituencies drawn from a single 
 social stratum, or from a few closely allied strata, in the com- 
 munity. Very rarely does a congregation include employers and 
 workers, the older American stock and the newer. Our churches 
 are class-bound in their outlooks and sympathies. There is 
 pathos in finding the Puritan churches, which at one epoch were 
 the protagonists of democracy among the forces that conserve 
 existing social groupings and fail to be factors in fusing our 
 varied population into a brotherhood. 
 
 And many of our churches are dealing in their worship and 
 teaching with religious ideas which are unrelated to the current 
 thought of men. It is not that they are too theological theology 
 is simply thought concerning God and the life with Him, and 
 the more theological a church is the better, provided it handle 
 
20 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 living theology. Nor is it that they are not sufficiently "practi- 
 cal" (to employ a sorely overworked word). American preach- 
 ing is not lacking in definite application. If anything our 
 churches are too "practical," making religion something useful, 
 rather than something fertile; something to be immediately done, 
 rather than the establishment of a relation with the Unseen out 
 of which many things will spontaneously come. But the ideas 
 and the language' used in them have little connexion with the 
 aspirations and needs of the great mass of men as they under- 
 stand themselves. Many a sermon seems to them to contain, like 
 Glendower's talk to Hotspur, "such a deal of skimble-skamble 
 stuff as puts them from their faith." A penetrating writer, who 
 fell in the war, entitles a suggestive chapter, "The Religion of 
 the Inarticulate," in which he points out that the ordinary run 
 of British soldiers "never connected the goodness in which they 
 believed with the God in whom the chaplains said they ought to 
 believe." He rightly insists that we must find our point of con- 
 tact in showing men that "Christianity is the explanation and 
 the justification and the triumph of all that they do now really 
 believe in." This means that in every age the Church must recast 
 its worship and restate its teaching to meet the immediate neces- 
 sities of men. The eternal God may abide the same through all 
 generations, but life with Him varies with the circumstances under 
 which it must be lived. A mobile and plastic Church is demanded, 
 ever ready to adapt itself to furnish inspirations to men and 
 women and little children in any conditions under which it finds 
 them. Principal Rainy once said: "As things change around us, 
 immobility may become at once the most insidious and the most 
 pernicious form of inconsistency." The fierce heat of the war 
 has made fluid many things formerly metallic. Let us hope that 
 the forms of Church organization and doctrine are among them, 
 that they may be run into more serviceable moulds. 
 
 Worst of all, our Protestant Churches have not only parted 
 with their relation to a world-wide organization the Universal 
 
THE DAY AND THE CHURCH 21 
 
 Church, but they have lost the feeling of their unity with the 
 whole Body of Christ throughout the earth, and the desire to see 
 that unity effectively functioning through some institution that 
 will enable it to speak and act as the Catholic Church of Christ. 
 One may heartily disagree with the conception of the papacy, 
 and one may think lightly of the moral role which the present 
 pope has played during a contest when great issues of right and 
 wrong were so conspicuously to the fore, but it was no small 
 thing that his position enabled him to speak to the nations. He 
 represented but a fragment of Christendom, and probably has 
 misrepresented the enlightened conscience of a great part of that, 
 but through him a world-wide Church might theoretically speak. 
 We cannot but reverence the ideal, see its practical worth, and 
 set ourselves to devise its more effective embodiment. National 
 churches, although essential for their purpose, are not enough. 
 We think in world-terms, and must apply them to the organization 
 of the Christian Church. Lesser terms do not fit the ideal before 
 us in the New Testament nor the actual necessities of our day. 
 But the most serious obstacle we encounter is as elusive and 
 invulnerable as the great Boyg in Ibsen's Peer Gynt a vague- 
 ness in the thought of God and an absence of the vivid sense of 
 fellowship with Him. This is neither new nor peculiar to our 
 day ; it is the common complaint of men of faith in all ages ; but 
 it has gained added force in ours. In the last century the world's 
 thought underwent revolutionary changes which required a radi- 
 cal restatement of religious convictions. This restatement has 
 been very imperfectly assimilated by the mass of people, and 
 indeed the majority of pulpits still state the Christian message 
 in terms that cannot be fitted into the views of the world held by 
 modern men. And those who have succeeded in rationalizing their 
 beliefs often find great difficulty in feeling God's actuality. Some 
 religious leaders have comforted themselves by speaking of the 
 "unconscious religion" of devoted lives who serve duty, or truth, 
 or beauty, unaware that they serve the living God. A few have 
 
22 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 even discussed a godless Christianity, consisting of the spirit 
 of sympathy and service. But such minimum faiths are feeble 
 substitutes for the sense of personal companionship with the 
 Lord of earth and heaven, which is the historic experience of 
 Biblical religion. A pathetically small number of persons know 
 how to worship, and services of worship are slovenly conducted 
 and barren of results in many, possibly in most, churches. Only 
 a rare figure, here and there, gives the impression of walking 
 with God. The atmosphere that has wrapped our country and 
 the entire western world during our lifetime has been so heavy 
 with material interests that the spirit of man has been breath- 
 ing with difficulty. It may be that, like an electric storm on a 
 humid day, the war will have cleared the air; but as yet we have 
 scarcely felt any relief; some would call the atmosphere muggier 
 than ever. 
 
 Over against all this there are several most heartening facts 
 in our present situation. One is the manifest desirability of the 
 assistance of a God. A great gain of having a world in frag- 
 ments on our hands is the inevitable longing for Someone wiser 
 and abler than ourselves to piece it together and get it going. 
 When men found themselves in a social order which, so far as 
 they personally were concerned, was functioning fairly com- 
 fortably, religion seemed a luxury. If one liked it, let him have 
 it, but it was a matter of taste. With an entire social order to 
 be refashioned, some sort of deity appears indispensable for 
 everybody. The problems are too intricate, the demands too 
 exacting, the strains too draining for man. The endeavor to 
 readjust human relations usually drives men towards religion. 
 Viscount Morley, reading J. S. Mill's article on The Claims of 
 Labour, queries whether Mill's drift towards Theism did not fit 
 in with his social bent. In the present lecturer's undergraduate 
 days in Yale College, a brilliant Lyman Beecher Lecture was 
 entitled, The Gospel for an Age of Doubt. That caption would 
 not be thought of today. Ours, while not an age of faith, is an 
 
THE DAY AND THE CHURCH 23 
 
 age of wistfulness. Whether believers themselves or not, men 
 are interested in religion. In the most suggestive novel of the 
 war the chief character sees it through to God. A typical man 
 of the last generation, who had passed from evangelicalism to 
 agnosticism, Sir Leslie Stephen, wrote to James Russell Lowell: 
 "I am content to take things as they come, and fight it out as 
 well as I can." Few thoughtful persons feel in that way now. 
 They may have no assurance of a God, but they cannot con- 
 tentedly take things as they come; things that come are too 
 terrible; and their own fighting does not suffice. They look long- 
 ingly for One to lead in the endeavor to make an earth fit for 
 human beings to live in. Never was there a more eager age to 
 which a convinced herald of the Most Highest could cry : "Behold 
 your God !" 
 
 A second asset is the quickened sense of social obligation. This 
 is in part the result of long centuries of Christian training. We 
 are likely to undervalue the cumulative gains of our Christian 
 inheritance until we hear it appraised by those to whom it has 
 come as a novelty. In the Forbidden City of Pekin, a year and! 
 more ago, one of the secretaries of China's first president said! 
 to me: "I often read the sacred books of the various great 
 teachers. They all seem to me to commend much the same vir- 
 tues courage, unselfishness, courtesy, loyalty. And I have asked 
 myself what is the difference between your great Teacher and 
 the others. It seems to me that He has the power to create a 
 more delicate conscience." Could there be a loftier or a more 
 discriminating tribute to the worth of Jesus Christ for an age 
 of social reconstruction? And in part the present sharpened 
 sense of social responsibility is due to factors that have been 
 playing upon us in the years immediately preceding and during 
 the war. A widespread social movement, showing itself in new 
 ethical standards, in industrial upheavals and readjustments, in 
 political platforms, in reinterpretations of religious convictions 
 and ideals, has been gathering momentum for at least a genera- 
 
24 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 tion. In some respects its immediate advances have been checked 
 by the war, for men fear to hazard innovations in "a scrambling 
 and unquiet time"; but its force has been vastly augmented and 
 many of its ends have been attained with accelerated speed. And 
 there is no question but that the war itself has brought home to 
 many Americans the obligations of citizenship. Apart altogether 
 from any specific results that may have come of it, there was 
 a moral effect in a state's requiring every inhabitant between six- 
 teen and fifty to register, and put down what he or she could do 
 for the commonweal. The Conscription Act forced a grim duty 
 upon hundreds of thousands of our young men. Civic responsi- 
 bility must react upon Church responsibility. We have been 
 learning that all our group-relations involve group-duties. The 
 Church, no less than the State, can and must demand universal 
 service of those who enjoy its privileges. The quickened con- 
 science of the community outside the Church is an incalculable 
 Christian asset. Men are fitted to appreciate Jesus, whose chief 
 appeal is to conscience, and to see and assume their obligations 
 in the Great Community into which He ushers them. Our con- 
 temporaries, both by the inheritance of Christian centuries and 
 by the special discipline of recent years, are "a people prepared 
 for Him." 
 
 A third encouragement is the kindling of social hopes. Apoca- 
 lypses have always been written in bad times. When an Antiochus 
 Epiphanes or a persecuting Caesar threatened the believing com- 
 munity with extinction, its faith rose to its enthroned God and 
 saw Him shortly ushering in His blessed reign. "Ranging 
 through the tamer grounds of these our unimaginative days," 
 men, suddenly confronted by the appalling sights of this war, 
 found their minds picturing a saner and juster world-order, guar- 
 anteed against such outbreaks of mad destruction. Some of 
 these apocalypses were lawyers' visions of an earth made orderly 
 by international jurisprudence; others were dreams of financiers 
 with plans for the use of credit to prevent strife. Economists 
 
THE DAY AND THE CHURCH 25 
 
 have come forward with schemes of trade and tariff adjustments, 
 and a distinguished philosopher linked his "hope of the great 
 community" with a project of international insurance. Each 
 drew his picture in accordance with the interests of his own mind ; 
 but the point is that such pictures are being drawn. They are 
 "Songs before Sunrise." Men desperately dissatisfied with things 
 as they are cannot keep from imagining a new world. Love of 
 "this present age" has always been the despair of the Christian 
 preacher. From the first salvation has meant detachment from 
 things as they are and attachment to things as they should be. 
 Dissatisfied men are predisposed to faith in a living God who 
 supplies "assurance of things hoped for." And once convinced 
 of Him, their hopes already alive renew their strength. 
 
 Paradise and Groves 
 
 Elysian, Fortunate Fields like those of old 
 Sought in the Atlantic Main why should they be 
 A history only of departed things, 
 Or a mere fiction of what never was ? 
 
 The Church finds in the wistful a ready hearing for its vision 
 of a world remade by the loving reign of the God and Father of 
 Jesus Christ. 
 
 Still another help is the importance every intelligent believer 
 now concedes to the corporate organization of the Christian 
 forces. War stimulates the herd instinct ; there has been an 
 increase in national solidarity in all the belligerent countries. 
 Danger and difficulty have welded the peoples. The peril to the 
 Christian life and the pressure of antichristian forces are pro- 
 ducing a similar drawing together of the followers of Christ. 
 In Protestant circles individualism has been so developed that 
 the embodiment of the Spirit in the believing group has been 
 made little of. Personal relations with God were primary; rela- 
 tions with fellow-believers were of minor moment. The Church 
 has occupied a subordinate place in Protestant thought, and has 
 
26 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 sometimes been lost sight of altogether. The individual Christian 
 felt the need of fellowship with kindred souls for his own growth 
 in truth and faith and craved tneir partnership in service; but 
 a small fellowship sufficed. There seemed nothing crippling in 
 belonging to a diminutive sect ; their fewness often gave its mem- 
 bers a more intimate sense of solidarity. Its inability to do large 
 things was never realized as a handicap; for did it not succeed 
 in the gigantic task of saving souls, and building them up into 
 fair-sized sons and daughters of God? But the imperative need 
 of today is a regenerated social order in which saved souls shall 
 be safe ; and that requires the combined effort of every Christian 
 for its accomplishment. A national Church is demanded for a 
 nation's renewing, and a universal Church for a world's recon- 
 struction. War conditions have taught us that individual liberty 
 can only be secured by subordinating liberty to the maintenance 
 of the social group within which the liberty we prize is possible. 
 A freedom that is gained at the cost of unity does not leave us 
 free as Christians to accomplish what we desire. Assuredly we 
 are not prepared to part with the dearly won liberties of the 
 Protestant Reformation; they belong to the very essence of the 
 Christian life itself, to our sonship with God in Christ ; but we 
 believe them compatible with a united democratic Church, the 
 Republic of Christ (to employ a phrase used by Zwingli) and 
 our emphasis today is not on individual freedom but on collective 
 life. We are ready to surrender personal preferences, even when 
 these are entwined with hallowed traditions, to bring ourselves 
 under a reasonable ecclesiastical discipline, and to accord fellow- 
 Christians a larger consideration and sympathy in order to attain 
 that corporate Christian action which is essential if the world is 
 to be reshaped after the mind of Christ. We long for a Church 
 truly catholic in its inclusion of every life ruled by the Master's 
 Spirit. If we must content ourselves with an organized and 
 operating unity considerably less than this, we want as big and 
 as comprehensive a church as we can get. The thoughtful Chris- 
 
THE DAY AND THE CHURCH 27 
 
 tian does not regard his relations with fellow-believers as trifling 
 matters. He must align himself with as many of them as possible, 
 supplementing his meagre religious life from their ample dis- 
 coveries, warming his zeal at the fire of their collective enthusiasm, 
 and combining his skill and' energy with theirs in a united under- 
 taking for the establishment of the earth-wide reign of God. The 
 day of separatist piety has gone; the Church as the functioning 
 Body of Christ has come to her own. 
 
 What, then, is the Church of Christ? We look back to its 
 arrival at self-consciousness and classic self-expression in the 
 New Testament. It is a fellowship that is its distinctive note. 
 It is a divine fellowship whose members are in living union with 
 Jesus Christ, with His God and Father, and corporately possess 
 His Holy Spirit. It is a distinctive fellowship, aware of its differ- 
 entiation from the world of men by barriers as marked as those 
 of race and nationality "an elect race, a holy nation," with 
 their citizenship in a heavenly commonwealth. It is an inclusive 
 fellowship, embracing every life to which Jesus is Lord a single 
 living organism, from which it is as impossible for a disciple of 
 Christ to be severed as for foot or ear to dissociate itself from 
 the body. It is a visible and realized fellowship whose members 
 show their oneness with each other in Christ by many tokens 
 the breaking of bread in communion with their Lord and with 
 one another, right hands of fellowship for kindred tasks, hospi- 
 tality to visiting believers, the use of personal gifts for the enrich- 
 ment of the whole group, the attempt to embody brotherhood in 
 a community-life ruled by the Spirit of love. It is a priestly 
 fellowship, all of whose members have direct access to God as His 
 friendly sons and daughters, and in whose collective life, as in a 
 hallowed temple, God Himself dwells. It is a gtfted fellowship. 
 The Holy Spirit bestows upon every member somewhat with which 
 to serve, and it is His charism of leadership, recognized by the 
 spiritually discerning Church, which impels the brotherhood to 
 set apart a man for any distinctive ministry. It is an authori- 
 
28 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 tative fellowship, in which as a theocracy God governs, through 
 which as a brotherhood His will is discovered by the judgment 
 of the whole fellowship, and by which, an Ecclesia regnans, that 
 will is set forth to the world. 
 
 This fellowship, the Church of Christ, you and I are to build 
 up, to serve and to lead for the world's rebuilding. We cannot 
 have too high a doctrine of the Church; this is a day for "high 
 churchmen." The New Testament draws no distinction between 
 an invisible and a visible Church. In human experience there is 
 always a difference between the ideal and the actual; but that 
 does not allow us to hold a lofty doctrine of a theoretical Church 
 and content ourselves with low conceptions of the actual Church. 
 The Church must become what it is. 
 
 The Church with which we have to do must be a fellowship. 
 It is not a collection of believers but a coalition. Their lives com- 
 bine and cohere and coalesce in a common purpose. There is 
 more in the union of Barnabas and Saul than the addition of 
 one loyal Christian to another. It is the combination of Barnabas 
 plus Saul and Saul plus Barnabas. One might represent it alge- 
 braically as(B + S)X(S + B). That is why in Biblical 
 mathematics if one chases a thousand, two put not twice, but ten 
 times as many to flight. The Church is a fusion in a single 
 allegiance and aim of Christians, each of whom is magnified and 
 enriched many fold by contacts with fellow-Christians. They 
 "agree as touching what they ask," and are "gathered together" 
 in Christ's name. 
 
 The Church must be a divine fellowship, composed of men, 
 women and children in union with Christ. When a minister is 
 captivated by a vision of redeemed society, he may lose sight of 
 the necessity of linking individuals mind to Mind, conscience to 
 Conscience, with Jesus Christ. Let him recall that he works for 
 social redemption through a redeemed fellowship. A congrega- 
 tion, however small, in which God has His habitation because each 
 member is builded on Christ and all are builded together, is a 
 
THE DAY AND THE CHURCH 29 
 
 centre of divine power, and can turn a community upside down 
 and set it right side up ; and no other group, however large, can 
 do anything of the sort. 
 
 It must be a distinctive fellowship. A city set on a hill cannot 
 be hid, and the Church cannot lie all over the ethical slope and 
 run down into the valley. She cannot sanction prevalent indus- 
 trial competition and present methods of settling international 
 differences, and recreate a new earth wherein dwelleth Christian 
 righteousness. She cannot endorse current standards of business 
 and current ideals of patriotism and expect to regenerate the 
 social order. As a new race this fellowship draws its living mind 
 from the Most High through Christ; its ideals in every age and 
 for every situation must be contemporaneously born of Him. As 
 a holy nation its members form a group with a unity of its own 
 that must be respected, as truly as we revere the solidarity of 
 any nation, small or large; and it has a right to insist that- its 
 fellowship be unbroken by the arrangement of the world order. 
 Its citizens have a supreme allegiance to Jesus Christ, and their 
 citizenship in any commonwealth on earth must be fulfilled under 
 superior loyalty to His heavenly community. 
 
 It must be an inclusive fellowship. Richard Baxter, summoned 
 to London to assist in settling "the fundamentals of religion," 
 made a proposal, to which it was objected that a Papist or a 
 Socinian might subscribe it, and is said to have replied: "So 
 much the better, and so much the fitter it is to be the matter 
 of concord." The Church is organically one, the living Body of 
 Christ, of which every believer is a member. The organization 
 must include the organism and be fitted to express its totality. 
 We find ourselves actually in the apostolic succession of the 
 varied communion of the saints of all the centuries, through whom 
 as a matter of historic fact the life of God in Christ has passed 
 to us. We cannot repudiate our spiritual ancestry. They are 
 all in the Church of Christ of yesterday of which we have been 
 born; all their descendants in the faith are the Church of today. 
 
30 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 It must be a visible and realized fellowship whose members feel 
 and show their kinship in God. Our country has passed from a 
 federation of states to which their inhabitants felt a supreme 
 loyalty to a nation in which state allegiance is subordinated to 
 national. The Church, with its communions partly federated 
 already, must pass through a similar development. The ways in 
 which a congregation will share one another's inspirations and 
 bear one another's burdens will vary in different ages and in 
 different places ; but the more of such ways as are opened between 
 Christian and Christian, the more truly that congregation 
 becomes a Church of Christ. The modes in which Christians 
 throughout the earth in their diverse communions manifest their 
 oneness will be varied, but their unity must be felt by all of them 
 in a strengthening sense of corporate solidarity, and must be 
 shown in effective common action. This does not imply identity 
 in belief, uniformity in worship, or even similarity in organiza- 
 tion; but it does mean a realized fellowship, whose members "in 
 mutual well-beseeming ranks march all one way." A Church 
 which does not embody brotherliness within itself cannot refashion 
 human society into a brotherhood. A Church which does not 
 combine its own forces for united effort cannot expect to lead 
 the nations into collective action for the weal of mankind. The 
 fellowship in a village or countryside should be embodied in a 
 community church ; and in a metropolitan area in a city church, 
 as conscious of its oneness as the village church although grouped 
 in many congregations. To the degree that the Church's unity 
 in any place or nation, or throughout the earth, is not felt by 
 all its members and is not demonstrated in common action, the 
 Church is not a fellowship, and is not the Church of Christ. "By 
 this shall all men know that ye are My disciples if ye have love 1 
 one to another." 
 
 It must be a priestly fellowship, whose every member knows 
 and approaches God for himself, hears His voice in his own con- 
 science, and feels commissioned to take his brethren into the 
 
THE DAY AND THE CHURCH 31 
 
 holiest of all. Each serves at the world's altar in home and shop 
 and school, in theatre and polling-booth and church, to reveal 
 God. The life of Christians with each other and with outsiders 
 is the sanctuary and the temple-courts in which the world is to 
 find and be found of the Lord of heaven and earth. 
 
 It must know itself a gifted fellowship. The Church's greatest 
 weakness is ignorance of her own powers. Too many of her 
 members are living before instead of after Pentecost. They pray 
 for an endowment already bestowed and allowed "to fust unused," 
 and they need to be told to stir up the gift of God which is in 
 them. There are no spiritually unempowered disciples of Jesus ; 
 and when the Master pictured His servants in the parable as 
 possessed of talents, not pennies, He suggested the vast wealth 
 entrusted to the poorest. We are leaders of companies of divinely 
 endowed ministers, and our effectiveness is measured not so much 
 by the use we make of our own gifts as by the extent to which 
 we get theirs employed. 
 
 Finally, it must be an authoritative fellowship. As a theocracy 
 it must be independent of any outside earthly domination that it 
 may respond directly to its Lord. As a brotherhood His will 
 is not the secret of some individual official or caste of officials, 
 but the open secret of all His friends, who recognize His voice, 
 and, without attempting to constrain each other's consciences, 
 find guidance in each other's intuitions. And God rules not alone 
 in it but through it to set up His sovereignty in the earth. 
 
 Historically two divergent views have prevailed on the scope 
 of the Church's authority. Roman Catholics and Puritans have 
 stood for her declaration of God's will for the State and for the 
 whole of man's life; Lutherans and Anglicans, First Century 
 Churchmen and modern evangelicals, have narrowed the Church's 
 sphere to individuals, and have held up no definite ideals for 
 government and industry and the common life. The former posi- 
 tion is illustrated by two such different ecclesiastical types as 
 Puritan Massachusetts and Jesuit Quebec in the Seventeenth Cen- 
 
32 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 tury. The latter, in an extreme form, is stated by one of Ger- 
 many's foremost teachers of political science, the late Professor 
 Bluntschli of Heidelberg, who stresses the masculine character 
 of the State in contrast with the feminine character of the Church. 
 (The nouns are der Staat and die Kir die in German.) ("A reli- 
 gious community," he writes in his Lehre vom modernen Staat, 
 "may have all the other characteristics of a political community, 
 yet she does not consciously rule herself like a man, and act 
 freely in her external life, but wishes only to serve God and per- 
 form her religious duties." (What an unemancipated Haus- 
 frau!) The latter position has reduced her to impotency, with 
 tragic consequences for humanity, while the former made her 
 an insufferable tyrant. Both positions misunderstood the nature 
 of religious authority. The Church, like her Lord, possesses the 
 authority of experience, the friendly power of the keys admit- 
 ting to the household life of God. She is authorized to teach and 
 to inspire, to declare and to urge, not to dictate and to enforce; 
 and her authority must extend over the whole of human life. She 
 has a message to nations and to individuals, a commission to 
 conquer all the kingdoms of this world art, science, industry, 
 education, politics for God and for His Christ. 
 
 The sorest need of a world in pieces is fellowship the fellow- 
 ship of nations, of races, of producers and distributers of the 
 world's wealth. The Church of Christ, whose distinctive note is 
 fellowship, is the divinely created company for the world's recon- 
 struction into a universal fellowship. Her programme for our 
 day has been set forth by an ancient prophet: "They that shall 
 be of thee shall build the old waste places ; thou shalt raise up 
 the foundations of many generations ; and thou shalt be called, 
 The repairer of the breach, The restorer of paths to dwell in." 
 
LECTURE II 
 THE MINISTRY OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 "Tnou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach" no title is 
 more to be desired for the Christian Church. And it is the title 
 which she ought to deserve. Through the bitter years of the 
 World War many of us have been haunted by the sentence : "God 
 gave unto us the ministry of reconciliation." 
 
 The world which it is ours to reconstruct is seamed by many 
 chasms. We think naturally first of that which has sundered 
 warring nations. Christendom ought to have held together. The 
 numbers and influence of avowed followers of Jesus in the hostile 
 peoples should have rendered the war impossible. The Church 
 must frankly and shamefully confess a tragic failure. She has 
 not understood, and consequently has not taught, a fundamental 
 truth of her own Gospel. She has failed to realize that she is 
 essentially a supernational fellowship. "There cannot be Greek 
 and Jew, barbarian, Scythian: but Christ is all, and in all." To 
 a company possessing so inclusive a loyalty is entrusted the duty 
 of preventing conflicts and healing divisions. A Second Century 
 Christian wrote to his friend, Diognetus : "In a word, what the 
 soul is in a body, this the Christians are in the world. The soul 
 is spread through all the members of the body, and Christians 
 through the divers cities of the world. The soul is enclosed in the 
 body, and yet itself holdeth the body together; so Christians are 
 kept in the world as in a prison-house, and yet they themselves 
 hold the world together. So great is the office for which God 
 hath appointed them, and which it is not lawful for them to 
 decline." 
 
34 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 But the Church has been declining it. It has been lamentable 
 that while small groups of internationally minded Socialists have 
 met, or have tried to meet, during the war, and have striven to 
 act as peace-makers, the Christian Church has felt herself power- 
 less to undertake her rightful task. To be sure her first concern 
 is not peace but righteousness, and God forbid that the Church 
 of Christ should ever be reconciled to militaristic imperialism, or 
 fail to encourage free people to do their utmost to thwart 
 
 The brute and boist'rous force of violent men, 
 Hardy and industrious to support 
 Tyrannic power. 
 
 But it is her office to bring the nations to a righteous concord, 
 and for that duty she is ill-equipped today. The Protestant 
 Reformation, with its many splendid gains, is chargeable with 
 an incalculable loss when it broke up the supernational organiza- 
 tion of the Western Church, and encouraged the Reformed 
 Churches to shape themselves along strictly national lines. 
 Occasionally a unifying faith transcended national barriers, as 
 when, for example, Sir William Cecil in a letter to John Knox 
 signs himself: "Youris as ane Member of the same Body in 
 Christ"; but this sense of fellowship in the one Church has been 
 rarely present in later generations. The union of Church and 
 State has further subordinated the Church-consciousness to the 
 national consciousness, and among Protestants patriotism is 
 superior to loyalty to the Church. Roman Catholicism, while it 
 has theoretically maintained the supremacy of the Church and 
 safeguarded its international organization, and has made 
 attempts through the pope to mediate between the nations, has 
 shown itself almost as futile. Roman Catholic has been arrayed 
 against Roman Catholic as fiercely as Protestant against Protes- 
 tant. It is part of the task of leaders in the Church today to 
 recreate the sense of corporate solidarity among believers in Jesus 
 as members of His Body, with obligations to one another and to 
 
THE MINISTRY OF RECONCILIATION 35 
 
 the whole Body which are prior to those to fellow-countrymen 
 and to their nation, and to urge the devising of machinery through 
 which the Church can work to hold together the nations. 
 
 The creation of the sense of corporate solidarity is our first 
 duty. In 1806, in the midst of the Napoleonic wars, Humphrey 
 Davy, the British scientist, was awarded the prize of the French 
 Academy. In accepting it, he said: "Science knows no country. 
 If the two countries or governments are at war, the men of science 
 are not. That would, indeed, be a civil war of the worst descrip- 
 tion. We should rather through the instrumentality of men of 
 science soften the asperities of national hostility." Christianity 
 recognizes nationality. Into the city of God of its hope the 
 glory and the honor of the nations are brought. It insists that 
 Christians must be loyal patriots, as it insists that they be dutiful 
 kinsmen. But patriotism and love of family only reach their 
 highest under allegiance to a more-inclusive fellowship. And it 
 is intolerable that national hostilities should set brother against 
 brother in the one household of faith the Church, which exists 
 to embody and create the world-wide community of God. "Is 
 Christ divided?" A British and a German Christian have more in 
 common than either possesses with non-Christian fellow-country- 
 men, since Christ means more to each than the whole of his national 
 heritage apart from Christ. A Japanese and an American Chris- 
 tian share more in the fellowship of their one Lord than each owns 
 in the entire wealth of his fatherland with His riches left out of 
 the reckoning. Much has been said about hyphenated citizens; 
 but what of hyphenated churchmen? We are a holy nation; and 
 we cannot allow loyalty to our countries to lead us into civil strife 
 in the Divine Fellowship. 
 
 Four centuries ago Erasmus (in his comment on the adage 
 Dulce helium inexpertis) protested: "From whence cometh it into 
 our minds, that one Christian man should draw his weapon to 
 bathe it in another Christian man's blood? It is called parri- 
 cide, if the one brother slay the other. And yet is a Christian 
 
36 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 man nearer joined to another than is one brother to another; 
 except the bonds of nature be stronger than the bonds of Christ. 
 What abominable thing, then, is it to see them fighting among 
 themselves, the which are the inhabitants of the one house the 
 Church, which rejoice and say, that they all be members of one 
 body, and that have one head, which truly is Christ. Christ 
 saluted His disciples with the blessed luck of peace. Unto His 
 disciples He gave nothing save peace; saving peace He left them 
 nothing." 
 
 The day will come when the nations shall be bound in the all- 
 comprehending Kingdom of God; but men of many kindreds are 
 already one in the Church, and only by conserving and asserting 
 her unity can the Church bring in the Kingdom. In our preach- 
 ing and in our worship, above all at the Lord's Table where we 
 take the symbols of communion with all who call Jesus Lord, we 
 must renew in believers the consciousness that "we being many 
 are one bread, one body: for we all partake of the one bread." 
 We must make it unthinkable that Christians should permit 
 national antagonisms, however bitter, to rend the Church a 
 house divided against itself. We must make governments aware 
 that Christians cannot suffer them to demand in the name of 
 patriotism that w r hich nullifies their duties to one another in the 
 Church of the living God. 
 
 The subject of the international organization of the Church 
 belongs to a subsequent lecture; we are dealing today with her 
 reconciling ministry. We cannot overlook the immeasumbly 
 moral difference between the contending groups of nations, nor 
 close our eyes to the fact that no Christian peace is possible with 
 the sinister and unprincipled aggressive purposes that dominate 
 Germany, nor can we expect a lasting peace while similar motives 
 rule any other people. The present conflict must go on until 
 she and all the nations involved are willing to learn righteousness. 
 But we are commissioned even now and always to make nations 
 disciples and to teach them Christ's principles. We shall have 
 
THE MINISTRY OF RECONCILIATION 37 
 
 to begin with the primary lesson of repentance sincere sorrow 
 for the part which all have had in self-aggrandizing national 
 ambitions in a grasping commercial order. The scourge of war 
 has come upon all the Great Powers, judging them one in a guilty 
 partnership, and binding the more and the less guilty in a com- 
 munion of pain and poverty and death. Those of finer moral 
 sense will acknowledge the justice of their condemnation, and, 
 bearing the sin of others as well as their own, will lead them in 
 penitence. We shall then have to teach forgiveness such for- 
 giveness as the North showed the South, winning Swinburne's 
 applause, who told England : 
 
 Lo, how fair from afar, 
 Taintless of tyranny, stands 
 Thy mighty daughter, for years 
 Who trod the winepress of war; 
 Shines with immaculate hands ; 
 Slays not a foe, neither fears ; 
 Stains not peace with a scar; 
 
 and such forgiveness as our country showed China when it re- 
 stored the Boxer indemnity and "gained a brother." We must 
 constantly point out how all Christian duties apply to nations, 
 and show what it means for a land, in its diplomacy, its tariff 
 and trade regulations, its dealings with weaker and backward 
 peoples, to love its neighbors as itself. Every minister must keep 
 before himself nothing less than a world, and through the ministry 
 of his small segment of the Church build citizens whose patriotism 
 makes their nation one with the peoples of the earth "in a general 
 honest thought and common good to all." 
 
 The breaches between nations are often instances of the divi- 
 sions between groups within each nation divisions due to com- 
 petitive industrialism. It is notorious that the Church is failing 
 to prevent class wars. Who fancies that a strike or a lockout 
 is impossible where there are Christians among employers and 
 
38 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 employed? Who stops to consider the Christian discipleship of 
 those involved as a factor in the situation? It may be said that 
 clashes are inevitable and even desirable in a system that is 
 inherently faulty; but clashes are not the method of advance 
 Christ commended, and Christians are responsible for the intro- 
 duction of a kindlier method of change. It may be said that the 
 relations of capitalists and workers in modern industry are 
 largely impersonal the relations of the company and the union; 
 but such relations do not discharge the Church from the duty 
 of preventing or of ending strife. So long as there are Christians 
 in the group, the Church can, if she will, influence group-attitudes. 
 Augustine, after a riot had terminated in the killing of an un- 
 popular official, brought home Christian responsibility for public 
 opinion in a sermon, in which he said : "Persuade such as you can 
 persuade, and in the case of those over whom you have authority, 
 exercise constraint. I am well aware, and you are well aware, 
 that there is in this place not a single household in which there 
 are not some Christians; there are many in which there is not a 
 single pagan. Nay, on careful examination you will find no house- 
 hold in which there is not a majority of Christians. That is true; 
 I see you assent to it. You see, then, that the bad deeds cannot 
 be done if the Christians will not permit them. There is no deny- 
 ing that." 
 
 As leaders in the Christian Church we have several plain duties 
 in regard to this industrial conflict. One is to sympathize with 
 current discontent with present economic arrangements. We can- 
 not preach acquiescence in things as they are. How can we 
 when so generally 
 
 here's naught to see, 
 But just the rich man and just Lazarus, 
 And both in torments ; with a mediate gulph, 
 Though not a hint of Abraham's bosom? 
 
 So long as industrial relations are unbrotherly, the Church 
 
THE MINISTRY OF RECONCILIATION 39 
 
 belongs in the party of protest. We must keep our own minds, 
 and keep our people's minds, open to welcome changes, however 
 radical, that look towards ampler justice and fuller economic 
 fellowship. In the days immediately following the war, with so 
 much poverty to be faced and such wastes to be repaired, we 
 must stand for the homely maxim, "No cake for anyone till all 
 have bread." 
 
