Old farms and village stores pass into the hands of aliens—in many instances Hebrews—summer boarders claim the attention of the faithful women of the congregation for the most favorable months of the year. Sunday sports engage the interests of the indifferent, and there are many other disintegrating elements.
In a land where progress calls to progress, where the results of hasty development create a large share of its problem—a land where the need of Christian effort is paramount, and where such effort is so vital to the world, the decadence of the country church is of far-reaching significance. Home Missions is called to direct its energizing, constructive ability to the solution of this baffling and discouraging feature of its problem to a greater degree than ever before.
Home Missions at this time also confronts a new opportunity and obligation—to make its voice heard, its influence felt, for international peace.
These winter days of 1914, in which the world has apparently lost its soul in the fury of slaughter, speak very loudly to the heart of Christianity.
No force for the upbuilding of the Christ power on earth can ignore the significance and solemnity of this time.
Has Christianity failed in these warring lands, or have they who are controlled by Christian standards and ethics in other relations, failed to apprehend that the Christ test—His principles—must be brought to bear upon all of life—upon personal, individual, national and international relations?
The fruition of Christianity must at last bring in the day when the conscience of Christian nations will hold true to the Master's teaching. "What ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them," must be wrought into national consciousness and practiced as an international principle. With the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man is the very heart of the Gospel message.
Home Missions must take account of the moral reactions of such carnage as is now taking place.
"Death meets those myriads whilst indulging the most appalling passions—their hands filled with weapons of carnage, their hearts with fratricidal hate. It is the sense of the moral death involved, searing of conscience, deadening of heart, blunting of moral faculty, fruits of death brought forth in the soul of the survivor, which are more horrifying to the enlightened consciousness than the dying groans of the stricken can be to the more bodily nerve. The thing to fear is not pain, but trespass; not suffering, but sin—the peculiar sin of war is that it corrupts while it consumes, that it demoralizes whilst it destroys. It is not because war kills that it is the devil, but because it depraves; and it is because it depraves that it is condemned by the religious consciousness. The damage that it inflicts upon the persons and property of men is trifling beside the damage it inflicts upon morals; and it is this that is exciting in thoughtful minds a fresh interest in the whole military conception. The ominous thing is not the body prostrate on the battlefield, but the brute rampant in the mother-land; the general lowering of ideal, the blatant materialism and defiant selfishness." [Footnote: Walter Walsh—The Moral Damage of War.]
Home Missions must consider the responsibility of our Christian nation toward the attitude of world thought that made possible this war. It was John Hay in his instructions to our American delegates to the First Hague Conference who said: "Next to the great fact of a nation's independence is the great fact of its interdependence." [Footnote: William I. Hull—The New Peace Movement.]