Religion and the War

by Yale University. Divinity School

Representing in a semi-official way the missionary societies of the United States and Canada, Dr. Robert E. Speer writes thus: "Foreign Missions are the direct antithesis of the world conditions which men most deplore and the purest expression of the principles which underlie the world order for which men are longing. Foreign Missions represent international friendship and good will. The missionary goes out to help and serve. He bridges the gulf between his own nation and the nation to which he goes. He is not seeking to exploit, or to take advantage, or to make gain. He is seeking only to befriend and aid. And his aim and spirit are internationally unifying. The missionaries succeed in surmounting all the hindrances of nationality and language in binding different peoples together in good will. Furthermore, they are demonstrating the possibility of the existence of a strong nationalistic spirit side by side with human brotherhood and international unity. They are seeking to develop in each nation a national church embodying and inspiring and consecrating to God the genius and destiny of each nation. But they are doing this because these are the elements of a yet larger unity, the unity of mankind. The first is not contradictory to the second; it is essential to it, as the perfection of the State requires the perfection of the family unit, and the family demands and does not exclude the richest individualism. It is out of her perfect ministry to the life of each nation that the Church is to be prepared to minister to the life of all humanity and to achieve its unity."[20]

As editor of The International Review of Missions and secretary of the Edinburgh Continuation Committee, Mr. J. H. Oldham states his views of the world-functions of missions: "Missions are the antithesis of war. They have created between different peoples relations, not of competition, but of coöperation. With all their shortcomings they are an embodiment of the idea that the stronger and more advanced nations exist to uplift the weaker and more backward. They are a vital expression of the principle on which the new society must rest.... The gospel of love must embody itself in act no less manifestly than selfishness and brutality have expressed themselves in the terrible scenes that the world has witnessed. The non-Christian races fear, not without cause, that the object of western peoples is to exploit them. Missions must convince them that the Church exists to help and serve them, and the desire to serve them must be made evident in ways that they can understand. The task of Missions thus grows broader and larger than we at first conceived."[21]

And such statements are not the claims of interested propagandists merely,—officials employed by missionary organizations, and hence liable to overrate the character and importance of missions to the nations. Few men have traversed the world as extensively and observantly as Sir Harry Johnston, and probably no one equals him in his varied administrative and anthropological services to Africa. In his Introduction to the Cambridge University Maitland Prize Essay for 1915, he says: "Although the writer ... is so heterodox a professor of Christianity, practical experience in Africa, Asia and America has brought home to him ever and again during the last thirty-four years the splendid work which has been and is being accomplished by all types of Christian missionary amongst the Black, Brown and Yellow peoples of non-Caucasian race, and amid those Mediterranean or Asiatic Caucasians whose skins may be a little duskier than ours, but whose far-back ancestry was the same, whose minds and bodies are of our type, but whose mentality has been dwarfed and diverted from the amazing development of the European by false faiths,—false in their interpretation of Cosmos, false to the best human ideals in daily life."

On a later page he upholds with the author "the work of Christian missionaries in general and lays down the rule that our relations with the backward peoples of the world should be carried on consonantly with the principles of Christian ethics—pity, patience, fair-mindedness, protection and instruction; with a view not to making them the carefully guarded serfs of the White race, but to enable them some day to be entirely self-dependent, and yet interdependent with us on universal human coöperation in world management."

And once more this British administrator asserts: "The value of the Christian missionary is that he serves no government. He is not the agent of any selfish State, or self-seeking community. He does not even follow very closely the narrow-minded limitations of the Church or the sect that has sent him on his mission. He is the servant of an Ideal, which he identifies with God; and this ideal is in its essence not distinguishable from essential Christianity; which is at one and the same time essential common sense, real liberty, a real seeking after progress and betterment. He preaches chastity and temperance, the obeying of such laws as are made by the community; but consonantly with all constitutional and peaceful efforts, he urges the bringing of man-made laws more and more into conformity with Christian principles."[22]

As representing nations of ancient culture coming under the helpful influences of Christian missions, perhaps no one will command a more attentive hearing than Marquis Okuma, ex-premier of Japan and one of the world's foremost statesmen. From a summary of his address, delivered at the semi-centennial of Protestant missions in that Empire, we excerpt the following: "The coming of missionaries to Japan was the means of linking this country to the Anglo-Saxon spirit to which the heart of Japan has always responded. The success of Christian work in Japan can be measured by the extent to which it has been able to infuse the Anglo-Saxon and the Christian spirit into the nation. It has been a means of putting into these fifty years an advance equivalent to that of a hundred years. Japan has a history of 2,500 years, and 1,500 years ago had advanced in civilization and domestic arts, but never took wide views, nor entered upon wide work. Only by the coming of the West in its missionary representatives, and by the spread of the Gospel, did the nation enter upon world-wide thoughts and world-wide work. This is a great result of the Christian spirit. To be sure Japan had her religions, and Buddhism prospered greatly; but this prosperity was largely through political means. Now this creed [Buddhism] has been practically rejected by the better classes who, being spiritually thirsty, have nothing to drink."[23]

