With God in the World: A Series of Papers

by Charles Henry Brent

The official temper of mind is by no means the only bar to wide fellowship. Exclusiveness and temperamental dislike are responsible for a great many sins against brotherly love, and must be fought down by every true follower of our Lord. When men are left to themselves, they gravitate into mutually exclusive groups composed of congenial classes or of congenial types. But Christianity steps in and breaks up these little sets, in order to blend them into one varied and splendid whole. The vision which S. John had revealed to him, was humanity in all its variety—"out of every nation, and of all tribes and peoples and tongues"—but at perfect unity with itself, a complete and harmonious family.

§ 1. Probably there is no temper of mind more difficult to master than that of exclusiveness. In the evolution of society class differentiations have come into being, differentiations which, at the time of their appearance, may have been a necessary phase of progress, but which, in the development of Christian thought, should pass away. It would not be right or wise to contend for the immediate obliteration of all artificial distinctions in life, for conventionalities are often social safeguards and have their place in civilization. But surely the earnest disciple of Jesus must array all the forces at his command against the continuance of customs that have been separated from their usefulness, and are perpetuated only to be stumbling blocks to human fellowship.

The worth of conventionalism has for its supreme test the life and teaching of Jesus Christ. When He quieted the strife of the disciples, who were filled with the ignoble lust of domination, He inaugurated a new social order. "He that is the greater among you, let him become as the younger; and he that is chief, as he that doth serve." The old order made kings the recipients of much service, the new calls them to give much service; the old order led men to strive for honour, the new inspires them to avoid honour unless bound up with an enlarged opportunity to serve; the old order prized whatever privileges set men above and apart from their fellows, the new seeks everything that will bring them nearer to their fellows. So merit and reward, privilege and responsibility, greatness and service must never be separated. Where they have been separated in the past, as well as where they are in the present, the result is exclusiveness. Men cling to prerogatives which in common justice they have no real claim upon, beyond the flimsy plea of hereditary right and the permission of society. Out of this have grown those groups of persons who, though possessing nothing but a very common humanity indeed, would, from a sense of superiority derived from a name, or from the false prestige given by wealth and social position, withhold their fellowship from all but a select few. If men could but realize the cramping influence on character of exclusiveness, how quickly would they hasten to divest themselves of every trace of the vice of snobbishness! Dives lived in exclusive society after death because he did so before death. He was no farther from Lazarus in the other world than he was in this; the gulf created here was "fixed" there, that is all. And among the "losses of the saved" will be lack of capacity for wide fellowship.

The dignity of humanity is so great that nothing can add to its greatness, excepting what ennobles human nature itself. Wealth, social position, mere intellectual attainment, no more deserve deference or homage, than do the tatters of a pauper or the ignorance of a dolt. No man insults human nature or demeans his personality so much as he who bows down to these accidents, excepting only the man who receives homage on the ground not of what he is but of what he has. We may neither pay homage to, nor receive it for, any of those things which belong merely to time and of which death will strip us bare; though piety, spiritual wisdom, and all forms of moral power, always and everywhere, demand homage and reverence.

The true basis on which Christian fellowship is begun and maintained, is our common humanity—that which is essential and not that which is accidental. Our Lord drew men to Himself and had human fellowship with them, by virtue of the completeness and attractiveness of His splendid manhood. He had none of the accidents of life to use, and He was not weak without them. He was the most refined among men, and yet He found companionship among the peasant folk. Social differentiations did not enter into our Lord's reckoning. He ignored them, reaching through them and past them. It is touching to remember that one of the earliest companionships in Paradise of the human soul of Jesus, was the resumption of almost His last intercourse on earth. As the soul of the penitent outlaw and robber, "pale from the passion of death," went into the society of Paradise, it was received and welcomed by the Man, Christ Jesus.

It is a myth that the wise and cultured must confine their fellowship to the wise and cultured.[15] By means of literature men and women of high privilege, have joined hands with those whose lives were bare of everything but character—with Adam Bede and with Uncle Tom. If this is possible with the creations of fiction, it is capable of being widely true in actual life. The richest human nature is often found in the most obscure places, as the experience of every social worker from Edward Denison to the resident in the newest "settlement," will testify. True refinement is not the result of paltry conventionalism, the flimsy creation of an artificial society; true refinement is the inalienable possession of that character in which the Spirit of God rules, in which the material is made the handmaid of the spiritual. At first men went out into the highways of the city, armed with their privileges, thinking that they had everything to give. But they soon learned that this spirit could only end in condescension, which is fatal to fellowship, for fellowship means give and take, and that the poor and unprivileged had much to give. Unless representatives from the different classes of society are contributing their special gifts to our lives, life is poor indeed. Wealth of fellowship consists not in numbers, but in variety.

When men reach out for wider fellowship, they must not forget that no man ever yet won his fellows through his own interests. He must, by the subtle power of sympathy, dive beneath the surface of other lives and court their interests. Even God failed to win men, until He made man's concerns wholly His own by becoming Man. "For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that ye through His poverty might become rich."

§ 2. Temperamental dislike is another obstacle to Christian fellowship to be conquered. It is something found wherever human nature is. And men commonly excuse quarrelsomeness, rudeness and other unchristian conduct on this score, though the excuse is by no means valid. Probably all of us are afflicted with a natural antipathy to certain kinds of temperament, but at least we need not humour it. It was part of God's design, that human society should be enriched by variety of disposition. That is a poor garden which contains but one kind of flower, beautiful as its blossom may be. True beauty consists in variety; and monotony is the height of ugliness. It is a reason for thankfulness that human nature is so wonderfully diversified that no two human beings are exactly alike, and that there is a whole gamut of temperamental difference in the race.

Now it is a part of the work of Christianity, to reconcile dispositions that are naturally antipathetic and jarring. And the process by which this is brought to pass, is probably one of the most beneficial disciplines to which men are subjected. The Church is a great mixing bowl, in which all this vast variety is brought into close touch and blended together into a harmonious whole. "The very purpose of the one Church for all the men of faith in Jesus is that the necessity for belonging to one body—a necessity grounded on divine appointment—shall force together into a unity men of all sorts and different kinds; and the forces of the new life which they share in common are to overcome their natural repugnance and antipathies, and to make the forbearance and love and mutual helpfulness which corporate life requires, if not easy, at least possible for them."[16]

That society is at once the most beautiful and the most powerful which is composed of the largest variety of temperaments, exercising their various faculties in unity and mutual helpfulness. Some persons imagine that the most desirable parochial life is where all the parishioners are of one stripe, instead of that in which there is a finely disciplined diversity. A parish of dead uniformity would be comfortable but not educative, quiet but colourless and insipid.