Never have I received any satisfying answer. Partyism--churchism--will ever stick to its fetish. Too many churches--or, shall I say, church fabrics--breeding controversy where there should be agreement, each sect and subdivision fighting phantoms of its fancy. In the city that once proclaimed itself eternal there is war between the Quirinal and the Vatican, the government of Italy and the papal hierarchy. In France the government of the republic and the Church of Rome are at daggers-drawn. Before the world-war England and Germany--each claiming to be Protestant--were looking on askance, irresolute, not as to which side might be right and which wrong, but on which side "is my bread to be buttered?" In America, where it was said by the witty Frenchmen we have fifty religions and only one soup, there are people who think we should begin to organize to stop the threatened coming of the Pope, and such like! "O Liberty," cried Madame Roland, "how many crimes are committed in thy name!" "O Churchism," may I not say, "how much nonsense is trolled off in thy name!"
I would think twice before trusting the wisest and best of men with absolute power; but I would trust never any body of men--never any Sanhedrim, consistory, church congress or party convention--with absolute power. Honest men are often led to do or to assent, in association, what they would disdain upon their conscience and responsibility as individuals. En masse extremism generally prevails, and extremism is always wrong; it is the more wrong and the more dangerous because it is rarely wanting for plausible sophistries, furnishing congenial and convincing argument to the mind of the unthinking for whatever it has to propose.
III
Too many churches and too much partyism! It is love--love through grace of God--truth where we can find it--which shall irradiate the life that is. If when we have prepared ourselves for the life to come love be wanting, nothing else is much worth while. Not alone the love of man for woman, but the love of woman for woman and of man for man; the divine fraternity taught us by the Sermon on the Mount; the religion of giving, not of getting; of whole-hearted giving; of joy in the love and the joy of others.
Who giveth himself with his alms feeds three--
Himself, his hungering neighbor and Me.
For myself I can truthfully subscribe to the formula: "I believe in God the Father Almighty; Maker of heaven and earth. And Jesus Christ, his only Son, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried; He descended into hell, the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead."
That is my faith. It is my religion. It was my cradle song. It may not be, dear ones of contrariwise beliefs, your cradle song or your belief, or your religion. What boots it? Can you discover another in word and deed, in luminous, far-reaching power of speech and example, to walk by the side of this the Anointed One of your race and of my belief?
As the Irish priest said to the British prelate touching the doctrine of purgatory: "You may go further and fare worse, my lord," so may I say to my Jewish friends--"Though the stars in their courses lied to the Wise Men of the desert, the bloody history of your Judea, altogether equal in atrocity to the bloody history of our Christendom, has yet to fulfill the promise of a Messiah--and were it not well for those who proclaim themselves God's people to pause and ask, 'Has He not arisen already?'"
I would not inveigh against either the church or its ministry; I would not stigmatize temporal preaching; I would have ministers of religion as free to discuss the things of this world as the statesmen and the journalists; but with this difference: That the objective point with them shall be the regeneration of man through grace of God and not the winning of office or the exploitation of parties and newspapers. Journalism is yet too unripe to do more than guess at truth from a single side. The statesman stands mainly for political organism. Until he dies he is suspect. The pulpit remains therefore still the moral hope of the universe and the spiritual light of mankind.
It must be nonpartisan. It must be nonprofessional. It must be manly and independent. But it must also be worldy-wise, not artificial, sympathetic, broad-minded and many-sided, equally ready to smite wrong in high places and to kneel by the bedside of the lowly and the poor.