It seems impossible to exaggerate the apparent contrast between Christian society in its first shape and that society which has grown out of it; between the Church, as it was at first called forth out of the world—at open war with it, condemning its morality, rejecting its objects, declining its advantages, in utter antipathy to its spirit—and Christian society as we know it, and live in it, and on the whole take it for granted. The Sermon on the Mount was once taken very literally: it is easy to say, take it literally still, with the Poor Men of Lyons or the Moravians; only then you sacrifice society.
But society, as well as religion, is God’s creation and work. If we have anything to guide us as to God’s will in the facts of the world—if we see His providence in the tendencies and conditions amid which we live, and believe that in them He is our teacher and interpreter, we must believe that social order, with its elementary laws, its necessary incidents and pursuits, is God’s will for this present world. He meant us to live in this world. And for this world—unless there is anything more to be done than to wait for its ending—what we call society, the rule of law, the employments of business, the cultivation of our infinite resources, the embodiment of public force and power, the increase of wealth, the continued improvement of social arrangements—all this is indispensable. There is no standing still in these matters; the only other alternative is drifting back into confusion and violence.
Man has to live his appointed days on earth. He must live them according to the conditions, physical, moral, social, which one greater than man has imposed upon him. He must live in society, and fulfil the obligations which social and political life imply and require. He must render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. He must, if his life here is not to be a wreck and a ruin submit himself to the law of duty, of reason, of conscience: he must tame the wild beast within him, he must crush the dull brute selfishness, which, at the very height of polished civilization, would cut him off from his kind, in a deadly isolation from sympathy and help and love. [Note: R. W. Church, The Message of Peace, 43.]
1. The Christians of long ago, though they shared the antique view of the universe which harmonized with the apocalyptic notion of the Kingdom, were unable to maintain the faith in its speedy coming. Time itself had belied that expectation. We, on the other hand, with our totally different conception of the world, are staggered not so much by the delay of the Kingdom as by the strangeness of the whole notion. If we are honest enough to confess it to ourselves, we must realize that we do not seriously expect a catastrophe which will involve the sun and all the stars of heaven in the fate of this small planet which is our earth. Our present astronomical knowledge forbids us to entertain the conception that the stars might fall in showers upon the earth. Some cosmical catastrophe there may be, some startling intervention of God in the history of the world. But in the main we rather expect that God will work out His purpose by gradual and orderly means, and with whatsoever religious ardour we have we devote ourselves in the way of our several callings to the amelioration of this world as we now find it.
The Prince of Peace works in the centuries; He takes His time. As it was in the days of His flesh, so it is in history. He teaches men as they are able to bear His teaching. Not by sudden revolutions, but through the slow and gradual emergence and victory of principles, does He make captive the powers of the world. Slavery was from the first implicitly condemned to abolition by the essential principles of the Gospel. But it was tolerated and emptied of its characteristic evils by the great Apostles; while it only disappeared, even from the Christian world—if it has disappeared—in the nineteenth century. And as with slavery, so with war. War is condemned by the spirit and drift of our Lord’s teaching, although the New Testament seems, in a sense, to recognize it by laying down the duties of soldiers, just as it seems to recognize slavery by prescribing the duties of masters and slaves. But war, so an Apostle teaches us, as a rule, has its origin in unregulated human desires; and when all hearts and minds, or those of the majority, are brought into the obedience of Christ, war will become impossible.
(1) We are bound to see that the coming of the Kingdom is to be progressive, but we are not bound to admit that it will be slow. In that assumption we have been misled by analogies from Nature. The pre-human stages were leisurely; therefore we had said, God in His grace must be leisurely. We had come to acquiesce in God’s delay; many had come to acquiesce in war as the human sequel to the struggle for existence; and with as little reason. From the unlawful tyranny of biology, applied blindly to human history, we were delivered by the discovery of the apocalyptic element in the Gospel. “The Kingdom need not tarry.”
(2) One thing more, the Christian spirit must enter into every part of thought and life. That obedience, which is implicit in Christian discipleship, is something which carries right to the furthest frontiers of our lives. We have been told that Christianity has nothing to do with business. Consequently, there have been Christian men who have lived up to a high Christian standard in other respects, but, when they have come to business, have accepted the conventional business standards of the time. We know what the consequences of that are. We have similarly heard it said that religion has nothing to do with politics, as if religion and politics could be separated. So we have been dividing our lives because we have not yet disciplined ourselves to the view and to the practice which make Christianity imperial right through the whole of our lives.
