The New Christianity; or, The Religion of the New Age

by Salem Goldworth Bland

CHAPTER III.

THE GREAT CHRISTIANITY

But American Christianity is not final Christianity, nor even the highest and richest form of Christianity in sight, unless it blossom into a yet richer and more varied loveliness than it at present gives promise of. Of all actual forms of Christianity it seems to have the fairest promise, but it will probably prove to be only a tributary, though a great one, of a still mightier river.

Is it possible for us at this stage to discern at least the outline of the Great Christianity that is to be?

Certainly, every great historic form of Christianity has been tried by history and found wanting. As much of primitive Jewish Christianity as refused to merge in the large Catholic Christianity of the Greco-Roman world dried up into an unfruitful, bigoted, and eccentric heresy and perished.

Greek Christianity emphasized doctrine and tore itself by doctrinal disputes into a shattered, helpless welter of vituperative sects, powerless to spread the Gospel, powerless to withstand the Mohammedan,--the shame and tragedy of Christian history.

Latin Christianity emphasized the organization and became the enemy of freedom and progress which, with few exceptions, every Roman Catholic people has had to fight and dethrone to escape intellectual and moral decay and death.

Teutonic Christianity has emphasized freedom and the rights of the individual. Like Islam, it has been a fighting faith. And judgment has fallen on it in its loss of unity, its bitter and wasteful sectarian wrangles, and the ferocious strife between labor and capital, the outcome of which may be one of the great tragedies of history.

[#] It is, perhaps, scarcely necessary to remark that Protestantism is here being compared, not with Roman Catholicism, but with ideal Christianity. Roman Catholicism, too, has been a fighting faith, and in the appalling century and a half of religious wars that set in with the Protestant Reformation it was the older faith that first resorted to force. [Transcriber's note: there was no reference to this footnote in the source book.]

Protestantism has taught her people to fight for their rights and now is helpless before the selfish conflict of her own children that have learned too well her spirit.