These representative testimonies suggest both the fitness and the willingness of Christian missions to participate in the coming international readjustments necessitated by the war. Such an enterprise supplies what the war-weary world so greatly needs—the élan vital et créatur, to borrow Bergson's fine phrase. And the missionary leaders are alert and at their task. On April 4, 1918, Drs. John R. Mott and Charles R. Watson, representing the missionary boards of the United States and Canada, met with the Standing Committee of Missionary Societies in Great Britain and Ireland, when it was resolved to form an international "Emergency Committee of Coöperating Missions." Already the British committee had been consulted by the Government concerning certain important matters affecting the mission fields and their problems arising from the war. Such questions are becoming increasingly numerous, and their solution demands an intimate knowledge of missions and of the spirit and aspirations of African and Asiatic races. America is likewise needing such a body of experts to supplement government investigations. This country has a slight preponderance in representation on the Emergency Committee; and in the chairman, Dr. John R. Mott, the foremost Protestant leader of the world, and a man of such diplomatic gifts that President Wilson twice vainly called him to the position of minister to China,—though he accepted appointment upon commissions to deal with Mexico and Russia later,—the committee has a missionary statesman who is equal to the important trusts that will be committed to its consideration. To serve as the eyes, ears and hands of this important post-bellum council, the two largest fields, India and China, have each an energetic Continuation Committee of the Edinburgh Conference of 1910, established as the result of Dr. Mott's visits and conferences in 1912-1913. The Foreign Missions Conference of North America, and especially its Board of Reference and Counsel, are in annual and ad interim consultation as questions arise from time to time.

President King quotes these words from Lloyd George's address to a labor delegation: "Don't always be thinking of getting back where we were before the War. Get a really new world. I firmly believe that what is known as the after-the-War settlement will direct the destinies of all classes for generations to come. I believe the settlement after the War will succeed in proportion to its audacity. The readier we are to cut away from the past, the better we are likely to succeed. Think out new ways, new methods, of dealing with old problems."[24]

Another horizon of the same idealistic character opens before the eyes of our own President, the seer to the nations in this epoch-making time. In an address delivered on October 5, 1916, President Wilson proclaims the new day to the United States: "America up to the present time has been, as if by deliberate choice, confined and provincial, and it will be impossible for her to remain confined and provincial. Henceforth she belongs to the world and must act as part of the world, and all the attitudes of America will henceforth be altered." And again three weeks later he adds: "America was established in order to indicate, at any rate in one government, the fundamental rights of man. America must hereafter be ready as a member of the family of nations to exert her whole force, moral and physical, to the assertion of those rights throughout the round world." Here is a sentence from his greetings to France on Bastille Day, 1918: "The War is being fought to save ourselves from intolerable things; but it is also being fought to save mankind." And as a final word from President Wilson, taken from his discussion of the new international morality: "My urgent advice to you would be, not always to think first of America, but always, also, to think first of humanity. You do not love humanity, if you seek to divide humanity into jealous camps. Humanity can be welded together only by love, by sympathy, by justice, not by jealousy and hatred." While none of these utterances refer specifically to missions, yet surely Dr. W. I. Hull is correct in interpreting President Wilson's relation to races of the mission fields in these words: "Instead of exploiting backward peoples, he would apply the maxim of noblesse oblige, and would summon all nations to mutual aid in their ascent of 'the world's great altar stairs' up to the law and order, peace and justice, which constitute the true sunshine of God."[25]

The "really new world" of Britain's Premier will not be dominated by Machiavelli, the motto of whose sixteenth and seventeenth century monarchs was "L'état c'est moi!" even though Treitschke ranked him second only to Aristotle as a political philosopher.[26] The present cataclysm of woes does not prove Professor Cramb's contention that "Corsica has conquered Galilee"; nor has Nietzsche thrust the "pale Galilean" from his throne. That semi-insane philosopher's Uebermenschen must fall before Sir John Macdonnell's "Super-Nationalism" as set forth in the March, 1918, issue of the Contemporary Review. And the President's world-echoed phrase, "world-democracy," is uttered only with the corrective in mind that was sounded forth a score of years ago by England's Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, "Think imperially." It is only by the establishment of an Imperium in imperio through obedience to what the Duke of Wellington called the Christian's Marching Orders, the Great Commission, that the new reign of the Prince of Peace can become possible. If the blood-soaked "savagery of civilization on the march to save the world from the civilization of savagery" is the dolorous duty of the present hour, there is solace in the thought that Golgotha was but the prelude to the Resurrection and Ascension. The Ascent of Mankind in all its nations and peoples and kindreds and tongues is at hand. To hasten this universal uplift and aid the World Powers as they seek to inaugurate the New Order, no agency is likely to aid more than foreign missions among the peoples reached by that enterprise. And the new Imperial Thinking and Acts are simply those of the seven-fold Commission of the Saviour of the World, "Behold, pray, go, heal, preach, teach, baptize, all nations," the conquering Labarum of an onward-moving Church.