I had a letter only yesterday from a friend of mine. He says that under all the circumstances, Christians may be justified at the present time in coming out on to a sub-Christian platform. I think that that is where the Church has always been, so that it will be nothing new for it to come out on to a sub-Christian platform. We have not yet, in a thoroughgoing way, claimed for our Lord Jesus Christ that empire over the whole of life which belongs to Him by right. [Note: R. Roberts, in Friends and the War, 35.]
But are we really making progress? Yes, we are making progress. Though the delay has proved long, though the wheels of the chariot tarry, though the morning-red faded into a colourless day, and the sunset consummation-lights are not yet in sight, much has been accomplished.
We are tempted in our despondency with the state of Christendom to forget how much better it is than non-Christendom. I remember, after spending a short time in Mohammedan countries, on my return to England, feeling for some months as if everything here were perfect. To see the roads made and life safe, to go about without fear of personal assault or robbery, to know that women were honoured, and that law was effective, stood out against the picturesque hell of the Moslem communities as a solid and gleaming reality, an achievement for which we should be daily thanking God. It seemed to me in that period as if it would be a worthy object of life to get the rule of Islam pushed out of Europe and the Holy Land, where I had seen its desolating and corrupting sway.
But when I visited a heathen country these impressions were even stronger. After seeing Madura and Kalighat, the images of Siva and Kali, the object of a people’s worship, after hearing of what goes on continually in the homes and the temples of Hinduism, I could hardly believe the happiness of being on an English ship, and on Sunday hearing the service and joining in a Christian hymn. The overwhelming difference between Christendom and the countries which have not come into contact with the Christian truth at all, I can only imagine. But I know that it is impossible to put the two pictures side by side without knowing that Christ’s good news has penetrated the world and produced an effect which is, as He said, like leaven hidden in three measures of meal, working until the whole be leavened. [Note: R. F. Horton, Reconstruction, 298.]
On the 14th of June 1910, at the Central Y.M.C.A. Hall in Bombay, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bombay, who is a Justice of the Bombay High Court, a Hindu gentleman of the highest standing, who does not call himself a Christian, made an address on “The Kingdom of Christ and the Spirit of the Age.” Among other things, he said: “I should like to say at the outset that it is not an easy thing for me to stand on this platform and address a Christian audience on the Kingdom of Christ and the Spirit of the Age. Let me tell you what I consider the greatest miracle of the present day; it is this: that to this great country, with its three hundred millions of people, there should come from a little island unknown by name even to our forefathers, many thousand miles distant from our shores, and with a population of but fifty to sixty millions, a message so full of spiritual life and strength as the Gospel of Christ. This surely is a miracle, if ever there was one. And this message has not only come, but it is finding a response in our hearts, for as I have already indicated to you, the old conception of a spiritual worship of God has not entirely perished from the minds of the people, though it may be buried below a mass of ceremony and superstition. The process of the conversion of India to Christ may not be going on as rapidly as you hope, or in exactly the manner that you hope, but, nevertheless, I say India is being converted; the ideas that lie at the heart of the Gospel of Christ are slowly, but surely, permeating every phase of Hindu thought.” [Note: R. A. Hume, An Interpretation of India's Religious History, 215.]
3. The progress is not continuous. There comes a set-back. It has been so in all the history of Christendom. But the defeat is only temporary. Since Christianity began to act on society, as unprecedented, as characteristic, is the power of recovery which appears in society in the Christian centuries. What is the whole history of modern Europe but the history of such recoveries? And what is there like it to be found in the ancient world? Dark days have been, indeed, in Christendom. Society seemed to be breaking up, as it did at last at Rome. But wait awhile, and you saw that which you looked for in vain at Rome. The tide began to turn; the energy, the indignation, the resolute, unflinching purpose of reformation began to show itself; and whether wise or not, whether in its special and definite work a failure or even a mischief, it was at least enough to rouse society, to set it on a new course, to disturb that lethargy of custom which is so fatal, to make men believe that it was not a law of nature or of fate, that “as things had been, things must be.” That terrible disease of public and stagnant despair which killed Roman society has not had the mastery yet in Christian; in evil days, sooner or later, there have been men to believe that they could improve things, even if, in fact, they could not. And for that power of hope, often, it may be, chimerical and hazardous, but hope which has done so much for the improvement of social life, the world is indebted to Christianity.
