If, on the one hand, this unsettlement has caused pessimism and distress on the part of those who cannot see that a living faith is bound to be a growing thing, an organism and not a crystal, it has brought about a very different attitude on the part of many others, who feel that certain obvious religious duties are incumbent upon them, even if they may never be able to solve for themselves such questions as modern scholarship has raised. The social and business life of to-day has one fine feature, unfortunately quite dissociated from the Christian Church, although created largely by Christian people. Men, immersed in business and professional life, have yet religion in their hearts; they know the need, for their own spiritual health as well as for the good of the community, of guarding against the tendency to selfishness and absorption in gain. And so we have springing up everywhere Rotarian Clubs and Kiwanian Clubs and many other organizations of similar kind, which foster a genial and kindly rivalry in well-doing. Once a week men gather and refuse to admit that they are growing old. They laugh and are happy. They are looking around for some good thing to do. Is it an industrial training home for boys, away among the mountains, in the best of surroundings, far from the city streets; is it the installation of a new hot-water apparatus in their city hospital—to take two instances known to me of the activities of a Rotarian and a Kiwanian Club—they throw themselves into the effort with zeal, and get, as surely they should do, joy for themselves in the securing of joy for others. Behind it there lies the feeling that whatever the uncertainties of faith may be, there are certain duties incumbent upon all who love their kind. It is better to be unselfish than selfish, better to be glad than frowning, better to come out of your isolation and know your neighbor and competitor than to retire into your shell and imagine all kinds of evil about his persistent activities. Such a movement, spreading with somewhat of the fire of a crusade, is just another evidence of the working of the Holy Spirit, another proof that religion is the most pronounced and permanent bent of the human mind. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty, and the Spirit will always manifest himself in varying modes.
What we are faced with to-day is not the destruction of religion but the change in its form and outlook. The permanent thing in the Christian religion, the unique thing, is that it has been the attempt to set forth Jesus of Nazareth. Everything else has been temporal, but that has been permanent. As men look back over history they see that many expressions of that loyalty have become antiquated, and have, without any active hostility on the part of reformers, simply ceased to be. The human mind has no longer regarded them as adequate. The study of a doctrine such as the Atonement is the best of all evidence for the fact. On so great a truth the greatest thinkers of all times have exercised themselves, and the statements made of the doctrine have been made in terms intelligible to the men of the age in which they were made. Books which deal with the subject of the Atonement are invariably stronger on their historical and critical than on their constructive sides. It is easy to understand now the defects of so great and permanent a book as Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, or, leaping over many hundreds of years, to question the adequacy of the statements of Robertson of Brighton, or of MacLeod Campbell. Even the greatest writers, when they deal with eternal truth, the Apostle Paul himself being witness, write in the language of their time for the men of their time, and are influenced in their statements by the ideas that are in the air in their time. The truth itself is a matter of Christian experience, whether it be taught by the old women of Bedford to John Bunyan, or by the thoroughly equipped scholar of to-day to a student who has all his senses exercised to receive the truth. But, while mediæval thought has few greater names than that of Anselm, Cur Deus Homo is now studied exactly like Faraday’s Researches, only as a matter of history. Human thought has left Anselm behind.
To the trained thinker, of course, this position is the merest commonplace. The wine of divine truth is ever new, and it has to be put into new bottles. He does an infinite disservice to faith who strives to tie it indefinitely to particular statements. The heresy of yesterday may be the orthodoxy of to-day, and the orthodoxy of to-day the exhausted formula of to-morrow. The men of this generation read with amazement the attacks of the sixties on Darwin, attacks so full of acerbity, so reckless in their bandying of evil charges and in their ascription of anti-religious motives. And to-day, while the biologist may still debate the particular issue, we know that the conception of continuity and development has been of enormous service in every range of thought. The first debates on the Origin of Species have given place to a general conception. Einstein, in the same way, may influence profoundly not only physical but theological and ethical problems.
And so those who to-day have faith in a living and personal Christ must not lose courage, even if they do find the envelope in which that faith was wrapped being torn asunder. This particular envelope may have served its turn. We have this treasure in earthen vessels. We may ask as a matter of intellectual curiosity as to the form in which men expressed their belief some centuries ago, but the vital thing for us is that to-day we shall have such a form as shall be intelligible and arresting for us and our contemporaries. Wherever the Spirit of Christ is quick there will always be the double process in action, the challenging of old forms and the creation of new. The speech in the process may vary from generation to generation, but the process itself is a symptom of life. The desire for change is no evidence of impiety; it may be the setting forth of the prophet. The ages which are the ages of godlessness are those in which there has been no challenging of the accepted thing. In social as in religious life there are always multitudes whose motto is “Leave well alone.” The position is a complete begging of the question. Is the situation really “well”? Many to-day in the Old Country sigh for the industrial conditions of forty years ago, when labor was subservient and cheap, and when taxation was low. At that time it never seemed to occur to any one that there was something wrong with a system in which one-third of the population of a great city like Glasgow lived in houses of one room, where women went barefoot throughout the winter months, where the question of the next meal was an insistent one with tens of thousands. Because the system had existed so long, the sufferers under it did not challenge it, while those who profited by it had no sense of the anomaly of a situation which worked comfortably for them. It was not that men were heartless or unbelieving. They were tender in their affections and quick with their charities. But the existence of this condition of great wealth alongside of abject poverty and degradation was regarded with the inevitableness of fate. It existed and therefore it was accepted. It had the sanction of age and was not to be challenged. The public conscience was not awake. There was no vision and the people perished. The last seven years have wrought a mighty change. Apart from any immediate economic issue there has been an alteration in the general attitude toward the question of wages. A community is not stable in its ordering nor is it genuinely prosperous if one main element in its financing is the maintenance of vast industries by labor so cheap as to be always upon the verge of destitution. The economic considerations are not the only ones, nor indeed are they the primary ones. A healthy and contented population is real wealth. A generation ago our cities emptied their filth into the rivers and lakes at their doors, and then used dredges to remove the sludge. Now, under new methods, unclean products are purified by chemical or bacteriological processes; the effluent is clean and innocuous, and there is no need for dredging. A great deal of the social rescue work and philanthropy of past years has been a beginning at the wrong end. Drunkenness and an iron social system manufactured the criminal, the wastrel, the lunatic, and we dealt with the waste product. Now we are trying to keep our rivers clean.
