The Church and Modern Life by Washington Gladden

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But we must learn to interpret the words of Jesus as meeting the
occasion on which they were spoken; and before we base any
generalizations or rules of conduct upon them, we must bring together
all that he said and did which bears upon the case in hand, and try to
arrive at some meaning which shall include and explain it all. When we
treat the utterances and acts of Jesus after this manner, we shall find
that no such deduction as that which we are considering can be drawn
from them.

We discover, in the first place, that he himself did not always pray in
secret; for several of his prayers made in public places are reported
for us. Moreover, he told his disciples that when even two or three of
them were gathered together in his name, he would be in the midst of
them. The implication is that they would be in the habit of gathering
together in his name, and that there would generally be many more than
two or three of them.

The only form of prayer which he has left us is manifestly intended
primarily, not for secret worship, but for social worship. The pronouns
of the "Lord's Prayer" are all in the plural number: "_Our_ father who
art in heaven;" "Give _us_ this day our daily bread." For solitary
prayer these phrases are not suitable.

When he went away from his disciples he left them a great promise of the
manifestation to them of that Spirit which had been given without
measure to him; and he bade them tarry in Jerusalem until that promise
should be fulfilled. Accordingly they assembled, about one hundred and
twenty of them, in an upper room in Jerusalem, and "continued
steadfastly" in prayer together for many days. The response to this
prayer was that outpouring of the Spirit by which the apostolic church
was inspired, and equipped for its work. Saint Peter told the disciples
that this was the gift of the ascended Christ,--the fulfillment of his
promise to them. If this was true, it can hardly be conceived that he
disapproved of the common prayer in answer to which this gift had come.

Nor can any reasonable interpreter of his words and deeds imagine that
he intended his admonition in the sixth chapter of Matthew to be taken
as a prohibition of public worship or of social prayer. Those words were
simply a reproof of ostentation in worship. The Pharisees, whose conduct
he is castigating, "loved to pray standing in the synagogues and in the
corners of the streets, that they might be seen of men." It was a
private and personal prayer, offered in a public place, to advertise the
devotion of the worshiper. With our private and personal prayers the
public has no concern; it is a manifest indelicacy to thrust them before
the public; the place for them is the secret chamber. Individual sins
and sorrows and needs we all have, and when we talk with our Father
about them we ought to be alone with him; but we have also common sins
and sorrows and needs, and it is well for us to be together when we talk
with him about them. It is therefore a gross perversion of these words
of Jesus to quote them in condemnation of acts of public worship. His
entire life and the example of all those who were nearest to him, as
well as the testimony of the best Christians in all the ages, unite to
render such a notion incredible.

If I have succeeded in answering the cavils which seek to discredit the
church as a social organization, and especially as an agency for the
maintenance of social worship, let me go on to suggest some positive
reasons for the existence of such an agency.

Such an opportunity as the church offers for social worship is essential
to the maintenance of religion. Religious feeling the expression of
which was confined to the relations between the individual and his God,
would become self-centred, egoistic, and morbid. If there were no
praying but secret praying, if the social element were eliminated from
prayer and praise, faith would take on ascetic forms, devotion would
become rancid, sympathy would be smothered, and the character of the
worshiper would be hardened and belittled. There is a place and a time,
as we have seen, for private devotion; probably many of us make far less
use of it than would be good for us; but any attempt to shut our
religion into the closet would be suicidal. It would mould there. To
keep it fresh and wholesome it must be taken out into the light and air;
the winds of heaven must blow through it; our desires must mingle with
the desires of others; our voices must join with their voices; we must
learn to think of the needs, the struggles, the sorrows, the hopes that
are common to us all, to put ourselves in other people's places when we
pray, to feel that our religion is a bond that binds us to our kind.

There is a kind of prayer which we could only use in the
closet,--intimate, personal, dealing with matters of which no one else
has any right to know. But there is another kind of prayer for which
there is no other place than the great congregation; a prayer in which
many pleading hearts unite; in which the sympathies and hopes and
aspirations of a thousand worshipers are blended. Such a prayer, if some
one can give it voice, is something far higher and diviner than ever
ascended from any secret shrine.

It is true that the prayer of the great assembly does not always find a
fitting voice. It is sometimes arid and formal; it is sometimes palpably
insincere and perfunctory, alas for our human disabilities and
infirmities! The power of the leader to forget himself, to gather up
into his heart the common needs of those who are listening, and pour
them out before God, is sometimes wanting. Not seldom we may find
ourselves wishing for those forms of prayer, sanctified by centuries of
use, in which the Christian church, in all the lands of earth, has made
known its requests to God. These are always dignified and reverent;
every truly devout heart may find utterance for some of its deepest
needs in the petitions of the Book of Common Prayer. But most of us have
heard prayers in the sanctuary which lifted and kindled us as no written
prayers could ever do. If the leader of the devotions could be "in the
Spirit on the Lord's day;" if he could forget himself; if the simplicity
which is in Christ could take possession of his thought, if he could
look over the company round about him before he closed his eyes, and
with a swift glance could glean out of that field of human experience
some inkling of the trials, the perplexities, the griefs, the struggles,
the tragedies of the lives there before him, and with a great, fervent,
energizing[16] prayer could carry them all up to God, there would be
something in that which would convince all who were listening that the
highest form of prayer is not secret prayer, but social prayer. Nor is
it an uncommon thing to hear, even in humble pulpits, prayer which
effectually meets this great demand.