 A second duty is to apply the Spirit of Christ to existing 
 arrangements and point out their shortcomings, and to hold up 
 the ideal which that Spirit demands in men's dealings with each 
 others as producers and distributers and users of the world's 
 wealth. This must be done from the pulpit, in Bible classes, in 
 our training of young communicants, and in the Sunday School. 
 The good seed are the children of the Kingdom ; and it is ours to 
 develop men and women who know what is wrong with economic 
 adjustments, and who have caught the vision of what should be. 
 
 A third is to inspire them with the faith that industry and 
 commerce, conducted in the Spirit of Jesus, will succeed. We 
 need to insist that godliness is profitable, that nothing less brings 
 maximum returns in a world over which God is Lord. Economic 
 conflicts are appallingly wasteful, in enforced idleness of men and 
 machinery, in underselling, dumping, manipulating markets, and 
 destroying surplus products, above all in the mental and moral 
 wear and tear of the contestants. We offer the hope of economic 
 harmony in Him "in whom all things hold together." If it be 
 said, as it is widely said, that the Spirit of Christ cannot be 
 embodied in a successful business enterprise, then let us either 
 frankly renounce allegiance to Him as a fantastic dreamer, or 
 let the business go to its seeming failure in loyalty to Him, and 
 see whether that apparent failure be not, like another outside 
 the walls of Jerusalem, a most amazing success. At all events 
 we must remind Christians that success is not to be measured 
 primarily in terms of profits or of wages, although these have 
 their just claims on "wise stewards," but in terms of the brother- 
 
40 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 hood of the workers in the enterprise with one another and with 
 the public which they serve. 
 
 For the Christian Church the most serious problem in con- 
 nexion with this industrial chasm lies in the fact that it divides 
 her own fellowship. In pitifully few congregations do rich and 
 poor, employers and employees, capitalists and workers, meet 
 together before the Lord, the Maker of them all. At Point Lobos, 
 on the coast of California, there is a long line of cypress trees on 
 the tops of the cliffs close to the sea ; then, separated from them 
 by a space never less than a hundred yards, the pines begin. So 
 far as one's eye can reach up and down the coast there does not 
 appear a single spot where the two species of trees mingle. It 
 is a picture of the aloofness of social sets in our nominally demo- 
 cratic America! Educated more and more generally in different 
 schools, brought up in separate castes, moving in closed circles 
 almost all their days, it is seldom that they work and worship 
 side by side in the same Protestant congregation. Indeed the 
 divisions between the Protestant communions in any community 
 are not due so much to differences in belief, or in theories of 
 church government, or in forms of worship, as they are to differ- 
 ences in social status. Study the economic rise or fall of a family 
 during several generations and note its church affiliations. A 
 group of well-to-do city dwellers spending their summers in a 
 country neighborhood will erect a church of their own rather 
 than join with the farmers and townsfolk of the neighborhood, 
 not because they hold divergent religious convictions, but because 
 the two groups do not find themselves at ease with each other. 
 A wealthy city congregation will provide "a mission church" a 
 few blocks away for poorer people, not that distance makes the 
 second building necessary, for many of the attendants at both 
 churches live farther from their respective church homes than 
 the buildings are from each other, but that the two classes do not 
 know how to meet even in the presence of God. When foreigners 
 move into a community a church seldom thinks of adapting itself 
 
THE MINISTRY OF RECONCILIATION 41 
 
 to fill their religious wants, but deplores the loss of its constitu- 
 ency, and is content to leave the aliens to be served by some other 
 religious agency, or to go unchurched. A socially stratified 
 Protestantism, organized in cliquish congregations, cannot exer- 
 cise a ministry of conciliation. So far from repairing, it widens 
 the breach. 
 
 The Church that wishes to preach brotherhood to the nations 
 and embody it in the social order must first exemplify it in her 
 own fellowship. Her congregations must be such families as she 
 wishes the race to become. A family binds together very diverse 
 and often uncongenial persons in a common life. In building up 
 a socially inclusive congregation we must recognize the reality of 
 social differences due to wealth, education, nationality or race. 
 We are not attempting to force social identity, but to produce 
 religious solidarity. We are not trying to obliterate the natural 
 groupings into which any company of human beings always falls, 
 but to comprehend these groups in a higher unity in God. It is 
 a mistake for a church to begin to bring people together in a 
 congregational "social," or to start by combining them in guilds 
 or societies where social intercourse is the prominent feature of 
 the organization's life. This will render those who meet more 
 painfully aware of their mutual remoteness. They should be 
 joined first in common worship and common effort for the King- 
 dom. Capitalist and wage-earner can meet at the Table of the 
 Lord and be unconscious of any barrier between them: their 
 common need and their common satisfaction in the Bread of 
 heaven makes them one. City man and farmer can work side 
 by side in a missionary campaign or an evangelistic movement 
 or a crusade against some social iniquity. Common interests will 
 form, which give those who have worshipped and worked together 
 something to talk about that renders easy subsequent social 
 fellowship. 
 
 A socially comprehensive congregation must both allow natural 
 group affiliations and provide for the mingling of the groups. 
 
42 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 Its plan of religious education should mass all its boys and girls 
 in the one school, while arranging the classes to bring together 
 children facing similar circumstances and with similar mental 
 capacities. Working girls and girls who have no distinctive call- 
 ing can be encouraged to form clubs and guilds of their own for 
 specific purposes, and girls of both sorts ought to be put side 
 by side in the teacher-training class and developed as comrades 
 in a kindred service. It must provide societies for persons whose 
 leisure makes it possible or convenient for them to meet at cer- 
 tain hours night-workers, nurses, Sunday-toilers, business-men, 
 women who find it easiest to plan and pray for missions in the 
 forenoon and women who prefer to sew together and drink coffee 
 in the afternoon; and it must do its utmost to bring all these 
 groups together in its worship. Young people from homes of 
 all social grades should be prepared for church membership in 
 the same training class, and made to face the various personal 
 problems which confront fellow-Christians. Richer and poorer 
 members must be brought into the one fellowship of giving, and 
 made to share responsibility for the church's support and aggres- 
 sive missionary propaganda. Leaders from all the social groups 
 represented in the church's fellowship must meet often enough to 
 understand each other thoroughly and plan together the methods 
 by which the church attempts to serve every element in its neigh- 
 borhood. The congregation must have a warmth in its life: 
 people, like metals, fuse only at high temperature. 
 
 The minister who would make his congregation inclusive must 
 proclaim the Christian message as demanding fellowship for the 
 Kingdom's sake. He must carefully place himself at the disposal 
 equally of all sorts and conditions among his people. He must 
 make them feel by his own attitude and by constant teaching that 
 unity in Christ transcends class distinction: "there cannot be 
 bondman and freeman" ; and that snobbishness and offishness are 
 heinous sins, sins against the Holy Spirit of love. The less said 
 publicly about social differences within the congregation the bet- 
 
THE MINISTRY OF RECONCILIATION 43 
 
 ter: no one should be made class-conscious. He must scrutinize 
 the church's appeal to detect the elements in the community it 
 fails to attract. He must attempt to have its office-bearers repre- 
 sentative, if that may be, of all the groups that make up the 
 congregation. He must try to put men and women of larger 
 capacities and outlooks in the midst of groups that lack advan- 
 tages of education and culture to supply them with necessary 
 stimulus. He must seek to give his more privileged people per- 
 sonal touch with the cramped in resources that they may feel 
 at firsthand the burdens of poverty and the limitations of con- 
 fining toil. He must train a set of leaders who understand and 
 heartily believe in his aim, and are themselves socialized, which 
 is only another way of saying that they are Christian men and 
 women. By his own inclusive friendliness he must build these else 
 unrelated lives into a firm comradeship of aspiration and of serv- 
 ice. Above all he must keep his church a religious fellowship 
 a company who seek God, who meet each other in God, and who 
 work together with God. 
 
 Another breach that yawns wide in many communities a 
 breach that inevitably opens in every generation is due to the 
 divergence in the thought of the age from the forms in which the 
 historic Church states her faith. There are many serious and 
 earnest men and women in a very uncomfortable position, stand- 
 ing with their hearts inside and their heads outside the doors 
 of the Christian Church. Doubtless there are Christian and 
 unchristian ways of thinking witness current conceptions of 
 patriotism, of property rights, of liberty of conscience, of the 
 living God and no loyal follower of Jesus wishes the Church 
 door made so large that unchristian heads can enter. But unfor- 
 tunately the present shape of our doors often keeps out the 
 idealist whose thought is most in accord with the mind of Christ, 
 but who cannot phrase it in the conventional terms of the devout, 
 while it admits those who like this phraseology but have con- 
 sciences palpably at variance with that of Christ on most of the 
 
44 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 social questions of the hour. The Church needs a moral narrow- 
 ing and an intellectual broadening. Men seldom come head-first 
 to Christ; they come heart-first; and where the heart has arrived 
 there must surely be some way of stating the Christian position 
 which renders it credible and cogent to sincere lovers of Jesus. 
 Those who attempt the restatement of Christian convictions are 
 usually misrepresented by some of their brethren within the 
 Church as destroyers of the faith. In reality they are the truest 
 conservatives conserving not doctrines primarily, but men and 
 women who but for them would be lost to the organized Christian 
 fellowship ; and really conserving doctrines as well, for a doctrine 
 is maintained, not when it is simply repeated in the identic lan- 
 guage in which it has always been phrased, but when it is kept, 
 in whatever words old or new, a vital factor in the consciences of 
 living Christians. 
 
 Repairers of this breach must make sure that they belong on 
 both sides of it that they are at home in the historic faith of the 
 Church, and at home in the thought of the day. We cannot per- 
 mit ourselves even to think, much less to speak, slightingly of 
 any formulation of truth that has ever been any sincere Chris- 
 tian's living conviction. We must accustom ourselves to appre- 
 ciate the religious experience of Bible writers and Church fathers 
 and Reformation divines and more recent evangelicals, while we 
 boldly discard their terms and employ others more congenial 
 to the mind of our time. No man is a worthy minister of the 
 Church who does not realize the continuity of her corporate life 
 with God in Christ through the centuries, and prize the inherit- 
 ance which it is his to conserve, to make available as the chief 
 constructive factor in the life of his generation, and to pass on 
 as its most enriching bequest to the ages to come. We stand in a 
 glorious succession of apostles and prophets, and of men and 
 women who through faith subdued kingdoms and wrought right- 
 eousness; our position of leadership in the historic Church 
 renders us representative recipients of a priceless trust ; we dare 
 
THE MINISTRY OF RECONCILIATION 45 
 
 not be careless stewards of the Church's patrimony. How can 
 we better fit the Church for her ministry of social rebuilding 
 than by keeping alive in our contemporaries all the spiritual 
 vitality of their forefathers in God? On the other hand we must 
 be frank and fair in facing the problems of thoughtful people. 
 It is fatal for any cause when men feel that its advocates are too 
 prejudiced to be just to living issues. Ministers who dodge the 
 difficulties their listeners confront cannot command their respect. 
 We must keep posted as to the gains % of scholars and thinkers. 
 That is a principal reason for our support by our congregations 
 in sufficient leisure to study. We must be systematic in our read- 
 ing, and open-minded and painstaking in our revision of our 
 methods of presenting the Christian message. We have an apt 
 illustration of our task in the work of the author of the Fourth 
 Gospel, who took the Jesus of the Palestinian tradition and set 
 Him in the midst of the Mediterranean world in an interpretation 
 that conserved the faith of the first disciples and made it intelli- 
 gible and persuasive to an age which was thinking in terms 
 altogether different from those of Galileans in Jesus' own day. 
 The building of a new world-order is so titanic an undertaking 
 that the Church must have within her ranks all men of Christian 
 purpose. Upon her leaders rests the duty of so stating her con- 
 victions that no man of Christian goodwill will feel that he can- 
 not be heartily loyal to truth and in fullest sympathy with the 
 Church, and that no believer of maturest experience will complain 
 that our restatements omit aught of the wealth of the life with 
 Christ in God of the Church's heritage. 
 
 The same fissure emerges at the moment within every com- 
 munion of the Church itself, dividing men into parties, classified 
 roughly as modernist and traditionalist, liberal and conservative. 
 At times it seems questionable whether some of our communions 
 can continue to hold together; but none can afford to part with 
 any group within it who are sincerely doing the work of Christ. 
 It is absurd to plead for Church unity, and then attempt to foster 
 
46 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 further disruption within one's own communion. We must not 
 subdivide existing dominations, multiplying waste and increas- 
 ing their futility, but must combine them with as scanty secessions 
 as possible into larger federated units. But it is by no means 
 easy to be factors in progress and not cause divisive strife in 
 our own communions. Educational facilities and mental types 
 vary in a huge country like ours. Doctrinal positions that are 
 accounted conservative in New England, are moderate in New 
 York, liberal in Philadelphia, radical in Pittsburgh, and rank 
 infidelity in many places south of Mason and Dixon's line. A 
 social outlook that is traditional in Kansas, is conventional in 
 Chicago, progressive in Rochester, and anarchistic in the financial 
 centres along the Atlantic seaboard. Heresy and orthodoxy in 
 theology and social theory are matters of latitude and longitude 
 in the United States of America; and most towns of any size 
 are likely to contain dwellers on a number of parallels and 
 meridians. Men entering the ministry must be sensible that under 
 the circumstances good people within their communion are often 
 very trying to one another. There is a type of radical who 
 glories in the dissidence of his dissent, who speaks contemptuously 
 of ancient formulations of truth which his religious experience is 
 perhaps too shallow or too restricted to appreciate, who forever 
 airs his negations. There is a type of reactionary who has the 
 unhappy faculty of fastening on some unessential details of the 
 historic creed and exalting them as decisive tests of fitness for 
 leadership in the Church, who appears to lose sight of the great 
 body of truth in which his brethren accord with him while he 
 rivets attention on the one or two points over which he can 
 wrangle with them, who seems to forget a world's need while he 
 disquiets the Church with attacks that leave lasting suspicions. 
 There is a species of over-developed individualist whose uncom- 
 fortable conscience compels him to bring to the fore and to harp 
 on such of his views as he knows are most unpalatable to the 
 majority of his brethren a man who puts a heavy strain on 
 
THE MINISTRY OF RECONCILIATION 47 
 
 temper and tolerance, and forces the Church to stretch to the 
 limit the liberty which it accords to prophesying. There is a 
 species of dogmatist, be he one who leans backward or one who 
 leans forward, who cannot respect his brethren's differences of 
 opinion and leave them alone, but must constantly press upon 
 them his particular interpretation of truth a man with no con- 
 ception of what is involved in the liberty of prophesying. And 
 all these extreme types, as well as the great mass of more moderate 
 men in between them, must be retained. Part of our ministry of 
 reconciliation is to repair the breaches within our own communion. 
 We must broaden our sympathies until we understand the nega- 
 tions of radicals and the undue emphases of finicky literalists. 
 We have to learn to tolerate those who do not wish to tolerate us. 
 We must judge men, in so far as it is necessary for us to form 
 estimates of them (and judging is always a hazardous under- 
 taking for a Christian), not by their views but by their purposes, 
 and try always to look at them with the believing eyes of love. 
 Happily the grounds of controversy are shifting from the rela- 
 tively petty matters brought to the front by the historical investi- 
 gations of the Biblical narratives the accuracy of the account 
 of some miraculous happening, the mode of Jesus' birth or the 
 manner of His resurrection to much more important matters 
 affecting faith in the Christian conception of God and our under- 
 standing of His will. The new alignments will not be based so 
 exclusively on information or its absence as were those of the 
 past five and twenty years. No doubt ignorance will always be 
 dangerous; but the breaches will not be so often between the 
 mentally dull and the mentally acute, as between the morally 
 darkened and the morally enlightened. The Church can well 
 afford to part with those who do not sincerely wish to see the 
 structure of society dominated by love; she cannot afford to lose 
 genuine children of the Kingdom whose differences consist in vary- 
 ing interpretations of Biblical narratives or of doctrines, or in 
 matters of taste and temperament. For their sakes, it is part of 
 
48 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 the ministry entrusted to us so to present our message and so to 
 discharge our ecclesiastical duties that we maintain hearty fra- 
 ternal relations with all shades of opinion among followers of 
 Christ, and do our utmost to hold our own communion together 
 as a united force in rebuilding our world for a habitation of God 
 in the Spirit. 
 
 And every minister discovers similar rifts within his own con- 
 gregation. He will naturally expect differences in opinion due to 
 differences in age or in culture, but these are accentuated by 
 the truly revolutionary changes in thought which have taken place 
 in the last fifty years, and which have been very unequally 
 assimilated by the people who compose our churches. A Chris- 
 tian preacher today deals with at least three world-views : first, 
 the nai've world-view of the Biblical writers, with its flat earth 
 and local heaven and God operating directly and somewhat 
 irregularly on men and things; second, this Biblical view com- 
 bined with the popular scientific and philosophical outlooks of a 
 generation or more ago, which is the conventional or orthodox 
 world-view in most Protestant communions ; and third, the world- 
 view taught in our universities and high schools. All three views 
 may be represented in the minds of a congregation; and various 
 adaptations of all three are certain to be there. We are not 
 much concerned with the world-views held by our people, although 
 as educated men and devotees of truth we are eager to have them 
 as well informed as possible. We realize that the conceptions 
 of the universe in present-day science and philosophy are only 
 temporary abodes of the human mind. We are concerned that 
 whatever a man's view of the universe he shall be aware of God's 
 presence in every nook and cranny of it, and live in it in unbroken 
 fellowship with Him. We cannot take time to give a man a new 
 world-view before we attempt to give him personal friendship 
 with the living God, and set him to building His Kingdom. We 
 recall that Jesus had a complete and perfect life with the Father, 
 
THE MINISTRY OF RECONCILIATION 49 
 
 and yet pictured it against the background of the notions of the 
 universe current in First Century Palestine. 
 
 Consequently a preacher facing his congregation will sometimes 
 feel himself like a juggler with three, or even with half a dozen, 
 balls in the air at once. He is taking men's minds as he finds 
 them and seeking to toss them Godwards. He must not allow 
 any of them to fall with a bump; for thuds of that sort banish 
 all other and higher thought. He is not handling men to supply 
 them with conceptions of the universe but with a vital touch with 
 God. We must learn to preach so that God and the life men 
 may have in Him shall be so outstanding that any references to 
 philosophic and scientific opinions will seem insignificantly sec- 
 ondary. Men both more and less enlightened than we in current 
 thinking will through us be faced with the Most High and inspired 
 with Him to build a righteous community. 
 
 To be sure we do not wish to risk having our young people 
 extend their thought of the universe with stretches of space or 
 in modes of motion in which the Gbd of their religious training 
 appears to have no part. In teaching them we must assume the 
 results of the best present-day education. Nor dare we fail to 
 try to refill with God the imperfectly adjusted minds of men and 
 women to whom has come a new world-view from which He appears 
 to be debarred. We must be frank with them, stating as clearly 
 as we can the Christian convictions in relation to the most recent 
 modes of scientific thought. We owe them honest intellectual 
 guidance. But we shall always have a number of older and some 
 younger people whose conceptions of the universe are not those 
 of the current philosophy, and our duty to them is to lead them 
 along their own mental pathways to God. And if a new pathway 
 must be taken, let it connect as naturally as possible with the 
 well-worn route. His biographer says of the most brilliant and 
 fascinating teacher at whose feet I ever sat, Professor A. B. 
 Davidson : "He had unparalleled skill in communicating new 
 truths, some of them revolutionary, with a minimum of friction." 
 
50 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 We must build a congregation with a religious solidarity despite 
 inevitable clefts in opinion. If a minister rouses antagonism 
 either by his modernism or by his traditionalism, it is because 
 he is underemphasizing God in Christ and men's life with Him. 
 Doubtless, too, no man is fit for the ministry who lacks a certain 
 deftness in handling a group of human beings akin to the skill 
 of the ball-tosser in our illustration. 
 
 There is still another breach in many places between a grow- 
 ing group of socially minded men and women, engaged in various 
 enterprises for the betterment of the community, and the mass 
 of the membership of the churches. The former are keenly inter- 
 ested in human welfare, but apparently indifferent to religion ; 
 the latter are devout, but often apathetic to matters of social 
 advance. The two groups sometimes disparage each other, the 
 latter complaining that the human are so ungodly, and the former 
 that the godly are so inhuman. Our social enthusiasts seem not 
 to realize what an infinite difference it makes to those who are 
 striving to improve our world whether it be "ampler day divinelier 
 lit or homeless night without"; our soul-savers not to be aware 
 that unfavorable economic conditions, grinding poverty, occa- 
 sional and uncertain employment, a precarious family life, a 
 seven-day week, on the one hand, and enervating luxury, irre- 
 sponsible leisure, wasteful plenty, on the other, make life with 
 the Christian God practically impossible. The minister must 
 convince the former that he is as concerned as they for the 
 redemption of social conditions, that he will go as far and farther 
 in sacrificial devotion to the welfare of men, and that in addition 
 he possesses inspirations, hopes, regenerative resources they know 
 not of. He must convince the latter that a Gospel which expects 
 to alter the world really means vast changes (and it is amazing 
 how many good people expect the world to be redeemed without 
 being changed), that they must be prepared to welcome and 
 assist social and economic upheavals, and that they cannot have 
 intimate fellowship with One who from His throne declares, 
 
THE MINISTRY OF RECONCILIATION 51 
 
 "Behold, I make all things new," unless they, too, are renovating 
 an outworn world-order with the newness of Chris't's love. These 
 two groups are natural allies. According to the genealogy in 
 Matthew, both Ruth, the devoted, to whom God was merely inci- 
 dental to her obligation to her mother-in-law, and Rahab, the 
 believing, to whom civic and social ties were nothing, for she was 
 both traitress and harlot, but who had a discerning eye for Him 
 who is invisible, are among the ancestresses of Christ. For the 
 task of social reconstruction the leaders of the Christian Church 
 must combine within its fellowship under the mastery of Jesus 
 the devotees of man and the lovers of God. Each group needs 
 the other; and both can meet in Christ, and should be side by 
 side in His Church. 
 
 And our ministry of reconciliation is not only the adjustment 
 of man to man, but the inward adjustment of each man to him- 
 self. The abbot in Byron's poem says of Manfred: 
 
 This should have been a noble creature: he 
 
 Hath all the energy which should have made 
 
 A goodly frame of glorious elements, 
 
 Had they been wisely mingled; as it is, 
 
 It is an awful chaos light and darkness, 
 
 And mind and dust, and passions and pure thoughts, 
 
 Mixed and contending without end or order 
 
 All dormant or destructive. 
 
 That describes the confusion in every life until the Spirit of God 
 controls it. We have to think of those to whom we minister, as 
 indeed we have discovered ourselves, at war within aspiration 
 tugging against inclination, an idealist wrestling with a sensualist, 
 a cynic scoffing at an enthusiast, a believer struggling with a 
 skeptic, a blase man of the world tied hand and foot to an eager, 
 interested, optimistic small boy, a gentleman attempting to down 
 a barbarian, a man of God at grips with a man of sin. Tenny- 
 son sang of the battle of the spirit with the brute, the man with 
 
52 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 the tiger and the ape; and an Anglican bishop has reminded 
 us of another animal ingredient, the donkey, still more difficult 
 to dispose of. There is a whole Noah's ark of beastly qualities 
 in every soul pig, sheep, rooster, fox, mule, wolf, cat, snake 
 and the list is only begun. Tennyson would have the ape and 
 tiger die; but a greater poet foretold a Messiah in whose reign 
 wolf and lion, leopard and bear, should feed and lie down with 
 lamb and kid and calf. Who would wish the survival of the 
 bovine elements only? Who wants a society of fatlings? Is there 
 not as much sanctification required by the sheep as by the wolf 
 to attain the morally heroic spirit of the Lamb of God? Not 
 elimination but reconciliation, a redemption that conserves a 
 whole man, is the Messianic ideal. The production of such rebuilt 
 men and women to rebuild the social order is the primary task of 
 ministers of the Saviour of the world. It is Christ's unique glory 
 that He can make fractional persons units, fragments wholes. 
 
 His truest interpreter saw in His cross the breaking down of 
 walls of partition. Paul was thinking of barriers as serious as 
 any we have mentioned walls sundering race from race, and 
 barriers running (as he knew from his painful experience) 
 through his own soul, setting him at odds with himself. But in 
 the Life that culminated at Calvary something was done that 
 took the foundations from under these walls, and ever since they 
 have been waiting to topple before whoso knows their baseless 
 plight whoso knows that underneath the solid ground of all 
 life is unifying Love. "God was in Christ reconciling the world 
 unto Himself." Men are at one with God only as they are at 
 one with themselves and with each other. The Church is the 
 company of the reconciled, embodying fellowship, continuing the 
 life of God in Christ, and to the Church is committed "the word 
 of reconciliation." 
 
LECTURE IV 
 THE MINISTRY OF EVANGELISM 
 
 "Go ye and make disciples of all the nations," has stood before 
 the Church's eyes as the climax of her First Gospel ; but she has 
 often read the words to mean only "make disciples of individuals 
 in all the nations." The words certainly mean that, and many a 
 splendid evangelistic campaign and missionary enterprise has 
 been inspired by them. But they as certainly mean more that 
 nations are to be made disciples of Jesus. The corporate as well 
 as the personal life of men must be brought under His sway. 
 St. Paul thought of God as reconciling the world unto Himself 
 through Christ. There is a gospel for society no less than for 
 the individual; and it is the same gospel for both the good tid- 
 ings of new life with Christ in God. An evangelism which does 
 not present both aspects of the Gospel the corporate and the 
 personal does justice to neither and is not "the whole counsel 
 of God." We are familiar with fervid savers of souls, who define 
 sin exclusively in individualistic terms, as personal dishonesty or 
 drunkenness or unchastity, and plead for an acceptance of Christ 
 as Saviour from these, without a word of corporate iniquity for 
 which the individual must bear his responsibility, or of the new 
 social life of righteousness into which Christ brings His disciples 
 in the Kingdom of God. And we are familiar with zealous saviours 
 of society, who denounce social injustices and picture the right- 
 eous community, but do not press home the necessity for a per- 
 sonal devotion to Christ as Lord, that men and women may 
 be new creatures in Him. Neither presents the full-orbed 
 Evangel. The former rescue men from a number of specific 
 
54 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 sins often most ruinous iniquities, so that one would not make 
 light of their great salvation but rescue them to a most imper- 
 fectly Christianized conscience, which functions only in a small 
 circle of duties. They give their converts no vision of their homes, 
 their business, their town, their country, in Christ Jesus. In 
 consequence these saved souls are frequently most unchristian 
 kinsmen, traders, voters, patriots. The latter deal too lightly 
 with specific transgressions, losing sight of the necessity for 
 confession to those whom they have wronged and for restitution 
 wherever possible, minimizing the personal tie between the soul 
 and Christ with the miracle of regeneration and continuous re- 
 newal through believing contact with Him, and frequently pass- 
 ing over the obligation that rests on every disciple to bring others 
 to an avowed loyalty to his Lord. Both the individual and the 
 social demands and promises of the Gospel must enter into a truly 
 Christian evangelism. 
 
 An inadequate evangelism is due to a misunderstanding of 
 what the Gospel is. Our earliest biographer of Jesus introduces 
 His ministry with the statement: "Now after John was delivered 
 up, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the Gospel of God." The 
 Gospel is essentially good news concerning God. Many evange- 
 lists, however useful they may be as denouncers of vice, or as 
 recruiting agents for the Church organization, fail to bring any 
 good tidings of God. Many preachers of social righteousness, 
 however valuable their exposure of corporate injustice and their 
 quickening of consciences, leave their hearers with no more 
 strengthening trust in God nor glowing love for Him. Neither 
 really preaches the Gospel. That which saves a man or a nation 
 is nothing less than God Himself; and no message which does 
 not place Him in the forefront, making men understand Him 
 more clearly and love Him more dearly, is an evangelical message. 
 And once let God be set forth as He is in Christ, and the life with 
 Him in Christ pictured in its fulness, no man can fail to hear 
 good news for himself and for every group to which he belongs. 
 
THE MINISTRY OF EVANGELISM 55 
 
 Such a God really believed in means both personal and corporate 
 salvation new creatures in a new creation. 
 
 Let us begin by looking carefully at the message of our min- 
 istry of evangelism, for unhappily so much that passes by the 
 name is not genuinely the Gospel. The deity officially recog- 
 nized by nominally Christian nations has rarely been the Chris- 
 tian God. The deity proclaimed by many a Christian pulpit and 
 embodied in many a creed and ritual is not the God of Jesus 
 Christ. The appalling catastrophe which has engulfed our mod- 
 ern world is ultimately traceable to religious ignorance and un- 
 belief; our sole hope of social rebuilding along lines that will 
 endure is the proclamation of the Gospel of God, and the making 
 of men and nations disciples of His Son. 
 
 Men want a God big enough to remake a world and good enough 
 to make it a Christian world. These two requisites are con- 
 veniently summed up in two sayings on the lips of Jesus in the 
 Fourth Gospel: "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father," 
 and "the Father is greater than I." 
 
 Our God is Christlike that certifies His goodness. The God- 
 manhood of Jesus, which is the fundamental doctrine of catholic, 
 evangelical Christianity, is not primarily a statement concerning 
 Jesus what He is speaks for itself but a statement concern- 
 ing the invisible God and of ourselves. If the Jesus of the New 
 Testament be the image of the Most High, then we know what 
 is the supreme power and wisdom in the universe love like His. 
 Men and nations are made disciples when won to rely on such 
 love as the most forceful and clever thing in the world. No man 
 is truly a disciple who deems something else a safer political 
 principle or a more successful commercial policy. To lead men 
 to see God in the face of Christ, to believe that He never deals 
 with them otherwise than as Jesus dealt with men, that God bears, 
 believes, hopes, endures all and never fails with the love that was 
 in Him, is the means of reproducing that filial trust which was 
 His; and that is saving faith. The commonest and deadliest 
 
56 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 heresy among so-called orthodox Christians is the practical denial 
 of the Godlikeness of Jesus Christ, the virtual abandonment of 
 the central conviction of Paul and Athanasius and Luther, by 
 picturing God as dealing with men, and as sanctioning their deal- 
 ing with one another, in ways unlike those of the Jesus of history. 
 "Begin," writes Luther, "by applying thy skill and study to 
 Christ, there also let them continue fixed, and if thine own 
 thoughts or reason or someone else guide and direct thee other- 
 wise, only close thine eyes and say: I must and will know of no 
 other God save in my Lord Christ. See, there open up to me 
 my Father's heart, will and work, and I know Him." 
 
 God so seen in Christ must in a world like ours be a struggler 
 battling and toiling for His heart's desire; a sufferer, pained 
 and thwarted by the selfishness and wrong of His children; a 
 comrade, who needs friends and gives Himself to them that in 
 fellowship they may rear the city of His and their faith and hope. 
 God is like Jesus. 
 
 And He is greater that certifies His sufficiency. As the ocean 
 is vaster but not other than a bay, so the Father transcends the 
 Son. This allows for the cosmic relations of the Lord of heaven 
 and earth which could not be disclosed in One whose life was 
 within the world. We amplify our thought of the Most High 
 from His Self-disclosures in Israel's experience, and in the experi- 
 ences of the believing in other nations (for He hath not left Him- 
 self anywhere without witness), from the hints and suggestions 
 of science and art and the ideals of men, with their intimations 
 of the True, the Beautiful and the Good. Christ defines but does 
 not confine our thought of God. We have a boundless prospect 
 before us in our explorations of Him and in His revelations of 
 Himself to us. In God we possess both a home and a horizon: 
 He is like Christ that satisfies, rests, assures us ; He is greater 
 that increases our trust, whets our curiosity and sets before us 
 infinite reaches. 
 
 We have been putting somewhat theologically what must be put 
 
THE MINISTRY OF EVANGELISM 57 
 
 only in picturesque and moving language in our evangelistic mes- 
 sage. But it is not the method of its presentation but the content 
 of the message that concerns us for the moment. Men and nations 
 are saved by knowing and trusting the only living and true God. 
 
 And here we face the most serious intellectual difficulty of the 
 day: Is there such a living God? All other questions put by 
 inquiring spirits the historicity of the narrative of some miracle, 
 the value of prayer, the authority of the Bible, the certainty of 
 immortality come back to this fundamental query : Is Christ an 
 ideal in men's minds only, or is He the portrait of a living God? 
 It is asked on a university campus, in a meeting of workingmen, 
 in a remote village in China. As preachers of the Gospel of God 
 we must face it. And how shall we handle it ? 
 
 It may be wise to begin by reminding men that this image is 
 not such stuff as dreams are made on but the solid texture of 
 the impression of an historic life. It has not merely been 
 fancied; it has been lived. It is, therefore, part of the fabric of 
 the universe, an event in its history; and if the universe be the 
 work of a creative Father, would it not have been like Him to 
 have sought to image Himself to His children? 
 
 It helps further to point out that we see our fellow-men only 
 through images tiny images the fraction of an inch in dimensions 
 on the retinae of our eyes and that through these images the 
 richest and tenderest intercourse of life is carried on. We exist 
 for each other in the mind's eye. Repeated experiences alter and 
 clarify these images of our friends ; and what comes to us through 
 the image is the decisive test of its correspondence with a living 
 being whom it mirrors to us. Men have had various images of 
 the invisible God through the centuries ; their very number sug- 
 gests the actuality of Someone there; and they have discarded 
 the less for the more accurate. Think of the long row of dis- 
 carded divinities ! "Where are the gods of Hamath and of Arpad? 
 where are the gods of Sepharvaim, of Hena, and Ivvah?" 
 
58 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 Apollo, Pallas, Jove and Mars 
 
 Held undisturb'd their ancient reign 
 In the solemn midnight 
 Centuries ago. 
 
 The Christian image of God in Jesus is combating today other 
 images of Deity on mission fields and among nominally Christian 
 nations. Through which image does the most come to men ? That 
 image will prevail; and that which the image succeeds in convey- 
 ing is the only criterion of what is behind it and to which it corre- 
 sponds. "Trust God in Christ," we say, "and see what fellow- 
 ship will be yours." An intelligent Jewess, who had gone through 
 a varied religious career, passing from orthodox through reformed 
 Judaism, then through the Ethical Culture Society, once, at the 
 close of a service where the Gospel of God had been preached, 
 said: "Now I see." "See what?" was asked her. "See that all 
 I can think of in the God I adore I see in Jesus, and all I want 
 a God for Jesus does for me." 
 