A change of similar character, but even more rapid in its operation, is taking place in our thoughts of religion. It is coming about rather by the opening of the eyes than by any special process of reasoning or by any definite challenging of old methods. We are becoming not a little wearied of the tyranny of organization. We are afflicted by “drives” of all sorts; by vast conceptions of “the world for Christ in this generation,” while the streams of Christian thought are all the while running shallower and more shallow, with less and less power to drive anything. In the States, as in Canada, there have been great campaigns for funds which also tried to be campaigns for spiritual results. It has been discovered to be an easier thing to raise money than to quicken the spirit. Life remains as materialistic and as worldly as before, and the temperature is dropping as with the coming of an east wind on the Maine coast. Theologically in both countries we are still inclined to fight for a former condition of things which, as a matter of fact, has ceased to have power. It is our burden, as it is our glory, to stand in difficult days. We shall all the sooner come to grips with the real issue if we understand that it is our business to set forth the undying Christ as we know him, and not to resuscitate, if that were possible, the forms and phrases and intellectualisms of an age that is gone. Back to Christ is the necessity—not the Christ of the Creeds compounded with the technical terms of Greek philosophy or the juristic outlook of Roman law, but the Christ of the Gospels. Any religious awakening which is going to move the common weal will begin in a revival of personal religion. Public morals are what personal religion makes them. The power-house is more vital than the transmission-plant. Wherever one looks it is to find that great public movements have had their origin in the hearts of consecrated men and women. Religion does not suffer by changing its form; it will founder if it be not ever related afresh to Jesus.
It may be taken for granted that an inquiring age like this will never submit itself to an intellectual position which presents itself merely on the ground of authority. The Reformation won the right to think, and in this we shall not be less than our fathers. Whatever we believe must be in harmony with our reason and our experience. This does not mean that those who exercise this right to think are become rationalists. We know ourselves everywhere to be surrounded by the evidences of a divine purpose: for us the things which are not seen are eternal. We find in the history of to-day—in the history of those past seven tangled and tragic years—clear manifestations of the hand of God. But we believe that in the interpretation of Jesus personal experience must always have a major part. Our faith must be something not merely personal to ourselves but of which we can give some sort of account to others. Christ spoke no more incisive word than this: “Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee of me?”
There can be no question as to the dire need there is of such an awakening by which men and women may once again be turned to spiritual things. War is, under all conditions, and even when waged for the purest of motives, an unmitigated evil. The saddest things in war are not the deaths in action. Abnormal conditions, which bring together millions of men in a cause in which the sense of personal responsibility is merged in the sacrifice for a general purpose, produce abnormal results. The old moorings are lifted. The old restraints, so largely the result of environment and of local opinion and knowledge, cease to operate. The sense of “mine” and “thine” is loosened. Continence ceases to be a primal virtue. The idle become yet more idle and the reckless yet more reckless. And if the results upon the men who have seen service have been thus evil, the effects on the stay-at-home community have been even more evil because less gross. Money has been made in great quantity by those who have no sense of the stewardship of wealth, and has been displayed with an aggressiveness that only embitters the way of simple and modest people. If the morals of men have deteriorated, women may well consider whether their fashions of dress have not contributed largely to the general demoralization. There were periods when lewdness advertised itself by its garb and indecency wore a uniform. It is not possible now to draw any large generalizations. The pungent definition of the modern novel as the kind of book that no nice girl would allow her mother to read may or may not be justified, but a glance through the pages of the cheap American story magazine will leave no one in uncertainty as to the kind of thing that is apparently most marketable. Any one to-day who takes a grave view of moral and religious conditions need not be afraid of being counted a misanthrope. Public life will always reflect not inaccurately private conditions. If ever there was a time when those who name the name of Christ required to reflect the character of Christ it is now.
Suppose, then, we come to Jesus and ask ourselves what were the characteristics of the life he lived and the faith he taught, should we not set down some broad and simple issues which current religious life might well be reminded of?
1. The Joy That He Brought.
When our Lord came it was to a world which was shrouded with the idea of demons and vindictive spiritual powers. That dark time between the close of the Old Testament period and the beginning of the New had been a forcing ground for all such thoughts. The powers of evil were serried ranks over against the power of God, and in the hands of those powers of evil Pilate and Herod were mere puppets. St. Paul, for instance, speaks of the wisdom of God, and then he adds: “Which none of the princes of this world knew, for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory” (1 Cor. 2:8). “It was not of Pontius Pilate and of Herod that Paul was speaking, but of things far more awful and far more powerful—thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers—as he calls them elsewhere the world rulers of this darkness, and at their head is the prince of the power of the air” (Glover, Jesus in Experience, page 1).