It goes without saying that, for the highest forms of praise, we must
have the conspiring voices of the great congregation. We cannot let
loose the hallelujahs in the closet; that would be almost as unseemly as
to pray on the street corner. If the Bible is any guide as to the forms
which our worship should take, praise must constitute a large part of
it. And praise is mainly a social act.

Even the preaching gathers much of its impressiveness from the
congregation. The message which stirs the hearts of five hundred
worshipers would make much less impression upon any one of them if he
heard it alone. It could not be given to him alone, as it is given to
the five hundred; that is a psychological impossibility. There is
something in it when the five hundred hear it that is not in it when the
single auditor hears it, and that something is, far and away, the best
thing that it contains.

All these considerations show that public worship is essential to the
vigorous maintenance of true religion. The elements which it supplies to
religion are vital elements. Let no man imagine that by reading the
Bible and good books at home, and by worshiping in his closet, or, as
some are fond of saying, "in God's first temples," the life of religion
can be successfully maintained. It never has been maintained in that
way, and it never will be. When men forsake the assembling of themselves
together for worship, there is no more reading the Bible and good books
at home, and no more praying in the closet, much less in the woods.
Single individuals might, if the religious atmosphere of the community
were kept vital round about them, continue to enjoy religion. Invalids
are often forced to deprive themselves of social worship; but if they
are there in spirit, something of the benefit finds them. But a
community which deliberately abandoned social worship would be a
community in which no private worship would long be maintained.

If, then, we agree that religion is an essential element in the life of
mankind, we must see that it is necessary that some institution should
exist which shall make provision for social and public worship. The
Christian church undertakes primarily to fulfill this function. It has
other large and important relations to society, of which we shall speak
further on. But this is its first concern. I hope that it has been made
evident in this discussion that it is a very important function. I hope
that those who read these pages may be able to see that if we are to
have any religion in our land, the kind of work which the church
undertakes to do cannot be neglected. That the church is not doing this
work as well as it ought to be done is true enough; we shall have all
that before us presently; but the vital necessity of the work is not
therefore disproved. The work would be better done if those who now hold
aloof, because they see its defects, would put their lives into the
business of mending them.

There are very few men and women, after all, in our modern society, who
do not say, without hesitation, that we must have churches; that it
would not do to let them die; that they are essential to the social
welfare; that, imperfect as they are, they supply a need which every one
can recognize. They have no hesitation, either, in admitting that if
there are to be churches, somebody must belong to them, and share the
responsibility for their maintenance. But when the question is asked,
"If somebody must, why must not you?" a good many of them are not able
to give a very clear answer. Very often the excuse that is set up is
some form of theological dissent. But that is not, in many cases, a
serious barrier. It might shut some men out of some churches; but there
are great varieties of creeds, and the conditions of membership in some
churches are so simple that no really earnest man is likely to feel
himself excluded. If it is essential that the work of the church be
done, and if the reader of these pages has not convinced himself that he
is exempt from the common human obligations, then he can find, if he is
in earnest, some church with which he can conscientiously ally himself,
and in whose work he can bear a part.

IV

The Business of the Church

We have seen that religion is a social fact; that religious feeling
creates social organizations, and is preserved and promoted by them. God
is love, and love is social attraction; the children of God, who are
made in his image, must find in their hearts a tendency to get together
and worship and work together.

We find here a reciprocating action. An apple seed produces a tree which
in its turn produces apples with seeds. So the religious impulse
organizes the church, and the church cultivates and propagates religious
impulses. The point to be emphasized is that religion, and especially
the Christian religion, is inseparable from social forms; that its
natural result is to bring human beings together in cooeperative groups.

It is the business of life to organize matter; there is no life without
organization; the inorganic is the lifeless. These are facts which
should be borne in mind by those who approve of the religious life but
object to religious organizations. If religion is life, it will create
organic forms.

In our last chapter we showed how worship, in its highest expression, is
essentially social, and how impossible it would be to maintain it
without the aid of institutions having the same essential purpose as the
Christian church. Let us turn our thought now to the other great
function of the church, the regeneration of human society.