 It is also well to distinguish between the actuality of God and 
 our sense of it. Visitors to Japan are eager to see its famous 
 Mt. Fuji; but they may easily spend a month or more within 
 sight of its snow-capped dome and never have a glimpse of it. 
 Fogs, haze, clouds, may wrap it from their eyes. They will see 
 Fuji pictured on a thousand articles screens, teacups, fans, 
 postcards the representations of it differing according to the 
 skill or taste of the artist, and the point from which he took his 
 view. Many of the pictures are conventionalized Fujis, drawn 
 at second or at twentieth hand by men who have not tried to put 
 down what they saw with their own eyes ; but there the mountain 
 is, portrayed again and again and again as Japan's chief glory. 
 They will hear certain places praised for their outlooks upon it, 
 and will find tea-houses built at points said to command lovely 
 or majestic prospects. They will notice advertisements of 
 arrangements for ascending it at certain seasons ; and they can 
 talk with those who have themselves climbed to its top. They 
 
THE MINISTRY OF EVANGELISM 59 
 
 may not see it with their own eyes, and no one may be 
 able to show it to them at the moment; but there is con- 
 vincing testimony to its existence; and trusting that evi- 
 dence, if they will set their faces in the right direction, and 
 possess normal eyes, and will wait, they shall see Fuji. A man 
 may have no personal assurance of the living God, and no one 
 may be able at once to help him to that certainty. Let him look 
 about and see signs of religious faith all around him the face 
 of God on human lives, more or less skilfully reproduced as men 
 have the will or the power at first hand or at second hand to 
 enter into fellowship with Him ; let him notice particularly God's 
 face on one Life who millions agree was closest to Him. Let him 
 take knowledge of men and women who claim, or for whom others 
 claim, that friendship with God is the inspiration of the best, the 
 most useful and the fairest things about them. Let him observe 
 institutions founded, arrangements maintained, methods com- 
 mended, to assist intercourse with the Most Highest. Let him 
 talk with those who have themselves found Him their strength, 
 their peace, their exceeding joy. Then let him set himself trust- 
 fully and obediently towards God, as they tell him; let him live 
 on thus ; and, if his heart have eyes, he, too, shall see the living 
 God. 
 
 And once men believe the Gospel of God, they can believe that 
 His Kingdom is at hand not merely some faint beginnings of it, 
 or some slight developments of it, but the world-wide social order 
 of love in which He is all in all. The Kingdom is at hand in Him, 
 who is eager and able to bring it into being "with winged expe- 
 dition swift as the lightning glance," if only His children believe 
 that it can come and venture themselves with Him to establish it. 
 The message that bids men expect to become very gradually the 
 least bit better, and to see our world slowly and imperceptibly 
 improved, misrepresents God and dwarfs faith. God's righteous 
 rule with all its blessings is at hand both for individuals and for 
 the corporate life of mankind ; His salvation would "through and 
 
60 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 through cleanse the foul body of the infected world"; and His 
 mercy is upon us according as we hope in Him. To postpone 
 the anticipation of durable world peace, or of brotherly indus- 
 trial relations, to defer the hope of the alteration of human 
 nature in nations or in some particular man or woman to a 
 remote tomorrow, is to rob the tidings of their goodness, is to 
 negate the Gospel. Lack of faith, or little faith, Jesus com- 
 plained of oftener than of anything else. A God who comes 
 quickly, who is able and wistful to fulfil His will straightway, is 
 our good news. 
 
 A day in April never came so sweet, 
 
 To show how costly summer was at hand. 
 
 But there must be no belittling the completeness of the trans- 
 formations which His Kingdom demands. The awfulness of the 
 world-wide tragedy and the appalling moral shipwrecks in men 
 and women at our side accuse us of having healed far too lightly 
 humanity's hurt and of having preached peace, where there was 
 no peace. The more specifically and searchingly we set forth 
 what life under God's rule means for a man or for society the 
 better. Conscience wakens and men come to a sense of sin. It 
 is a fashion to say that this is no longer a potent factor in 
 religion among us; but that is a shallow misreading of facts. 
 Show men God in Christ, and the contrast between Him and them- 
 selves, between His Spirit and that which pervades the social life 
 in which they move, is overwhelming. The great revival of religion 
 which ushered in the public ministry of Jesus seems to have come 
 to Him, as to thousands of others, as a call to repentance. Schol- 
 ars have cast about for some explanation why He, the sinless, 
 underwent John's baptism of remission. John was preaching 
 corporate righteousness for Israel, appealing to men in their 
 callings as soldiers, tax-farmers, religious leaders, to change their 
 minds that they might fit into the new order which God was about 
 to set up in their nation. Is not the simplest explanation that 
 
THE MINISTRY OF EVANGELISM 61 
 
 Jesus felt, and felt far more keenly than any other, social shame 
 and a craving for the new life of His people with their God? 
 Today, whether burdened or not with a sense of personal wrong- 
 doing, men are faced with the frightful results of corporate trans- 
 gression. God's judgments on national greed, on trust in organ- 
 ized brute might, on contempt for Christlike love, are abroad 
 in the earth, and have come home in unutterable suffering to mil- 
 lions of hearts. The guilt for this must be brought home as 
 personally. 
 
 We are all diseased, 
 
 And with our surfeiting and wanton hours 
 Have brought ourselves into a burning fever, 
 And we must bleed for it. 
 
 A conscience awakened to responsibility in social guilt will soon 
 focus itself on the more immediate circle of life about its possessor 
 and bring to sight the hideous consequences of his own self-seeking, 
 unfairness, indulgence and distrust. While it is not the good 
 news to show a man his sin and his nation's sin, it is the best 
 news so to show him God that he is shamed with what he is and 
 with what his people are. There is nothing healthy-minded in 
 self-complacency. Bagehot well said: "So long as men are very 
 imperfect, the sense of great imperfection should cleave to them." 
 And here the cross becomes central in the Evangel, and Christ 
 crucified as sin-bearer the supreme Gospel of God. Our social 
 thinking renders this convincing. Jesus bore sin in the sense that 
 it was the collective evil of His world, in the Church with its 
 nationalistic and class religion, in the State with its military 
 imperialism, in the commercial life which invaded even the house 
 of prayer with its greed of gain, and in the public opinion of a 
 host of indifferent and irresponsible nobodies, which nailed Him 
 to the cross. Such a Calvary is no past event merely, but a pres- 
 ent occurrence; Christ's brethren are crucified by similar forces, 
 and with them Him, and with Him God. "I thought once, on the 
 
62 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 Somme," wrote a British sergeant, "that the two races facing 
 each other in such agony were as the two thieves on their crosses, 
 reviling each other, and that somewhere between us, if we could 
 but see, was Christ on His Cross. Whatever we called our motives, 
 we who fought aimed equally at our enemies through Christ." 
 (We should wish to distinguish between the penitent and the im- 
 penitent thief.) Again, He bore sin in the sense that every fault 
 and failure and folly of His brethren was social guilt for which 
 His sensitive conscience charged Him with accountability. He 
 was the Conscience of the whole family of the less conscientious 
 children of God, and that conscience laid on Him the iniquity of 
 them all. 
 
 All woes of all men sat upon Thy soul 
 
 And all their wrongs were heavy on Thy head ; 
 With all their wounds Thy heart was pierced and bled, 
 And in Thy spirit as in a mourning scroll 
 The world's huge sorrows were inscribed by roll, 
 All theirs on earth who serve and faint for bread, 
 All banished men's, all theirs in prison dead. 
 
 And He still is the Conscience of humanity, the unveiling for us 
 of our Father's conscience, who feels Himself implicated in all 
 that His children do and in all that they are. And again, Jesus 
 bore sin in the sense that His sympathetic kinship with the guilty 
 made Him feel the crushing shame they were too obtuse to feel. 
 His kinship with them took Him down into the uttermost darkness 
 where He felt Himself abandoned: "My God, My God, why hast 
 Thou forsaken Me?" That He endured that no child of God 
 need ever repeat His awful loneliness, for at our farthest from 
 our Father's face we are met by a wondrous Companion, who 
 leads us surely home, Himself the way. And His Church and 
 every member of it must follow Him sharing His atoning ministry. 
 In His sin-bearing Christ is both substitute and exemplar, the 
 path-finder, whose solitary sacrifice in exploring faith need never 
 
THE MINISTRY OF EVANGELISM 63 
 
 be repeated, and the path-maker, whose way of love must be con- 
 stantly trod by all who would live with His and their Father. 
 
 For the immediate hour we need to interpret the impoverish- 
 ment of the nations and the outpouring of blood in the light of 
 Calvary, so that it may be seen as a judgment both upon our 
 enemies and ourselves for an unrighteous international and com- 
 mercial order, a judgment by which sensitive consciences are 
 moved to a contagious repentance ; and as a sacrifice in which both 
 the more and the less blameworthy share a fellowship of suffer- 
 ing, and the just suffer for the unjust, in atonement for corporate 
 sin to redeem the world to "heart-sorrow and a clear life ensuing." 
 Viewed in this light, whether the war continue until all the wealth 
 piled by imperialistic exploitation shall be sunk, and all the drain 
 of militarism on the life of the toilers of the world be paid in 
 blood, we shall still say with Lincoln: "The judgments of the 
 Lord are true and righteous altogether." 
 
 We never proclaim God at His best until we preach Christ 
 crucified. The cross is still an offence, and if we place national 
 ambitions, political platforms, commercial principles, educational 
 ideals, personal motives, side by side with the cross, men are faced 
 with revealing decisions of what they deem weakness and folly. 
 The cross challenges to the same daring that was His who first 
 bore it. To hazard the national policies and the industrial rela- 
 tions demanded by the Spirit of Calvary involves serious risks; 
 they will almost surely bring experiences akin to Gethsemane and 
 Golgotha; but it is the Gospel that Christ crucified is the power 
 and the wisdom of God. In the midst of the heavenly city we are 
 seeking to build, we must place the Lamb as the light thereof. 
 
 And the Gospel of God is not complete save as we tell of His 
 indwelling in the redeemed community in His Holy Spirit. There 
 is, perhaps, no single word in the common religious vocabulary 
 so nebulous as the word "spiritual." We must define spirituality. 
 We may begin by noting the diversity of types labelled "spiritual" 
 in the Bible. Here is Samson, Israel's Hercules, the muscular, 
 
64 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 passionate, coarsely humorous tribal hero of an iron age; and 
 four times in the brief record of his career his prodigious feats 
 are ascribed to the empowering Spirit. Here is Bezalel, in whose 
 artistic craftsmanship pious recorders of Israel's antiquities saw 
 evidences of the Spirit's presence. Here is Stephen, whose tact 
 in handling disgruntled women, whose logic in arguing Jesus' 
 Messiahship, whose insight into the friendly heavens, whose plea 
 for the forgiveness of his slayers, are given as token that he is 
 full of the Spirit. Here is Barnabas, whose breadth in welcom- 
 ing believing Gentiles to the Church at Antioch, and whose dis- 
 crimination in passing over unessentials and insisting solely on 
 loyalty to Christ, are cited as signs that his goodness is due to 
 the Holy Ghost. Samson, Bezalel, Stephen, Barnabas differ 
 widely: spirituality must be conceived as including many types. 
 All four have in common two characteristics : each devotes his 
 powers to the cause of God as he sees it ; and each impresses men 
 as being himself plus the present and acting God. Spirituality 
 consists of consecration and inspiration. We must call upon men 
 to yield themselves with their varied gifts in their several callings 
 to the purpose of God, and assure them that in and through them 
 none less than the wise and mighty Lord of all will Himself dwell 
 and plan and labor. This will spiritualize the rough work of life 
 wrought by men of muscle and the delicate tasks performed by 
 men of taste, the toil of brain and the labor of hearts, so that 
 none of it remains unhallowed and all of it is raised to a divine 
 efficiency. We must give every man a sense of mission in his occu- 
 pation and the conviction that He who sends him breathes on 
 him, saying: "Receive ye the Holy Ghost." 
 
 We must also point out that according to the Bible the Spirit 
 of God in man is always a public spirit. When King Saul is 
 turned into "another man," it is not said that he became more 
 devout, but instead of being concerned with the family matter 
 of his father's asses, he is interested in all Israel's welfare. When 
 Jesus is endued with the Holy Spirit at the Jordan, no change is 
 
THE MINISTRY OF EVANGELISM 65 
 
 noted in His personal character nor in His intimacy with His 
 Father, but He ceases to be a private person and comes forward 
 as the responsible Servant of God to proclaim His Kingdom. 
 Spirituality today must be manifest in social-mindedness. No 
 man, no church, no nation, is spiritual unless self-interests are 
 subordinated to the commonweal. 
 
 And we must make plain that in the Bible the Spirit is never a 
 personal possession apart from the spiritual community. At 
 Pentecost the Spirit came upon the believing Church, and each 
 Christian's spirituality attained rich growth and expression be- 
 cause "the multitude of them that believed were of one heart 
 and soul." No individual can expect to attain and develop spirit- 
 ual life in isolation ; he must be in the fellowship of the faithful ; 
 and the more inclusive the spiritual fellowship with whose cor- 
 porate life he is identified, the ampler his own spiritual endow- 
 ment. No single communion can enrich to the full its own mem- 
 bers so long as it is not consciously in union with the whole Body 
 of Christ. No individual, however conscientious, can hope to make 
 his business or his financial affairs fully spiritual until the col- 
 lective commercial life of mankind is dominated by the Spirit of 
 Jesus. No citizen can freely express spiritual patriotism so long 
 as the nation is not corporately seeking to be ruled by the min- 
 istering purpose of the Son of man. This is not to say that 
 individually we are not loyally to follow Christ even to breaking 
 the most sacred ties that bind us to family and Church and nation, 
 nor that in such loyalty God will not be with us. There is a 
 saying of our Lord's which may contain a hint of autobiography, 
 where He speaks of the sycamine tree, in obedience to faith, up- 
 rooted and planted in the sea. What more unpropitious soil 
 for a tree's roots than salt waves ! May He not have felt His 
 own life equally ill-nourished from His surroundings in home and 
 town, Church and nation? By faith He drew on what seemed 
 not there, and flourished. But even He found the lack of spiritual 
 fellowship straining: "O faithless generation, how long shall I be 
 
66 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 with you?" God craves social incarnation in a united Church, a 
 dedicated business community, a servant nation; and only as we 
 make these corporate groups disciples will their members attain 
 unto a fullgrown man as churchmen, workers, citizens, unto the 
 measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. 
 
 This, in briefest outline, is the Gospel of God for our day of 
 social rebuilding; the old Gospel of the Father, Saviour, Spirit; 
 of God as love, Lord of heaven and earth, in Christ, becoming 
 all in all in a Christlike world. The ministry of evangelism needs 
 not the crudest but the finest, the most thoroughly Christian 
 thought. If it be associated in the public mind with outworn 
 theology, it is in part the shame of those of us who possess the 
 gains of accurate scholars and who have lacked the passion to 
 make known the God we claim to know. 
 
 But today passion has caught fire. We have been kindled to a 
 flaming indignation at rapacious and domineering arrogance and 
 at fiendish brutality. The consequences of sin have been made 
 more frightfully clear to us in the horrors and terrors of Armenia 
 and Belgium, and in the brutal carnage of the trenches, than 
 Dante's imaginative pen or the lurid brush of any Fifteenth Cen- 
 tury painter could portray them. A world in desperation de- 
 mands of the Church whether she have a gospel, and pleads 
 that, if she have, she publish it forthwith. The hot fury in which 
 our consciences have flamed against intolerable wrong must be 
 the passion with which we set forth the saving Gospel of God. 
 
 With regard to the methods of this ministry of evangelism, let 
 us remind ourselves at the outset that the disciple-making spirit 
 should dominate all that the Church does and is. Every service 
 of worship, every lesson in the Sunday School, every social meet- 
 ing, every help or recreation a church may offer a community, 
 must have this as its ultimate aim. The Church is not com- 
 missioned to do anything for any man apart from making him a 
 follower of Jesus Christ. Every one of its members must be dedi- 
 cated to bringing individuals and the social groups they influence 
 
THE MINISTRY OF EVANGELISM 67 
 
 under the sway of their Lord. This means that their leader in 
 his preaching, in his planning of the church's work, in his per- 
 sonal contacts with men and women, must be preeminently an 
 evangelist. There is no place in any ministry of the Christian 
 Church for a man who is not ruled by the one motive of making 
 disciples. An evangelism which occasionally imports a spiritual 
 expert to win people from a dead world to a scarcely living church 
 adds little to the Kingdom of God. Experience proves that only 
 the church which is making disciples is able to keep and train 
 those already made. 
 
 And evangelism is not a ministry introduced now and again, 
 as an interruption or a supplement to the Church's more usual 
 work. Its education is itself disciple-making; its fellowship lifts 
 up and draws men to Christ. A properly taught Sunday School 
 lesson needs no application tacked on at its conclusion, and a 
 thoroughly Christian sermon does not require an added special 
 appeal. But this does not exclude the occasional definite effort 
 to bring men to decisions. The most carefully planned social 
 system of religious education provides an opportunity in adoles- 
 cence "for correcting unsocial sets that the personality may 
 have acquired" (to borrow a phrase from my colleague, Dr. Coe). 
 Seemingly earnest Christians grow indifferent and must be 
 brought to reconsecration. Boys and girls slip through our Sun- 
 day Schools unmastered by the Spirit of Jesus and must be won 
 in maturity. A very large semi-pagan public needs the impact 
 of a concentrated attempt to proclaim God in Christ and gain 
 decisive acceptance. The earth is watered by steady rains which 
 soak in as soon as they fall; but it is also watered by an occa- 
 sional downpour where the water falls in sheets and sweeps 
 obstacles before its flooding torrents. 
 
 In suggesting specific methods for these more definite evange- 
 listic attempts, one can only draw on personal observations. It 
 appears that our regular services of worship are not likely to 
 win many who have not been brought up with some contact with 
 
68 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 the Church. Outsiders are more effectively reached in some less 
 formal meeting, such as a Bible Class, or a service in some home 
 or shop, to which Christians bring neighbors or fellow-workmen, 
 and where the personal relations are closer and more telling than 
 in a large congregation. In industrial communities the Church 
 ought to use the groupings brought about by common occupation, 
 and to seize the most favorable off-times of working people to 
 give its message. In far too many places unless a man is willing 
 to be saved on a Sunday at 11 a.m. or 8 p.m., the Church opens 
 no door for him to life with God. 
 
 A series of special services, lasting a week or longer, is a widely 
 used and often effective means of enlisting them that are with- 
 out. It centres a congregation's attention upon its primary 
 business. It furnishes a definite object for preliminary meetings 
 of companies of Christians for prayer and inspiration to personal 
 effort. The continuous character of the presentation of the mes- 
 sage gives it cumulative power. The appeal calls for immediate 
 decisions. Opportunities for personal interviews can readily be 
 provided and the conversation naturally turns to the main point. 
 Most congregations find such special missions rewarding. 
 
 And there is value in a simultaneous mission, when all the 
 churches in a community combine their efforts. It is a great 
 thing to get the mind of a whole town thinking of God, and its 
 tongues, usually so tied on this theme, speaking freely. A throng 
 in a huge building warms a man by its enthusiasm and renders 
 him more susceptible to an infection of Christian faith. But 
 there is often an ambiguity in decisions pled for in a wholesale 
 fashion, and difficulty in relating those reached to the fellowship 
 of the churches. A wise pastor will organize his own congrega- 
 tion for this primary task of gaining disciples ; he will keep it at 
 work constantly; and when some special interest is abroad in the 
 community, his church will be the readiest to give intelligent 
 assistance and the best fitted to conserve any results. 
 
 The children of a congregation are a minister's evangelistic 
 
THE MINISTRY OF EVANGELISM 69 
 
 responsibility. As they arrive at the period of life when they 
 determine their plans for themselves, he wishes to see them resolv- 
 ing to be devotees of Christ. A Sunday School training ought 
 to make conversion unnecessary, but it should prepare the way 
 for a calmly reached decision. A pastor's class which embraces 
 all the boys and girls of an appropriate age, irrespective of any 
 previous indication of desire to enter the full communion of 
 the Church, gives a minister a chance to present the Christian 
 life to them very concretely with ample opportunity for ques- 
 tions, and on the basis of a clear understanding to ask for 
 deliberate enrolment as followers of Jesus. 
 
 There will always be room in the Church for the specially gifted 
 evangelist whom God from time to time sends us ; but there is 
 urgent need today that all preachers try to prepare themselves 
 for this ministry. It is a fine thing when the pastor can himself 
 conduct a series of special services in his own church or in some 
 more neutral building in his town, and lead his people in their com- 
 mon effort. If there is value in the sound of a less familiar voice 
 and in a fresh presentation of the Gospel, it is usually wiser to 
 invite a man of pastoral experience, who knows how to work with 
 the church organization, and will develop it. Some of our com- 
 munions happily have permanent committees on evangelism, 
 devised to give intelligent aid in this ministry. It would seem 
 a wise proviso to insist that evangelists, who are not pastors, 
 or under the direction of their communions in some other office, 
 should be organized as were the preaching orders of the Medieval 
 Church, under competent ecclesiastical oversight, that questions 
 of finance and of cooperation with local leaders of the churches 
 may be harmoniously adjusted. Pastors with gifts for this type 
 of preaching ought to be released from their pulpits for an 
 occasional mission in some other church. Above all, the ministry 
 of evangelism must be identified with the vow of loyalty to Christ 
 taken by every member of the Church: "Come ye after Me, and 
 I will make you fishers of men." 
 
70 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 We have been speaking of talking the Gospel. It is striking 
 how little the New Testament says of this, and how much oftener 
 it speaks of walking in wisdom towards them that are without. 
 If the Gospel of God is news of a new social order, the Church 
 must be in some sense a foretaste of it, and her members exponents 
 of the new social type. All our talk is futile until as employers 
 and workers, as citizens and patriots, we stand manifestly for a 
 fraternal industrial system, for a distribution of the world's wealth 
 that allows none to waste and none to want, for a servant nation, 
 and for a commonwealth of the peoples of the earth. When the 
 Church at Jerusalem seriously undertook to embody the love of 
 Christ in its communal life, "with great power gave the apostles 
 their witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus." He was 
 manifestly a living factor, "and the Lord added unto them day 
 by day those that were being saved." 
 
 Such a church stands for a distinctive type of life, and is salt, 
 light and leaven in its community. The Church of today suffers 
 most, perhaps, from her failure to represent enough that is dis- 
 tinctive. Her ranks are full of moral mediocrities. Her members 
 are not clear what their vow of allegiance to Christ and their 
 fellowship with His Church demands of them. We have swung 
 far from the elaborate doctrinal confessions expected of com- 
 municants in many churches a couple of generations or more ago. 
 We agree with Zwingli that "it is a Christian man's business not 
 to talk grandly of dogmas, but to be always doing arduous and 
 great things with God." We need to make plain what these 
 arduous and great things are in the rebuilding of a world after 
 the mind of Christ. If our membership should show few or no 
 additions, if it should even show a shrinkage, that would be no 
 cause for grief, provided the remnant that remained were devotees 
 of love. But we need not fear a shrinkage under such circum- 
 stances, for it is such a fellowship for which men are wistful, and 
 the summons to the difficult is always captivating. Our ministry 
 of evangelism should seek to bring men to a threefold loyalty: to 
 
THE MINISTRY OF EVANGELISM 71 
 
 Christ as Lord and Saviour, to the Kingdom of God, and to the 
 Church. Each of these may be amplified in detail. The second 
 must mean Micah's summary of Old Testament religion: "to do 
 justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God," plus the 
 distinctive demand of the New Testament to be ready to spend 
 and be spent for those for whom Christ died; and the third may 
 well be itemized to include earnestness in prayer and in the study 
 of the Scriptures, regular attendance in the house of God, per- 
 sonal service to increase the Church's usefulness and the adorning 
 of her fellowship with a life of love. The church whose members 
 intelligently and faithfully fulfil this threefold vow will not fail 
 to proclaim the Gospel of God. 
 
 And we must not forget that this Gospel is the Church's unique 
 contribution to the world. There is a tendency to employ her in 
 a host of public services, and to appeal to her to aid every civic 
 and social movement. It is, no doubt, a tribute to her power that 
 her assistance should be so sedulously sought. But the danger 
 is that she may come to be regarded merely as one among the 
 forces for social welfare. Religion, however, is not primarily 
 something useful, but something fruitful. It is not a means of 
 improving mankind alongside of other means, such as education, 
 art, politics, and morality; it is the parent of them all their 
 fountain of life. It is not one among several factors cultivating 
 the soil of humanity; it is the source of its fertility. We are 
 busy today directing the flow of Christian motives into many 
 trenches to irrigate tracts of life which hitherto have been desert. 
 And this must be done. But digging such ditches is for the 
 Church a minor task; her main concern is the supply of the 
 spiritual stream. An earlier generation often had a copious river 
 confined within far too few ditches ; we may find ourselves with a 
 vast system of trenches and only a trickle in them. The living 
 water is the Spirit of God, who enters and fructifies the spirits 
 of men. The Church's paramount duty is not to stir men to 
 a number of endeavors, however useful, but to bring them 
 
72 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 God, their Saviour and their Captain in the salvation of the 
 world. 
 
 And how our cruel and woesome day forces upon us the urgency 
 of heralding the Gospel of God! Now- is the judgment of this 
 world; now may the prince of this world be cast out, if if Christ 
 be lifted up in a Church towering above the world's ethical level. 
 At home and in the ends of the earth the Church must give the 
 preaching of the Gospel of God the right of way over every other 
 concern. We are not warning men of a wrath to come; they are 
 faced with a wrath that is here. We live in a world on fire, and 
 its only hope of a safe and quiet life is in faith in the God who 
 is love. 
 
 Not long ago I was standing on one of the corners of Fifth 
 Avenue on Murray Hill at the most crowded hour in the after- 
 noon. Two long lines of vehicles moving up and two lines moving 
 down the avenue seemed to fill it from curb to curb. There were 
 omnibuses and automobiles with shoppers and pleasure-seekers, 
 delivery wagons and, just in front of me, a United States mail- 
 cart. Suddenly the shrill sound of a fire claxon was heard, and a 
 hook-and-ladder motor-truck swung into the avenue, and sped 
 up the hill. As by a miracle the columns of vehicles parted, and 
 in the cleared centre the fire-truck ran without a stop up the 
 avenue. Everything was at stake homes, pleasures, business, 
 government, would be nothing, if the fire got beyond control. 
 Today our entire civilization is threatened. War, which is the 
 result of greed, trust in force, a patriotism unhallowed by devo- 
 tion to mankind, consumes everything of worth. The Church of 
 Christ which is certain of a salvation, and of only one, need make 
 no apology nor speak hesitantly, but with urgent insistence demand 
 right of way, for the Gospel of God. 
 
LECTURE IV 
 THE MINISTRY OF WORSHIP 
 
 To those who believe that religion is a creative force, there is no 
 more socially constructive act than public worship. It is not col- 
 lective thought about our highest ideal, valuable as such united 
 contemplation is ; it is a collective consent to the living God. We 
 thing about God in the third person, we worship Him in the 
 second ; and the difference in language between "He" and "Thou" 
 produces a vast difference in results. Talking of a man is always 
 quite another matter than talking to him. His personality, face 
 to face, has a decisive effect on the conversation. Real religion 
 begins only when one addresses one's self directly to God. A 
 subtle master of the soul, Fenelon, advised a correspondent: "If 
 you are bored by God, tell Him that He bores you." Such first- 
 hand dealing with our Highest breaks the thought-enclosure of 
 our minds and of the thinking of the community in which we live, 
 and lets in new inspirations. The picture of Him whom we adore 
 is, to be sure, our own thought of God, and always limited and 
 soiled by our imperfections ; but yielding ourselves up to Him 
 through it, we erect ourselves above ourselves, and become new- 
 born different by some slight increment from what we were 
 before. There is "an access of mind" 
 
 in such high hour 
 Of visitation from the living God. 
 
 Worship is thus an act momentous for both God and man. 
 It sets God free from the confinements of His children's thought- 
 
74 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 lessness and contrary wills; it sets them free in the fuller liberty 
 of their Father's creative wisdom and energy. He gives and 
 they take their beings afresh from the Fountain of life. Their 
 heredity becomes contemporaneous : His fatherhood is not a past 
 fact merely but a present process. Adoring men come again from 
 their Divine Kinsman with whom they have communed as a family 
 in His household of faith, and "trailing clouds of glory do they 
 come." Prayer and praise are not like balls in a squash-court 
 that bounce back from the hard walls of our self-bounded world. 
 The living God is not excluded from His universe, and He em- 
 ploys the processes of thought in men's minds for His entrances. 
 
 Matthew Arnold was voicing the experience of the race when 
 he said that, while man philosophizes best alone, he worships best 
 in common. This is partly a matter of psychology: the group- 
 adoration lifts the individual into a richer and intenser experi- 
 ence than would be his in isolation. And it is partly a more funda- 
 mental matter : a God who is love finds us readiest for His incom- 
 ing when we are consciously sharing each other's aspirations. 
 God fulfils His purpose not through separated individuals but 
 through His Church, and corporate worship fits for corporate 
 service. 
 
 Worship which is etymologically "worth-ship," a giving God 
 His value, has a distinctive meaning for Christians. There are 
 three degrees of communion which men have with one another. 
 A first is the sense of physical presence. A room has a different 
 feeling for us when someone is in it with us, than when we are in 
 it alone. A second is the sharing of passing thought. Conversa- 
 tion is an interchange of the ideals at the time in the minds of the 
 speakers. A third is the fellowship in purpose. Two persons 
 may be half the circumference of the globe apart; each may be 
 ignorant of what the other is doing or thinking at the moment ; 
 but each is certain that the other's interests in life are identical 
 with his own. They are "hearts remote but not asunder." 
 
 In all these three degrees men experience fellowship with God. 
 
THE MINISTRY OF WORSHIP 75 
 
 To many the sights and sounds of nature suggest a Being at hand 
 mightier and not wholly unlike ourselves. 
 
 The sense of an Eternal Presence thrills 
 The fringes of the sunsets and the hills. 
 
 Music has a similar effect on others. "Music," writes Carlyle, 
 "leads us to the verge of the infinite, and lets us gaze on that." 
 Men try to reproduce the awesome influence of nature, the 
 witchery of light and shadow, the mysterious depth of the forest 
 and the suggestion of varied colors, in their churches, and by the 
 pageantry of ritual give the spirit this sense of the nearness of 
 Deity. 
 
 Again, men try to share God's passing thoughts. Mystics 
 make much of the immediate touch of God's mind on ours, and 
 speak of thinking His thoughts after Him. 
 
 Or again, they go deeper, and seek to be in unison of will with 
 Him who is working out His purpose through the centuries. They 
 may not have a vivid sense of God's presence; that varies with 
 temperament, circumstances, health. They may not feel that 
 they share God's current thought: they are continually faced 
 with baffling situations, and life eludes their explanations of it. 
 God may seem both far off and incomprehensible ; but they are 
 convinced that His eternal purpose has been disclosed in Christ, 
 and they adore God in Him; they consent to Him, so that His 
 aim and theirs, His conscience and theirs, are at one. This is 
 worship in spirit and in truth. 
 
 One would not disparage emotional exaltation which makes 
 men keenly conscious of God's nearness. Well for those who 
 possess it; and it is a legitimate aim of public worship to foster 
 it. But two persons may be together in a room and poles apart 
 in thought and feeling. Nor would one rule out the mystic experi- 
 ence of immediate touch between the Divine mind and ours. But 
 our grasp of God's truth is never more than a fractional holding, 
 and imperfect understanding will make two persons face to face 
 
76 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 feel themselves leagues asunder. Genuine communion requires 
 oneness of purpose. The New Testament conceives of true 
 worship as "in the Spirit" prayer, praise and message, under 
 God's control, and His worshippers one in will with Him. We 
 give God His Christian worth only as we approach Him with 
 the self-commitment of Jesus and let Him return us such Self- 
 impartation as He gave to Jesus. Christian worship may be 
 described as an exchange of selves. 
 
 And these selves we offer are not merely our individual wills 
 but the collective personalities of the various groups we represent. 
 A socially minded God is seeking social embodiment. Public 
 prayer and praise have been too individualistic; but the day of 
 social litanies, national penitence and intercession, prayers and 
 praise that seek to commune with God in His purpose for every 
 aspect of the community's life, has arrived. This conscious con- 
 nexion of the living God in common worship with all our group 
 aspirations and group sins ought to mean much for the release 
 of new redemptive inspirations, for the further admission of God 
 into our lives as relatives, toilers, citizens and churchmen. 
 
 Leadership in public worship demands the most delicate skill. 
 One is employing language, music, the associations of a hallowed 
 place, symbolic acts, the inherited thought and sentiment of many 
 generations, the fresh light of the current day, to form a high- 
 way for God into the lives of a congregation, and through them 
 into a community's life. Such leadership is an art which works 
 in the sensitive materials of the minds, hearts and consciences of 
 living beings to enact God. 
 
 To be effective public worship must meet four requirements : 
 
 First, it must hold the worshippers' attention. Throughout 
 they must be kept mentally alert and focussed on Him who is 
 invisible in His various relations with them and their world. How 
 deftly all its elements must be arranged to rivet interest! In a 
 striking bit of self-analysis, John Donne in one of his funeral 
 sermons makes this confession regarding his private devotions: 
 
THE MINISTRY OF WORSHIP 77 
 
 "I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in and invite God 
 and His angels together; and when they are there, I neglect God 
 and His angels for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, 
 for the whining of a door; I talk on in the same posture of 
 prayer, eyes lifted up, knees bowed down, as though I prayed to 
 God ; and if God should ask me when I last thought of Him in that 
 prayer I cannot tell. Sometimes I find that I forgot what I am 
 about; but when I began to forget it, I cannot tell. A memory 
 of yesterday's pleasures, a fear of tomorrow's dangers, a straw 
 under my knee, a noise in mine ear, a chimera in my brain, troubles 
 me in my prayer." We recognize that as an accurate picture of 
 what occurs with almost all of us during part, and often the 
 greatest part, of public worship. An incongruous hodgepodge 
 of irrelevant matters from without and up from within pop into 
 people's heads in the collective inattention or partial attention 
 produced by most church services. Attention can only be com- 
 manded by a continuous succession of things that interest. 
 Sermons, hymns and particularly prayers (which are most 
 liable to be padded with merely conventional phraseology), 
 ought to be composed of sufficient thought to keep the mind 
 employed. 
 
