The Church and Modern Life by Washington Gladden

W >> Washington Gladden >> The Church and Modern Life

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11

There are certain great living religions which make this claim of
universality. Judaism and Parseeism have both entertained this
expectation, but the fewness of their adherents at the present time
indicates that the expectation is but feebly held. The three living
faiths which aspire to universal dominion are Buddhism, Mohammedanism,
and Christianity.[10] Each of these hopes to possess the earth. Each of
these is strong enough to enforce its claim with some measure of
confidence.

Recent estimates give to Buddhism 148,000,000 of followers, to
Mohammedanism 177,000,000, and to Christianity 477,000,000.
Mohammedanism has been rapidly extending its sway in Africa during
recent years; Buddhism is not, probably, making great gains at the
present time.

If any form of religion is to become universal in the earth it would
appear that it must be one of these three. If any of us wishes to
exchange the religion of his fathers for another faith, his choice will
be apt to lie between Buddhism and Mohammedanism. What claims to our
credence and allegiance could either of them set up?

It would not, for most of us, be an easy thing to turn from the faith of
our fathers to any other form of faith. The ideas and usages to which
we have been accustomed all our lives are not readily exchanged for
those which are wholly unfamiliar. Rites and ceremonies and customs of
other religions, which may be intrinsically as reasonable and reverent
as our own, strike upon our minds unpleasantly because they are
unwonted. It would, therefore, be somewhat difficult for us to put
ourselves into a mental attitude before either of these great religions,
in which we should be able to do full justice to its claims upon our
credence.

Yet if we could gain the breadth of view to which the disciples of
Christ ought to attain, we should be compelled to admit that each of
these great religions has rendered some important service to mankind.

What those services have been can only be hinted at in this chapter. Of
Islamism, Bishop Boyd Carpenter testifies that it "has been, and still
is, a great power in the world. There is much in it that is calculated
to purify and elevate mankind at a certain stage of history. It has the
power of redeeming the slaves of a degraded polytheism from their low
groveling conception of God to conceptions which are higher; it has set
an example of sobriety to the world and has shielded its followers from
the drink plague which destroys the strength of nations. And, in so far
as it has done this, it has performed a work which entitles it to the
attention of man and no doubt has been a factor in God's education of
the world."[11]

Of Buddhism even more could be said. In the words of Mr. Brace:--

"Sometime in the sixth century before Christ there appeared in Northern
India one of those great personalities who in a measure draw their
inspiration directly from above.... When he says, 'As a mother at the
risk of her life watcheth over the life of her child, her only child, so
also let every one cultivate a boundless good-will towards all beings,
... above and below and across, unobstructed, without hatred, without
enmity, standing, walking, sitting, or lying, as long as he be awake let
him devote himself to this state of mind; this way of living, they say,
is the best in this world'--when these words come to our ears we hear
something of a like voice to that which said, 'Come unto me, all ye that
are weary and heavy-laden.' From a thousand legends and narratives we
may gather that to Gotama the Enlightened (the Buddha) the barriers of
human selfishness fell away. To him the miseries of the poor, the slave,
the outcast, were his own; the tears which men had shed from the
beginning, 'enough to fill oceans,' were as if falling from his eyes.
The great pang of sorrow, piercing the heart of the race, inconsolable,
unspeakable, struck to his own heart. For him the sin of the world, the
unsatisfied desire, the fierce passion and hatred and lust, poisoned
life, and he cared for nothing except for what would change the heart
and remove this fearful mass of evil."[12]

The character of Gotama as it emerges from the reek of tradition is one
of the noblest in history, and while the religion of which he was the
leader has been defiled by all manner of corruptions and superstitions,
it has borne much good fruit in the life of many peoples.

It would be easy to point out the radical defects in both these
religions; let me rather call attention to some of the distinguishing
peculiarities of our own faith.