Religion cannot be kept alive without alliance with the social forces;
the social forces cannot be kept in healthful operation without the aid
of religion. Neither blade of a pair of shears will cut without the
other. You cannot raise corn without seed, and you can only get seed
from corn.

Religion is not an ultimate fact. When men are religious just for the
sake of being religious, their religion is good for nothing. Religion is
for character. Its end is gained when it has made us good men and women.
Religion is for service. It finds its justification in the work that it
can do in making a better world of this. Jesus gave us the truth about
it when he said, "The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the
Sabbath." And he carried the truth forward to a larger application when
he said, "I came not to judge the world, but to save the world."

"_To save the world._" That was the errand of the Christ; that is the
business of his church. It is not merely to save a certain number of
people out of the world, and to get them safely away to another world;
it is to save the world.

There is no danger of giving to this phrase too wide an application. We
are entitled to the expectation that this salvation is to have a large
scope; that it is to include the earth and all its tribes of life. When
we speak of making a better world of this, we ought to mean the physical
world as well as the social world and the moral world. It is a true
insight of faith which makes the poet say:--

"The world we live in wholly is redeemed;
Not man alone, but all that man holds dear:
His orchards and his maize: forget me not
And heartsease in his garden, and the wild
Aerial blossoms of the untamed wood,
That make its savagery so homelike; all
Have felt Christ's sweet love watering their roots:
His sacrifice has won both earth and heaven.
Nature in all its fullness is the Lord's.
There are no Gentile oaks, no Pagan pines;
The grass beneath oar feet is Christian grass;
The wayside weed is sacred unto him.
Have we not groaned together, herbs and men,
Struggling through stifling earth-weights unto light,
Earnestly longing to be clothed upon
With one high possibility of bloom?
And He, He is the Light, He is the Sun
That draws us out of darkness, and transmits
The noisome earth-damp into Heaven's own breath,
And shapes our matted roots, we know not how,
Into fresh leaves, and strong, fruit-bearing stems;
Yea, makes us stand, on some consummate day,
Abloom in white transfiguration robes."

This vital sympathy between man and his environment is never lost sight
of by the great prophets. The redemption of man must mean, as they
clearly see, the redemption of the world in which man lives. When the
drunkard is reformed, the house which he inhabits puts on a new face and
there are flowers instead of weeds in his garden. Isaiah knew that when
his people were redeemed from their captivity, the wilderness and the
parched land would be glad and the desert would rejoice and blossom as
the rose.

That wonderful passage in the eighth chapter of the Romans shows how
strongly Paul had grasped the old prophetic idea; he beholds the whole
creation humiliated and disfigured by its share in man's degeneration,
and waiting to be delivered with man from the bondage of corruption
into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. That expectation
is yet to be realized. It is an essential part of the Christian
expectation. It is part of what redemption means.

True, it is that by the selfishness and thoughtlessness of man large
portions of the earth's surface have been despoiled; mountains have been
denuded of their forests; fertile lands have been worn out, and fruitful
fields have become wildernesses. But we are beginning to reverse this
tendency, and now many a wilderness is being reclaimed, arid plains are
green with corn, and the forests are creeping back upon the hillsides.
As men become socialized, as they learn to cooeperate for the common
good, as some sense of their social responsibility gets possession of
their minds, we shall see this process extending; the waste of the
common resources of the earth will cease; deserts will be visited by the
life-giving water; swamps and jungles will be subdued; the earth, in
many regions now uninhabited and desolate, will be made to bring forth
and bud that it may give seed to the sower and bread to the eater.

All this is the natural result of the quickening in human hearts of the
social sentiments, by which they are drawn into closer cooeperation for
the common good; and this quickening of the social sentiments is the
work that Christ came to do, and the work that his church will be doing,
with all her might, as soon as she fully understands what is her
business in the world.

The redemption of the physical order will be the result of the
socialization of mankind. It is an integral part of the work that Christ
came into the world to do. It is part of what he meant when he said that
he came to save the world. When we realize this, we get some idea of the
scope of the redemption which he proclaims. It is not a superficial or a
sentimental thing that he proposes; it takes hold of life with the most
comprehensive grasp; it proposes to redeem not only man but his
environment.

It is not, however, the redemption of the physical order to which Christ
primarily addresses himself. He begins in the spiritual realm. He begins
with the individual. His first concern is to reveal to every child of
God the great fact of the divine Fatherhood, and to bring him into
filial relations. His whole programme for humanity rests on this simple
possibility of realizing the Fatherhood of God. If this can be realized,
everything else will follow. If any man is in the right filial relations
with his Father in heaven, he cannot be in wrong social relations with
his brother on the earth. If he is in harmony with God in thought and
feeling, he must think God's thoughts about his neighbor, and the law of
love will be the law of all his conduct. No man can love the God and
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ with heart and soul and mind without
loving his neighbor as himself. Heartily to believe what Jesus has told
us about the Father, and fully to enter into fellowship with him, is to
put ourselves into such relations with our fellow men that every duty we
owe them will be spontaneously performed. In a society composed of men
who were thus in harmony with God the only social question for each man
would be, "How can I best befriend and serve my neighbor?"