 Second, it must awaken their imaginations. God, like every- 
 thing else, is real to us only as we see Him, and that means the 
 forming of a mental image. All that enters into worship those 
 for whom we pray, the blessings we name in praise, the selves 
 we aspire to be, the ideals we cherish for homes and commerce 
 and nations have to be pictured, and pictured not in forms and 
 colors of the world of sense but in their relation to God in light 
 that never was on sea or land. Keats, as a medical student, writes 
 in a letter: "The other day during the lecture there came a sun- 
 beam into the room, and with it a whole troop of creatures float- 
 ing in the ray ; and I was off with them to Oberon and fairyland." 
 Worship must bring to a congregation a similar ray from Him 
 in whom is no darkness at all, and let them see the whole troop 
 
78 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 of their relations and obligations in its light, until they are off 
 to God and the land that ought to be. The prosaic has no place 
 in a church service or rather no more place than to serve as 
 the frame for a picture. Hymn, prayer, sermon, should be of 
 imagination all compact. Worship must be throughout symbolic ; 
 and the symbols, be they material like the bread and wine on the 
 Lord's Table, or gestures like the uplifted hands in benediction, 
 or such unsubstantial things as words and musical sounds, are 
 to be valued to the extent that they are translucent windows 
 through which light streams from God. Worship ought to be 
 a series of visions. 
 
 Third, it must stir their feelings. A comprehensively arranged 
 order of worship, providing for invocation, confession, thanks- 
 giving, petition, intercession, consecration and adoration, ought 
 to take a congregation through a whole gamut of moods. The 
 worshipper must feel wistful, again feel abasedly sorry, again feel 
 exaltedly grateful/ again feel eagerly craving, warmly sympa- 
 thetic, firmly resolved, glowingly satisfied. And worship is not 
 effective unless these feelings are intense. It takes something like 
 an eruption of emotion to break through the crust of the con- 
 ventional and release the creative faculties of men's souls. Now 
 no intense feeling can be long sustained. Richard Hooker wisely 
 defended the divisions in the elements in the worship of the An- 
 glican Liturgy: "Forasmuch as effectual prayer is joined with a 
 vehement intention of the interior powers of the soul, which can- 
 not therein long continue without pain, it hath been therefore 
 thought good so by turns to interpose still somewhat for the 
 higher part of the mind, the understanding, to work upon that 
 both being kept in continual exercise by variety, neither might 
 feel any great weariness, and yet each be a spur to other." 
 
 A service must pass fairly rapidly from mood to mood. The 
 hymns ought not to be all alike, whether contemplative or active, 
 whether viewing God objectively in nature or history or in His 
 present purpose in the world, or musing on Him within ourselves. 
 
THE MINISTRY OF WORSHIP 79 
 
 Psalter and Scripture lesson should not both be chosen to fit in 
 with the mood of the sermon. The prayers should be consciously 
 framed to meet other needs and voice other wants than those to 
 which the message is directed. Monotony kills fervor, and we 
 scarcely worship without glow. The service must provide variety 
 and concentration. Variety in the posture of the body bowing 
 or kneeling, sitting, standing; variety in participation in the 
 service actively joining in prayer or praise or reading, or pas- 
 sively receiving with active thought ; variety in the topics contem- 
 plated humbling, exalting, resting, arousing; variety in the 
 turning of the mind outward, inward, upward; variety in the 
 freshness or the familiarity of the music, the prayers, the ele- 
 ments of instruction, surprising the soul by the unusual and 
 striking melody, in phrase, in thought, and moving it by that 
 which has the association of sentiment the familiar hymn, the 
 historic prayer, the hallowed Scripture, the traditional rite, the 
 acknowledged conviction ; variety is essential to maintain inten- 
 sity of feeling utter restfulness and knit resolve. And so is 
 concentration. One thing at a time should occupy a prayer, if 
 a body of people are to agree as touching their asking and feel 
 together in a collective emotion. It is a mistake to mix confes- 
 sion, thanksgiving, intercession in the same sentence. The accom- 
 panying feelings are a jumble. As in successful baseball it is a 
 good rule to "bunch your hits," to gather enough concrete char- 
 acterizations of sins in a confession to abase a congregation in 
 penitence, to sum up enough definite benefits in a thanksgiving 
 to lift them in ecstatic gratitude, and to assemble in an inter- 
 cession enough men and women of other kindreds and tongues 
 and stations and plights to expand those who pray in inclusive 
 sympathies. Worship must move men. This is not to disparage 
 the calm judgment with which we Protestants rightly insist they 
 must discern the will of God for them, in all that the Church 
 presents through its accredited leaders. But we cannot in praise 
 and prayer come close to God without having our hearts burn 
 
80 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 within us; nor does His light break upon us in its splendor, with 
 out giving us 
 
 that thrill of dawn, 
 When the whole truth-touched man burns up, one fire. 
 
 Fourth, it must enlist their consciences. The ultimate test 
 of worship is the extent to which a congregation agrees with God. 
 The aesthetic enjoyment of a musical service is of no Christian 
 value save as it makes men more truly one with their Father's 
 purpose. A sermon may fascinate men's interest and rouse their 
 emotions without ministering communion with the God and Father 
 of Jesus Christ ; that occurs only when they are moved to will as 
 He wills. A congregation enters a church a chaos of conflicting 
 purposes; group interests race prejudices, nationalistic ambi- 
 tions, class aims, family feelings, clannish and cliquish motives 
 dominate them; they have a score or more antagonistic elements 
 jarring within themselves resentments and acquiescences, doubt- 
 ings and believings, selfish, and unselfish motives, snarled and 
 twisted beyond any human unravelling, hopes and despairs, brute 
 passions and angelic aspirations, a legion of demons and seraphs. 
 Their corporate worship must lift them into unison with God, 
 into unison with one another His family in this small subsection 
 of His household of faith, into unison with His Church universal 
 the Divine Community which holds the world together, and into 
 unison with all mankind as it ought to be in His Kingdom. 
 Worship readjusts us. The more mixed the congregation of 
 which we are a part, the more representative it be of childhood, 
 youth and age, of divers callings, circumstances and conditions, 
 of varied races and nationalities (and here we in this country 
 with its cosmopolitan communities are singularly favored), the 
 more likely is corporate worship to carry the individual out of 
 himself, and to adjust him to God and to the whole family of 
 his dissimilar brethren in God. Men see and flow together and 
 their hearts are enlarged. Such readjustment fastens afresh the 
 
THE MINISTRY OF WORSHIP 81 
 
 bonds of brotherhood, and ties about men's conscience the cords 
 of responsibility. They are informed with the mind of Christ, 
 bound with their kind in the unity of His Spirit, and made one 
 with the one God and Father of all. Anything short of this is 
 to fail to worship to give His full worth to God in Christ. 
 
 Having stated these requirements of public worship, one may 
 be expected to deal somewhat in detail with its constituent ele- 
 ments. Preaching is a chief factor in giving God His worth, so 
 that preaching is part of worship ; but the present lecturer has 
 nothing to say regarding the technique of preaching to adults, 
 for the good reason that his eminent predecessors in this lecture- 
 ship seem to him to have said everything that can be said on that 
 topic. He would, however, remind you that a normal congrega- 
 tion ought not to be composed of adults only, and that some 
 adults are not adult in mental capacity. If children are not to 
 stay away from the Sunday morning service, as they often do, 
 and confine their church-going to the sessions of the Sunday 
 School, part of the worship should be planned for their benefit. 
 It is as important that in corporate worship young and old should 
 be together, as that rich and poor should meet before the Maker 
 of them all. The elders help the children to grow in wisdom, in 
 reverence, in responsibility; and the children do even more for 
 them in renewing in them the heart of a little child with which 
 to receive and enter the Kingdom of heaven. It is rarely possible 
 to prepare a sermon that is adequate for the needs of grown men 
 and women which children can understand and appreciate. Much 
 every way is to be said for the growing custom of inserting in 
 the morning service a brief children's sermon. Its theme ought 
 never to be so trivial that it has no message for the adults pres- 
 ent; in that case it will be scorned by sensible children. It ought 
 to be picturesquely put, perhaps with an object that assists atten- 
 tion by holding the eye, and always in words that conjure images. 
 It can often instruct old and young in elementary things which 
 the former have forgot and the latter have never heard. It 
 
82 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 can deal with characters in the Bible, in Church history, in the 
 records of missionary heroism or of social advance, or with the 
 characters of Pilgrim's Progress, or their counterparts in the 
 life of our day Mr. Shitty Shally, Lillie Lazybones, the Cock- 
 sures and the dwellers in Put-Off Town. It can tell the stories 
 of famous hymns, or take up the romantic history that lies behind 
 our English Bible. Like Solomon or Mrs. Gatty's Parables from 
 Nature, it may speak of trees, from the cedar of Lebanon even 
 unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall, of beasts, and of 
 birds, and of creeping things, and of fishes ; and it may supplement 
 Solomon with lessons drawn from the scientific knowledge of 
 today. It may treat of what we do, and of what we do not do, 
 in the house of God and formalism is prevented where every act 
 is shown to have a purpose. It may apply current events, or the 
 sights and sounds of city streets, or the observed doings and mis- 
 doings of living boys and girls, or the signal code of ships, or for 
 that matter anything under the sun, to the life of the children 
 of men with one another in God. It will not only make boys and 
 girls feel that they belong in the congregation a most effective 
 means of incorporating them into the Body of Christ but it will 
 be within the grasp of grown-ups of the simpler sort, and assure 
 them of a message that day ; and it will rest the minds and delight 
 the fancies of robuster thinkers, whose intellectual doors give as 
 ready a welcome as those of the lowly to truth embodied in a tale. 
 It would be hard to say whether young or old are more profited 
 by such preaching, when it is painstakingly prepared and artisti- 
 cally done. 
 
 With regard to the element of praise, we must remind ourselves 
 that the hymnal is a storehouse of religious experience to be 
 skilfully employed to reproduce similar experiences of God. It 
 comes next only to the Bible in this regard, and deserves careful 
 study. Almost all existing collections should be gone over by a 
 minister to place the bad poetry, bad theology and bad religion 
 in them on an index expurgatorius of hymns that should not be 
 
THE MINISTRY OF WORSHIP 83 
 
 sung, and to cull tunes that are unsingable by his people and, 
 perhaps, ought not to be sung by any devout people. There are 
 enough hymns and tunes of solid worth to supply the reasonable 
 needs of any congregation. To be sure tastes and capacities dif- 
 fer, and an inclusive church of any size may well find use for sev- 
 eral different types of praise in its various meetings, but all its 
 hymns ought to be religiously healthy. Music must be measured 
 not by a purely aesthetic standard, but by its religious effects ; 
 and we cannot forget the words Kipling has put on the strings of 
 his banjo: 
 
 And the tunes that mean so much to you alone 
 
 Common tunes that make you choke and blow your nose, 
 
 Vulgar tunes that bring the laugh that brings the groan 
 I can rip your very heartstrings out with those. 
 
 A minister should steadily increase his congregation's repertory 
 of hymns until three or four hundred at least are in annual use. 
 He should note in the hymnal he keeps in his study the date when 
 each hymn is sung, to guard himself from too constant employ- 
 ment of his favorites, and to help him to extend the range of the 
 religious experience of his people. Most congregations can also 
 learn a limited number of chants, and if one is employed at a serv- 
 ice, and eight or ten sung every month, they become familiar with- 
 out growing stale. Hearty congregational singing fuses a com- 
 pany of worshippers as almost nothing else. Such singing is best 
 led by a chorus choir, and most poorly led by a quartette. Choir 
 music ought to be used sparingly in most congregations, where 
 really good voices are not often secured, and the majority of 
 people worship more truly when joining than when listening, save 
 in those rare instances where the selection and its rendering move 
 and lift them. The main duty of every choir is to lead the sing- 
 ing of the whole congregation; organist and singers fail when 
 any of the worshippers present are not drawn out of themselves 
 sufficiently to be sharing in thought, heart, and with as much 
 voice as they can, in the common praise. 
 
84 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 It is with regard to the element of public prayer that most 
 needs to be said. Happily the controversy between the advocates 
 of a liturgy and devotees of free prayer has been theoretically 
 settled by most of us with the admission that both are desirable; 
 but as a matter of practice few congregations are intelligently 
 given the advantages of historic prayers and the free composi- 
 tions of its minister. Every minister should compile a collection 
 of the best prayers from the liturgies of all communions; and 
 should employ them sufficiently often to make their rich phrases 
 familiar, and not too often to rob them of freshness. Many con- 
 gregations are helped to worship by joining actively in some of 
 the great prayers which were prepared for and have won their 
 way to general use. The wealth of the devotional experiences of 
 Christians of all communions should be made available for the 
 members of every congregation just as the best hymns of all 
 communions are to be found in every hymnal. One of the silliest 
 forms of petty denominationalism is to refuse to use a beautiful 
 prayer because it is identified in people's minds with the liturgy 
 of some other communion ; as well decline to sing "Nearer, my God, 
 to Thee" because it was penned by a Unitarian or "There's a 
 wideness in God's mercy" because it came from the heart of a 
 Roman Catholic. There is scarcely a church in our land whose 
 worship would not be fittingly enriched were part of the prayers 
 in at least one of its services every Sunday drawn from the grow- 
 ing canon of the universal Church's accepted forms of prayer. 
 
 And every minister should set himself to acquire with constant 
 toil that highest and most difficult art of leading men, women 
 and little children by his own carefully chosen words into com- 
 munion with the Most High. Effective public prayer must meet 
 certain conditions : 
 
 First, it must be orderly. It cannot be a farrago of thanks- 
 giving, petition, confession and intercession, and fulfil the re- 
 quirements of attention and intense feeling. A congregation 
 ought to know what is coming in a prayer, if they are to join in 
 
THE MINISTRY OF WORSHIP 85 
 
 it intelligently. This can be done by dividing the elements of 
 prayer more than is commonly done in our American churches, 
 so that invocation and confession occupy one prayer, thanks- 
 giving a second, petition and intercession a third ; or by marking 
 the paragraphs in a single prayer by a new address to Deity 
 appropriate to the matter that is to follow: e.g., "0 Lord, our 
 God, to whom belong mercies and forgiveness" naturally intro- 
 duces a confession of sin, while "God of nations" as inevitably 
 leads to an intercession either for our own country or for the 
 nations of the earth. An order assures a congregation that the 
 prayers every Sunday will be sufficiently comprehensive to cover 
 some aspect of each of the subjects that ought to be found in a 
 service of corporate worship. The intercessory prayer, for in- 
 stance, should include at least the world, the nation, the Church 
 universal, the congregation's special needs, those in trouble, and 
 a thankful remembrance of the dead in Christ. Without order- 
 liness, a congregation, like Laertes in Hamlet, will justly com- 
 plain of "maimed rites." 
 
 Second, it must be thoughtful. In no other composition is it 
 so essential to "load every rift with ore." Attention is lost in 
 prayer because there is often not enough to think about. We 
 must be as much on our guard "against the stupidity which is dead 
 to the substance," as we are against "the vulgarity which is dead 
 to the form" (to borrow a phrase of Walter Pater's). A whole 
 Christian ideal ought to be packed into every petition and inter- 
 cession. All repetitions and superfluous words should be excised. 
 Into the brief minutes of public prayer a wealth of thought 
 should be condensed that worshippers may have enough of the 
 whole range of their lives in which to meet God and to be made 
 at one with Him. 
 
 Third, it must be concrete. "Bless our country," means little 
 by its generality : "bless our land with honorable industry, sound 
 learning and pure manners," sets forth a national aspiration. 
 "Make us open-minded" is not as good as "Keep us from narrow 
 
86 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 pride in outgrown ways, blind eyes that will not see the good of 
 change, impatient judgments of the methods and experiments 
 of others." To say, "We confess sins of speech" is not so stimu- 
 lating to penitence as to say, "We find it easier to speak ill than 
 well of others." "Those in trouble" is not definite enough to evoke 
 sympathy: while such phrases as "those who have lost the light 
 of reason, those whose beloved give them pain, those whom man's 
 harshness robs of faith in Thy tenderness," touch the heart. The 
 more explicit the description the better, provided we keep within 
 the circle of needs and desires that are common to a worshipping 
 company. We are not to seek novel subjects in prayer; the 
 wants of the soul are the most ancient commonplaces; but we 
 have to phrase the obvious arrestingly. Specific and picturesque 
 language grips mind and heart. 
 
 Fourth, it must supply variety. The chief argument for free 
 prayer as against a fixed form is that the latter becomes hack- 
 neyed. Unfortunately many ministers fall into forms equally 
 conventional and stereotyped, and forms much poorer and less 
 beautiful than those in the liturgies. To insure variety in thought 
 it is a good thing in preparing the prayers to run over the per- 
 sons in one's congregation one has met during the week, to list 
 the blessings for which they should be thankful, the faults, fol- 
 lies and failures of which they should repent, the advances in char- 
 acter they ought to covet. A faithful pastor has an almost end- 
 less supply of vital matters of this sort in his mind and on his 
 heart; let him phrase a dozen of them aptly, and variety from 
 week to week is assured. It is good to list topics for prayer 
 topics personal and social and deal with a few each Sunday 
 in their appropriate place in the order of service : the industries of 
 the community, the schools, the recreations, the government, 
 the institutions of mercy and correction, the Church's work in 
 its many phases at home and abroad, the families of the con- 
 gregation, will each supply a fairly long number of such topics ; 
 and one does not go over the cities of Israel, the collective life of 
 
THE MINISTRY OF WORSHIP 87 
 
 men, in this way before he finds the Son of man coming with new 
 disclosures of iniquities that plead for pardon, of blessings that 
 ought not to be forgot, and of needs that cry aloud to be brought 
 to God for His filling. It is good to follow the main outlines of 
 the Church Year Christmas, Holy Week, Easter, Ascension- 
 tide, Pentecost, Trinity Sunday, and the seasons of Advent and 
 Lent and let their appropriate themes fill prayer as well as 
 praise and sermon; and good to supplement the Church Year 
 with festivals of patriotism at Thanksgiving and Independence 
 Day, of the solemn passing of the year, of seed-time and harvest 
 with their reminders of our dependence and consequent obliga- 
 tion to share God's gifts as brethren, of the beginning and close 
 of the school and college year, and the festivals of labor, which 
 may well be varied to hallow the various callings represented in 
 a community. It is good to avail one's self of the volumes of 
 prayers, of devotional services, and of materials for prayer that 
 have been published. With the freedom from rigid forms pos- 
 sessed by our non-liturgical churches, it is lamentable that we 
 make so few permanent contributions to the devotional services 
 of the Church universal. We ought to be assisting our brethren 
 in the liturgical communions who are pleading for greater variety 
 in their worship, by enriching them with prayers as fittingly 
 phrased as their own and covering many moods and themes theirs 
 do not touch. It is good to make a collection of phrases from 
 the English Bible, and from other devotional classics, and to 
 cull from this abounding store week by week an unworn way of 
 phrasing an old longing ; good to employ varied characterizations 
 of God in addressing Him, instead of allowing one's self to be- 
 come confined to two or three tiresomely repeated names; for 
 there is no more important matter in prayer than setting God in 
 His richness ever before those who seek His face; good to recall 
 how wealthy our English tongue is, and to ransack its treasures 
 to keep the language in which we voice men's cravings Jresh 
 enough to compel interest and quicken feeling. If we conserve 
 
88 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 the familiar in historic prayers which have worn well for gen- 
 erations and cannot be bettered in form and content, we must 
 provide freshness in the prayers of our own composition. 
 
 It is superfluous to add that the most careful preparation of 
 the prayers is essential. Men prepare differently ; but to protect 
 our congregations against poverty of thought and slipshod lan- 
 guage ninety-nine out of a hundred of us ministers ought to write 
 out at least one, and better still several, of the prayers every 
 week. The habit of constantly writing prayers, whether one 
 reads them, or commits them to memory, or lets them form the 
 background of the prayer in which he leads from the pulpit, is 
 the surest form of training. "The faculty and facility of ex- 
 temporary prayer" is, as Fuller said, "the easy act of a labo- 
 rious habit." The language of public prayer ought generally 
 to be confined to the vocabulary used by the translators of the 
 Bible a copious well of English suited to religious speech. More 
 modern words ought to be scrutinized and tested, and a rough 
 test of their fitness is their appropriateness in lyric verse. A 
 word which is out of place in a lyric poem is usually clumsy in 
 prayer. 
 
 But if we wish our people themselves to pray in corporate wor- 
 ship, we make a mistake in confining them to the words of prayer 
 uttered aloud by the minister or by the whole congregation in 
 unison. In the Friends' Meeting at the one extreme and in the 
 Roman Mass at the other, collective silence is used as a socially 
 stimulated opportunity for worshippers to frame their own pray- 
 ers. We provide for this in the Communion Service, and probably 
 we ought to make further provision. Those of us who attended 
 the World's Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910, were 
 much impressed with devotional services in which the leader sug- 
 gested the acts of prayer : "Let us confess the sins of the Church 
 in" , and then came a series of concrete specifications of fail- 
 ure, ^allowing a silence to follow each sentence in which that 
 great company thoughtfully, and with personal pointedness and 
 
THE MINISTRY OF WORSHIP 89 
 
 poignancy, phrased the sin as each was aware of it. Similarly 
 acts of thanksgiving, of intercession, of personal petition, of 
 lowly adoration of God, were suggested. At times audible par- 
 ticipation was made possible by the leader's using a versicle, such 
 as "Hear us, O Lord from heaven," to which the congregation 
 gave the response, "And when Thou hearest, forgive;" or by his 
 repetition of a phrase such as "Thanks be unto Thee, O God," 
 or "We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord," which the company 
 caught up and used to express their united feeling. Such a care- 
 fully prepared and skilfully led service would restore genuine 
 prayer to many a so-called prayer-meeting, where those present 
 often do everything but pray. And in the regular worship on 
 Sunday there may well be a pause in at least one of the prayers, 
 during which worshippers, enlarged and upborne by the corporate 
 approach to God, may pray each for himself. For instance, In 
 the intercession for those in special need, the minister may say: 
 "We lay before Thee those severally known to us this day in pain, 
 sorrow, indifference, doubt or open sin, naming them one by one 
 in our hearts before Thee" and then wait for a full minute that 
 each may present those he bears on his thought in that uplifting 
 stillness. The element, too, of adoration the conscious setting 
 of the Most High before the eyes of the heart and giving Him 
 worship worth-ship requires sufficient silence to allow the imag- 
 ination to paint its picture of God, and sufficient suggestion 
 through speech to furnish appropriate materials for the imagina- 
 tion to work with, and then further silence while the soul bows 
 before, rejoices in, and covenants with Him. 
 
 In arranging the order of worship at its various services, the 
 church must consider those for whom each is particularly de- 
 signed. It is a poor plan to provide two similar services for the 
 same people on the same day ; it is a question whether there ought 
 not to be more variety in the arrangement of the same service from 
 Sunday to Sunday than is usual. One would like to see a church 
 edifice opened for several different kinds of worship on a Sunday 
 
90 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 and throughout the week, to meet the various temperaments and 
 tastes of its community. There should be services of propaganda 
 and of teaching, where the element of devotion is at a minimum; 
 and there should be devotional services where preaching is omitted 
 or occupies but a brief part of the time. There should be a serv- 
 ice with considerable ritual and symbol, and a service of the 
 utmost informality. The more catholic the individual church, the 
 less need for denominational subdivisions to answer the desires 
 or fit in with the traditions of particular groups. Churches that 
 loudly proclaim their freedom in matters of ritual often show 
 themselves most narrowly rigid in offering the community but one 
 type of worship ; and when their neighborhood fills up with people 
 of other antecedents, they make no effort to adapt themselves 
 to their wants, and fairly invite the organization of churches of 
 other communions. Ministers ought to be trained to conduct 
 worship of various types ; we ought to be skilled in symbolic wor- 
 ship, in the use of a liturgy, in the leadership of a dignified and 
 beautiful service of free prayer, in the direction of a service in 
 which the worshippers frame their own petitions under sugges- 
 tion, in the guidance of most informal meetings in which those 
 present freely participate. If a church is to be socially compre- 
 hensive, it must display great flexibility in adapting its worship 
 to many sorts of persons. 
 
 There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays 
 And every single one of them is right. 
 
 There are seventy times seven methods of arranging corporate 
 worship all of them justified to the degree that they enable God 
 to enter more fully His children's lives and build through them 
 His Kingdom in the world; and each church ought to seek to 
 supply at least seven of them to the community it serves. Scien- 
 tific agriculturists tell us that certain soils need to be impreg- 
 nated with a particular bacillus before they will produce some 
 crops. It will not do to spring novel methods of worship upon 
 
THE MINISTRY OF WORSHIP 91 
 
 a congregation ; its forms must grow out of its traditions ; but 
 there is such a thing as impregnating the soil and fitting it for 
 other, and perhaps richer, harvests of fellowship with God. 
 
 Since the beginning the Church has found the climax of its 
 worship in a symbol the Lord's Supper. The Christian cen- 
 turies have given this sacrament various interpretations in accord 
 with current views of Christ's saving work and His followers' 
 life with Him ; but the symbol itself links the differently thinking 
 generations, and lends itself most suitably to the social con- 
 ception of communion with God prevalent today. It is a symbol 
 which carries us back to a time before there was a written gos- 
 pel, or a creed, or a ritual, or a polity; which carries us back to 
 the Upper Room and the first circle of disciples; and which has 
 been observed through all the succeeding ages a sacrament of 
 the continuity of the Church throughout its changing history. 
 It is a symbol in use in almost every part of the Church today, 
 and even where the elements of bread and wine are not employed 
 (as among the Friends), they remain as metaphors of speech for 
 communion a sacrament of the unity of the Church throughout 
 the earth. It is a symbol which looks forward "until He come," 
 and the Great Community is a fact. In itself the symbol is social 
 a company of friends of Christ, breaking bread and sharing a 
 cup in fellowship with their unseen Lord and with one another 
 in Him. One disciple alone cannot keep the Lord's Supper, and 
 fellow-communicants are as truly sacramental as the elements 
 on the Table the faith and love of each strengthen those of all. 
 It is the symbol of a shared life the Self-offering of Christ ap- 
 propriated by believers as their sufficient strength and their rea- 
 sonable service: "Take this, and divide it among yourselves." 
 From the first it has been a symbol of the corporate oneness of 
 the Church: "We, who are many, are one bread, one body; for 
 we all partake of the one bread." "Let no man having a dispute 
 with his fellow meet with you," says the Didache; and its two 
 Eucharistic prayers plead that the Church may be gathered to- 
 
92 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 gether and become one. Underneath the differences of interpre- 
 tation, the symbol speaks to all of the central place of Jesus 
 Himself in the Christian faith, of the dependence of all Christians 
 upon Him for their life with God, and of their possession of God's 
 life in the measure of their fellowship with one another. No rite 
 more fitly enables us to worship the God and Father of Jesus 
 Christ to give Him His worth as the supply of all His children's 
 needs, according as they form, in the Church, in nations, in indus- 
 try, a believing and friendly commonwealth of His sons and 
 daughters. 
 
 When Jerusalem lay in ruins, Jeshua and Zerubbabel and those 
 who had the vision of the restored temple in their hearts, began 
 by setting in place the altar and offering the burnt-offering, al- 
 though "the foundation of the temple of the Lord was not yet 
 laid." In our wrecked, or rather never-yet-built, city of God 
 we dream of a temple the renewed and reunited Church of 
 Christ, hallowing with its ministries the whole city. But while 
 the temple is still a vision only, we can at once set in place the 
 altar the table of fellowship with its symbols of a Life offered 
 up for us and given to us, and of our offering of ourselves a liv- 
 ing sacrifice. The altar in Jerusalem was the promise of the 
 completed temple and the restored city. The sacrificial fellow- 
 ship of the Table of the Lord is the earnest of the Church of 
 Christ which is to be, until its ministry shall have fully glorified 
 the city of God with the light of the Lamb. 
 
LECTURE V 
 THE MINISTRY OF TEACHING 
 
 A COLLEAGUE of mine said not long ago : "I am afraid this is not 
 the time for an Ecclesia docens. How rarely does one receive 
 instruction in a modern church!" There could hardly be a more 
 damaging criticism of current preaching. The Gospel of Christ 
 has a distinctive conception of God and calls for an equally dis- 
 tinctive life in men and in communities. We cannot assume that 
 what man is to believe concerning God and what duty God re- 
 quires of man under present circumstances are understood. The 
 world struggle is a patent proof that nominally Christian people 
 have confused notions who God is and what He asks of His chil- 
 dren. "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge." The 
 economic and nationalistic rivalries which brought on the catas- 
 trophe were largely led and widely approved by men who con- 
 sidered themselves followers of Jesus, and had little idea that He, 
 to whom they professed allegiance, had principles which demanded 
 specific courses in these spheres of life. The Church, their pre- 
 sumed teacher, must bear the blame for leaving them in igno- 
 rance. Her constant prayer and effort must be, like St. Paul's, 
 that her people's love "may abound yet more and more in knowl- 
 edge and all discernment, so that they may distinguish the things 
 that are morally different." There is scarcely a word in the 
 common religious and ethical vocabulary which does not need, 
 like a worn coin, to be called in, reminted, and put into circula- 
 tion with the clear image and superscription of Jesus Christ. 
 
 And besides the widespread use of religious words in a sub- 
 
94 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 Christian sense, we have to face the fact that generally men 
 breathe a godless atmosphere and that ninety-nine per cent of life's 
 interests are thought of by supposedly Christian people with no 
 reference to Christ. Religion is connected with a limited range 
 of family and personal concerns, while topics of government, 
 industry, commerce, medicine, art, science, are discussed on a 
 frankly atheistic assumption. Speaking of his editorial expe- 
 rience, Dr. Thomas Arnold said: "I never wanted articles on 
 religious subjects half so much as articles on common subjects, 
 written with a decidedly Christian tone," and it is that tone which 
 is lacking. Theoretically the line between the sacred and secular 
 was wiped out a generation or more ago ; practically in the minds 
 of the members of the Church by far the larger area of life re- 
 mains unrelated with God. We have often been deservedly rebuked 
 for failure to fulfil the first item in the Great Commission 
 preaching the Gospel to every creature; we have been even more 
 remiss in another article of that same Commission teaching 
 those who accept the Evangel to observe Christ's will and show- 
 ing them specifically what it involves in the circumstances of 
 contemporary life. 
 
 For example, there seems to have been hardly any object to 
 which Jesus devoted more attention than to training His follow- 
 ers to trust God. Again and again He insists upon that faith 
 which brings quietness and confidence. But how rarely serenity 
 characterizes a modern Christian! Look at a congregation who 
 have grown up from earliest childhood under the Church's influ- 
 ence, and who were willing to learn what she had to teach; and 
 one would expect faces like that of Abou Ben Adhem's angel, 
 with "a look made of all sweet accord." But in fact they are 
 not likely to be noticeably calmer than those of a group of world- 
 lings. No doubt they assent to the teaching: "Fear not, only be- 
 lieve ;" they say, "I know I ought not to worry ;" but the Church 
 has not set herself seriously to train them from earliest infancy, 
 as Jesus tried to train His disciples from the first day they met 
 
THE MINISTRY OF TEACHING 95 
 
 Him, so to connect the living God, their Father, with every situa- 
 tion in which they find themselves that fearfulness disappears and 
 they abide in His love. Our churches are full of easily scared 
 persons, with the usual large stock of ordinary human anxieties, 
 which they do not handle any more successfully than other mor- 
 tals, and often with even more apprehensions of the movements 
 of the world's thought or of its varied happenings. Their Lord 
 would ask them: "Why are ye fearful? have ye not yet faith?" 
 And they might reply : "Yea, Lord, we believe ; but we were never 
 taught not to be afraid of Ajjpse things, never told that these 
 winds and waves were under our Father's control." The Church 
 is not ready for her part in an era of social rebuilding until her 
 members have learned to be so continuously aware of God, their 
 refuge and strength, a very present help, that they say: "There- 
 fore will we not fear, though the earth do change." 
 
 We need to insist that Christian faith is never passive sub- 
 mission in ungodlike physical conditions or social adjustments, 
 but an aggressive conqueror, confidently assuming that the brute 
 creation and the warring world of man can be reshaped to dis- 
 close love an overcoming faith. And we need also to recall that 
 there will still be a large remainder beyond man's knowledge and 
 power the forces of the universe he is as yet unable to subdue, 
 the sickness and frailty he cannot master, the accident his fore- 
 sight fails to forestall, the wills of others he knows not how to 
 control and that in this apparently hostile territory there is a 
 faith which, when a man's strength and skill are overcome, still 
 brings victory faith in the one Lord of heaven and earth, of 
 whom and through whom and unto whom are all things, which 
 gives confidence in the darkness, with the unpreventable, in the 
 face of that in which, however reluctantly, we needs must ac- 
 quiesce. 
 
 Thus God hath will'd 
 That man, when fully skill'd 
 Still gropes in twilight dim; 
 
96 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 Encompass'd all his hours 
 
 By fearful'st powers 
 Inflexible to him; 
 That so he may discern 
 
 His feebleness, 
 And e'en for earth's success 
 To Him in wisdom turn, 
 Who holds the keys of either home 
 Earth, and the world to come. 
 
 To furnish men with a trustful attitude always and everywhere, 
 a mastering faith that subdues to the Christian purpose what- 
 ever seems to oppose it, a faith still victoriously sure of God's 
 triumph when the opposition is insuperable, this is the funda- 
 mental aim of our ministry of teaching. "To have a God is to 
 trust Him." 
 
 Such a faith connects itself immediately with the rebuilding of 
 our shattered world into a world that will hold together. There is 
 a widespread opinion that this is impossible because of the very 
 structure of the universe in which conflict is inherent. In the first 
 year of the War, a young Harvard alumnus, who enlisted in the 
 Foreign Legion of the French Army, and lost his life in the as- 
 sault upon Beloy-en-Santerre, wrote in a letter: "Standing fac- 
 ing the silent and uncertain lines of the enemy's trenches from 
 his ramparts, the sentinel has ample time for reflection. Alone 
 under the stars, war in its cosmic rather than its moral aspect 
 reveals itself to him. Regarded from this more abstract plane 
 the question of right and wrong disappears. Peoples war because 
 strife is the law of nature and force the ultimate arbitrament 
 among humanity no less than in the rest of the universe. He thrills 
 with the sense of filling an appointed necessary place in the conflict 
 of hosts, and facing the enemy's crest above which the Great 
 Bear wheels upward to the zenith, he feels, with a sublimity of 
 enthusiasm that he has never before known, a kind of companion- 
 ship with the stars." There is religious feeling in that utterance, 
 
THE MINISTRY OF TEACHING 97 
 
 but it is an antichristian faith. Strife may seem at present a 
 law of nature in men and stars, but to the Christian it cannot 
 be unalterably so; nor is companionship with warring cosmic 
 forces fellowship with God. 
 