1. The God whom Jesus has taught us to believe in, is a far nobler
object of affection and trust than is ever presented to the thought of
the followers of Mohammed or of Gotama. He is our Heavenly Father,
infinite in his purity, his truth, his kindness, his compassion, his
care for all his children.

Now it is true that the central and fundamental difference in religions
is that which concerns the character of the deity. The best religion is
that which worships the best god. And when we compare the Christian
conception of God with the Buddhist conception or the Mohammedan
conception, we cannot fail to see which is the highest and the purest.

A brilliant Japanese scholar, discussing this subject of the relative
values of religions, was asked if, in any respect, the Christian
religion was better than the Oriental religions, and he promptly
answered: "Yes; the Christian conception of God as the Heavenly Father
is higher and better than that of any Oriental religion." If that is
true it settles the whole question.

It is, perhaps, inaccurate to speak of Buddhism as having any conception
of God. "The very idea of a god as creating or in any way ruling the
world," says one authority, "is utterly absent in the Buddhist system.
God is not so much as denied, he is simply not known." Buddha taught
men to be compassionate to one another, but he did not teach them to
look above themselves for any divine compassion. It is true that they
now venerate him, and even pray to him; for the human soul will
pray,--its instinct of dependence, its craving for fellowship with
something higher than itself will prevail over all theories; but this
prayer must be somewhat incoherent, for the worshiper believes that
Buddha has no longer any conscious or personal existence. And there is
certainly no conception in his mind of any such fatherly relation with
any Power above himself, who loves him and cares for him and knows how
to help him, as that which Jesus has revealed to us.

The Mohammedan Deity is indeed a person, but he is a relentless,
omnipotent Will. The worst phases of the old Calvinism--those which have
disappeared from Christian thought--are the central ideas of the
Mohammedan creed. God is represented in the Koran as fitful and
revengeful, as arbitrary and despotic; he is a very different being from
the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

2. The religion of Jesus emphasizes, as no other religion has done,
"the redemptive principle in its idea of God." It does not hide the fact
of moral evil as the source of all our woes, but it shows an eternal
purpose in the heart of God to save man from sin, even at the cost of
suffering to himself. This is the meaning of redemption; it is the
salvation of men through a divine self-sacrifice. No such revelation of
the love of God as this has ever been made to the world, except through
the life and teachings and death of Jesus Christ. No wonder that when it
is simply and clearly presented to men it wins their hearts. A Chinese
woman, listening to a recital of this redemptive work of God, turned
suddenly to her neighbor and said, "Didn't I tell you that there ought
to be a God like that?"

We shall look in vain through the scriptures of the other religions for
any such conception of the relation of God to men. Men must save
themselves by their own endeavors; they must obey or they will suffer;
perchance by their own suffering they may be purified: but that God
should stoop to earth and stand by the side of sinning and suffering
man, and save him by suffering with him, is a truth to which none of
them has risen.

3. Christianity, above all other faiths, is the religion of hope. It
not only kindles in our hearts the hope of overcoming the sin which is
our worst enemy, but it conquers in our hearts the fear of death and
opens up to us the prospect of unending and glorious future life, in the
society of those most dear to us.

Mohammedanism also permits us to hope for future blessedness, albeit its
representations of the life to come are not always such as to purify and
elevate our thoughts. Buddhism, on the contrary, though it tells us that
we may be reborn many times, assures us that each reappearance in this
world will be attended with suffering and struggle; from which, if we
continue to walk in the true path, striving more and more to conquer our
desires, we may at length hope to be delivered; but the blessedness
which comes at the end of all this struggle is simply forgetfulness: we
shall lose our identity and be remerged in that fount of Being from
which at first we came. Existence is the primal evil: to get rid of
ourselves is what we are to strive for; salvation is our disappearance
out of life, our absorption in the ocean of unconsciousness. This is the
best that Buddhism has to offer us. Not many of us, I dare say, will
wish to exchange for this the Christian hope.