That the religion of Jesus begins here, in the heart of the individual,
cannot be questioned. And it must never be forgotten that there can be
no sound social construction which does not build on this foundation.
But it is well to remember also that here, as everywhere, a foundation
calls for a building, and is useless and unsightly and obstructive
without it. The foundation of Christianity is the reconciliation of
individual souls to God, and the establishment of friendship between
these individual souls and God; but what is the structure for which this
foundation is laid? It is the establishment of the same divine
friendship among men. That is the building for which the foundation
calls. If the building does not go up, the foundation is worthless. If
the building does not go up, the foundation itself will crumble and
decay. The only way to save a foundation is to cover it with a building.

Fault might be found with the figure, but the fact which it imperfectly
illustrates is beyond gainsaying. The right relation to God, which Jesus
always makes fundamental, cannot be maintained except as it issues in
right relations with men. Here is the apostle John's blunt way of
putting it: "If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a
liar; for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, cannot love
God whom he hath not seen. And this commandment have we from him, that
he who loveth God love his brother also."

The commandment is, in fact, only the statement of a logical necessity.
How could any human being enter into a loving communion with that great
Friend whose love is always brooding over our race, who is seeking to do
us good and not evil all the days of our lives, who is kind even to the
unthankful and the evil,--and not be a lover of his fellow men and a
servant of all their needs?

It is evident, therefore, that a religion which has no room in it for
social questions cannot be the Christian religion. The social question
is the one question which Christianity--genuine Christianity--never
ceases to ask. The first thing it wishes to know about your religious
experience is, how it affects your relations with your fellow men. It
insists that your relations must first be right with God, but in the
same breath it declares that there is no way of knowing whether or not
your relations are right with God except by observing how you behave
among your fellow men. Faith is the root, but faith without works is
dead, being alone; and works concern your human relations.

These principles enable us to determine what is the business of the
church. Its business is to foster and propagate Christianity, and
Christianity exists to establish in this world the kingdom of heaven.
The church is not, therefore, an end in itself; it is an instrument; it
is a means employed by God for the promotion, in the world, of the
kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of heaven is not an ecclesiastical
establishment; it includes the whole of life,--business, politics, art,
education, philanthropy, society in the narrow sense, the family: when
all these shall be pervaded and controlled by the law of love, then the
kingdom of heaven will have fully come. And the business of the church
in the world is to bring all these departments of life under Christ's
law of love. If it seeks to convert men, it is that they may be filled
with the spirit of Christ and may govern their conduct among men by
Christ's law. If it gathers them together for instruction or for
inspiration, it is that they may be taught Christ's way of life and sent
out into the world to live as he lived among their fellow men. Its
function is to fill the world with the knowledge of Christ, the love of
Christ, the life of Christ. That is what Christ meant by saving the
world. The world is saved when this is true of it, and it is never saved
till then. The work of the church is successful just to the extent to
which it succeeds in Christianizing the social order in the midst of
which it stands.

If by means of its ministrations, the community round about the church
is steadily becoming more Christian; if kindness, sympathy, purity,
justice, good-will, are increasing in their power over the lives of men;
if business methods are becoming less rapacious; if employers and
employed are more and more inclined to be friends rather than foes; if
politicians are growing conscientious and unselfish; if the enemies of
society are in retreat before the forces of decency and order; if
amusements are becoming purer and more rational; if polite society is
getting to be simpler in its tastes and less ostentatious in its manners
and less extravagant in its expenditures; if poverty and crime are
diminishing; if parents are becoming more wise and firm in the
administration of their sacred trust, and children more loyal and
affectionate to their parents,--if such fruits as these are visible on
every side, then there is reason to believe that the church knows its
business and is prosecuting it with efficiency. If none of these effects
are seen in the life of the community, the evidence is clear that the
church is neglecting its business, and that failure must be written
across its record.

Even though it be true that large numbers are added to its membership,
that its congregations are crowded, its revenues abundant, its
missionary contributions liberal, and its social prestige high; yet if
the standards of social morality in its neighborhood are sinking rather
than rising, and the general social drift and tendency is toward
animalism and greed and luxury and strife, the church must be pronounced
a failure: nay, even if it be believed that the church is succeeding in
getting a great many people safely to heaven when they die; yet if the
social tendencies in the world about it are all downward, its work, on
the whole, must be regarded as a failure. Its main business is not
saving people out of the world, it is saving the world. When it is
evident that the world, under its ministration, is growing no better but
rather worse, no matter what other good things it may have the credit of
doing, the verdict is against it.

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