 "The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together 
 until now." Men battling in air and sea and land, and struggling 
 together in the hardly less fierce contests of the industrial order, 
 are one with fighting myriads of germs in every organism and 
 with the destructive earthquakes, storms, frost and wind of the 
 inanimate world. But "the earnest expectation of the creation 
 waiteth for the revealing of the sons of God." Redeemed men 
 are to redeem the brute creation. Nature is not fixed but plastic. 
 What is natural in stars or men today may not be in their natures 
 tomorrow. Nothing abideth forever that is discordant with the 
 will of God, and that will is seen in Christ. The "nature" of 
 stars or of humans is not that which they are at present, but 
 that which they may become when they receive requisite divine 
 inspirations. In the story of Eden earth is pictured as barren, 
 because "Jehovah God had not caused it to rain, and there was 
 not a man to till the ground." Eden might have been termed a 
 natural desert, while its real nature was to become a garden of 
 the Lord. There are many sections of the inanimate world un- 
 touched as yet by human science and art, and many areas of 
 human life unwatered by the Spirit of Jesus, which resemble the 
 desolation where later stood the paradise of God. "The creation 
 itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into 
 the glorious liberty of the children of God." The New Testa- 
 ment's first concern is to produce sons of God : the Seventh Chap- 
 ter of Romans, with its account of the inner strife and the victory 
 through Christ, precedes the Eighth Chapter, with its hope of a 
 redeemed creation. "Human nature," which is commonly credited 
 with all unideal qualities, and is cited as the effectual barrier to 
 desired progress, is to be looked at in the Man Christ Jesus ; 
 every human being and every human group families, industries, 
 
98 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 nations is to be considered subhuman until its "nature" accords 
 with His. We have to teach Christ as Redeemer, and show how 
 under His control the inward strife issues in triumphant concord 
 and the maladjustments of men with each other become an ordered 
 harmony. 
 
 The sons of God are to answer the longing of the creation still 
 in the pangs of birth. On the first pages of the Bible man is told 
 to subdue the earth and have dominion over every living thing. 
 In the Gospels the Son of man assumes a subduer's position 
 towards the creation. Whatever interpretation one may give to 
 the narratives of miracles, Jesus impressed His contemporaries 
 as mastering deranged minds, diseased bodies, dangerous waves, 
 deficient food supplies, and bringing sanity, vigor, calm seas and 
 enough and to spare for hungry people. We are to teach that 
 as sons of the Most High it is ours to refashion nature in man 
 and stars, to find no comradeship with its strife, but satisfaction 
 in its subjugation to the purpose of its Lord. "Instead of the 
 thorn shall come up the fir-tree; and instead of the brier shall 
 come up the myrtle-tree." Man's ability to understand and rule 
 is the faith which underlies all science and all art; but his knowl- 
 edge and control may render his brethren fiends, and lower the 
 lower creation. The brutalities of these unspeakable years, and 
 the deadly use of nature's forces to achieve them, are only too 
 evident. But human responsibility under God for the cosmos is 
 brought home to our consciences. 
 
 Yea, the rough rock, the dull earth, the wild sea's furying waters, 
 
 All with ineffable longing are waiting their invader, 
 
 Still when resisting and raging, in soft undervoice say unto him, 
 
 Fear not, retire not, O Man ; hope evermore and believe. 
 
 Go from the east to the west, as the sun and the stars direct thee, 
 
 Go with the girdle of man, go and encompass the earth. 
 
 Go with the spiritual life, the higher volition and action. 
 
 With the great girdle of God, go and encompass the earth. 
 
 ft 
 
THE MINISTRY OF TEACHING 99 
 
 A creation so girt with the cords of love will no longer be a strug- 
 gling chaos, but ordered by the peace of Christ. This is an 
 essential teaching, and a teaching not yet generally grasped, by 
 a Church whose members are to rebuild the earth into a dwelling- 
 place for God and His children. 
 
 Again, at the basis of life lies the economic question of the 
 production, distribution and use of wealth; and it is notorious 
 how insufficient has been the Church's teaching of the mind of her 
 Lord on this matter. She has contented herself with commend- 
 ing industry, thrift, and above all generosity, which are virtues, 
 although not distinctively Christian virtues, and she has spoken 
 next to nothing in condemnation of the unchristian industrial 
 system on which our present social structure is built. A Scottish 
 theologian, Professor W. P. Paterson, recently said: "During 
 the bygone century it may be doubted if the ornaments of the 
 Christian pulpit did as much as lay preachers like Ruskin and 
 Carlyle to quicken the social conscience, and to commend lofty 
 ideals in the various departments of secular life and labor." He 
 wisely adds: "The exhortations to sanctification were too gen- 
 eral." Our commercial order stimulates the competitive motive, 
 holds our personal gain as the incentive to effort, and sanctions 
 selfish possession as the reward of labor. As a result it produces 
 men and women diametrically opposite in mind and heart to Jesus 
 Christ, and moulds nations after the pattern of bellicose sons of 
 Belial. The Church has insisted that her ministers and mission- 
 aries be actuated by higher motives; and certain callings, like 
 those of the physician, the nurse, the teacher, the artist, have been 
 lifted to loftier standards; but industrial workers, shopkeepers, 
 merchants, men of affairs, have been allowed to think themselves 
 disciples of Christ, while they did the world's work with pagan 
 principles. How debasing to men in business, who must be the 
 vast majority in every community, to allow the adjective "com- 
 mercial" to be a synonym for low incentives, so that a profession 
 becomes degraded when it is "commercialized." The unbrotherly. 
 
100 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 and often bitterly hostile, social relations in which industrial 
 workers and business men find themselves most uncomfortable as 
 sons of God, are the inevitable judgment that follows failure to 
 order this large sphere of life according to God's will in Christ. 
 
 There are still many who regard the bitter rivalries of our 
 commercial world as "healthy competition," and view the fre- 
 quent strikes and lockouts as inevitable concomitants of a vigor- 
 ous industrial struggle. Their attitude reminds one of the sur- 
 geons of a bygone generation who expected a wound to become 
 inflamed and dirty with what they ignorantly termed "laudable 
 puss." Today wounds are irrigated with Dakin's Solution and 
 the healthy tissue repairs itself. We must discover the principles 
 of industrial antisepsis ; and for us, Christians, they are to be 
 found in the application of the Spirit of Jesus to commercial 
 relations. There may be various opinions as to which economic 
 theory affords the wisest method of setting up a Christian social 
 order. We dare not be dogmatic in the economic embodiment of 
 the mind of Christ any more than in its theological statement. 
 The present tendency is plainly towards democracy in industry, 
 and it makes in the Christian direction. But it is not the form 
 but the spirit of the industrial order with which we are concerned ; 
 we prize that form which stimulates most the ministering spirit. 
 
 The Church must teach men to hold their minds open : she must 
 save them from sleek contentment and smug complacency, and 
 from servile acceptance and hopeless submission. They dare not 
 be satisfied with the present economic situation which renders 
 Christian fellowship well-nigh impossible even in the house of God. 
 Membership in the Church should guarantee a predisposition to 
 industrial changes, and a mind hospitable to plans for economic 
 readjustment. She must teach that cooperative impulses must 
 supplant the competitive, and that an industrial s}^stem is to be 
 judged primarily by the human relations which it establishes 
 among producers, distributers and consumers; that the will to 
 serve must be substituted for the will to gain as the motive to 
 
THE MINISTRY OF TEACHING 101 
 
 labor ; and that responsible trusteeship of whatever one controls 
 for the benefit of the family of mankind is the only reward of 
 effort which a Christian society can sanction. She must bring 
 home to men's consciences that the earth and the fulness thereof 
 belong to God; man's tenure of any part of it is but for a brief 
 span; and the Father's goods are the patrimony of His whole 
 family of sons and daughters, so that none ought to be debarred 
 from a full share in the inheritance, and none should enjoy more 
 than an amount proportionate to his needs and to the service 
 which he renders. She must develop an elect race, none of whom 
 dares to be idle, and all of whom are scrupulously sensitive lest 
 they be employing more of the family heritage for themselves and 
 theirs than the equivalent they add to the family's welfare. She 
 must insist that poverty in an earth where an open-handed Father 
 provides bread enough and to spare is a remediable evil, due to 
 man's bad management or self-seeking (to think otherwise is to 
 impugn the goodness or the competency of God) ; and that, while 
 he that will not work should not be given to eat, the right to 
 work at a return which enables a man and his dependents to live 
 as children of God is a debt which society owes him. She must 
 teach the interdependence of men in the industrial body, as Chris- 
 tians are members one of another in the Body of Christ. While 
 some callings remain peculiarly hazardous or disagreeable, and 
 while much labor is mechanical taskwork which dehumanizes, 
 workers in these occupations must be accorded special con- 
 sideration, and assured sufficient leisure and inspirations to 
 keep them spiritually alive. "Those parts of the body which we 
 think to be less honorable, upon those we bestow more abundant 
 honor. God tempered the body together, giving more abundant 
 honor to that part which lacked; that there should be no schism 
 in the body ; but that the members should have the same care one 
 for another." 
 
 The Church's main interest is the production of character; 
 and things their acquisition and their use, their loss and their 
 
102 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 lack are a large part of the mechanism which makes men. She 
 dare not be negligent in teaching them how to gain and to employ 
 possessions as Christians, and how under some circumstances to 
 do without them, that she may let them into the Christian secret 
 both how to be filled and to be hungry, both to abound and to be 
 in want. This is not to exalt mere things which a man owns or 
 wants to undue prominence, in view of our Lord's statement that 
 he who is unfaithful in the unrighteous mammon will not be 
 trusted with the true riches. The Church must convince her 
 members that the more Christian the industrial system becomes, 
 the more productive it will be. The most substantial gains are 
 added to those who seek first God's just rule in the realm of labor 
 and business. 
 
 Again, the break-up of Christendom in the world war is a 
 glaring evidence of the Church's failure to teach the duties of 
 nations. We cannot assert that a particular form of govern- 
 ment is alone Christian. St. Paul apparently believed that the 
 rulers of his day were under demonic sway, and he looked forward 
 to their ultimate abolition ; yet meanwhile he preached obedience to 
 the Roman imperialism. Yet we must judge forms of govern- 
 ment as more or less fitted in given circumstances to enable those 
 who are under them to live as Christians, and must keep citizens 
 up to the most Christian public duties existing conditions permit, 
 and planning a yet more Christian expression of the corporate 
 life. The principles of Jesus are involved in the administration 
 of justice to wrong-doers, in the control of a country's resources, 
 in its system of taxation ; and they call for redemptive discipline, 
 a fraternal use of the national wealth, a distribution of public 
 burdens by which the strong bear the infirmities of the weak. 
 Political thinkers may differ widely on the wisdom or folly of 
 specific proposals, and the leaders of the Church are dowered 
 with no more knowledge in these matters than other men, and 
 must not as ministers of Christ "preach politics," in the sense of 
 advocating a particular measure as the manifest will of God; 
 
THE MINISTRY OF TEACHING 103 
 
 but there should be no hesitancy in dealing with the motives and 
 social effects of any policy. These must be in line with the pur- 
 pose of Christ. 
 
 A distinction is sometimes drawn between individual and 
 national duty. It is said that a man must love his neighbor as 
 himself, but that a nation has obligations to its own people which 
 are prior to those it owes the inhabitants of other lands. But an 
 individual's duties lie about him in concentric circles duties to 
 family, to community, to nation, to world. "If any provideth 
 not for his own, and specially his own household, he hath denied 
 the faith, and is worse than an unbeliever." A nation's duties 
 are no different. To allow a country to take a course that would 
 be immoral for an individual is to demoralize its inhabitants. We 
 must hold fast Milton's oft-quoted saying that a nation should be 
 "one mighty growth or stature of an honest man." The Biblical 
 writers personalize nations, and judge them by the same moral 
 standards they demand between man and man. Cavour re- 
 marked unblushingly : "If we were to do for ourselves what we 
 are doing for Italy, we should be great rogues." It was that 
 attitude among statesmen which led Gladstone to write: "The 
 history of nations is a melancholy chapter; that is, the his- 
 tory of governments is one of the most immoral parts of human 
 history." 
 
 An immigration act dare not abrogate the Golden Rule. A 
 policy of national defence cannot be based upon the intimidating 
 effect of superior force and maintain a peace of Christ. A tariff 
 law must embody the principle of mutual service. Within these 
 walls a Yale man may be pardoned for glorying that the teach- 
 ing in economics in this University has so accorded in this re- 
 gard with the spirit of the Gospel. Richard Cobden, whom we 
 were trained to revere, said in one of his speeches (on January 15, 
 1846) : "I see in the free-trade principle that which shall act on 
 the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe 
 drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race and 
 
104 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL BEBUILDING 
 
 creed and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace. 
 I believe that the desire and the motive for large and mighty em- 
 pires, for gigantic armies and great navies will die away. I be- 
 lieve that such things will cease to be necessary, or to be used, 
 when man becomes of one family, and freely exchanges the fruits 
 of his labor with his brother man." We, ministers of Christ, 
 must Christianize patriotism by teaching our people that a na- 
 tion's ambitions should be for something other than 
 
 the glory that was Greece, 
 And the grandeur that was Rome; 
 
 should be for that greatness which comes in being servant of all, 
 like the Son of man, if they would have the nation abide through 
 the centuries, a doer of the will of God. 
 
 The application of the principles of Jesus to industrial and 
 national questions raises a problem on which the Church's teach- 
 ing has by no means been sufficiently explicit the problem of the 
 authority of Jesus. There are many who declare that as these 
 matters lay outside His purview, it is absurd to hark back to 
 this Galilean Peasant as the guide for present social advance. 
 Within the Church itself there is a diversity of opinion. At 
 one extreme, we find literalists, taking His sayings as specific com- 
 mands and attempting to build them into a system of Christian 
 ethics, as they have tried to construct His utterances of faith into 
 a system of belief. At the other, we have those who consider His 
 ethics temporary counsels in view of an immediately expected 
 end of the age, and inapplicable as the principles of a Christian 
 commonwealth. In between, are all manner of compromises which 
 stress some sayings as imperative and pass over others as per- 
 plexing. 
 
 Both Paul and John in their day described the authority of 
 Jesus : Paul in his thought of Him as the Spirit of social unity, 
 the expression of God's eternal purpose, under whose control all 
 things are to be summed up; John when he records the saying: 
 
THE MINISTRY OF TEACHING 105 
 
 "I am the light of the world : he that followeth Me shall not walk 
 in the darkness, but shall have the light of life." A purpose is 
 not something that can, in shifting circumstances, be achieved 
 by rigid adherence to a set of inflexible rules. A light which one 
 follows is continually moving and illumes the next few steps 
 immediately ahead. The apostolic Church faced many questions 
 which had not confronted Jesus ; they viewed them in the light 
 of His purpose, from His outlook, with "the mind of Christ." 
 We have similarly to ask ourselves: "What is the most Christ- 
 like course open to us, or to the group to which we belong, under 
 present conditions?" Decisions are seldom between alternatives, 
 one of which is ideally Christian. Think of the alternatives St. 
 Paul faced when he decided what to do with Onesimus, the run- 
 away slave of Philemon. The follower of Christ has to be con- 
 tent with the course which leads in the Christian direction. What 
 one should do with a thief who has broken into one's house, or 
 what a nation should do with another which has broken into a 
 neighbor's country, are not questions that can be settled by 
 searching the sayings of Jesus for a rule that will fit the case, 
 nor by following a course which He took under other circum- 
 stances. In Him we have not a technique or method of doing 
 righteousness, but a purpose the establishment of the sover- 
 eignty of His Father, a spirit His spirit of redeeming love; and 
 towards this purpose in this spirit we must invariably move. 
 
 Both Paul and John see in Christ the eternal purpose of God, 
 the light of the world, the light of life. His sayings, His life, His 
 cross, His Person (and all are of one piece) take us in a definite 
 direction with a definite motive. We may feel that to imprison 
 a thief, or to war upon a transgressing nation, are more Chris- 
 tian under the circumstances than to allow them to sin on with 
 impunity ; but imprisonment and war can never be Christian 
 goals features of a Christian social order. We must work for 
 a redemptive justice which immediately surrounds a thief with 
 transforming influences, and for an international system that 
 
106 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 provides a more loving mode of dealing with an offending nation 
 than by butchering its men. 
 
 This definition of the authority of Jesus in terms of purpose 
 and motive may seem to leave us with insufficient guidance. We 
 may call ourselves in a course that will by and by approach His 
 standards, while we advance at a snail's pace, and allow an easy 
 tolerance of the subchristian on the ground that the time is unripe 
 for anything better. The rate of progress is not our concern; 
 times and seasons are within the Father's authority ; and our God 
 is a present guide. We are not merely getting our bearings by 
 the general direction of Christ's purpose in the past; we have a 
 Divine Leader with us, as Israel was led by the symbolic pillar of 
 cloud and fire. The Church has not succeeded in convincing men 
 of God's immediate leadership, so that they habitually look for it, 
 because she has not shown them with sufficient definiteness how 
 His leading is to be had. Here and there a devout soul occasion- 
 ally seeks God's direction, but almost never do social groups col- 
 lectively look to Him to be pointed into His way. In the autumn 
 of 1652, on a day of humiliation during the unpropitious naval 
 war with Holland, John Owen preached to Parliament: "You 
 take counsel with your own hearts. You advise with one another 
 hearken unto men under a repute of wisdom; and all this doth 
 but increase your trouble. You do but more and more entangle 
 and disquiet your own spirits. God stands by and says, 'I am 
 wise also,' and very little notice is taken of Him." With a God 
 standing by, it is not for us to delay or to hasten advance, but 
 to receive His contemporary direction. 
 
 We must first recall the purpose of Jesus and make clear to 
 ourselves, under existing conditions, the general line of advance. 
 This is to bring our thinking under Christ's control. Then we 
 must think, and think carefully, availing ourselves of all the 
 light at hand, for through it God is giving His hints and sug- 
 gestions. Then we must wait upon Him. In social questions fel- 
 lowship in prayer is the Christian method of ascertaining God's 
 
THE MINISTRY OF TEACHING 107 
 
 will. "If two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything 
 that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of My Father 
 who is in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together 
 in My name, there am I in the midst of them." God's leading in 
 social solutions is found by collective search. Nations gathered 
 together in line with the purpose of Christ and seeking of God 
 the means to ensure their remaining in Christian fellowship; in- 
 dustrial workers in an enterprise, placing themselves with a ser- 
 vant's consecration before the world's business, and praying to- 
 gether to be shown His will for their economic adjustments to- 
 day ; who that believes in the living God will doubt that -they 
 shall receive His guidance? 
 
 That guidance is always uphill. How can it be otherwise when 
 He seeks to lift us to heavenly places in Christ Jesus? It takes 
 courage and strength to go forward. We are flung back on 
 God for reinforcement. Indeed, God's way for social advance is 
 seldom merely uphill; it usually faces us with the seemingly im- 
 possible, as Israel was confronted with the passage of the Red 
 Sea. We are required to hazard ventures. We cannot foresee 
 whither social changes will take us, nor foretell the problems 
 we must solve. Luther once wrote to Melanchthon: "Had Moses 
 waited till he understood how Israel could elude Pharaoh's armies, 
 they might have been in Egypt still." The Church must teach 
 men that there are things which faith can safely attempt which 
 unbelief cannot: "By faith they passed through the Red Sea as 
 by dry land: which the Egyptians assaying to do were swallowed 
 up." 
 
 We are back where we started, at the necessity of clearer teach- 
 ing of faith in the adequacy of our God. We have not begun to 
 tap the wealth that is waiting for us in Him. The Church is 
 pitiably unaware of her own latent resources. Her sincere mem- 
 bers, for the most part, appear to have been baptized into some- 
 thing analogous to John's baptism. They are marked by moral 
 earnestness with little conscious contact with a living God. A 
 
108 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 Paul would ask them: "Did ye receive the Holy Spirit when ye 
 believed?" Expectation limits experience, as it did in the case of 
 the believers at Ephesus, to whom that question was first put. 
 Our possession of the wisdom and power of God is bounded by 
 our lack of any anticipation of receiving them, or rather by our 
 failure to appreciate that they are ours already. The Church 
 attempts small things ; she seems a company of spiritual pygmies. 
 Did she really believe in the indwelling God in His Holy Spirit, 
 she would plan and labor and hope on a scale commensurate with 
 power from on high. From childhood Christians should be taught 
 to count on incalculable reinforcements whenever they move in 
 the way of love: "Go ye, and make disciples of all the nations; 
 and lo, I am with you." The Church has to teach explicitly both 
 what is to be done and Whom we possess to empower us. Could 
 we convince men that God, the Father of Jesus Christ, is at hand, 
 both to guide and to strengthen, there would be no disposition 
 to postpone the rebuilding of the world after His mind. "Son of 
 man, what is this proverb which ye have in the land of Israel, 
 saying, The days are prolonged, and every vision faileth? Tell 
 them, therefore, Thus saith the Lord Jehovah: I will make this 
 proverb to cease, and they shall no more use it as a proverb in 
 Israel; but say unto them, The days are at hand, and the ful- 
 filment of every vision." 
 
 We have touched in sketchiest outline a very few of the ele- 
 ments in the Christian message on which explicit teaching is 
 urgently demanded. The point, however, is not so much that 
 these things should be taught, as that the Church should con- 
 tinually be teaching. A minister is of little worth who is not 
 "apt to teach." And this requires much more thought and study 
 than is usual at present among American clergymen. Much of 
 our preaching is like the conversation of Dickens' Mr. Plornish, 
 "a little obscure but conscientiously emphatic." The recipe for 
 compounding many a current sermon might be written : "Take a 
 teaspoonful of weak thought, add water, and serve." The fact 
 
THE MINISTRY OF TEACHING 109 
 
 that it is frequently served hot, may enable the concoction to 
 warm the hearers, and make them, as they express it, "feel good." 
 It may, while the stimulus lasts, nerve them to do good; but it 
 cannot be called nourishing. Donne quaintly said that a pastor 
 must distribute not only bread but quails, "meat of a stronger 
 digestion." It is true that the average church-goer is not asking 
 for quail. A preacher who makes his congregation think will 
 not have the widest popularity. But there are ways and ways 
 of serving quail ; and it is a preacher's duty by thought and study 
 to have meat to set before his people, and to know how to serve 
 it so that it whets their appetite. Strong thought can be put in 
 simplest speech. Dr. A. B. Davidson once remarked: "There is 
 no doubt that the language which 'wives and wabsters' speak is 
 capable of expressing everything which any reasonable man can 
 desire to say to his fellows." But we must have enough to say. 
 The Church at present is filled with frail and feeble Christians 
 who have not been fed on sufficiently strong food to nourish men 
 of God. We ought to aim to set a generous table. Charles Lamb 
 said that "the quantity of thought which Hogarth crowds into 
 every picture would alone unvulgarize every subject which he 
 might choose." And Hogarth's art does not lack in moving 
 power. Sermons crowded with thought are usually those most 
 stirring. And the only preaching to which people can really 
 listen Sunday after Sunday for years, and which alters them and 
 turns them into intelligent children of God, is that which is so 
 full of thought that it keeps them thinking. They may not 
 always agree with the preacher ; if he is steadily thinking, and 
 making them think, they certainly will not always agree with 
 him; but their minds are set in motion. And the only hopeless 
 congregation is the mentally dormant. 
 
 Let the preacher think through his philosophy of life, and 
 possess a theology of his own. Let him covet for himself the lines 
 which Lily placed in his epitaph over Dean Colet's grave in St. 
 Paul's : 
 
110 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 Doctor et interpres fidus Evangelii 
 Qui multum mores hominum sermone diserto 
 For mar at. 
 
 Let him plan his sermons in courses, that he may systematically 
 teacli Christian thought and life. Let him deal with the great 
 convictions with God in Christ, in the Bible, in Christians, in the 
 world; with God in the varied experiences where He finds men. 
 A short course of theological sermons ought to go into a preach- 
 er's yearly plan. "Strong beliefs," writes Bagehot, "win strong 
 men, and then make them stronger." The social interpretation 
 of the Gospel calls for repeated restatements of all the Christian 
 doctrines, that men may have a God whom they can connect with 
 every social situation. And let the preacher point out Christian 
 duties specifically. A course in Christian ethics ought also to be 
 included in one's annual programme. There is a bold definite- 
 ness worthy of imitation in the title of Richard Baxter's bulkiest 
 work: A Christian Directory: or a Summ of Practical Theology, 
 and Cases of Conscience, Directing Christians how to Use their 
 Knowledge and Faith; How to improve all Helps and Means, and 
 to Perform all Duties; How to overcome Temptations, and to 
 escape or mortifie every Sin. In Four Parts: I. Christian Ethicks 
 (or private Duties). II. Christian Oeconomicks (or Family 
 Duties). HI. Christian EcclesiasticJcs (or Church Duties). IV. 
 Christian Politicks (or Duties to our Rulers and Neighbours). 
 There is much Biblical material, too infrequently used in the con- 
 temporary pulpit, which lends itself to very concrete applica- 
 tion, and which in people's minds is far too vaguely related with 
 existing circumstances. What is the meaning of the Ten Com- 
 mandments for Christians in the present social situation? What 
 are Wisdom's Ways in our world, as Israel's sages saw them in 
 theirs and as Jesus further defined them, who claimed for Himself 
 a place among Wisdom's children? What do the ideals of the 
 prophets and the provisions of the lawgivers demand of us and 
 our contemporaries in the further light of their fulfilment in 
 
THE MINISTRY OF TEACHING 111 
 
 Incarnate Love? What do the sayings of Jesus, and the ethical 
 inferences which St. Paul almost invariably drew from his Gospel, 
 ask of us in all our relations as kinsmen, workers, friends, citi- 
 zens, churchmen? Generalia non pungunt. Let a preacher treat 
 each of the fruits of the Spirit those in the apostle's admirable 
 list, or a list of one's own compilation and let his people see 
 clearly how these fruits should look when gathered in baskets for 
 present-day consumption. 
 
 And the Church's ministry of teaching is not solely or mainly 
 a task for the pulpit. Educators know the limitations of in- 
 struction by lectures. The Sunday School, graded with classes 
 for all ages, ought to be the Church's principal means of Chris- 
 tian education. A pastor has two specific responsibilities in it 
 its curriculum and the personnel of its teaching staff. While he 
 will have a leading part in its entire organization, for no institu- 
 tion in the Church is of greater moment, these two matters are 
 his personal obligations. If he be loyal to this trust today, he 
 will see that its curriculum is framed primarily to fit pupils at 
 their stage of growth to fill their social relations as Christians, 
 and that the teachers are men and women who by example and 
 intelligent precept fit them into their places in a Christian social 
 order. The Sunday School must face a social goal the world 
 rebuilt after Christ's mind and educate children and adults to 
 fashion it. 
 
 The pastor will usually have other means of personal instruc- 
 tion besides his preaching a series of midweek lectures, now and 
 again, or various Bible classes ; and his particular duty is the 
 training of younger and older persons entering the full com- 
 munion of the Church. In this class he will teach very explicitly 
 what a Christian is, what he should think, what he should do, 
 and what are his means of obtaining God's wisdom and strength. 
 A minister's aim is not to produce good and faithful members of 
 the Church after conventional standards, but to develop Chris- 
 tians of enlightened and sensitive consciences, who will upset exist- 
 
112 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 ing standards and under the guidance of the Spirit of Christ 
 reshape both Church and world. Southey, at the conclusion of 
 his Life of John Wesley, characterizes him "as a man of great 
 views, great energy, and great virtues." Let the Church see to 
 it that all her members possess great views ; they are prerequisites 
 of great energy and great virtues. 
 
 The clear and definite statement of her faith and ideal is the 
 Church's most cogent appeal. There is no more effective defence 
 and proclamation of the Gospel than explicit instruction. The 
 ministry of teaching is a continuous ministry of evangelism. 
 Ignorance of the truth as it is in Jesus is still perhaps the most 
 serious obstacle to His mastery of men. Plainly and positively 
 the Church must set forth her convictions and hold up her pro- 
 gramme, "teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may present 
 every man perfect in Christ." 
 
LECTURE VI 
 THE MINISTRY OF ORGANIZATION 
 
 SAINTE BEUVE, in his classic history of Port-Royal, names over 
 the most conspicuous figures in that earnest and devout Christian 
 company, showing how sadly it lacked vigorous and farsighted 
 leadership ; at the end of his list he mentions Arnauld, the reputed 
 head of the movement in the world's eyes, and calls him "a general 
 who in fact was only the most enthusiastic soldier." The min- 
 istry is the trained and appointed leadership of the Church; and 
 ministers ought to possess organizing and administrative gifts, 
 in addition to being devoted, eager and hardworking followers 
 of Jesus. Unquestionably there is room in the ministry for men 
 of diverse talents, and a man may have gifts that fit him to lead 
 his brethren and yet be lacking in executive ability; but there is 
 no sorer need in the Church at present than for statesmanlike 
 churchmen. 
 
 It has been common to contrast the prophet with the ecclesi- 
 astic to the latter's dispraise. We are told that our Lord was 
 a Teacher and Redeemer of men, but cared nothing for insti- 
 tutions. This is to forget His fidelity to the Church in which 
 He was reared, and His appreciation of its heritage, worship, 
 festivals and opportunities for service; and to lose sight of His 
 most effective organization of a group of disciples, whom He so 
 bound to Himself, so successfully trained in a few months' com- 
 panionship, and into whom He so breathed His Spirit, that they 
 came to self-consciousness as His Church, carried on His faith 
 and purpose through the difficult break with the Church to which 
 
114 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 He and they had belonged, and began to build a world-wide fel- 
 lowship. Organizing talent is not to be measured by the elabo- 
 rateness of the machinery it devises, but by the success with which 
 it achieves its purpose with the materials at hand. The simpler 
 the forms it evolves the better, and Jesus for His immediate aim 
 is as truly a consummate ecclesiastic as His greatest apostle, 
 whose vision of the Church was as extensive as the Roman Empire, 
 and whose missionary genius planted groups of Christians in 
 almost all its chief centres and bound them to each other in a firm 
 fellowship of convictions and endeavor. 
 
 The present crisis has brought to light that a principal cause 
 of the Church's weakness is defective organization. The most 
 obvious failing is its crippling nationalism. Time was when the 
 Catholic Church with its world-wide order dominated the govern- 
 ments of the peoples of Western Christendom. In the interest of 
 liberty, individual and national, that domination was overthrown. 
 But its overthrow has been so complete that the Church has been 
 everywhere submerged by the State. Whether Greek or Roman 
 or Protestant, whether under governmental control or nominally 
 free, the Church is today subservient to national opinion uttered 
 through the heads of the State; and in this war it has been con- 
 tent in every land to affirm its patriotism and endorse the course 
 of the government. We recognize this most readily in the State- 
 ruled churches of Germany ; but the free churches of the United 
 States have shown little more independence. The ideals for which 
 we are fighting, as they have been set forth by the President, 
 command the consciences of Christians, and the churches cannot 
 but stand loyally with the nation for their triumph. But that 
 does not exhaust our obligations as Christians. Theoretically 
 we hold that our allegiance to Christ is superior to our allegiance 
 to country, and that Christ unites us in His Body with men of 
 every nation; but in this hideous conflict no church has moved 
 to establish relations with fellow-Christians in enemy lands that 
 might assist in ending the intolerable conditions which not only 
 
THE MINISTRY OF ORGANIZATION 115 
 
 set man to slay fellow-man, but disciple of Jesus to slaughter 
 fellow-disciple. The Church is constrained to say with one of 
 Shakespeare's woesome characters : 
 
 Each army hath a hand; 
 And in their rage, I having hold of both, 
 They whirl asunder and dismember me. 
 
 For companies of British and German Christians to meet to 
 receive the Lord's Supper in their respective camps, symbol of 
 their union with Christ and with one another in Him, and then 
 go forth to bomb and spray with liquid fire and tear each other to 
 bits with shrapnel, is the ghastly self-slaughter of the Body of 
 Christ, and means who knows what anguish to its Head. 
 
 Even if each church were so convinced of the righteousness of 
 the national course that it felt bound to uphold the State, no 
 church can ever view war as a Christian method of settling inter- 
 national differences, nor ought it to allow civic duties to absolve 
 its members from their loftier obligations to fellow-churchmen. 
 We have lacked now for several centuries an adequate inter- 
 national or supernational organization of the Church, to main- 
 tain its consciousness of unity in Christ, and to supply a natural 
 means of bringing its leaders together to fulfil their bounden 
 duty of guiding the nations to righteousness and peace. Roman 
 Catholicism has suppressed an earlier tendency towards a gen- 
 eral council in its exaltation of the papacy, leaving a hopelessly 
 unrepresentative ecclesiastical autocrat of decreasing significance 
 in a world moving rapidly towards democracy. Protestantism 
 has forgotten altogether the wistful longings of its early leaders 
 for such an ecumenical representation of Christendom an assem- 
 bly consonant with its ideal of the Church as the Respublica 
 Christi. Thoughtful statesmen are discussing an international 
 league; shall the Church lag behind civil governments in a prov- 
 ince which is peculiarly her domain the organization of her 
 forces to secure earth-wide brotherhood? 
 
116 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 In recent decades representatives of the Reformed Churches of 
 many lands have met in ecumenical conferences to advise together 
 on missionary work in heathen countries. Would that some 
 "heathen" would call loudly to us to meet again, and talk over 
 Christianizing national ambitions, commerce, tariffs, diplomacy, 
 the control of immigration and the adjustment of international 
 disputes ! Such a conference ought to include our Greek and 
 Roman brethren, if they will attend. It would be found that 
 in dealing with the duties of nations, with the principles that 
 should govern industry and trade, with the obligations of stronger 
 towards weaker peoples, the old ecclesiastical alignments would 
 be wiped out. A papalist and a congregationalist, a sacramen- 
 tarian and a quaker, may well agree on what nations must do to 
 prevent war and become helpful servants one of another. A con- 
 ference on faith and order may do somewhat to remove misunder- 
 standings and bring to light underlying agreements among the 
 communions of Christendom ; but a discussion of duties, individual 
 and social, should precede the discussion of polity. The Church 
 should organize herself in view of the purpose she is given to 
 fulfil in the circumstances of the hour. What form must she 
 assume and what machinery must she devise to make nations, 
 industrial groups, men and women in their homes, callings and 
 world, disciples of Jesus Christ? Here is a task for organizing 
 talent of the highest kind. Unless such organization be achieved 
 the Church cannot come to herself as the universal fellowship of 
 Christ, nor fulfil the ministry committed to her of building man- 
 kind into one household of God. 
 
