"But it is more significant to our purpose to note that the blood of youth had hardly ceased to run before the officials began to dicker for the material fruits of conquest. Not how to obtain peace but how to exploit victory—to wrest each for himself the larger tribute from the fallen foe—became their primary concern. So the youth appear to have died for a tariff, perished for trade routes and harbors, for the furthering of the commercial advantages of this nation as against that, for the seizing of the markets of the world. They supposed they fought 'to end business of that sort' but they returned to find their accredited representatives contemplating universal military service in frank expectation of 'the next war.' They strove for the 'self-determination of peoples' but find that it was for some people, but not all. And as for the cooperation among nations, Judge Gary has recently told us that, as a result of the war, we should prepare for 'the fiercest commercial struggle in the history of mankind!'"[19]
Is it not clear, then, today that behind the determining as distinguished from the fighting forces of the war there lay a commercial and financial imperialism, directed by small and powerful minorities, largely supported by a sympathetic press which used the machinery of representative democracy to overthrow a more naked and brutal imperialism whose machinery was that of a military autocracy? Motives, scales of value, methods and desired ends, were much the same for all these small governing groups as they operated from behind the various shibboleths whose magic they used to nerve the arms of the contending forces. The conclusion of the war has revealed the common springs of action of the professional soldier, statesman, banker, ecclesiastic, in our present civilization. On the whole they accept the rule of physical might as the ultimate justification of conduct. They are the leaders and spokesmen in an economic, social and political establishment which, pretending to civilization, always turns when strained or imperiled by foreign or domestic dangers to physical force as the final arbiter.
It is truly ominous to see the gradual extension of this naturalistic principle still going on in the state. The coal strike was settled, not by arbitration, but by conference, and "conferences" appear to be replacing disinterested arbitration. This means that decisions are being made on the principle of compromise, dictated by the expediency of the moment, not by reference to any third party, or to some fixed and mutually recognized standards. This is as old as Pythagoras and as new as Bergson and Croce; it assumes that the concept of justice is man-made, produced and to be altered by expediences and practicalities, always in flux. But the essence of a civilization is the humanistic conviction that there is something fixed and abiding around which life may order and maintain itself.
Progress rests on the Platonic theory that laws are not made by man but discovered by him; that they exist as eternal distinctions beyond the reach of his alteration. Again, an unashamed and rampant naturalism has just been sweeping this country in the wave of mean and cruel intolerance which insists upon the continued imprisonment of political heretics, which would prohibit freedom of speech by governmental decree and oppose new or distasteful ideas by the physical suppression of the thinker. The several and notorious attempts beginning with deportations and ending with the unseating of the New York assemblymen, to combat radical thinking by physical or political persecution—attempts uniformly mean and universally impotent in history—are as sinister as they are stupid. The only law which justifies the persecution and imprisonment of religious and political heretics is neither the law of reason nor the law of love, but the law of fear, hence of tyranny and force. When a twentieth-century nation begins to raise the ancient cry, "Come now and let us kill this dreamer and we shall see what will become of his dreams," that nation is declining to the naturalistic level. For this clearly indicates that the humane and religious resources of civilization, of which the church is among the chief confessed and appointed guardians, are utterly inadequate to the strain imposed upon them. Hence force, not justice, though they may sometimes have happened to coincide, and power, not reason or faith, are becoming the embodiment of the state today.
We come now to the final question of our chapter. How has this renewal of naturalism affected the church and Christian preaching? On the whole today, the Protestant church is accepting this naturalistic attitude. In a signed editorial in the New Republic for the last week of December, 1919, Herbert Croly said, under the significant title of "Disordered Christianity": "Both politicians and property owners consider themselves entitled to ignore Christian guidance in exercising political and economic power, to expect or to compel the clergy to agree with them and if necessary to treat disagreement as negligible. The Christian church, as a whole, or in part, does not protest against the practically complete secularization of political, economic and social life."
You may say such extra-ecclesiastical strictures are unsympathetic and ill informed. But here is what Washington Gladden wrote in January, 1918: "If after the war the church keeps on with the same old religion, there will be the same old hell on earth that religious leaders have been preparing for centuries, the full fruit of which we are gathering now. The church must cease to sanction those principles of militaristic and atheistic nationalism by which the rulers of the earth have so long kept the earth at war."[20] Thus from within the sanctuary is the same indictment of our naturalism.
But you may say Dr. Gladden was an old man and a little extreme in some of his positions and he belonged to a past generation. But there are many signs at the present moment of the increasing secularizing of our churches. The individualism of our services, their casual character, their romantic and sentimental music, their minimizing of the offices of prayer and devotion, their increasing turning of the pulpit into a forum for political discussion and a place of common entertainment all indicate it. There is an accepted secularity today about the organization. Church and preacher have, to a large degree, relinquished their essential message, dropped their religious values. We are pretty largely today playing our game the world's way. We are adopting the methods and accepting the standards of the market. In an issue last month of the Inter-Church Bulletin was the following headline: "Christianity Hand in Hand with Business," and underneath the following:
"George W. Wickersham, formerly United States attorney-general, says in an interview that there is nothing incompatible between Christianity and modern business methods. A leading lay official of the Episcopal Church declares that what the churches need more than anything else is a strong injection of business method into their management. 'Some latter-day Henry Drummond,' he said, 'should write a book on Business Law in the Spiritual World.'"
In this same paper, in the issue of March 27, 1920, there was an article commending Christian missions. The first caption ran: "Commercial Progress Follows Work of Protestant Missions," and its subtitle was "How Missionaries Aid Commerce." Here is Business Law in the Spiritual World! Here is the church commended to the heathen and the sinner as an advertising agent, an advance guard of commercial prosperity, a hawker of wares! If the Bulletin ever penetrates to those benighted lands of the Orient upon which we are thus anxious to bestow the so apparent benefits of our present civilization it is conceivable that even the untutored savage, to say nothing of Chinamen and Japanese, might read it with his tongue in his cheek.
Such naïve opportunism and frantic immediacy would seem to me conclusive proof of the disintegration and anarchy of the spirit within the sanctuary. It is a part of it all that everyone has today what he is pleased to call "his own religion." And nearly everyone made it himself, or thinks he did. Conscience has ceased to be a check upon personal impulse, the "thou shalt not" of the soul addressed to untutored desires, and become an amiable instinct for doing good to others. The Christian is an effusive creature, loving everything and everybody; exalting others in terms of himself. We abhor religious conventions; in particular we hasten to proclaim that we are free from the stigma of orthodoxy. We do not go to church to learn, to meditate, to repent and to pray; we go to be happy, to learn how to keep young and prosperous; it is good business; it pays. We have a new and most detestable cant; someone has justly said that the natural man in us has been masquerading as the spiritual man by endlessly prating of "courage," "patriotism"—what crimes have been committed in its name!—"development of backward people," "brotherhood of man," "service of those less fortunate than ourselves," "natural ethical idealism," "the common destinies of nations"—and now he rises up and glares at us with stained fingers and bloodshot eyes![21] In so far as we have succumbed to naturalism, we have become cold and shrewd and flexible; shallow and noisy and effusive; have been rather proud to believe anything in general and almost nothing in particular; become a sort of religious jelly fish, bumping blindly about in seas of sentiment and labeling that peace and brotherhood and religion!