On the Future of This Church
On Sunday, November 24 last, as most of you know. I was invited by unanimous vote of the people of All Souls Church, Chicago, "to take up the work laid down by (their) beloved pastor," the late Dr. Jenkin Lloyd Jones. On Thursday, November 28, I received this call through the personal visitation of two members of the Chicago church, and agreed to give it most earnest consideration. On Sunday, December 1, through my associate, Mr. Brown, I announced this call to the congregation of the Church of the Messiah, explaining that it involved the ministry of All Souls Church, the directorship of Abraham Lincoln Centre, and the editorship of the weekly liberal religious journal, called "Unity." I stated in my announcement that I had asked and been granted ample time for the consideration of this call, but that I intended to answer it as speedily as possible. On Thursday last, just five weeks to a day after receiving the invitation to Chicago, I sent my reply for transmission to the people of All Souls Church this morning. I choose this same time to announce to you my decision.
At the beginning of my consideration of the problem, I found questions of personal inclination and comfort inevitably to the fore. For twelve years minus one month, I have lived and labored in New York City. Every particle of moral energy which I possess, I have invested here. Nearly all of my friends are associated with this community. Especially am I bound by ties of deepest reverence and affection to this church. Here are memories of joy and sorrow and great trial which are more truly a part of me than the voice with which I speak, or the hand with which I turn these pages. It [3] needed but this single summons to teach me what I had not known—how deeply my roots are struck into the soil of this place, and how great the pain and hazard of their exposure, removal and replanting.
It very soon became clear to me, however, that personal considerations could rightly have but little part in the settlement of this problem. In no spirit of bravado, but in simplest recognition of the truth, I say to you that I believe I would have been betraying the profession which I have sworn to serve had I permitted conditions of personal affection, however lovely and precious, to determine my decision in this case. I take seriously the fact of my ordination—that as a minister of religion I have been "set apart," as the traditional phrase has it, to the high purpose of propagating an idea, championing a cause, seeking the best and the highest that I know in terms of God and of his holy will. I am here, in other words, not to make or to keep friends, not to enjoy pleasant associations of hand and heart, not even to serve a particular church, but to serve, perhaps at the cost of these other and more personal things, the great idea of which I speak. To allow my individual sentiments to fix the place and fashion of my professional service, would be to me as dastardly a thing as to allow considerations of profit or prestige to make decision. Not even my wife or my children could interfere in this case. My problem was to determine where I could best advance the ideals to which I have given my life—where I could find the weapons or tools best fitted to my hand for the doing of my work—and there to stand. To remain in this church and city might be infinitely desirable to me as a man; but I must decide not as a man but as a minister, and therefore if I remained, it must be because I could do no other!
But there was another consideration which held me to this impersonal relation to the problem. I refer to the fact that the Great War had brought to a focus in my own soul the inward and largely unconscious spiritual development of a decade. I had discovered, through [4] much tribulation of mind and heart, the ideal which I sought to serve, and disclosed to myself at least the picture of the realization of this ideal in institutional form. This same Great War, however, had distracted my parish, absorbed the energies and attention of my people, and in spite of wellnigh unexampled forbearance, had introduced elements of misunderstanding and even alienation. The conflict, in other words, had no more left our church unchanged than the world itself. We had been shaken and distressed and tortured and driven, so that we were no longer the persons we once were. You knew me, and I knew you, as we were yesterday; but we did not know one another as we were going to be, or should want to be, tomorrow. It was necessary that we should meet not on the plane of the past, nor even of the present, but on the plane of the future, and thus find ourselves again, and discover what now, in this new world, we wanted, and would be able, to do together. Months before the War was ended, it had clearly entered into my mind to summon you to conference on our future relations as minister and people. This invitation from Chicago but precipitated suddenly what was in itself inevitable sooner or later. It introduced into a problem already existing between you and me, a third element—namely, the people of Abraham Lincoln Centre. The problem, however, in its nature, remained the same. I have work to do. I have set my hand to the plow, and I must find the field where I can best drive this plow through the furrow of my sowing.
In order to make plain the situation, as it has presented itself to my mind during the last five weeks, I must turn to the past for a moment, and bring to you therefrom some fragments of autobiography. Those of you who were present at the meeting on last Monday night, have already heard what I am about to say. I beg your undivided attention, none the less, that you may note the bearing of this recital not on a problem presented, as then, but on a decision made, as now.
I entered the Unitarian ministry in the year 1904, [5] under the influence of motives not unfamiliar. In the first place, I saw the pulpit. I went into the ministry for the same primary reason which has held me there through all these years gone by—a desire to preach. I think I can say, in no spirit of boasting, that from my earliest days I have had an intense interest in the problem of truth, and a passion to interpret and defend by the spoken word, the truth as I saw it, to other men. It is just this passion, I suppose, which makes the preacher, as distinguished from the poet or the scientist. So Phillip Brooks would seem to suggest in his famous dictum, that preaching is "Truth (conveyed) through Personality." Furthermore, the truth which I desired to expound was theological in its nature. My whole approach to the problem was along the lines of speculation in the field of religious, as distinguished from political or social, thought. God, the soul, immortality, the origin and destiny of man, sin and salvation—these were the questions that held me, even as a boy, partly, I suppose, because of native inclination, partly because of careful training in a Unitarian home and church, mostly I am convinced because I early came under the spell of that prince of liberal preachers, Dr. Minot J. Savage. To do what Dr. Savage was doing each Sunday, preaching to eager throngs the great truths of the Unitarian gospel—this became the consuming ambition of my life. I wanted to stand in a pulpit and preach. I decided to do so; and if judgment in such a question can be based on experiences of inward joy, I am ready to testify that my decision was not unwise.