 Another manifest weakness is denominationalism. When the 
 churches of this country faced the duty of caring for the soldiers 
 and sailors in training camps, on the sea, and in the field, it was 
 evident that our sectarian organizations were incapable of meet- 
 ing the situation. Happily we possessed an effective interde- 
 nominational agency in the Young Men's Christian Association, 
 and the beginnings of a united Protestant Church in the Federal 
 
THE MINISTRY OF ORGANIZATION 117 
 
 Council of the Churches of Christ; but those who have had part 
 in the work know how pitiably often sectarianism showed itself 
 an annoying and hampering factor, and how outworn our divi- 
 sions appeared. So long as religion is viewed mainly as a per- 
 sonal affair between a man and his Maker, denominations seem 
 desirable. A believer has a choice of churches, in some one of 
 which he is likely to find a form of worship and of teaching and 
 a fellowship of kindred souls which is suited to help him in his life 
 with God. A town is thought justified in having as many churches 
 as its inhabitants can support, or can prevail on like-minded 
 believers elsewhere to assist them in supporting. That these 
 churches are small is nothing against them; many people prefer 
 small churches ; and they suit the tastes of their congenial mem- 
 bers in the momentous matter of their personal intercourse with 
 God. The differences in the denominations may become negligible 
 in the eyes of many of their adherents, and both ministers and 
 people may move freely from a church of one communion to one 
 of another; thoughtful persons may deem the maintenance of a 
 number of similar churches in a community very wasteful, and 
 ministers in such charges may feel themselves cramped, unless 
 they be clerical Lilliputians ; but the denominational system is 
 valiantly defended so long as the individualistic conception of 
 religion prevails. 
 
 But when the social character of the Christian faith is recog- 
 nized, it becomes unbearable. Social vision leads men to view a 
 city or a rural region as a unit, and to frame a comprehensive 
 design for its supply with religious inspirations ; but denomina- 
 tionalism prevents any unified plan, and invariably causes the 
 overchurching of some sections and the neglect of others. One 
 cannot, and (it is to be hoped) one would not project a Con- 
 gregationalist Connecticut or a Reformed Dutch New York, an 
 Episcopal China or a Methodist Japan. Where federation keeps 
 a number of sects from overlapping, it cannot give a single front. 
 The war has taught the difficulty of attaining the complete unity 
 
118 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 of allies. Denominationalism leaves home missionary societies too 
 straitened to supply in many places the sort of church adequate 
 for local needs, and tempts them to multiply puny enterprises. 
 Rival churches are compelled to justify their separate existence 
 by magnifying their differences and belittling their likenesses; 
 the assembling of like with like intensifies and solidifies their par- 
 ticular type; inevitably their members are deprived of most valu- 
 able portions of the Church's heritage, and become sectaries 
 rather than catholic Christians. They assist social stratification 
 by drawing together families of the same economic status, and 
 barring them from religious fellowship with those of another 
 class. They are to be found in numbers in a prosperous neighbor- 
 hood, and are forced to desert a neighborhood of diminishing 
 opulence even when its population is increasing. Worst of all 
 they give the community no sense of religious solidarity that 
 fundamental oneness from which other much-needed harmonies 
 will spring. 
 
 Almost every American town has at least a half dozen Protes- 
 tant churches, whose members hold almost identical beliefs and 
 standards of conduct, which maintain very similar methods of 
 work and worship, and whose ministers have been trained to do 
 about the same thing. Each of these churches carries on a Sun- 
 day School, which probably parallels those of the other five in its 
 curriculum, and which is usually too small to be anything like as 
 well graded and taught as the single public school of the town. 
 None of them is apt to be strong enough to attempt more than 
 a limited ministry to the religious wants of its adherents. A 
 community church, with a staff of several trained ministers, spe- 
 cially fitted for leadership in different ministries, could maintain 
 all of the types of worship and service now to be found in the 
 six churches, and add other types of devotion and usefulness, 
 could conduct a school comparable in educational efficiency to 
 the public school, would give the town a consciousness of religious 
 oneness, at present sadly to seek, and be able to provide it other 
 
THE MINISTRY OF ORGANIZATION 119 
 
 ministries to Christianize some now untouched areas of its life. 
 There ought to be a saving in the cost of operation that would 
 be a substantial gain to the Church's power to contribute to mis- 
 sions and benevolences. Above all, such a realized fellowship of 
 the Christians in a community, such a true Church of Jesus 
 Christ, would enrich each of its members out of the wealth of the 
 whole Christian inheritance present in that place; and advances 
 in service would mark their closer corporate life. 
 
 There are a few favored localities where it is feasible even 
 under existing circumstances to build up such a comprehensive 
 church for an entire community ; but in most places the denomi- 
 national system renders this impossible. We do not hasten the 
 wished-for unity by forsaking the communions of our birth and 
 upbringing, with whose advantages and disadvantages we are 
 most familiar, nor by founding independent and union local 
 churches, which only add to the ecclesiastical confusion. Socially 
 minded Christian leaders who have in heart transcended sectarian 
 barriers and feel their oneness with all Christ's disciples, must 
 remain steadfastly in their communions, and by their ministry 
 of organization reshape them into the inclusive Church of Christ, 
 banishing everything that disbars a sincere follower of the Master 
 or impedes him in the exercise of his gifts ; and must lead their 
 communions into federations for service, and into mergers, which 
 a world now in fragments and soon to be in process of recon- 
 struction will help to make possible. Hitherto it may be said of 
 most of the approaches towards Church unity, as Thomas Fuller 
 wrote of the Episcopalians and Presbyterians of his day: "They 
 make motions with their mouths, but none with their feet, for 
 peace, not stirring a step towards it." But the time for action 
 is at hand; a many-times-subdivided Church cannot meet the 
 social situation ; and the time calls for men with organizing gifts. 
 
 Such men will be faithful and intelligent ecclesiastics in exist- 
 ing communions, for they must carry them with fewest possible 
 losses into the more comprehensive bodies that will be. Ecclesi- 
 
120 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 astics, like politicians, as we have said, are underrated. To be 
 sure some at present in control of church organizations are, like 
 some in political positions, inferior and unadmirable men. Ad- 
 vance may at times require the wresting of control from the 
 incompetent and unworthy; and in the Church, as in the State, 
 we often find 
 
 How softly, but how swiftly, they have sidled back to power 
 By the favor and contrivance of their kind. 
 
 But to be a skilful ecclesiastic with vision, and with administrative 
 ability to bring visions to pass, is to render the very highest serv- 
 ice to the Church of Christ. John Calvin, in his farewell to the 
 ministers of Geneva, told them : "When I first came to this church, 
 I found almost nothing in it. There was preaching and that 
 was all. Everything was in disorder." The plans he made for 
 discipline, teaching, worship, became the organizing principles 
 of the Reformed Churches everywhere, and contain elements that 
 will be a valuable contribution to the Church of all time. Thomas 
 Chalmers found the Scottish Kirk of little service to the ever 
 increasing industrial population of the cities. In the projects 
 which he evolved while minister of the Tron Kirk in Glasgow, and 
 which he published in a series of pamphlets on The Civil and 
 Christian Economy of our Large Towns, and later embodied in 
 St. John's Parish in the midst of a working-class district, he laid 
 out a comprehensive system for the effective management of an 
 urban charge. The Glasgow Herald, on the Monday morning 
 after his first Sabbath at St. John's, said: "The decidedly paro- 
 chial aspect of the evening congregation was scarcely, if at all, 
 impaired by any great admixture of hearers from the general or 
 indiscriminate public ; and it was felt as a novel and affecting 
 singularity to witness such a multitude of the laboring classes 
 of our city so respectably provided with Sabbath accommodation 
 in one of the churches of the Establishment. The impression 
 was much heightened upon observing that the great body of the 
 
THE MINISTRY OF ORGANIZATION 121 
 
 population, on retiring from church, when they had reached the 
 bottom of Macfarlane-street, turned in nearly an unbroken 
 stream to the east along the Gallowgate, or in the direction 
 which leads to the main bulk of the parish and its inhabitants." 
 His careful census of his more than ten thousand souls for whom 
 St. John's was the nearest church, his methods of districting the 
 parish, planning to reach every family, and to supply thorough 
 Christian education, his skill in associating a large group of men 
 and women with him as lay helpers and in getting his elders and 
 deacons to assume definite responsibilities, repay most careful 
 study and are suggestive to any minister today. What Calvin 
 did for the Reformed Church in Geneva, and what Chalmers did 
 for the Scottish Kirk in the early days of Nineteenth Century 
 industrialism, must be taken in hand by men of organizing talent 
 to adjust the socially enlightened Church of our time to its mis- 
 sion of turning every community and nation, and the world itself, 
 into kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ. 
 
 Now the eager people yearn to find 
 The organizing hand that fast may bind 
 Loose straws of aimless aspiration fain 
 In sheaves of serviceable grain. 
 
 In the Church, as in civil government and in the management 
 of industry, the problem of polity is the combination of indi- 
 vidual freedom with social efficiency, and of administrative initia- 
 tive and power with democratic control. The Church must be 
 kept open and safe for prophets, and compact and loyal for 
 collective service. Her organization must be strong enough to 
 marshal all her forces in a common purpose, and elastic enough 
 to give full play to local and individual independence in thought 
 and method. She must provide against "strength by limping 
 sway disabled" and truth "made tongue-tied by authority." We 
 shall be assisted in churchcraft, no doubt, by the experience of 
 statecraft and of the conduct of industry; but, as in the past, 
 
122 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 the Church should be the pioneer in government and offer her 
 contributions to the ordering of civil and economic affairs. We 
 are under the living leadership of the Spirit of Christ, who is 
 the Spirit of liberty and unity. The more fully we bring our 
 communions and parishes under His sway the more completely we 
 shall attain both. 
 
 There are some facts concerning existing organizations to be 
 borne in mind: 
 
 One is that, while polities are not equally favorable to the 
 cultivation of the various gifts of the Spirit, one finds a striking 
 similarity of gifts in all communions of the Church, when one 
 looks beneath the different labels attached to various functions 
 and offices. A veteran Baptist missionary may abhor the title 
 but exercise all the authority of a diocesan bishop, and a strong 
 Methodist congregation may be as independent as many a Con- 
 gregational church. On the other hand identity in name by no 
 means implies identity in gift. The episcopal office in the days 
 of Charles the Second in the Anglican Church is quite different 
 from that office in the Protestant Episcopal Church in this coun- 
 try, and an elder in a Presbyterian church in New York City a 
 century ago discharged other duties than those now laid on his 
 titular successors. The Church, no more than other institu- 
 tions in a changing world, can keep an unchanging form. To 
 see her spiritual continuity chiefly in the unbroken succession of 
 a particular office is to see it in a mere name that alters its signifi- 
 cance with the circumstances of the age and land in which the 
 Church finds herself. The continuity is in the one enriching 
 Spirit of life who lives in the organism through the centuries, 
 distributing His gifts as freely as the fellowship will receive and 
 employ them. We should study what gifts the situation in any 
 place or in the world of our day demands, and shape polity to 
 provide for their development and exercise, confident that the 
 indwelling Spirit will not fail us. 
 
 A second is the possibility even under present conditions of 
 
THE MINISTRY OF ORGANIZATION 123 
 
 borrowing from other polities and incorporating in one's own 
 most of their useful features. An Episcopal rector may lead his 
 vestry to assume the responsibilities of spiritual oversight borne 
 by a Presbyterian session. The Methodist conception of a class- 
 leader may be advantageously employed in other communions to 
 care for new members. Episcopal and Methodist deaconesses 
 are coming into vogue in Presbyterian and Congregational 
 churches. In polity, as in worship, the more extensively we bor- 
 row from one another, the more we shall enrich our several com- 
 munions and bring unity before the day of reunion. Gregory 
 the Great, according to Bede, gave Augustine of Canterbury 
 wise counsel: "You know, my brother, the custom of the Roman 
 Church wherein you yourself were bred. But it pleases me that 
 if you have found anything either in the Roman, or in the Galli- 
 can, or in any other Church, which may be more acceptable to 
 Almighty God, you carefully make choice of the same, and teach 
 it to the Church of the English which is but new in the Faith. 
 Choose therefore from every Church those things which are pious, 
 religious and upright; and when you have as it were made them 
 into one body, let the minds of the English be accustomed 
 thereto." 
 
 A third is the necessity of remembering that organization is 
 for people, and not people for organization. The question is 
 often put "Can a Lutheran church be maintained in a given local- 
 ity?" instead of "Can the community be best served by a Lutheran 
 church?" One frequently hears of "getting a congregation for 
 the second service," or of "solving the problem of the midweek 
 meeting," or of "developing a men's association," as though these 
 were ends instead of means. In the Church as in our human 
 bodies, there may be survivals of things once useful and now with- 
 out a function, like the vermiform appendix. Under some circum- 
 stances the church organization is the better for a surgical 
 operation. We ought to look at everything about the church 
 in view of the function it fulfils ; what is the most useful service 
 
124 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 the church can render the community on a Sunday afternoon or 
 a Sunday evening? what end can be accomplished by a midweek 
 meeting? are there purposes an association of churchmen can 
 achieve? The fairly large machinery of many churches often 
 produces no effect commensurate with its magnitude; and noth- 
 ing is more depressing to minister and people than the sense that 
 they are faithfully and painfully keeping wheels revolving which 
 do not assist in manufacturing Christian men and women. The 
 Church, like the sabbath, is made for man, and no teaching, 
 worship or activity should have a place in it that is not humanly 
 serviceable. 
 
 Our immediate concern is not with the organization of our com- 
 munion nor of the reunited Church of Christ, but with the organi- 
 zation of a parish. A new minister's duty is to assume that the 
 existing activities of a church are useful, and to set himself to 
 take his part in them. He is called by a congregation to be their 
 pastor; let him not fail in any obligation to them. But let him 
 also remember that through them he is called to a community, 
 whose religious needs he must study in order to discover what 
 the church he leads should try to do. Nor can we define "re- 
 ligious needs" narrowly. Men's life with God depends upon all 
 the rest of their life their health, their education, their recrea- 
 tions, their social intercourse. There is no lack in the life of a 
 community which a church may not try to supply if it possesses 
 the power. It dare not lose its sense of proportion and forget 
 its unique ministry of the Evangel of Christ; but that Evangel 
 has a message for every human relation. If there is a lack of 
 healthy amusements, if civic questions require more public dis- 
 cussion, if the schools need supplementing with training in trades 
 or domestic science, if mothers are ignorant of the principles of 
 good home-making, if boys and girls are curtailed in their chances 
 for play, if young people cannot meet under wholesome auspices, 
 if working-men want a place to spend their leisure, in these 
 and numberless kindred needs the Church finds a duty and an 
 
THE MINISTRY OF ORGANIZATION 125 
 
 opening for her ministry. She ought not to undertake anything 
 that some other agency the government, or a social club, or a 
 business house can do as well; she will never want for work of 
 her own. If anything which she has started can be more advan- 
 tageously handled by the school, or the town authorities, or a 
 Christian Association, let her cheerfully part with it. Like a 
 physician, her aim is to render herself unnecessary; in the com- 
 pleted city of God there is no temple. But for the present in 
 most communities there are any number of approaches to men 
 and women and little children that she must attempt, and any 
 number of services she must take in hand for them, if she is to 
 furnish them with fulness of life with God. 
 
 This is not to urge that a church embark on social ministries 
 which are not definitely and outspokenly religious. If some gen- 
 erations have been too glib in their speech concerning God, ours 
 is too tongue-tied. It is not the churches which are apologetic 
 in presenting their message of God in Christ which are most 
 successful. A neighborhood ought to be surveyed, as Chalmers 
 surveyed his Glasgow parish, with a view to bringing as frankly 
 Christian inspirations to every accessible home and group in 
 it as he strove to bring to his people. We do not want less but 
 more evangelism, and an evangelism which has a regenerating 
 gospel for industry and pleasure and education and government 
 and the whole social life, as well as a personal appeal to men 
 to let Christ become their Lord and Saviour. But such social 
 evangelism has often to be presented by many ministries besides 
 those of preaching and teaching and individual conversations; 
 nor are any of these ministries less "spiritual," if we define spirit- 
 uality as was done in a previous lecture. And on the foreign mis- 
 sionary field and in parishes at home, ministries of human help- 
 fulness are richest in results when rendered by those whose glow- 
 ing passion to win lives for Christ keeps them open-eyed for 
 chances to face men with Him and unhesitant in speaking of His 
 incomparable worth. 
 
126 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 A manifold ministry is expensive. It demands a larger plant 
 with other facilities than most churches possess ; it requires more 
 workers, and workers who give regularly much time and skilled 
 service. Churches hesitate to face such outlays. But the sums 
 raised for the Young Men's Christian Association during the 
 War, and the unused leisure and energy of thousands of members 
 of our churches devoted to public service, show that means and 
 workers are not wanting when there is a cause to enlist them. 
 Many a church would find it easier to raise a larger budget, were 
 it giving the community a larger service. It is the part of a 
 skilful administrator to list the resources of his constituency, and 
 to keep facing his congregation with work that will prove a 
 constant strain. Churches, like individuals, work best under 
 considerable pressure. 
 
 And a manifold ministry usually requires more than one em- 
 ployed minister. An assistant trained along similar lines with 
 the pastor may be needed in very large congregations ; but it is 
 usually uneconomical to have two men fit for the same ministry. 
 Men of widely differing equipments supplement each other and 
 diversify the church's services. Whether technically ordained or 
 not, a director of religious education (corresponding in part to 
 the "teacher" of our early Puritan churches), a man who devotes 
 himself to evangelism and the care of those recently won to the 
 faith, an administrator of the Church's various forms of social 
 helpfulness, can fulfil offices as useful as that of the preacher and 
 pastor. Women, as well as men, are increasingly sought after 
 for supplementary ministries in the Church; and the positions 
 offered them must be made appealing to the finest graduates of 
 our colleges. None of these workers should be regarded as mere 
 subordinates and assistants of the pastor, simply to relieve him 
 and take tasks which he may assign them. Each must have a 
 place of dignity in the eyes of the congregation, a definite sphere 
 with scope for leadership, and a chance to be heard in the framing 
 of policies and the planning of the work. They are not employees 
 
 
THE MINISTRY OF ORGANIZATION 127 
 
 but members of a firm. The pastor must hold himself in the posi- 
 tion of a senior partner. Ministers in the past have usually 
 worked in single harness; ministers in the future must learn to 
 work in teams. 
 
 It is a moot question whether a so-called "institutional church" 
 should offer its ministries of recreation and education to any who 
 will accept them, or confine them to those who use its religious 
 ministry and are in some sense members of its Christian fellow- 
 ship. Advocates of the former view point out that these services 
 are of worth in themselves and enable the church to do good by 
 these opportunities to those who do not care to become of its 
 household of faith; that they attract many who would not come 
 in the first instance for its religious inspiration; and that they 
 afford the church's workers a chance to become acquainted with 
 them and to lead them into the life with Christ. Advocates of 
 the latter view insist that the church's sole interest is in giving 
 men life with Christ in God, and that to offer them anything 
 apart from this is to seem not to deem it indispensable; that all 
 men have religious needs, and, without apology the church should 
 present them with its Gospel, and appeal to them to receive it as 
 the power of God; and that anything it can do for them along 
 other lines should be viewed as supplementing and enriching lives 
 already possessed of, or at least being taught, the one thing 
 needful. Local conditions will usually determine which is the 
 wiser policy. The latter is much the easier to administer. Every 
 member of the church, and every regular attendant at any of its 
 services or religious classes, is expected to contribute towards the 
 church's budget and is entitled without further dues to its social 
 privileges. This obviates the necessity of fixed charges, makes 
 support of the church a matter for the conscience of all who 
 compose its fellowship, allows each to give according to his 
 ability, and brings all who avail themselves of any of its ministries 
 more readily under its spiritual oversight and control. 
 
 A church with a many-sided ministry is likely to find itself 
 
128 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 overlapping some of the work carried on by other institutions, 
 such as social settlements or Christian Associations. There must 
 be the closest and heartiest cooperation, and a minister will do 
 everything in his power to establish cordial relations with the 
 leaders of such enterprises. It is not possible to lay down hard 
 and fast lines delimiting their several spheres of work. It is fair 
 to say that some of these institutions would not have come into 
 being had the Church of the past been effectively organized. As 
 a rule they are not consciously rivals, and often they are the 
 Church organized under another name for specific tasks. They 
 command approaches to groups in the community which are 
 barred to the Church, and can do pioneer work along lines which 
 it is not easy for the Church to attempt. Let the Church join 
 with them in plans for the betterment of the community, supply 
 them with workers, with sources of income, and with inspiration. 
 Let them take the role of John the Baptist, preparing the way, 
 and, where possible, turning over those whom they reach to the 
 Church for permanent religious fellowship. 
 
 The Church exists for the Kingdom, and its members will 
 render the largest part of their Christian service outside its 
 walls in their homes, occupations and civic life; but it is ideal 
 to have each of them engaged in some of the Church's ministries. 
 By no means must work be made for them; such artificial tasks 
 disgust socially minded men and women. But if a church has 
 not a task for every member, there is something wanting in its 
 programme for the community ; it can hardly have asked itself, 
 What must be done to render this neighborhood in every aspect 
 a province of the Kingdom of heaven? Let its leaders study 
 their community again to see what circles in it are untouched by 
 Christian inspirations, or what phases of its life sustain a merely 
 colonial relation to the government of Christian ideals ; let them 
 notice whether men and women whose hours of employment are 
 irregular or unusual have been overlooked; let them observe what 
 persons or groups of persons have but a partial spiritual life 
 
THE MINISTRY OF ORGANIZATION 129 
 
 because of defective opportunities; and let them face the church 
 with these obvious claims. Our congregations ought to be made 
 much more uncomfortable for our all-too-numerous slackers. 
 Again and again as one views the able people who are loafers 
 so far as the Church's work goes, one is reminded of the saying 
 of Nehemiah concerning the labor on the wall of Jerusalem 
 assigned to the Tekoites: "their nobles put not their necks to 
 the work of their Lord." Men feel disgraced in a day of their 
 country's need if they have no share in the national service; let 
 them be made equally ashamed when the Church of Christ needs 
 them still more sorely, and they fail to fill some place in its 
 ministry. 
 
 And every church has responsibilities outside its own locality 
 which it must meet with knowledge, sympathy, prayer, gifts, and 
 sometimes with recruits. It must be organized to discharge these 
 obligations, for good intentions and generous impulses are made 
 fruitless by lack of well-contrived plans for their expression. 
 Its most important provisions are for adequate information and 
 for systematic response. Where congregations can be tied up 
 to particular missionary enterprises the chances for intelligent 
 and sympathetic cooperation are vastly increased. Nothing is 
 more spiritually deadening than congregational selfishness which 
 sees no responsibilities beyond its own bounds. A minister can- 
 not develop consciences sturdy enough for their immediate circle 
 of duties when he trains them in a sense of accountability for 
 anything less than a whole world. The financial scheme of an 
 "every member canvass" which presents unusually side by side 
 the needs of the parish and the claims of missions and benevo- 
 lences, and provides for regular and systematic contributions to 
 both, is not only successful in returns in money but in results 
 in character. 
 
 A minister in leading his people along new lines of service 
 needs constantly to remind himself that the church is always 
 a fellowship, and that he must win for the courses he advocates 
 
130 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 the intelligent and conscientious support of the whole congre- 
 gation, or at least of all but a negligible minority. At times a 
 pastor becomes restive under the objections raised to new ven- 
 tures, and impatient of the tenacity with which his people cling 
 to clearly outworn ways. On the other hand, a pastor is often 
 so loved and trusted that almost anything which he suggests is 
 followed for his sake without thoughtful consideration and intelli- 
 gent approval on its own merits, and he is expected (dear man!) 
 to assume entire responsibility for its success or failure. Neither 
 obduracy nor easy acquiescence are compatible with fellowship. 
 An administrator's most delicate problem is frequently that of 
 gauging the proper rate of advance; he must take his people 
 much further towards usefulness, and he must do it so that they 
 are not dragged, but go willingly with him. When a minister 
 attempts to drag a congregation, the pastoral cable usually 
 breaks. When they give him all the rope he wants, he is very 
 likely to hang himself. Both for their sakes and his, fellowship 
 must be maintained, or they are ceasing to be a Church of Christ. 
 In a day when the Church needs so thorough a reorganization 
 that it may compass the even more thorough regeneration of the 
 social order, it is easy for a minister to be goaded by the many 
 carping voices from without and by a few hasty spirits within 
 to attempt too rapid alterations. Fortunately, like all venerable 
 institutions, the Church is sufficiently conservative to stand safely 
 much ministerial radicalism. But let a pastor remember the 
 wise saying of a noted Anglican bishop, the late Dr. Creighton, 
 that "the administrator has to drive the coach; his critics are 
 always urging him to upset it." If we can show our people that 
 our first readjustments produce results, they grow readv to 
 attempt more hazardous experiments. When once a minister has 
 their confidence, they are prepared to follow as swiftly as it is 
 wise for him to move forward. Only let him never forget that a 
 fellowship "moveth all together if it move at all." 
 
 A minister's most difficult problem in organization is probably 
 
THE MINISTRY OF ORGANIZATION 131 
 
 not his congregation, but himself; and his first task is the direc- 
 tion of his own time and energies. Like the ant in Scripture, he 
 has no chief, overseer, or ruler (unless it be his wife), and the 
 more numerous the projects in which he is interested the more 
 essential that he deliberately focus his efforts where they will 
 prove of most service. Laziness is certainly the cardinal minis- 
 terial vice, a vice not often eradicated and sometimes sadly aug- 
 mented in the theological seminary. And by laziness is not meant 
 inactivity; American ministers are seldom inactive; but they are 
 active along the easiest lines theirs is the strenua inertia of 
 Horace. "There is one that toileth and laboreth and maketh 
 haste, and is so much the more behind." One man is shamelessly 
 lazy in his study, reads next to nothing and pursues no consecu- 
 tive course that may be called "study," flings together an ill- 
 thought, hastily worded sermon and slubbers over the preparation 
 of his public prayers, while he bustles about contriving advertise- 
 ments of services and urging people to attend, where they get 
 nothing. Another leaves everything in his parish at loose ends, 
 while he continually runs off to conferences on the betterment of 
 the world in general or the deepening of the spiritual life. A 
 third has a passion for committees, and travels all over the coun- 
 try (with the travelling expenses paid, of course) to attend to 
 various affairs in the management of his communion or in the 
 work of some board, while his people remain unvisited and he 
 never devotes a week to personal effort for the unchurched in his 
 immediate neighborhood. A fourth is absorbed in sermon-writing 
 and in literary ventures, but neglects the organization of men 
 and women to carry out the good purposes to which he so care- 
 fully exhorts them, and, while he coins clever phrases about the 
 evangelization of the world, allows the missionary programme of 
 his congregation to go unplanned. He that ordereth not himself, 
 how shall he order the Church of God? Theological students and 
 young ministers have often set down in their diaries an entry like 
 that which Mr. Gladstone made on his twenty-third birthday: 
 
132 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 "In future I hope circumstances will bind me down to work with 
 a rigor which my natural sluggishness will find it impossible to 
 elude." But a minister dare not trust himself to the constraint 
 of circumstances. He cannot allow himself simply to respond 
 to demands upon him as they come along. In most parishes there 
 are too few insistent demands to furnish sufficient pressure, and 
 in every parish some of the most important services are never 
 demanded. He must deliberately plan his weeks with enough to 
 crowd each day ; and if events sometimes force him to make room 
 for the unexpected, or to change the order of his arrangements, 
 he will usually find that dogged determination will carry him 
 through the entire week's work. On the 18th of December, 1519, 
 Martin Luther wrote from Wittenberg to Spalatin: "My lec- 
 tures on the Psalter require a whole man; my sermons to the 
 people on the Gospels and Genesis need another whole man; a 
 third is required by the little prayers and regulations of my 
 Order; a fourth might do this work you ask, not to mention my 
 correspondence and my occupation with the affairs of others, 
 including my meeting with my friends, which steals so much of 
 my time that I almost think it wasted." Obviously such a man 
 must carefully organize himself, as Luther certainly did; and 
 when a minister feels that he ought to be at least four men, then, 
 and perhaps not before, he is putting at least one whole man at 
 the service of the Church. 
 
 Our ministry of organization must meet exacting spiritual 
 tests. The seer on Patmos uses a striking figure which scholars 
 tell us he borrowed from some earlier apocalypse and applied in 
 a different connexion, and which we, following his admirable 
 example, may as freely apply in still another. "And there was 
 given unto me," he writes, "a reed like unto a rod; and one said, 
 Rise, and measure the temple of God, and the altar, and them 
 that worship therein." These are measurements which every 
 pastor should constantly take and record: First, the area of 
 the temple how much of the whole life of the congregation and 
 
THE MINISTRY OF ORGANIZATION 133 
 
 their world is included within the hallowed enclosure in which they 
 feel themselves in fellowship with God? Second, the altar what 
 are the dimensions of the sacrificial service which the church is 
 expecting and receiving from them? Third, "and them that 
 worship therein" how large are they in mind, heart and con- 
 science? how nearly do they, corporately and severally, approxi- 
 mate the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ? 
 
LECTURE VII 
 THE MINISTRY OF FRIENDSHIP 
 
 AN urgent task of economic repair is the equipment and training 
 of the maimed to fill some useful industry. It is not a task which 
 can be done wholesale. Men must be taken one by one, fitted with 
 an artificial limb or taught to perform day labor light denied. 
 The Church has a similar personal ministry, not merely to the 
 spiritually crippled, but also to the immature, in caring for them 
 one by one and training them for service in the Kingdom of God. 
 It is not a form of ministry which happens to be popular at the 
 moment. The pastoral office is frequently disparaged, either as 
 antiquated or as inferior to some other task. It is, however, 
 noteworthy that its disparagement does not come from congre- 
 gations, who invariably crave the personal interest and attention 
 of their minister; nor from those ministers who give themselves 
 to it, and know what it means to their preaching, to their leader- 
 ship of the Church's work, to their winning and training dis- 
 ciples of Christ, and to the enrichment of their own souls. But 
 a glance after twenty years at the list of one's classmates in the 
 theological seminary reveals only a fraction of them in pastor- 
 ates. Educational and philanthropic institutions, executive posi- 
 tions, divers forms of social service, and even public office, have 
 claimed many of them. There are various ministries which require 
 trained religious leaders, and it is to the credit of the Church 
 and of her schools of divinity that men have been supplied for so 
 many sorts of service. But we must recognize a tendency in this 
 day of interest in social movements to belittle the unobtrusive 
 
THE MINISTRY OF FRIENDSHIP 135 
 
 and most draining labor of caring individually for men, women 
 and little children in their life with God. Not much is made of 
 the office of Mr. Great-heart, the guide of the widow Christiana 
 and her four boys, of Mercy and Old Honest and Ready-to-halt 
 and Feeble-mind; who helped chicken-hearted Mr. Fearing so to 
 manage himself that he made no stick at the Hill Difficulty, and 
 went over the river at last "not much above wet-shod"; who 
 rescued Mr. Despondency and his daughter, Much-afraid, from 
 Doubting Castle; and who led his company on the Enchanted 
 Ground, where it was "but sorry going for the best of them," so 
 that "they make a pretty good shift to wag along." Some men 
 appear to feel that they are accomplishing bigger things if they 
 can be executive secretaries of an organization representing a 
 "movement," with a business office, a stenographer, ambitious sta- 
 tionery, and endless "conferences," than when pulling doorbells, 
 and climbing stairs, and spending almost endless time looking 
 after the spiritual health of a hundred or several hundred chil- 
 dren of God. Let us quickly grant that there is a place for 
 both lines of service, but let us also realize that the Church of 
 Christ needs a hundred or more pastors to every secretary and 
 administrator. There is often something pathetic in the lives 
 of men who give up the former for the latter type of ministry 
 on the ground that they are doing more for social rebuilding. 
 Not a few of them find themselves like Mrs. Browning's Romney 
 Leigh, 
 
 Who thought to take the world upon his back 
 To carry it o'er a chasm of social ill, 
 And end by letting slip through impotence 
 A single soul, a child's weight in a soul, 
 Straight down the pit of hell. 
 
 Some of the ministers of our large churches have ceased to be 
 shepherds and have become ranchers; they do not know their 
 sheep ; they know only their number. Other ministers who would 
 
136 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 fain be pastors fail through lack of preaching talent, for men 
 without pulpit power rarely succeed in having people wish their 
 pastoral care. But more fail through want of the proper endow- 
 ment, which we may roughly summarize as a genuine interest in 
 human beings, approachableness, and a contagious Christian 
 faith. 
 
 For what is a Christian pastor? Various metaphors are in 
 use to describe the office. Sometimes, stressing the derivation of 
 the word, he is likened to a shepherd; but rich as are the New 
 Testament phrases that employ this simile, modern men and 
 women are not sheep, and American boys and girls hardly lambs 
 of the flock. Sometimes he is compared to a general ; but a Chris- 
 tian congregation is and ought to be altogether unlike an army, 
 and military relations are usually the antithesis of those en- 
 couraged in the Gospel. Sometimes he is spoken of as a father, 
 and certain communions employ that title for their clergy; but 
 it very ineptly describes the relations of the minister of Christ 
 with those whom He calls friends, and wishes to make independent 
 and responsible sons and daughters of God. Sometimes he is 
 called a master-builder, which is suggestive, and might seem most 
 appropriate to the outlook of these lectures upon social recon- 
 struction; but it is inadequate for the intensely personal rela- 
 tions between minister and people, which are the essence of the 
 office. The minister is reshaping society, but he does it through 
 a company of men and women with whom he has intimate con- 
 tacts. The best metaphor for the pastoral office seems to be that 
 of friendship. A minister's relations with his own congregation 
 and with outsiders whom he may touch, his leadership, his author- 
 ity, his influence, are most akin to those of a close friend. And he 
 must be a unique kind of friend ; let me describe him as a trusted, 
 inspired, trained, and accredited friend at large. 
 
