“We are getting requests from every quarter for a repetition of the parliament.”
NEW RECOGNITION OF SOCIAL CHRISTIANITY
In religious periodical literature two high notes of social significance have recently been struck. The Constructive Quarterly has appeared from the press of the George H. Doran Company in America and Hodder & Stoughton in England. It is planned to be a free forum where all the churches of Christendom may frankly and fully state their “operative beliefs” and their distinctive work, “including and not avoiding differences,” but making “no attack with polemical animus on others.”
The purpose of this undertaking is to afford opportunity for the churches, without compromise, “to re-introduce themselves to one another through the things they themselves positively hold to be vital to Christianity,” “so that all may know what the differences are and what they stand for, and that all may respect them, in order to cherish and preserve whatever is true and helpful and to discover and grow out of whatever is harmful and false.”
As it has no editorial pronouncements and no scheme for the unity of Christendom to promote, the Quarterly will depend upon the catholicity and representative influence of its editorial board, selected from all countries and communions, to promote a fellowship of work and spirit. The middle term of the Quarterly’s subtitle—a journal of the Faith, Work and Thought of Christendom—is likely to prove the basis for the correlation of the other two. For long before the faith and the thought of Christendom may be correlated, the churches will surely co-operate in their common work.
The Hibbert Journal, which for ten years has been the ablest technical quarterly review of theology and philosophy, announces a department of social service. This policy was foreshadowed by the editor as early as October, 1906, in a notably direct and able protest against the church standing aloof from “the world.” He stoutly maintained that
“the alienation from church life of so much that is good in modern culture, and so much that is earnest in every class, is the natural sequel to the traditional attitude of the church to the world.”
How false and unintelligible, as well as untenable, this attitude is appears in these categorical imperatives:
“If by ‘the world’ we mean such things as parliamentary or municipal government, the great industries of the nation, the professions of medicine, law, and arms, the fine arts, the courts of justice, the hospitals, the enterprises of education, the pursuit of physical science and its application to the arts of life, the domestic economy of millions of homes, the daily work of all the toilers—if, in short, we include that huge complex of secular activities which keeps the world up from hour to hour, and society as a going concern—then the churches which stand apart and describe all this as morally bankrupt are simply advertising themselves as the occupiers of a position as mischievous as it is false.
“If, on the other hand, we exclude these things from our definition, what, in reason, do we mean by ‘the world?’ Or shall we so frame the definition as to ensure beforehand that all the bad elements belong to the world, and all the good to the church? Or, again, shall we take refuge in the customary remark that whatever is best in these secular activities is the product of Christian influence and teaching in the past? This course, attractive though it seems, is the most fatal of all. For if the world has already absorbed so much of the best the churches have to offer, how can these persist in declaring that the former is morally bankrupt?