There are many other characteristics of the Christian faith on which it
would be interesting to reflect, but these three great elements are
sufficient to enable us to form our judgment as to its comparative
value. No religion which in these particulars is inferior can ever draw
the world away from the leadership of Jesus Christ. And it ought to be
clear to all who can comprehend the needs of human nature that while
these other faiths, in view of the great services they have rendered to
mankind, are not to be despised; and while it is probable that the
world, until the end of it, will be indebted to them for contributions
which they have made to our knowledge of the highest things; yet there
is no good reason why any one who has been walking in the light that
shines from the life and teachings of Jesus Christ should wish to turn
from his way into the ways of Mohammed or Gotama.

It is not by any happy accident that Christianity is growing far more
rapidly than any other form of faith, and now vastly outnumbers every
other; it is not a strange thing that the lands in which it prevails
are far more prosperous and far more powerful than the lands in which
other religions prevail. It is winning the world. It is winning the
world because its interpretation of life is a truer interpretation than
any other religion has offered; because it meets and supplies the
deepest wants of men more perfectly than any other religion meets and
supplies them.

The great evolutionary law is at work here, as everywhere. There is a
struggle for existence among religions, as among all other forms of
life. The law of variation has had full play in all this realm; human
nature has produced a great variety of religious ideas and forms, and
natural selection is doing its work upon them. The fittest will survive.
And the fittest religion will be the religion that ministers most
perfectly to human needs; that makes the best and strongest men and
women; that rears up the most fruitful and the most enduring
civilization.

Everything visible within the horizon of our thought to-day indicates
that the religion which will survive--the permanent religion, the
universal religion--will be the Christian religion.

It will gather into itself the best elements out of every other form of
faith, but the constructive ideas will be those which have found most
perfect expression in the teachings of Jesus Christ.

III

The Social Side of Religion

We have found in our previous studies that religion is a central and
permanent element in human nature, and that Christianity bids fair to be
the permanent form of religion.

But the readers of these pages are constantly meeting with those who
would admit both these statements, yet who are disposed to deny or
ignore the value of the church in modern society. They believe in
religion, they say; they even believe in the principles of Christianity;
they may go so far as to say that they believe in Christ; but they do
not believe in the church. What they seem to object to is organized
religion. They appear to think that it ought to be diffused, somehow,
like an atmosphere, through the community. We hear Christians talk,
sometimes, about "the invisible church;" that is the only kind of church
which these objectors are disposed to tolerate. _Institutional_ religion
is the special object of their distrust.

Some of the more radical among them oppose religious organizations, not
because these organizations are religious, but because they have an
antipathy for all forms of social organization. It does not take an
open-eyed onlooker long to discover that social organizations of all
kinds are infested with many evils. Social machinery is never perfect in
its construction or operation. It is always getting out of gear; there
is endless friction and clatter and confusion; it takes a great deal of
trouble to keep it moving, and its product is often of poor quality.
When men get together and try to cooeperate for any purpose, by orderly
methods, they are always sure, because of the imperfection of human
nature, to do a certain amount of mischief. Often their organization
tends to tyranny; freedom is unduly restricted; selfish men get
possession of the power accumulated in the organization, and use it for
their own aggrandizement; it becomes, to a greater or less extent, an
instrument of oppression. Thus government, which is normally the
organization of political society for the protection of liberty and the
promotion of the general welfare, sometimes becomes, as in Russia, a
grinding despotism despoiling the many for the enrichment of the few.
Thus, in our American politics, we have the machine, which is simply the
perversion of party organization, and which in many instances has
become, under the manipulation of greedy and conscienceless men, an evil
of vast proportions.