 First, he must be trusted. His earliest duty on entering his 
 parish is to win men's confidence, and his last is to hold that 
 confidence unshaken to the end. Confidence is not something one 
 
THE MINISTRY OF FRIENDSHIP 137 
 
 can set out to gain ; it comes unsought to whoso deserves it. The 
 authoress of John Halifax describes her hero in words that should 
 be applicable to every man whom his fellows call to be their 
 pastor: "I knew from every tone of his voice, every chance ex- 
 pression of his honest eyes, that he was one of those characters 
 in which we may be sure that for each feeling they express lies a 
 countless wealth of the same, unexpressed, below; a character 
 the keystone of which was that whereon is built all liking and 
 all love dependableness. He is one whom you may be long in 
 knowing, but whom the more you know, the more you trust ; and 
 once trusting, you trust forever." The tragedies of the ministry 
 come when the faith of his people in their minister's character is 
 shattered. Some gainful business venture on which he has em- 
 barked with the same acquisitiveness and probably with less judg- 
 ment in such matters than other men, and, worse yet, a business 
 venture in which he induces some of those who trust him to invest ; 
 some moral lapse in truthfulness, in sobriety, in self-control ; 
 some insidious fault allowed to grow unchecked conceit, laziness, 
 colossal selfishness ; some trait which taints that all-important 
 thing, his atmosphere worldliness, cynicism, flippancy and 
 their confidence in him is shipwrecked. Nor can he hold their 
 trust if they feel him remiss in fidelity to them. One of the 
 parishioners of John Knox in England, and later in Geneva, Mrs. 
 Locke, had evidently written, complaining of her pastor's negli- 
 gence in writing to her ; and in the course of his reply, Knox says 
 of himself: "Of nature I am churlish, and in conditions different 
 from many: Yet one thing I ashame not to affirme, that familiar- 
 ite once thoroughlie contracted was never yet brocken by my 
 default. The cause may be that I have rather need of all then 
 that any hath need of me." There speaks a genuine pastor one 
 who having given himself to his people is henceforth theirs. They 
 may be exacting (as this woman evidently was), or cranky? or 
 exasperating, or discouraging, or disagreeable. Still they are his 
 people, and he needs them; he and they belong to each other in 
 
138 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 fellowship. A pastor's first obligation is to be a trustworthy and 
 faithful man. 
 
 Second, he must be inspired, and obviously inspired a mani- 
 fest man of God. Other men may supply other things which a 
 pastor furnishes incidentally friendliness, counsel, stimulus, 
 sympathy, idealism; his singular contribution is conscious fellow- 
 ship with the God and Father of Jesus Christ in His Church. He 
 must be able to talk of the things of the Spirit frankly and 
 naturally. He must be sufficiently intimate with the Most High 
 to introduce another to His friendship. He must have the cour- 
 age, the tact, and the vital touch with Christ, to talk face to face 
 with a man of his personal relation to God. He must so dwell 
 in the secret place that men feel that he belongs there, and can 
 help them to enter. Closeness to the heart of God carries one 
 farthest into the hearts of men. Pompilia had met several ecclesi- 
 astics, but she found a pastor in Canon Caponssachi. The Other 
 Half Rome put into her mouth the words : 
 
 I spoke to my companion, told him much, 
 Knowing that he knew more, knew me, knew God, 
 And God's disposal of me. 
 
 The sharing of God's sympathy with men is necessary for that 
 self-detachment which enables a man, whatever his personal cir- 
 cumstances at the moment, to devote himself unreservedly to 
 his people's needs. Anthony Trollope has drawn a memorable 
 portrait of his mother, that remarkable woman who to support 
 a dependent family began writing fiction, without previous literary 
 experience, at the mature age of fifty, and produced one hundred 
 and fourteen saleable novels before she ceased writing at seventy- 
 six. He describes her sitting by a son's bedside, who was dying 
 of consumption, caring tenderly for his wants, and at the same 
 time going on indefatigably penning the stories of her characters. 
 He tells us that "she could dance with other people's legs, eat 
 and drink with other people's palates, be proud with the lustre 
 
THE MINISTRY OF FRIENDSHIP 139 
 
 of other people's finery." A similar leisure from self and identifi- 
 cation of one's self with others is necessary in a pastor who is 
 constantly helping several hundred people to write their lives as 
 epistles of Christ. Inspiration, whether literary or scientific or 
 pastoral, carries a man out of himself and into his work. The 
 secret of its acquisition for the Christian pastor lies in his enter- 
 ing through Christ into the Father's absorbing interest in those 
 sons and daughters committed to his care. "He that dwelleth 
 in love dwelleth in God and God in him." 
 
 Third, he must be trained. Lord Lister used to say: "To 
 intrude an unskilled hand into such a piece of divine mechanism 
 as the human body is indeed a fearful responsibility." What 
 shall we say of the even more delicate spiritual nature? There 
 are general principles concerning the connexion of the spirit and 
 the body, and of mental health and spiritual sanity, which every 
 minister should be taught. There are laws of spiritual growth 
 and of spiritual vigor with which he ought to be familiar. His 
 course in pastoral theology should cover the treatment of repre- 
 sentative cases of spiritual need. But experience is the only 
 teacher that will supply him with the knack of discerning quickly 
 a man's lack, and the greater knack of knowing how to meet it. 
 Lord Lister (to quote again that eminent representative of a 
 kindred calling) said that "a feeling heart is the first requisite 
 of a surgeon," and it is an indispensable requisite of a pastor, 
 giving him touch or tact; but, like the surgeon, he must possess 
 the further skill to diagnose the cause of trouble and deftness in 
 helping the patient himself to remove it. With most pastors this 
 skill is an intuition, the unconscious outgrowth of observation, 
 thought and prayer; and they will agree with the son of Sirach 
 that 
 
 A man's soul is sometimes wont to bring him tidings 
 
 More than seven watchmen that sit on high on a watch-tower. 
 
 A pastor ought to have enough of his Bible and of the lines 
 
140 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 of a few rich hymns at his tongue's end for use in the sickroom, 
 at the deathbed, in the house of mourning, and with various 
 cases of spiritual illness in the physically well. He must know 
 what to say when men and women want that which will link them 
 with the living God. These friends come to us from life's journey, 
 knocking confidently at our door, and we abuse their trust if 
 we have nothing to set before them. A lad of seventeen, dying 
 in a city hospital, had his pastor sent for at midnight, and 
 explained when he arrived that he wanted someone by him "who 
 was experienced" yes, experienced in God and in strengthening 
 men in Him. He wanted one who could put his hand, from which 
 everything was slipping, into the right hand of the Most High. 
 A minister of Christ must not disappoint that expectation. 
 
 Fourth, he is accredited. That is the meaning of his ordina- 
 tion. The historic Church, through some duly constituted agent, 
 representing theoretically the whole Church of Christ a council, 
 a bishop, a presbytery sets apart this man by the laying on of 
 hands, and delegates to him as an authorized representative the 
 priestly function, which belongs to the entire body of believers, 
 that he may stand before the world declared competent to min- 
 ister the life with Christ in God. Further, there is usually an 
 act of installation by which he is assigned, on the election, or with 
 the consent of a congregation, to lead them, and they place them- 
 selves and theirs under his care. He bears the imprimatur of the 
 universal Church and is marked by the choice of a Christian 
 company as fitted to establish the touch with God. 
 
 The pastor is a trusted, inspired, trained, accredited friend, 
 and he is a friend at large. It is no easy undertaking to be a true 
 friend to a hundred persons. Let a minister be thankful if his 
 first charge be a reasonably small one. Should he find himself 
 required to become the friend of fifteen hundred or two thousand, 
 he will need the intensive training with the few to enable him to 
 keep his relations with the many really personal. And no congre- 
 gation in calling a man to be their minister restricts his work to 
 
THE MINISTRY OF FRIENDSHIP 141 
 
 themselves, and no ecclesiastical body in installing him in a charge 
 confines him to its recognized parishioners. His pastoral office 
 is a public position which places him at the call of the community. 
 He is supported by the church that he may with them, and as 
 their special representative, embody the friendliness of Jesus and 
 be approachable, as was his Master, by any who come to him 
 craving God. What function has larger social value than this, 
 if truly filled? A large if, for, as one of the early Puritan 
 chroniclers says of the Reverend Ralph Smith, sent over to share 
 the pastoral charge at Plymouth with Elder Brewster, "many 
 times it is found that a total vacancy of an office is easier to be 
 borne than an under-performance thereof." 
 
 A pastor's chief means of discharging his obligations of friend- 
 ship are visitation and consultation. 
 
 It is somewhat the vogue to sneer at the custom of making 
 pastoral calls as obsolete. They consume a vast amount of time 
 in merely going about from house to house, and they may often 
 seem barren of result. But no substitute is offered us for estab- 
 lishing personal relations with our people in their homes an 
 essential social relation to enable us to bind families in the fellow- 
 ship of the church. A pastor must take in hand this duty with 
 system, planning his week so that on different days, if possible, 
 he sets aside different hours for the purpose, and so finds at 
 liberty persons whose times of leisure vary, and arranging his 
 calls so that he sees the men as well as the more home-keeping 
 women. And where people can scarcely ever be found at home, 
 very effective calls can often be made on them at their places of 
 work in the noon hour in a factory where a group are eating 
 their lunch or at the least rushed periods in offices and shops. A 
 pastor must be scrupulously careful to overlook nobody. 
 
 He has definite aims before him in such systematic calling. He 
 is finding out of what his people are thinking, and how they fare ; 
 he is learning of members of families and their acquaintances who 
 need the church's special attention; he is giving his people a 
 
142 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 chance to ask him questions, to tell him wants, and to offer sug- 
 gestions on the church's work. He is discovering unused re- 
 sources in men and women, and will carry them on his mind, and 
 perhaps enter their names in a notebook, and study to employ 
 them for the Kingdom. He is looking up the careless, and bring- 
 ing in himself the church to those who have forgotten it. He is 
 helping timid and retiring persons by his friendly visit to realize 
 something of the fellowship of the Body of Christ, which they 
 are in danger of missing. He is after men and women who do 
 not come to listen to her sermons, or come rarely, and, if occasion 
 serves, he will say to them face to face a very little of what he 
 would have said from the pulpit, but that little a hundred times 
 more effectively because there is no need of a voice to add, "Thou 
 art the man." He is giving his people the opportunity to share 
 with him their anxieties and interests ; and as the years go by 
 and he wears into their friendship, there will be little of moment 
 untold to him. He is acquainting them more fully with the 
 church's work, or with its missionary enterprise, or with some 
 plan for social advance in the community. He is dropping a few 
 thoughts, which because they come from him are the likelier to be 
 repeated, which influence people's views, and affect their outlooks 
 upon God and man. He is looking over his people to keep him- 
 self posted as to their needs, that he may intelligently preach, 
 and pray and plan the church's work. Ministers who visit faith- 
 fully bear witness how many of their sermons, prayers and 
 projects are born in their calls. No pastor ought to live for 
 long out of sight of the words penned to describe his predecessors 
 in the early day, and which ought to be as applicable to him: 
 "They watch for your souls, as they that shall give account." 
 
 If the congregation be representative of many social groups 
 in the community, this visiting of the pastor in the houses of the 
 wealthy and the few rooms of the poor, entering the front door 
 to see employers and the back door to call on servants, dropping 
 in on a man of affairs in his office and stopping for a few minutes 
 
THE MINISTRY OF FRIENDSHIP 143 
 
 to see a stenographer or clerk or office-boy, has a unifying effect. 
 Without his being aware of it, he carries the point of view of one 
 to another, as bees carry fertilizing pollen from plant to plant. 
 In the background of his conversation, and sometimes in the fore- 
 ground, will be the thoughts and feelings of those differently cir- 
 cumstanced. His own mind becomes hospitable to many not easily 
 combined opinions and interests, and he is fitted to interpret men 
 to each other no small social service today. Like a shuttle in a 
 loom, he is constantly passing and repassing over the else un- 
 related strands of lives, and weaving them together as one fellow- 
 ship with a distinctive pattern to display to the community. In 
 the inclusive friendship of this friend at large, those who other- 
 wise might never understand each other meet, and meet as mutual 
 friends of Christ. 
 
 Besides his systematic visitation in which, so far as may be, 
 he seeks to cover every family and the stray individuals in his 
 parish, he must hold himself ready for calls where there is special 
 need. When he hears of serious illness, he shows his friendliness 
 by a visit of inquiry; and in cases of long and dangerous sick- 
 ness a minister's calls can sometimes mean as much and more than 
 the physician's. There is a common fallacy that sickness is sanc- 
 tifying; it is almost always the reverse. It "enlarges the dimen- 
 sions of a man's self to himself," as Charles Lamb well said; it 
 often weakens his self-control and makes him childishly irritable 
 and unreasonable. A long illness has to be "managed," if a man 
 is not to deteriorate in it. It is a form of war, and exhausts re- 
 sources. A minister who knows how can in a few untiring min- 
 utes restore or strengthen the contact with God, and perhaps 
 furnish thoughts and suggestions that will maintain a man 
 through tedious days and more dreaded nights of weakness and 
 discomfort. Occasionally (although not very often under modern 
 medical practice by which men are mercifully helped to slip out 
 of life in sleep) a pastor will be by when a life sets out into the 
 Beyond. He will have at command some large, divine, and com- 
 
144 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 fortable words, such as "The eternal God is thy dwelling-place, 
 and underneath are the everlasting arms ;" "When thou passest 
 through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, 
 they shall not overflow thee;" "He that dwelleth in the secret 
 place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Al- 
 mighty;" "Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is 
 stayed on Thee ; because he trusteth in Thee ;" "Verily, I say unto 
 thee, Today shalt thou be with Me in Paradise," and above all 
 the first few verses of the Fourteenth Chapter of John and the 
 concluding verses of the Eighth of Romans. And he will be spar- 
 ing of any words of his own to the dying, but will kneel and speak 
 with him to God. 
 
 He will wish to be with his people in their sorrow to share their 
 first thoughts of grief stunned, bewildered thoughts ; and to be 
 with them again in the more bleak and lonely second thoughts of 
 grief. His task is one of social building assuring them that the 
 Christian dead are with God and that God is in closest fellow- 
 ship with themselves, so that He binds the living yonder and the 
 living here in one enduring home, and they are still with their 
 dead in God. What more truly social service can any man ren- 
 der than to set lives into the holy communion of heaven and 
 earth ? 
 
 He will wish to be with His people in experiences far more bit- 
 ter than death tragic experiences of shame, when love lies dead, 
 crucified by disloyalty, or when trust has been abused, or when 
 a sinful habit has brought disgrace and ruin. He is the minister 
 of One who can do the impossible, and is to inspire with the love 
 which beareth, believeth, hopeth, endureth all and never faileth. 
 And when such love suffers on its Calvary, he is to hold his people 
 through the darkness that covers their world to One under whose 
 control all things, and none more conspicuously than the cross 
 itself, work together for good unto them that love Him, 
 
 He will wish to be with his people also in their happinesses 
 when the coming of a little child has made a father and mother 
 
THE MINISTRY OF FRIENDSHIP 145 
 
 peculiarly impressionable and eager to be worthy of their new 
 trust; when some long absent member of a family has been re- 
 stored; when son or daughter has attained an honor or a great 
 happiness ; when a new home is set up. God opens doors to 
 hearts by joys as well as by sorrows; they unbar the beautiful 
 gate of the temple; and the pastor will want to be there when 
 the portals are wide, to help by his friendliness the unseen Friend 
 to pass in. Great gladnesses and great sadnesses are both of 
 them unsettling experiences; he who would rebuild society after 
 the heavenly pattern finds lives loosened to the conventional and 
 habitual, and can try to readjust them to God, that, when they 
 settle again, they are in more kindly and strengthening touch 
 with their fellows in their Father's big family. 
 
 A look over the list of one's congregation always discloses an- 
 other set of names the lapsed and the never-yet-won. In many 
 a home there is one who has lost an earlier religious interest a 
 son or daughter, once a regular Sunday School scholar now never 
 seen inside the church door, some former member who was hurt 
 by an unfortunate incident or quarrelled with a member of the 
 church, a man who has become so immersed in his affairs that he 
 is stifling his soul, a woman who fancies she has attained a superior 
 mental position from which she can look down on the old-fashioned 
 ways of church folk. Let a minister every now and again sally 
 forth after a half dozen such most difficult persons. He will 
 find them discouraging. Even that stout and valiant conductor, 
 Mr. Great-heart, told of failures with Slow-pace, and one Short- 
 wind, and one No-heart, and one Linger-after-lust, and one 
 Sleepy-head, and the young woman named Dull ; and for all his 
 shaking he could not rouse Heedless and Too-bold in their arbor 
 on the Enchanted Ground. A pastor will be tempted to think his 
 time and effort thrown away; but occasionally sheer friendliness 
 has a surprising reward. And about every congregation there 
 is a fringe of men and women who are related to the church "by 
 marriage," or through their children, or by some slight contact 
 
146 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 which makes it probable that in the event of their dying its pastor 
 will be asked to conduct their funerals, but who themselves have 
 no personal connexion with Christ in His Church. It is a good 
 plan to set aside a whole week every few months to going after 
 persons of this description. .One must not expect large results; 
 these are the impossibles in the eyes of those who know them. 
 They may not be bad people; often they are fairly good; but 
 they have settled into an unreligious life. One can never tell, 
 however, when some circumstance may have affected them and 
 turned their minds into new paths ; and the attempt to keep 
 friendly with them, and, when possible, to deal frankly with them, 
 is always worth making. A pastor has to learn that spiritual 
 effort is never wasted: "If a son of peace be there, your peace 
 shall rest upon him : but if not, it shall turn to you again." 
 
 A call ought usually to be brief, for its point can be lost in 
 desultory conversation. A man must have skill in guiding the 
 talk so that real needs are easily told. He must himself be nat- 
 urally frank in speaking of God, and he ought not to allow the 
 conversation to be mere chatter about nothing that matters. 
 There are connexions in which things of moment will come out; 
 it is his business to take the line of talk which will bring them 
 out, if they are there. When it seems appropriate and the occa- 
 sion serves, he will offer prayer, and then immediately leave, for 
 all subsequent conversation is an anticlimax. Our predecessors 
 may have erred in praying too often, and in turning a friendly 
 visit into a formal and professional call. Our danger lies in the 
 opposite direction. We are likely to make the mistake of not 
 linking our people directly with God, when they really wish us to 
 help them to Him. One is aware that he has erred at least ten 
 times more often in not offering to pray, than in suggesting it 
 when it was not wise. Wherever there is a reason for prayer 
 illness, sorrow, perplexity, responsibility, a great joy we do 
 well to kneel with our people. A pastor's relation with a family 
 or with an individual is always much closer after he has been with 
 
THE MINISTRY OF FRIENDSHIP 147 
 
 them in the presence of God. And there are many circumstances 
 when frankness in conversation is extremely difficult, and when 
 prayer makes possible plainness of speech before Him who know- 
 eth all things. 
 
 A pastor will also keep a list of the shut-ins among his people, 
 and plan to visit them fairly often. There will be no question as 
 to the appropriateness of prayer on such visits, for they welcome 
 it. And he will arrange to keep with them from time to time the 
 Supper of the Lord symbol of their communion with Him and 
 His Church universal. 
 
 And there is scarcely a time when a pastor does not have on 
 his heart the difficulties of some of his people, which he must de- 
 cide whether it is wiser for him to notice or to treat as though 
 they were not a husband and wife jarring on each other, a son 
 or daughter at odds with parents, friends discording, a family 
 divided over money matters, or an unrelished marriage, men in 
 business straits. It requires a delicate tact to know when to 
 intrude, and when to seem unaware of the difficulty. Friendli- 
 ness is happily never out of place, and when one knows of a 
 heavy strain, one can take pains to keep within easy reach and 
 to render one's self accessible. 
 
 A pastor's friendly visits are as potent as any form of the 
 church's ministry in building and holding securely together the 
 fellowship ; and it is through the fellowship that a world is to be 
 rebuilt. 
 
 A pastor's other means of offering his friendship is by placing 
 himself at his people's disposal for consultation. In churches of 
 any size a minister ought to keep an hour or more each week 
 when people can come to him freely without fear of intruding. 
 We have to take the risk of cranks and bores, learning how to 
 manage them as painlessly as possible, in order to hold ourselves 
 at liberty for those who really need us. And as time passes the 
 number of people who come to a friendly pastor ever increases. 
 He needs to learn how to keep his mind hospitable, not to talk 
 
148 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 too much, and to be an inviting listener. Let him hear them sym- 
 pathetically, and he helps many persons by simply allowing them 
 to talk themselves out. He will by no means always give people 
 the sympathy they crave : many wish their weaknesses condoned, 
 or their conceit inflated, or their consciences soothed to com- 
 fortable sleep; and his kindly silence will provide a mirror in 
 which they will see themselves and be chastened. Friendly silence 
 does marvels. Ninety-nine out of a hundred questions answer 
 themselves when once a perplexed mind states the question fully 
 to another. "Certain it is," says Bacon, "that whosoever hath his 
 mind fraught with many thoughts, his wits and understanding 
 do clarify and break up in the communicating and discoursing 
 with another ; he tosseth his thoughts more easily ; he marshalleth 
 them more orderly; he seeth how they look when they are turned 
 into words ; finally, he waxeth wiser than himself." Some angry 
 or aggrieved persons have their bosoms charged with perilous 
 stuff, and it is no small service to the church, and to the com- 
 munity, and to their relatives and friends, if vicariously a min- 
 ister receives the outburst, and can persuade them to let the 
 matter remain between him and them. Others wish to shift the 
 responsibility for moral decisions to other shoulders, and he will 
 be careful to keep the load where it ought to be strapped. Others 
 again sincerely want light in which to make up their own minds, 
 and he will furnish them unreservedly all he possesses. 
 
 Those who consult a minister often have an amazing confidence 
 in his wisdom others naturally do not take the trouble to come 
 to him and he must guard himself against seeming wise beyond 
 that which he really knows (a very subtle temptation). Some 
 congregations, and some members of almost every congregation, 
 are foolish enough to wish to consider their minister a peripatetic 
 omniscience; and unfortunately some ministers are sufficiently 
 idiotic to be willing to attempt the part. 
 
 Most persons, however, consult their pastor because they feel 
 that he will look at their problems disinterestedly, and because they 
 
THE MINISTRY OF FRIENDSHIP 149 
 
 trust him for a conscientiousness that will reinforce their high- 
 est intuitions. Let him give them the right to feel themselves 
 entirely safe with him, by his honesty, his fidelity in keeping 
 secrets, his charity which makes it needless for them to weigh 
 thoughts and measure words, and possible to pour all out just as 
 they come. As a rule he will be chary of offering detailed advice ; 
 his main purpose is not to supply counsel, but to educate con- 
 sciences. Let him make sure that he helps those who come to 
 him to a Christian point of view, so that they see their families, 
 or their friends, or their enemies, or their business relations, or 
 their church responsibilities, or their own inward thoughts and 
 moods and feelings, in the light of Jesus Christ; and let him re- 
 spect the sanctity of their consciences, and believe that God will 
 speak in them His guiding word. Above all let him see to it that 
 he does his utmost to fasten everyone who comes to him to God; 
 sometimes this will be most fittingly done by a prayer, oftener 
 by a sentence or two and a friendly handshake symbol of the 
 clasp of the hand of the All-Wise. 
 
 Can we overestimate the social significance of the presence in 
 a community of a man to whom people may go freely to be helped 
 to adjust themselves usefully to their fellows in God? 
 
 The Church has no higher service than this ministry of friend- 
 ship. It seems the distinctively Christian method of rebuilding 
 human society into the Kingdom of heaven. The Saviour of the 
 world became the Friend of a few hundred sinners. He chose a 
 dozen of them "that they might be with Him ;" their relationship 
 to Him He summed up in the words: "I have called you friends," 
 and His relationship to them: "Greater love hath no man than 
 this that a man lay down his life for his friends." On their friend- 
 ship with Him and with one another He staked everything when 
 He trusted them with His mission to renew the earth. The cen- 
 tral rite of the Church is a festival of friendship, where the break- 
 ing of bread and the sharing of the sacrificial cup symbolize the 
 union of the believing company with their really present Lord, 
 
150 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 with one another and with all His friends in earth and heaven. 
 His chief apostle concludes his letters with greetings to men and 
 women by name, that disclose how much of his broad and lasting 
 work was accomplished by his personal relations with individuals. 
 A church's fidelity to its Lord cannot be more accurately tested 
 than by its friendliness. We have been speaking as though this 
 ministry were peculiarly that of the pastor, but he is the leader 
 of a coalition of friends. John Henry Newman gave a sermon, 
 preached in his Anglican days, the suggestive title : The Church a 
 Home for the Lonely, and every church ought to deserve the 
 name. Does it draw lines of caste and class? Or, if it does not 
 intentionally draw them, does it permit them to remain as bar- 
 riers to children of God? Does it organize its friendliness, so 
 that no one to whom it ought to be shown is overlooked? Is it 
 including a world-wide circle within the scope of its friendship, 
 and serving them in the missionary enterprise that most signal 
 and promising friendly undertaking to bind the peoples in fel- 
 lowship? Has it a name for corporate friendliness in the com- 
 munity? Does it espouse causes that need backing, and give a 
 sympathetic hearing to those who think themselves ill-used? Do 
 the wronged go to it for help in their battle for justice? Is it 
 quick to furnish any service the community lacks, however 
 remotely related it may seem with a church's conventional 
 activities ? 
 
 We were speaking in the last lecture of the place in the church's 
 organization of more than one employed minister. It is this min- 
 istry of friendship with its many personal contacts which de- 
 mands the multiplication of ministers. Volunteers can do much 
 of it. Office-bearers should be recalled to the standards set before 
 them in an earlier day and be assigned a number of persons to 
 befriend. The women of a congregation can be used to extend its 
 welcome to newcomers in the community and to do other calling. 
 Every Sunday School teacher should be a friend not only of his 
 or her pupils, but also of their families ; such cooperation alone 
 
THE MINISTRY OF FRIENDSHIP 151 
 
 renders teaching effective. But in our urban communities, and 
 in some of our rural districts, particularly where industrialism 
 heaps together a large and not very intelligent and self-sufficient 
 population, a church finds the services of deaconesses and the 
 work of men trained as are the secretaries of our Christian Asso- 
 ciations an invaluable supplement to the work of its pastor. In- 
 deed, apart from the social groups they organize and lead, and 
 the personal ministries they constantly render to those who come 
 with an endless assortment of wants, a pastor in such communi- 
 ties is well-nigh helpless. We can plead for a reorganization of 
 the Church, both because its unification will do away with sec- 
 tarian rivalries and make it a genuine fellowship, and because 
 the combination of small organizations will enable the enlarged 
 fellowship to support more workers and to give an augmented 
 ministry of friendship to its neighborhood. 
 
 If the pastor is to lead such a friendly fellowship, he must be 
 friend-in-chief. The name holds up a guiding ideal. It warns 
 him against the tendency to domineer over his church. Prophets 
 are not always easy to get on with; they are usually individual- 
 ists at the expense of the development of the organization. Let 
 him be a friendly prophet. George Eliot, speaking of Savonarola, 
 says : "Perhaps no man has ever had a mighty influence over his 
 fellows without having the innate need to dominate, and this need 
 usually becomes the more imperious in proportion as the compli- 
 cations of life make self inseparable from a purpose which is 
 not selfish." Unconsciously a minister with a forceful person- 
 ality may so grasp and hold a church under his leadership that 
 his people's initiative and individualities have no room for free 
 expression in its work. It is not an incorporation of many per- 
 sons, whose judgments, sympathies and energies are joined in 
 an unconstrained fellowship, but a single person supported by 
 acquiescent and unoriginal satellites. It is not a league of friends, 
 each of whom accepts his responsibility and is stimulated to 
 creative thought and effort, but a despotism in which each con- 
 
152 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 sents to suppress himself and back up a leader who plans the 
 enterprise for him. 
 
 And the name suggests that he must be eyes to his church, and 
 (if one may use the term) -feelers, to detect opportunities for 
 service and find a way in. It is proverbially easy for a minister 
 to become confined to fixed circles in the community. They are 
 naturally the circles which are closest to his own congregation, 
 and for that very reason often least in want of the church's min- 
 istry. A minister finds himself asked again and again to meet- 
 ings or social gatherings where he can predict beforehand the 
 faces he will see admirable people, but not those who most need 
 him. In every town there are a number of circles the labor 
 group, the advanced social radicals, the intellectuals, the artistic 
 or musical coterie without much connexion with the church. 
 Let him cultivate every opening given him into them. They will 
 help him to view the church from the outside, to discover the im- 
 pression it is giving those who see its work at long range, and he 
 will come back from them with new visions of what its work should 
 be. He will establish contacts with them that will enable him 
 and his company of friends to serve them. Had not Mr. Great- 
 heart looked out of the window, he had never caught sight of Mr. 
 Fearing. 
 
 And if he be friend-in-chief he must lead by the completeness 
 of his devotion. No man can be a pastor and have another career 
 besides. Ministers who try to combine the pastorate with other 
 work soon discover the impossibility of the mixture. This is not 
 to say that a versatile man may not have a many-sided ministry 
 and use various approaches to men ; but if he be a pastor, he must 
 in everything which he attempts have the single aim of placing 
 his life next to the lives of men that through him Christ may lay 
 hold of them. In leading the church's ministry of friendship he 
 must agree with himself: "this one thing I do." 
 
 Finally, the title may serve to remind him of the unique friendly 
 service he is to accord the company of friends he leads. He is to 
 
THE MINISTRY OF FRIENDSHIP 153 
 
 be the interpreter to them of their experiences ; the guide to high 
 place of vision, whence they look up and out ; 
 
 The very opener and intelligencer 
 
 Between the grace, the sanctities of heaven 
 
 And their dull workings. 
 
 You recall the shepherds with the significant names, Knowledge, 
 Experience, Watchful and Sincere (the four requisites of Bun- 
 yan's ideal pastor), whom Christian and Hopeful met on the De- 
 lectable Mountains, who "looked very lovingly upon them," and 
 "had them to the top of a high hill, called Clear, and gave them 
 their glass to look" at the Celestial City. The pilgrims "could 
 not look steadily through the glass ; yet they thought they saw 
 something like the gate and also some of the glory of the place." 
 
LECTURE VIII 
 MINISTERS FOR THE DAY 
 
 IN the Memoirs of Nehemiah there is a striking description of his 
 first inspection of the ruined Jerusalem, when he had returned 
 to take up the task of its rebuilding: "I rose in the night, I and 
 some few men with me. And I went out by night by the valley 
 gate, even toward the jackal's well, and to the dung gate, and 
 viewed the walls of Jerusalem, which were broken down, and 
 the gates thereof were consumed with fire. Then went I up in the 
 night by the brook, and viewed the wall: and I turned back, and 
 entered by the valley gate, and so returned. Then said I unto 
 them, Ye see that evil case that we are in, how Jerusalem lieth 
 waste, and the gates thereof are burned with fire." We began 
 this course of lectures with a similar survey of our world in pieces, 
 and the darkness of night is still about us as we scan the ruins. 
 As to Nehemiah the destroyed city seemed clearly a judgment 
 of God, so to the eyes of faith this catastrophe can have no 
 other interpretation. We quoted an arresting prophecy of 
 Frederick Robertson's. His biographer, the late Stopford 
 Brooke, with kindred insight, entered in his diary on January 1, 
 1898 : "Men look forward to a universal war, and now that self- 
 interest, that is the Devil himself, is believed to be the paramount 
 and practical law of life, there is nothing else to look for. Per- 
 haps we may need the horrors of universal war to teach poor 
 blundering mankind that self-interest is not the master idea of 
 nations, but their degradation and destruction." St. Paul speaks 
 of delivering an offender "unto Satan for the destruction of the 
 
MINISTERS FOR THE DAY 155 
 
 flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus." 
 It would seem that with ancient Judah and our modern world 
 God had taken a similar course. The Satanic forces of irra- 
 tional war have destroyed the fleshly resources of our civiliza- 
 tion men, wealth, famed cities, whole countrysides as com- 
 pletely as Babylonian invaders broke down Jerusalem. There 
 was a purification and a strengthening of Judah's spirit in her 
 ordeal; and we look for a like cleansing and fortifying of the 
 spirit of humanity. We already see signs of it. Never before 
 have greater things been offered to safeguard liberty and democ- 
 racy : human lives in millions and wealth in billions have been 
 poured out. Never before was it so evident that the arm of flesh 
 is no defence, and that safety lies in the unity of the Spirit among 
 the nations to maintain the bond of peace. Never before have in- 
 ternational relations been so searchingly scrutinized, and the 
 disease spots in imperialistic commerce, tariff discriminations 
 and threatening armaments exposed. Never before has it been 
 so generally recognized that a new heart and a right spirit must 
 govern nations, or all devices to preserve international order are 
 futile. And the probe has been put into other relations, notably 
 those of industry, with far-reaching disclosures. Undoubtedly 
 the social control which the war has forced upon us in manu- 
 factures, in commerce, in transport, in the distribution of food 
 and fuel, will not cease with the coming of peace. This marks 
 a distinct advance, which the war has hastened. 
 
 Never came reformation in a flood 
 With such a heady currance. 
 
 But men of social insight are aware that public control, how- 
 ever valuable, will not better matters much unless new motives 
 come into play, and men become socially minded. Never was the 
 supreme need of the social spirit so patent. It is the day of the 
 Church of Christ as the Fellowship of His Spirit, with the task 
 of spiritualizing every sphere of human society. 
 
156 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 Yea, even she as at first, 
 
 Yea, she alone and none other, 
 
 Shall cast down, shall build up, shall bring home; 
 Slake earth's hunger and thirst, 
 
 Lighten and lead as a mother. 
 
 But the Fellowship of the Spirit must be free, for without lib- 
 erty the Spirit of the Lord cannot be vigorous. Hard battles 
 have been waged for intellectual freedom against those who sought 
 to cramp the Church's thought in formularies of the past; and 
 the liberty of scholarship is widely conceded. But there are as 
 grave dangers from the tyranny of nationalism, which would en- 
 slave the Church to the State (a peril as threatening in a democ- 
 racy with its often intolerant majority as under other forms of 
 government), and dangers from the domination of capitalism, 
 which renders religious organizations subservient to their chief 
 financial supporters. The Church must achieve her own inde- 
 pendence by teaching citizens clearly their duties to country and 
 their obligations to the supernational Fellowship of Jesus, and 
 by training her members, rich and poor, to be more open- 
 minded, more fraternal, more considerate of one another, and 
 more completely obedient to the self-emptying mind of Christ. 
 There were powers in the land of Nehemiah's day Sanballat the 
 Horonite, and Tobiah the servant, the Ammonite, and Geshem the 
 Arabian, who had to be got out of the way by the assertion of 
 superior authority, or Jerusalem would never have been rebuilt. 
 