I entered the church, therefore, primarily because it had a pulpit. But other reasons, not so decisive, and yet impressive, persuaded me to this same end. Thus I saw in the church not only a pulpit but an altar. Indeed, the pulpit distinguished itself in my mind from a platform or a teacher's desk, by the fact that it was always associated with the presence, visible and invisible, of an altar for divine worship. It was easy for me to picture myself as saying all I wanted to say in [6] college halls, in theater meetings, in public forums, but I craved for my work on behalf of truth the atmosphere and environment of spiritual devotion. It was my desire, in other words, to be not merely a teacher or speaker, but a preacher; not merely a prophet, but also a priest. This does not mean that I am a churchman, as such; or that I find any permanent significance in rituals or other forms of worship. But there is in me that which seeks the stimulus of praise and prayer, the uplift of conscious communion with the Eternal, the consolation of appeal to, and trust in, God. Not only from habit, but from temperament, I find myself at home amid religious rites. Nothing so moved me on my one trip to Europe, as the hours I spent under the shadows of the great cathedrals. As a quiet place of worship, as well as a high place of testimony, the church called me in those youthful years, and I gave answer.
A third motive for my choice of the ministry must not be forgotten. I refer to the appeal of the church as a place for action, a service station on behalf of public causes. My vision of what we mean by public causes was strangely limited. It scarcely went beyond the Unitarian denomination, and the works of charity and kindly reform with which it has always been identified. I was a passionate Unitarian in those days. I had read, and been deeply stirred by, the story of the achievements which Unitarianism had wrought on behalf of freedom, fellowship and character in religion. I reverenced its saints and prophets, and longed to follow in their train. Hence the eagerness with which I sought preparation for the Unitarian ministry—that I might serve the church—advance its glory and magnify its work.
It was with such ideas as these in my heart that I was ordained in February, 1904. Within two years there came an event which shook my life to its foundations, revolutionized my thought, and changed the whole character of my interest and work. I refer to what we have [7] learned to describe in our time as the social question. This question, of course, is nothing new. It has burned at the heart of life from the beginning, and at intervals has flamed forth like the eruption of a volcano, to the terror and glory of the world. Its latest phase, as we know it today in the religious field, made its appearance at about the time I entered the ministry. I recall that the book, which first revealed the fires so soon to burst upon us—Prof. Peabody's "Jesus Christ and the Social Question "—was published in 1903, the year before my ordination. I was not unprepared for what was coming. My deep-rooted reverence for Theodore Parker, the supreme prophet of applied Christianity in our time, and my enthusiastic study of his life, had revealed to me the meaning of socialized religion. But I had caught only the pure essence of its spirit; I had not thought to apply it to the social problems of today. Indeed, I was not aware of the existence of such problems. My whole approach to the question of truth and experience up to that time, had been along the lines of speculation in the field of theological, as contrasted with political or social, thought. In the second year of my ministry, however, I read Henry George's "Progress and Poverty"; then followed the writings of Henry D. Lloyd and Prof. Walter Rauschenbusch; then came the deep and prolonged plunge into the waters of socialism. For several years after I came to this church, I was in a state of intellectual and emotional upheaval impossible for me to describe. At last came a conviction which was a complete reversal of all my former ideas. I was as a man converted; I was as one who had seen a great light. Henceforth I was a social radical; and religion, pre-eminently not a testimony to theological truth but a crusade for social change. Of course, my interest in theology has persisted; but its place in my life has tended to become ever more subordinate to other and more directly practical interests. You know how the character of my preaching has changed since I first entered the Messiah pulpit. You know with what [8] waxing intensity of expression I have moved to the left of our various divisions on the social question. You do not know, hence I must tell you, how this intensity of radical conviction is destined to continue in the years that are now before us. For the war has accelerated the social crisis beyond all forecasting. In two years has transpired what fifty years could not have consummated under more normal conditions. Three great empires—Russia, Germany, Austria—and several newborn countries, like that of the Czecho-Slovaks, have been captured by the Socialists; and the British Empire seems promised to the British Labor Party in not more than another decade or two. The social revolution long prophesied, long hoped for, long feared, is here; and this means in countries like our own, still untouched by change, such a "sturm and drang periode," as makes even the Great War pale into insignificance. Now in these years which are before us, I propose to speak and serve for the speediest and most thoroughgoing social reconstruction. I am committed both by conviction and temperament to the program of the British Labor Party and its policy of indirect or political action for the advancement of that program. This is my predominant interest at this moment, and through what is destined I suppose to be the whole period of my life. This is as much the cause of our day as abolition was the cause of the days before the Civil War. To this I have given all I have—from this I intend to withdraw nothing that I have given. Not in any sense of bitterness or violence in method, but in every sense of utter change as the end desired, I am committed to the ideal of the complete democratization of society.