Looking upon these abuses with which political organizations of all
kinds are always encumbered, some men propose to abolish all forms of
political organization. This is anarchism, of which there are two
varieties,--the anarchism of violence, and the anarchism of
non-resistance. Czolgosz represents one type and Tolstoy the other. For
the anarchism of violence we can have only detestation and horror; to
the anarchism which expects to abolish laws by ignoring them and
suffering the consequences, we must extend a respectful toleration.
Nevertheless the anarchism of Tolstoy offers us a programme which is
hardly thinkable. For we are made to live and work together; and if we
work together effectively we must have rules and working agreements,
methods of cooeperation, and these, whatever name we may give them, will
have the force of constitutions and laws. The great cooeperations, on
which the welfare of society depends, involve social organization. Even
if the form which this takes should be largely economic, it would have
political force and significance. Man is a political animal; it is his
nature to live politically; and, as Horace says, you may drive out
nature with a pitchfork, but she is sure to come back. And the same
weaknesses of human nature which infested the old forms of organization
would be found in the new ones, unless human nature itself were
regenerated.

Those who would destroy political society on account of its abuses are,
therefore, guilty of the same foolishness as that of the man who burned
his house to get rid of the rats. Doubtless the rats all escaped and
were ready to enter, with reinforcements, into the new house as soon as
it was builded.

The same reasoning applies to ecclesiastical anarchism. Those who,
because of the defects of church organizations, would abolish the
churches, are equally unpractical. For it is not only true, as we saw in
our first chapter, that religion is a primal fact of human nature, it is
equally true that religion everywhere has a social manifestation. The
same impulse which moves men to worship, draws them together in their
worship.

Any deep or strong emotion makes human beings congregate. Just as a
flock of sheep huddle together when they are frightened, so men, when
deeply moved for any cause, seek one another. As the impulse of religion
is one of those by which men are most deeply moved, it always brings
them together.

So long as religion keeps the form of fear it produces this result; when
fear is succeeded by more grateful emotions, and men begin to have some
sense of the goodness of the Power they have been blindly worshiping,
then their gladness and gratitude bring them together. Religion,
therefore, in all lands and ages, has been a social interest; indeed, it
has been the strongest of the bonds uniting human beings. To demand a
religion which should have no social expression is to fly in the face of
nature, and forbid causes to bring forth their normal effects. Wherever
there is religion men will be associated, and their worship and their
work will be carried on under forms of social organization. Anarchism is
no more thinkable or workable in religion than in politics.

If this is true of religion in general, it is eminently true of the
Christian religion. The characteristic note of Christianity is its
emphasis on the social relations. In this it simply exhibits what we may
call its scientific temper, its tendency to keep close to the facts of
life, to give the right interpretation to nature and to human nature.

A modern sociologist[13] tells us that "the sole point of view, aim and
goal of Jesus, in all his teaching and by implication of all his acts,
was social. The divine Father whom he proclaimed was social--a Being
whose one attribute was love." When we say that "God is love," this is
what we mean. He delights in Companionship, and finds his happiness in
the relations which unite him with his creatures. Since his own supreme
good is in these reciprocal affections and services, we cannot imagine
that he could expect us to find our good in any different way. If we
share our Father's nature, we must seek our happiness where he finds
his. The blessedness of life must therefore be in our social relations.
Such is the teaching of Jesus. Such is the essence of Christianity.

While, therefore, every religion by its very nature tends to bring men
together, Christianity lifts the social impulse into the light and
sanctifies and transfigures it, making it not merely a concomitant of
religion but the heart of religion. The effect of this revelation was
seen in all the ministry of Jesus. Whereever he went the people flocked
together. "Great multitudes followed him." Into the wildernesses, up to
the mountain tops, across the stormy lake, they made their way; it was a
day of great congregations. It was because they wanted to be with him,
of course; but when they came to him they came together, and one of the
things he sought for them was that they should like to be together. That
was surely a lesson that they learned of him; for as soon as he had gone
they began to gravitate together. Every day they met, sometimes in the
temple courts, sometimes in their own homes, for praise and prayer;
every evening they partook together, in little groups, of a simple meal,
in memory of him. Their religion, from the start, manifested a marked
social tendency. Indeed, we might give it a stronger word, and say that,
in the beginning, it was socialistic; it seemed to threaten a complete
reconstruction of the industrial order. For "all that believed were
together, and had all things common; and they sold their possessions
and goods, and parted them to all, as every man had need."[14]