 This liberty is not something which needs to be claimed for 
 the minister alone, but for the Church. Nothing is more neces- 
 sary than that the Church should come to self-consciousness as a 
 fellowship with ties uniting brethren in Christ which are stronger 
 than those of kinship, of country and of economic class. It has 
 sometimes been objected against the author of the Fourth Gospel 
 that he stresses ecclesiastical rather than human relations, and 
 makes Christ emphasize love of fellow-Christians rather than love 
 of fellow-men. Apart from the critical question of his accuracy 
 
 
MINISTERS FOR THE DAY 157 
 
 in interpreting the Master (and much might be said on the re- 
 lations to one another which Jesus sought to establish in His 
 group of disciples), all social obligations lie about us in concen- 
 tric circles ; we learn fellowship in the smaller zone first, and then 
 use it in the more inclusive zones beyond. The Church conscious 
 of herself as the Fellowship of the Spirit of Christ must assert 
 and use her own independence, if she is to be in advance of the 
 world, and lead into the fellowship of the great community. 
 
 The Lyman Beecher Lectureship is on "the special work of 
 the Christian ministry," and the present lecturer has spoken of 
 the ministry of the Church more than of that of the Church's min- 
 isters. The minister is nothing apart from the Church. Too 
 often he has been looked upon as a specially trained individual in 
 the community, a professional man, like the physician or the law- 
 yer or the school-teacher. True he has personal relations with 
 the community in which he lives, and it is a good thing for any 
 place to number among its' residents a physician of souls, an 
 adviser in morals, a teacher of the things of the spirit ; but his 
 relations with the community are not primary. He is the leader 
 of a distinct group within it, and related to a larger group 
 throughout the world. He is a minister of the Church of Jesus 
 Christ; his significance is not mainly personal, however enriching 
 may be his endowments; it is representative. He is the trained, 
 commissioned, installed pastor of a Christian Church. It is the 
 Church through which he has derived his life with God, the 
 Church to which he has dedicated himself for the world, the 
 Church which accredits him as her leader, which supports and 
 sustains him in his ministry, and it is the Church which it is his 
 duty to build up and make effective in its God-given task of 
 establishing the righteous community. It is not his ministry that 
 is of first importance, but the Church's ministry in which he leads. 
 You and I may count in remaking the world as citizens, kinsmen, 
 friends ; but our distinctive contribution is not as individuals, but 
 through the Church, whose ministers we are. 
 
158 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 A social vision sometimes leads a minister to lose sight of his 
 church, and devote himself to various personal efforts for the bet- 
 terment of society. To the extent that he acts apart from his 
 congregation he ceases to be a representative and a leader of his 
 group, and becomes merely an individual, however effective and 
 forceful. His social vision is not sufficiently social, or he would 
 see that it is with and through his church that his work for the 
 community must be done. It is always more difficult to induce 
 a group to think and act together, than to think and act for one's 
 self; but the minister has made his choice when he gives himself 
 to the leadership of the church. That and no other is his all- 
 absorbing life work. Henceforth he can do nothing publicly in a 
 private capacity. It may be questioned whether it is wise for 
 a pastor to take a conspicuous part in politics or in social move- 
 ments. He cannot well become a prominent party man, or 
 identify himself with the propaganda of some economic pro- 
 gramme. He is the leader of a fellowship which includes men 
 and women of various political views and social theories. He has 
 his personal rights, and there may be occasions when he feels 
 called on to take a public stand as a citizen. But he has rights 
 as an individual not to use them, but to subordinate them to his 
 calling of uniting, organizing and inspiring a company of friends 
 of Christ, whom he leads in their collective effort for the rebuild- 
 ing of society into a commonwealth of God. His aim is not to 
 get certain things done in the community, admirable as they may 
 be, but to develop men and women who will of themselves seek to 
 set up a Christian social order, which includes these things and 
 vastly more. He must distinguish between immediate results, 
 which may be accomplished by direct effort today or tomorrow, 
 and results which require time, and which he may not live to 
 see. He will sometimes have to sacrifice instant gains for the 
 sake of larger returns in the future. Jesus saw Satan fallen as 
 lightning, not when He had Himself cast out a legion of demons, 
 but when He inspired a few disciples with the faith and purpose 
 
MINISTERS FOR THE DAY 159 
 
 to assail the kingdom of darkness and they reported their first 
 successful assaults. 
 
 Satan is not to be cast out and a world rebuilt save as the 
 whole Fellowship is committed to the task. The minister's work 
 is always with the Church. On the stirring pages of Nehemiah 
 the entire community is seen repairing Jerusalem, each "for his 
 district" and "every one over against his own house," the devout 
 governor inspiring the people with "a mind to work." In the 
 summer of 1560, after the French forces had sailed away from 
 Scotland, John Knox, now free to return to his charge in Edin- 
 burgh, preached to crowded congregations in St. Giles from the 
 prophecy of Haggai on the rebuilding of the temple. "The doc- 
 trin," he tells us, speaking of himself in the third person, "was 
 proper for the tyme; in application quhairof he was so speciall 
 and so vehement that sum (having greater respect to the warld 
 than to Goddis glory), feling thair selffis prickit, said in mockage, 
 'We mon now forget our selffis, and beir the barrow to buyld the 
 housses of God.' ' We must inspire or shame the entire Church 
 to a like self-forgetfulness and self-absorption in the great cause, 
 if the fragments of a world in pieces are to be gathered up, and 
 an earth rebuilt which, in every part of its life, can be a habita- 
 tion of God in the Spirit. 
 
 Great times often enlarge people at least those who are 
 capable of enlargement. There have been Lilliputians in the 
 most spacious days, for some souls are born small and stay so ; 
 but a big task marvellously magnifies its devotees. You and I 
 may congratulate ourselves that we are to lead the Church in a 
 day when it cannot have less than a world outlook nor a smaller 
 purpose than the regeneration of the entire social order. That 
 prospect should greaten both us and our people. Boswell, with 
 his observing eyes, has left us an impression of the young William 
 Wilberforce, the future emancipator, in an early political speech 
 which he heard him deliver in Castle Yard at York against the 
 Coalition Ministry with its support of what he termed the Un- 
 
160 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 holy Alliance. "I saw," says Boswell, "what seemed a mere shrimp 
 mount upon the table; but, as I listened, he grew and grew until 
 the shrimp became a whale." The Church of the past has often 
 disgusted big-minded men by its pettiness. Its ministers have 
 seemed to be busied in trifles and their task has not appealed to 
 young men with largest capacities of brain and heart. But the 
 Church of today faces frankly the mightiest of undertakings 
 the supply of explicit Christian ideals for all social groups, and 
 for every man in his various relations, and the supply of Divine 
 power to attain them. Its ministers must say with Nehemiah: 
 "Come, and let us build up the wall of Jerusalem, that we be no 
 more a reproach ;" like him, we must be able from conviction born 
 of experience to tell them of the hand of our God which is good 
 upon us ; and draw from them the response, "Let us rise up and 
 build." 
 
 What, then, are some of the outstanding characteristics to be 
 sought in those who would lead the Church's ministry in this day 
 of social rebuilding? 
 
 First, vision. We must be dreamers of dreams. 
 
 They, in the ages lying 
 
 In the buried past of the earth, 
 Built Nineveh with their sighing, 
 
 And Babel itself in their mirth; 
 And o'erthrew them with prophesying 
 
 To the old of a new world's worth : 
 For each age is a dream that is dying, 
 
 Or one that is coming to birth. 
 
 That which is dying seems to us a hideous nightmare. We must 
 often feel ourselves in such a mad world that we wonder whether 
 we are not moving in a frightful trance, and long for the morn- 
 ing to waken us out of our horrors and terrors with the assur- 
 ance that they exist only in our disordered brains. But they are 
 the grim realities. Men have dreamt wickedly, dreamt in greed 
 
MINISTERS FOR THE DAY 161 
 
 and pride and lust of power, and their dreams have come to pass, 
 not as they anticipated, but as such dreams are realized in the 
 exposing judgment of God. We wonder, now, that only an occa- 
 tional seer, like Robertson, or Brooke, prophesied the impending 
 catastrophe. And it is easier to dream an age's death than an 
 age's birth. In a note to the chorus of his Hellas, Shelley wrote : 
 "Prophecies of wars, and rumours of war, etc., may safely be 
 made by poet or prophet in any age, but to anticipate however 
 darkly a period of regeneration and happiness is a more hazard- 
 ous exercise of the faculty which bards possess or feign." But 
 that is our duty. We have spoken of our time as a day of wist- 
 fulness. Its gloom has forced men to brighten the skyline with 
 hopes. We must fill out the less than Christian expectations 
 cherished by those who have left God in Christ out of their reck- 
 oning. Believing in the possibility and in the necessity of a world 
 based on and pervaded by love, we must body it forth in pictures, 
 as John on Patmos beheld and portrayed the holy city coming 
 down from God out of heaven. There can be no preaching and 
 no worship without imagination. The invisible must be made 
 vivid and compelling to the eyes of men's hearts. Charles II once 
 asked the scholarly John Owen how a courtly man such as he 
 could sit and listen to an illiterate tinker like John Bunyan. 
 "May it please your Majesty," came the reply, "could I possess 
 that tinker's abilities for preaching, I would most gladly relin- 
 quish all my learning." Our task is to fill men's minds with a 
 new Pilgrim's Progress out of a condemned social order into 
 one after the heart of Christ, and to paint the new celestial city 
 as concretely and with far minuter ethical detail than Bunyan 
 sketched that of which his pilgrims had sight from the Delectable 
 Mountains. 
 
 We have to see and describe life fulfilled in God in the terms of 
 our day. We have to fancy what a household's ways, a factory's 
 work, a farm's life, a school's studies, a community's pleasures, 
 a nation's influence, a church's ministry, would be like, were they 
 
162 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 controlled by such love as was divinely commended to us on Cal- 
 vary. We have to make our listeners see themselves as kinsmen, 
 friends, toilers, citizens, patriots, churchmen in Christ Jesus. 
 We have to stir them to hail from afar a "brave new world that 
 has such people in't." We must be constantly building castles in 
 the air. Suppose they are "in the air ;" that is where they should 
 be, aloft and conspicuous ; gradually the foundations of many 
 generations can be raised up to give them solid and substantial 
 substructure. It is our mission to fill the horizon of men's minds 
 with gleaming walls and turrets. Nothing is comparable in 
 haunting power to the ideal made concrete in vision. Men must 
 see what may be, before they will resolve that it is so good that 
 they will venture their all to make it come true. In every section 
 of life upon which we look a heart's sorrow, a nation's ambition, 
 a union's struggle, a child's hopefulness we must see what is not 
 there, but what may be there when the waiting God is allowed to 
 come in and reign. This is a time for believing, dreaming, dream- 
 ing in the presence of God in Christ. While we muse, the fire 
 kindles, and we speak and make men fellow-conscripts of the vision 
 splendid. 
 
 Second, moral intuition. Builders of a new world must feel at 
 their fingers' tips when things are right when nations, when 
 industrial relations, when men in every touch of life on life, are 
 adjusted according to the will of God. 
 
 Intuition is not a substitute for information. Social solutions, 
 like scientific discoveries, occur only to prepared minds. Many 
 dreamers of things that might be fail through ignorance of things 
 that have already proven undesirable. New faiths turn out old 
 heresies; new projects for social betterment old mirages; new the- 
 ories of conduct old vices. This is no time for would-be ministers 
 to "flutter off, all unfledged, into theology." Never had men in 
 the pulpit more urgent need of a thorough and ever-continuing 
 education in history, in philosophy, in economics, and of as thor- 
 ough a knowledge of living men and women. Our task is to teach 
 
MINISTERS FOR THE DAY 163 
 
 people how to live together in God in families, industries, nations, 
 and in the earth-wide brotherhood of mankind. This is no task 
 for a tyro. You will recall from college days the passage in 
 Xenophon's Memorabilia, in which Socrates satirizes Euthy- 
 dernos, the bumptious youth who, without instruction or expe- 
 rience, offers himself as a leader in public affairs. He pictures 
 him coming forward as a physician with as meagre an equip- 
 ment. "I, O men of Athens," he fancies him saying, "have never 
 learned the medical art from anyone, nor have been desirous that 
 any physician should be my instructor; for I have constantly 
 been on my guard not only against learning anything of the art 
 from anyone, but even against appearing to have learned the 
 medical art ; nevertheless, confer on me this medical appointment ; 
 for I will endeavor to learn by making experiments on you." 
 There is point in that for leaders in so infinitely complex an en- 
 terprise as the refashioning of the social order. Not that it is 
 our duty to discuss the details of economic and political theories, 
 or to work out policies for nations or plans for business enter- 
 prises. The better informed we are, the likelier we shall be to 
 restrict ourselves rigidly to our task as ministers of the Gospel 
 of Christ. But we need thoroughly informed minds to fulfil our 
 duty of holding up the Christian ideal for the various social 
 situations of our age. 
 
 Information, however, is of little worth to us without moral 
 intuition that tact of conscience which discerns Christian and 
 antichristian elements in any event or circumstance. On Septem- 
 ber 13, 1870, Richard W. Church, shortly to become Dean of 
 St. Paul's, wrote to his friend, Dr. Asa Gray, the Harvard bota- 
 nist: "What have been your thoughts during this wonderful two 
 months? How is one to judge? What is one to wish? It is 
 easy to condemn French insolence, to rejoice over so signal a 
 vengeance, to admire German thoroughness and devotion, to be 
 enthusiastic over military skill and success such as the world 
 seems never to have seen the like of; but it is as easy to see that 
 
164 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 ever since Count Bismarck guided Germany, Germany, if trium- 
 phant and mighty, has caught the audacity and unscrupulousness 
 of the Prussia of Frederick the Great ; that she has taken to 
 picking quarrels, that her policy has been provocative and dis- 
 quieting, that this very war with France, of which undoubtedly 
 French folly and wickedness gave the signal, is the very thing to 
 serve the Prussian statesmen's end the welding together, by a 
 bloody and successful struggle, North and South Germany. With 
 all my wishes for a grand and united Vaterland, the means which, 
 it seems to me, have been deliberately chosen to bring it about are 
 simply hateful ; as hateful as Napoleon's coup d'etat and demoral- 
 ising despotism which have succeeded for nearly twenty years in 
 making France the first nation of Europe. I believe that the 
 law of retributive justice is for Germany as well as for France, 
 and that from one, as from the other, it will wait to claim its 
 due." There speaks an acute spiritual perception, akin to that 
 of an Amos in his judgment of the nations of his world, and to 
 that of a greater Prophet who saw when the things which belong 
 unto peace were hidden from a people's eyes. 
 
 Leaders of the Church must be able to sense the ethical situa- 
 tion in the lives of men and women and of communities. Without 
 this discernment there can be no constructive preaching or plan- 
 ning of the Church's work. More profoundly than King Lear 
 dreamed, they must take upon themselves the mystery of things 
 as God's spies, feeling out the hidden hindrances to His will, 
 and entering in believing vision the promised land of His pur- 
 pose to report its goodly conditions to lure His people on. 
 
 It is moral intuition in men which appreciates Christ. I once 
 asked a group of Chinese pastors and teachers in an interior 
 town what it was in Christ that most impressed them. None of 
 them mentioned the account of any miracle; Chinese mythology 
 could outdo the marvels recorded on gospel pages. Various re- 
 plies were given when one elderly man said: "His washing His 
 disciples' feet," and a sudden general consensus showed that this 
 
MINISTERS FOR THE DAY 165 
 
 incident was peculiarly appealing to them. That a revered 
 Teacher should overstep the lines of class and position and take 
 a slave's place was an impressive moral miracle. We ministers 
 have to embody in ourselves the mind that was in Christ, if we are 
 to be received as His representatives ; and that demands a keen 
 sensitiveness of conscience in the ordering of our own lives. We 
 have to guide the Church to incarnate it in her fellowship, if she 
 is to commend reverence as the Body of Christ. All our teaching 
 must impress men with a spiritual penetration, or they will not 
 follow us into the secret place, where, behind what we say, they 
 find for themselves the mind of God for them and their world. 
 
 Third, sympathy. A few years ago the engineers who were 
 charged with the construction of the new Grand Central Terminal 
 in New York City faced the difficult problem of building new 
 tracks on new levels, while they kept the existing traffic in full 
 operation and had the trains arriving and leaving on schedule. In 
 part it was a problem of sympathy sympathy with the needs 
 of the future, so that adequate facilities for years to come might 
 be supplied; sympathy with the existing plan, so that, although 
 palpably obsolete, they would keep it going with as little inter- 
 ruption as possible. It would have been much easier, of course, 
 could traffic have been suspended while the new station was being 
 prepared. There were many parts of the work which had to be 
 carried on under unusual risks to the workmen and with extraor- 
 dinary difficulties. All social rebuilding has to be undertaken 
 under similar conditions. Things as they are must be kept going 
 at their best, while we prepare things as they ought to be. A 
 Christian minister must help men to do their business, earn their 
 profits or wages, buy and sell, in an economic order which is un- 
 fraternal and often glaringly unjust, while he opens their minds 
 to social sins and enlists them to alter industrial adjustments to 
 conform to the mind of Christ. He must enable the members of 
 his congregation to reach God by the existing tracks of their, 
 perhaps antiquated, theological opinions, while he attempts to 
 
166 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 furnish them with better terminal facilities which will bring more 
 of them head, heart, conscience into the life with God. He must 
 keep his people faithful to their patriotic duty under conditions 
 that are manifestly subchristian, and terribly sub, while he tries 
 with them to reshape international relations, in which loyalty 
 to country will place no man in an unchristian attitude towards 
 any brother on the face of God's earth. 
 
 This requires an inclusive sympathy. Many reformers and 
 idealists fail in their appreciation of that which imperfect pres- 
 ent contrivances are accomplishing. They want to smash what 
 is, and get it out of the way; they would tear up existing tracks 
 and fling the rails on the scrap-heap. On the other hand, many 
 staunch and steadfast workers, operating the traffic on the pres- 
 ent lines with considerable success, become furiously enraged at 
 those who propose such a thing as a new terminal. True, pres- 
 ent lines do not bring all the people to their destination in a 
 brotherly city of God; but they understand this social system, 
 have worked it, and point with pride to the numbers of passengers 
 it is annually carrying to upright, useful and comfortable life. 
 We must do justice to existing ideals in business, in charity, in 
 patriotism, in the Church of God. We must never enlist an ideal 
 against us, but overtop it with an ideal still higher, into which 
 it will merge in men's view as a foothill becomes part of a moun- 
 tain. 
 
 It is difficult to keep one's mind and heart moving in two worlds 
 at once hard to preach and practice patriotism along present 
 nationalist lines, and at the same time be entering into and think- 
 ing in the commonwealth of nations that shall be; hard to order 
 one's own affairs and assist one's people to be industrious and 
 faithful under the present economic system, and keep one's con- 
 science planning and preparing, and one's teaching holding up, 
 a more fraternal order to take its place; hard to be a loyal min- 
 ister in a communion of the present disunited Church of Christ, 
 and to show one's people how to be enthusiastic and devoted 
 
MINISTERS FOR THE DAY 167 
 
 churchmen in it, while one lives in feeling in the inclusive Church 
 of one's hope and trains a congregation to disesteem everything 
 in the existing organization and life of the Church which is less 
 catholic than they must seek to render the Church of tomorrow. 
 Lowell saw that problem a generation ago, when he wrote: 
 
 He who would win the name of truly great 
 Must understand his own age and the next, 
 And make the present ready to fulfil 
 Its prophecy, and with the future merge 
 Gently and peacefully, as wave with wave. 
 
 Fourth, daring. Sympathy with the good in what is may hold 
 us cautiously to it, when we ought to be moving out and up into 
 what should be. When one recalls that leaders of the Christian 
 Church in its earliest period were spoken of with bated breath as 
 "these that have turned the world upside down," one feels like 
 saying of their living successors, as Cowper makes Alexander 
 Selkirk say of the beasts on his island : "Their tameness is shock- 
 ing to me." All great institutions must be conservative : they are 
 custodians of values they dare not put in jeopardy. One would 
 not have the Church less careful in safeguarding its doctrine, in 
 preserving approved customs in worship, in exercising prudence 
 before it commits itself to innovations in social theory. But to 
 employ love like Christ's, and such love only, as a guiding prin- 
 ciple in practical affairs, cannot be other than revolutionary. A 
 Christian Church must be a company of venturesome spirits. 
 But, as someone has well said, many people when they put off 
 the old man put on the old woman. Most churches are excessively 
 timid. We have need to preach again and again sermons like 
 the two Samuel Rutherford preached at a critical juncture in the 
 history of the Scottish Kirk, on the text : "Fear not, thou worm 
 Jacob." Faint-heartedness is a perennial ecclesiastical vice; 
 rarely does the Church give a community intrepid leadership in 
 the way of righteousness. Of how few congregations can it be 
 
168 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 said, as Deborah sang of the two tribes; "Zebulun was a people 
 that jeoparded their lives unto the death, and Naphthali upon the 
 high places of the field." Office-bearers are generally chosen from 
 those who have passed the adventurous period of life. It is noto- 
 rious that in Church synods the laymen are more conservative 
 than the ministers. As a rule laymen active in affairs cannot or 
 will not find leisure for such meetings, and they are filled with 
 elderly delegates, who have retired or partially retired from 
 their business. The judgment of such men is likely, as Morley 
 says of one of his colleagues in Gladstone's last cabinet, to be 
 "good for all the occasions where prudence is safe, but less good 
 for the occasions where true prudence happens to demand a dose 
 of bold initiative." And office-bearers are chosen almost exclu- 
 sively from the conservative class in society; they are business 
 or professional men, rarely workingmen. In the national assem- 
 blies of our Protestant communions there are not a half dozen 
 representatives from the ranks of unionized labor. The women 
 who are usually prominent in the Church's work were aptly de- 
 scribed once by a colored janitor in the church I serve, who, 
 when he told me that a woman, whose name he had not caught, 
 wished to see me, and was asked what she looked like, replied: 
 "A kind o' settled lookin' lady, sir." A minister's training an- 
 chors him in the past ; he takes his people back to the Bible, back 
 to Christ. And this, in part, is well; but ours is a day to fling 
 the anchor as far ahead as we can cast it into what should be, 
 and haul the vessel up to it. Not "Back to Christ," for we 
 cannot reproduce the social conditions of First Century Galilee, 
 but "Forward with Christ" into the better country of God's 
 wished-for tomorrow. 
 
 Happily those who would like to keep things as they are have 
 today a difficult case to defend. Things as they are! our minds 
 go out to northern France and Belgium and Armenia and 
 Poland, to the hundreds of thousands of the maimed and the 
 millions of graves where lie the promising lives of a generation, 
 
MINISTERS FOR THE DAY 169 
 
 to the debt-piling governments of our own and other lands. 
 When the British captured Jerusalem, newspaper reporters called 
 on ministers to obtain comments on the taking of "the holy city." 
 Happy as we must have been over this success of the Allied 
 Cause, who could help thinking that the British had had for cen- 
 turies London and Liverpool and Glasgow and Manchester, and 
 we, Americans, for scores of years, New York and Chicago and 
 Pittsburgh and San Francisco, and we had little to show in the 
 way of "holy cities"? This is manifestly a time for change. 
 
 These lectures have advocated thoroughgoing alterations in 
 the Church's ministry and organization. Changes involve experi- 
 ments, and experiments are always risks. We must be prepared 
 to hazard risks for ourselves, and prepare our congregations to 
 hazard them. Surely every church can afford at least one ven- 
 ture a year; in the face of present scant success it cannot afford 
 less. Here are untouched elements in our neighborhoods often 
 far more numerous than those reached ; here are scores within our 
 fellowship ignorant of the principles of Jesus Christ, or at any 
 rate ignorant of their application to many aspects of life. Must 
 we not make experiments to fulfil our ministry? One of New 
 England's first ministers entered in his journal on the voyage 
 across the Atlantic : "Those that love their own chimney corner 
 and dare not fare beyond their owne towne's end, shall never 
 have the honor to see the wonderful works of God." 
 
 The pastor who would lead a congregation in social ascent to 
 the heavenly places in Christ Jesus needs the qualities of the 
 successful mountaineer: he must be fearless, swift, firm and cool- 
 headed. In every social situation he must be quick to see the 
 danger ; he must have a sharp eye for the way up ; he must know 
 how to keep his head, and stand surefootedly on a dizzy eminence 
 while he helps others to clamber on; he must be willing to take 
 risks in loyal confidence in a trusted Guide. He has to possess, 
 and to inspire his people with, a believing boldness. 
 
 And that brings us to the chief characteristic which must be 
 
170 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 his faith, faith in a God (as we have said) big enough to remake 
 a world, and good enough to make it a Christian world. The 
 last generation in its recovery of the historic Jesus Christian- 
 ized our thought of God. We bow before no deity less good than 
 Jesus of Nazareth. But in Christianizing His character, men 
 have often parted with His cosmic control. A very frank theo- 
 logical teacher once confessed in a moment of confidence: "I 
 haven't the least difficulty with the divinity of Jesus; He is the 
 God I adore. What I want to be assured of is that there is a 
 Divinity like Him in charge of the universe." In humanizing God 
 we have dwarfed Him. The God of many prayers and sermons 
 is a companionable Deity to whom men approach unawed. In 
 much religious intercourse 
 
 the air 
 
 Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself 
 Unto our gentle senses. The heaven's breath 
 Smells wooingly here. 
 
 This "heavenly Pal" (if one may be pardoned the expression) 
 is so good that He can be counted on to do all He can to help 
 us with a world that has gone to pieces ; but one is not convinced 
 that He is competent for so gigantic a task as its complete re- 
 building. 
 
 Donald Hankey describes a British soldier driven to prayer, 
 when left wounded out in No Man's Land between the lines under 
 the sky. "His greatest religious 'experience' had been a spas- 
 modic loyalty to the Christ-man, stimulating him at rare inter- 
 vals to sudden acts of quixotism." On his back, "he found him- 
 self wondering about the meaning of everything. The stars 
 seemed to make it all seem so small and petty. All this blood- 
 shed what was the good of it? It was all so ephemeral, so 
 trivial, so meaningless in the presence of eternity and infinity. 
 Eternity and infinity were so pitiless and uncomprehending. Yet 
 after all, he had the advantage of them. For all his pigmy in- 
 
MINISTERS FOR THE DAY 171 
 
 effectiveness he was of finer stuff than they. At least he could 
 feel suffer. There was that in him that was not in them, unless 
 it was in everything. 'God!' he whispered softly. 'God every- 
 where!' Then into his tired brain came a new phrase^ 'Under- 
 neath are the everlasting arms.' ' 
 
 Yes, no God within His world merely will do; He must also be 
 above and underneath it. "Ascribe ye greatness unto our God." 
 No "godlet" suffices; we need One who is immeasurably super- 
 human, before whose displays of wisdom we are left amazed: 
 "How unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past trac- 
 ing out;" we need One for whom nothing is too hard. And this 
 is the God we discover, if we approach Him through Jesus. We 
 have not entered into His experience unless in the presence of 
 our most overwhelming crises we can say: "Father, all things 
 are possible unto Thee." We do not know His resources, un- 
 less with that apostle who could not describe Him save as "the 
 God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ," we keep reminding 
 ourselves, "God is able." Able men for a supreme ministry are 
 produced by faith in an able God "able to do exceeding abun- 
 dantly, above all that we ask or think, according to the power 
 that worketh in us;" "able to make all grace abound unto us, 
 that we having always all sufficiency in everything, may abound 
 unto every good work." We must begin with and never leave 
 our companionable Father, found in Jesus His Son, our Brother; 
 but we must press out through every aspect of the Universe, of 
 human history, of life's many-sided experiences, to Him who is 
 behind and in all the Eternal Beauty of whom all things lovely 
 are reflections, the Eternal Truth apprehended in all knowledge, 
 the Eternal Right touching us in every compelling ideal, the 
 Ultimate Source of all existence, the Final End to which all 
 travel, the Sufficient Controller of all that lives and moves, the 
 Lasting Home in which we and our fathers and their children 
 and children's children dwell for ever. We must train our faith 
 to stretch its wings and use an inspired imagination. We 
 
172 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 must tread on shadowy ground, must sink 
 Deep and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds 
 To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil. . 
 
 We must stay ourselves on the Lord our God. 
 
 As in the days of Nehemiah, with whose visit to the ruins of 
 his city we began this study of what is asked of us who would 
 lead the Church's ministry in a day of social rebuilding, there 
 are many at the moment who are skeptical that we can put up 
 anything but patchwork destined to crumble again, as the 
 foundations of many generations before us. Like Nehemiah, we 
 are not basing our hopes on the skill of men, however able. A 
 man-made world is not our object. Our faith rises to Him who 
 knows the fabric of things, because He made them; who knows 
 what is in man, because His hands fashioned us ; and who waits 
 to fulfil a purpose halted and thwarted by man's unwillingness 
 to work with Him in the Spirit of His Son. "When Sanballat, 
 the Horonite," writes Nehemiah, "and Tobiah the servant, the 
 Ammonite, and Geshem the Arabian, heard it, they laughed us to 
 scorn, and despised us, and said, What is this thing that ye do? 
 Then answered I them, and said unto them, The God of heaven, 
 He will prosper us; therefore we, His servants, will arise and 
 build." 
 
CONVERTERS, Domine, usquequo? et de- 
 precabilis esto super servos tuos. Lae- 
 tati sumus pro diebus quibus nos humili- 
 asti, annis quibus vidimus mala. Et sit 
 splendor Domini Dei nostri super nos; et 
 opera manuum nostrarum dirige super 
 nosy et opus manuum nostrarum dirige. 
 PSALMUS LXXXIX, 14, 15, 17. 
 
LYMAN BEECHER LECTURESHIP ON PREACHING 
 YALE UNIVERSITY 
 
 1871-72 Beecher, H. W., Yale Lectures on Preaching, first 
 
 series. New York, 1872. 
 1872-73 Beecher, H. W., Yale Lectures on Preaching, second 
 
 series. New York, 1873. 
 1873-74 Beecher, H. W., Yale Lectures on Preaching, third 
 
 series. New York, 1874. 
 1874-75 Hall, John, God's Word through Preaching. New 
 
 York, 1875. 
 1875-76 Taylor, William M., The Ministry of the Word. New 
 
 York, 1876. 
 
 1876-77 Brooks, P., Lectures on Preaching. New York, 1877. 
 1877-78 Dale, R. W., Nine Lectures on Preaching. New York, 
 
 1878. 
 1878-79 Simpson, M., Lectures on Preaching. New York, 
 
 1879. 
 1879-80 Crosby, H., The Christian Preacher. New York, 
 
 1880. 
 
 1880-81 Duryea, J. T., and others (not published). 
 1881-82 Robinson, E. G., Lectures on Preaching. New York, 
 
 1883. 
 
 1882-83 (No lectures.) 
 1883-84 Burton, N. J., Yale Lectures on Preaching, and other 
 
 writings. New York, 1888.* 
 
 1884-85 Storrs, H. M., The American Preacher (not pub- 
 lished). 
 
LYMAN BEECHER LECTURESHIP 175 
 
 1885-86 Taylor, W. M., The Scottish Pulpit. New York, 
 1887. 
 
 1886-87 Gladden, W., Tools and the Man. Boston, 1893. 
 
 1887-88 Trumbull, H. C., The Sunday School. Philadelphia, 
 1888. 
 
 1888-89 Broadus, J. A., Preaching and the Ministerial Life 
 (not published). 
 
 1889-90 Behrends, A. J. F., The Philosophy of Preaching. 
 New York, 1890. 
 
 1890-91 Stalker, J., The Preacher and His Models. New 
 York, 1891. 
 
 1891-92 Fairbairn, A. M., The Place of Christ in Modern The- 
 ology. New York, 1893. 
 
 1892-93 Horton, R. F., Verbum Dei. New York, 1893.* 
 
 1893-94 (No lectures.) 
 
 1894-95 Greer, D. H., The Preacher and his Place. New York, 
 1895. 
 
 1895-96 Van Dyke, H., The Gospel for an Age of Doubt. New 
 York, 1896.* 
 
 1896-97 Watson, J., The Cure of Souls. New York, 1896. 
 
 1897-98 Tucker, W. J., The Making and the Unmaking of the 
 Preacher. Boston, 1898. 
 
 1898-99 Smith, G. A., Modern Criticism and the Old Testa- 
 ment. New York, 1901. 
 
 1899-00 Brown, J., Puritan Preaching in England. New York, 
 1900. 
 
 1900-01 (No lectures.) 
 
 1901-02 Gladden, W., Social Salvation. New York, 1902. 
 
 1902-03 Gordon, G. A., Ultimate Conceptions of Faith. New 
 York, 1903. 
 
 1903-04 Abbott, L., The Christian Ministry. Boston, 1905. 
 
 1904-05 Peabody, F. G., Jesus Christ and the Christian Char- 
 acter. New York, 1905.* 
 
176 IN A DAY OF SOCIAL REBUILDING 
 
 1905-06 Brown, C. R., The Social Message of the Modern Pul- 
 pit. New York, 1906. 
 1906-07 Forsyth, P. T., Positive Preaching and Modern Mind. 
 
 New York, 1908.* 
 
 1907-08 Faunce, W. H. P., The Educational Ideal in the Min- 
 istry. New York, 1908. 
 1908-09 Henson, H. H., The Liberty of Prophesying. New 
 
 Haven, 1910.* 
 1909-10 Jefferson, C. E., The Building of the Church. New 
 
 York, 1910. 
 1910-11 Gunsaulus, F. W., The Minister and the Spiritual 
 
 Life. New York, Chicago, 1911. 
 1911-12 Jowett, J. H., The Preacher; His Life and Work. 
 
 New York, 1912. 
 1912-13 Parkhurst, C. H., The Pulpit and the Pew. New 
 
 Haven, 1913.* 
 1913-14 Home, C. Silvester, The Romance of Preaching. New 
 
 York, Chicago, 1914. 
 1914-15 Pepper, George Wharton, A Voice from the Crowd. 
 
 New Haven, 1915.* 
 1915-16 Hyde, William DeWitt, The Gospel of Good Will as 
 
 Revealed in Contemporary Scriptures. New York, 
 
 1916. 
 1916-17 McDowell, William Fraser, Good Ministers of Jesus 
 
 Christ. New York and Cincinnati, 1917. 
 1917-18 Coffin, Henry Sloane, In a Day of Social Rebuilding. 
 
 New Haven, 1918.* 
 1918-19 Kelman, John, The War and Preaching. New Haven, 
 
 1919. 
 
 * Also published in London. 
 
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