Just how far this communistic experiment was carried it is difficult to
say, but it is evident that the disciples felt that their religion ought
to permeate and control their entire social life. And there has never
since been a day when the social side of religion has not been
recognized and provided for. The very impulse which is kindled in their
hearts when they are brought into association with Christ, brings men
together. Communion, fellowship, these are the first words they learn.
It has been so from the beginning. One of the great Christians of the
apostolic age admonished his converts against "forsaking the assembling
of themselves together," and that admonition has always been heeded. No
other religion has brought people together so constantly and in so many
ways as Christianity has done. Christian people are always getting
together, to pray together, to sing together, to partake together of the
sacraments, to listen together to the teaching of the pulpit, to study
the Bible together, to take counsel together about their work, to unite
their efforts, in manifold cooeperations, for the upbuilding of the
Kingdom. They have even come to believe--and they are profoundly right
about it--that it is a good thing for people to come together just for
the sake of being together, even when no distinctly religious business
assembles them. To establish and promote pleasant and amicable social
relations between human beings is a Christian thing to do. It is a sign
of the progress of the Kingdom, and a preparation for it, when men and
women enjoy meeting one another for no other reason than that they like
to be together. It is a condition of the manifestation of the love which
is the fulfilling of all law. The stranger, as many languages testify,
is apt to be the enemy. The chief reason why he is dreaded and hated is
that he is not known. Acquaintance allays suspicion and promotes
sympathy and kindness.

Not the least of the services which Christianity has rendered to the
world may be seen in what it has accomplished in bringing human beings
together socially. Setting aside its purely religious function, it has
done, in Europe and America, more than all other agencies put together
to promote acquaintances and neighborly relations among men. It has
done, as we shall see by and by, far less than it ought to have done in
this direction; its failures in this department of its work have been
manifold and grievous; but after all this is admitted, it must still be
affirmed that it has done most of what has been done to socialize
mankind, and no other institution or agency is entitled to throw stones
at it because of its deficiencies.

When, therefore, those who read these chapters hear the criticisms and
cavils to which I referred at the beginning, they will know how to reply
to them.

When they hear an argument which assumes that the church is worse than
useless because all social institutions are worse than useless, they may
answer that the reasoning is unsound, because it repudiates the deepest
facts of human nature; that social institutions, the church among them,
are natural growths as truly as the cornfields and the forests.

When they hear any one maintaining that he believes in the principles of
Christianity but not in the social organizations which embody these
principles, they may well reply that the principles of Christianity
naturally and inevitably embody themselves in forms of social
organization; that you could no more prevent it than you could prevent
light from breaking into color or spring from coming in May; that, as a
matter of history, the growth of Christianity has been signalized by a
marvelous development of the social sentiments and habitudes which must
find expression in some kind of social cooeperation; and that, as a
matter of fact, after all necessary deductions have been made, the
church has been a powerful agency in developing that temper of
likemindedness which makes civilized society possible.

There is still another cavil to which it may be needful to refer. It is
based on the notion that religion, after all, is a purely individual
affair; that it concerns only the relations between the soul and its
God; that therefore public worship is not only needless but unseemly.
Prayer is sometimes described as "the flight of one alone to the only
One;" and it is sometimes contended that any other than private prayer
is a violation of all the higher sanctities. If this were true, of
course the church would be an anomaly or an imposition. And while there
are not many who would urge this argument unfalteringly, some such
notion as this may be found lying at the bottom of a good many minds.

The words of Jesus, in the sixth chapter of Matthew, are sometimes
quoted in support of this criticism upon public worship: "And when ye
pray, ye shall not be as the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray
in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be
seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But thou,
when thou prayest, enter into thine inner chamber, and having shut thy
door, pray to thy Father which is in secret, and thy Father which seeth
in secret shall recompense thee."[15]

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11