The great reforms in Christian days have been very mixed ones; but they have been reforms, an uninterrupted series of attempts at better things; for society, for civilization, successive and real, though partial, recoveries. The monastic life, which was, besides its other aspects, the great civilizing agent in the rural populations; the varied and turbulent municipal life in the cities; the institutions in the Middle Ages, on a broad and grand scale, for teaching, for study, for preaching, for the reformation of manners; the determined and sanguine ventures of heroic enthusiasts, like St. Bernard, Savonarola, or Luther, or of gentler, but not less resolute reformers, like Erasmus and Colet; the varied schemes for human improvement, so varied, so opposed, so incompatible, yet in purpose one, of Jesuits, of Puritans, of the great Frenchmen of Port Royal—all witness to the undying, unwearied temper which had been kindled in society, and which ensured it from the mere ruin of helplessness and despair. [Note: R. W. Church, The Gifts of Civilization, 202.]
4. Such a set-back is the great European War. At least so it seems to us as we stand so near it. But even we, and in spite of all the frightfulness, even we can discern progress. The moral sense of mankind is surely, though slowly, developing into a new type of higher power: which of itself is both a cause and an effect of the shrinkage of the power of evil. And future generations will probably look upon our toleration and practice of war with much the same marvel with which we regard the barbaric customs of our ancestors. In the upward march of the ages, war will vanish as a glory and descend to a shame. Formerly, no one dreamed of apologizing for war. Multitudes exulted in it. But already war has come down to this low estate, that it has to apologize for its existence. For who now, except those militarists whose glory is their shame, and those rare writers whose super-man is little better than a brute, thinks of war otherwise than as essentially evil—necessary, it may be, for a time as a counterirritant to other evils, or as a poisonous microbe injected into the frame of things to devour other microbes still more poisonous, yet none the less radically evil? A great advance in moral evolution has manifestly been made when, as now, conscience, erect and august, with the voice of resistless command, summons war to its bar to vindicate itself; instead of lying, as once it lay, prostrate and dumb under its Juggernaut wheels.
It is difficult for us to realize how late in the history of man is the acquisition of those sentiments adverse to war, so very general in our day, which are based upon man’s repulsion from the immediate torture it entails. For untold ages he has seemed to think lightly of war’s horrors. He appears to have but just awakened to the realization of the fact that they far outbalance any possible gains it can bring. Not until 1792 was organized effort made to mitigate these horrors by the establishment of ambulance services on the field; and the Geneva Convention that founded the beneficent Red Cross was held only fifty-one years ago. But note how rapid has been the development of this movement in the last five decades.
In like manner, it is only in late times that men have thought to count the cost of war in resultant misery and monetary loss, and to balance this against the supposed benefit attained; with the result that they begin to look upon war as stupid rather than glorious. Admirable as is Norman Angell’s book The Great Illusion, it must be seen that it could not have appeared to be so striking and effective had not the masses of thinking people been quite unprepared for the thesis it maintains.
Another indication of this rapid spread of sentiments opposed to war is, of course, found in the far-seeing efforts that have led in very late decades to the establishment of The Hague tribunals, and, above all else, the League of Nations.
In 1870 Dean Alford wrote: God knows we are far enough from being an example to our neighbours: but perhaps this much may be said, that the individual and family life of our people is more generally led under the guidance of bond fide religious faith than is the case elsewhere: and that, however lamentable may be our inconsistencies, and however considerable our shortcomings, a vast pressure in the Christian direction is exercised by English public opinion over the acts and plans of our Government. We are obliged to take shame to ourselves in acknowledging that great blots may be pointed out even in recent times. Few religious men can derive satisfaction in reading of the vengeance taken in India or in Jamaica; but this we may at least venture to hope, that an utterly wanton and unjustifiable war would be for England impossible: and that in any case of national misunderstanding, there would be in this country every guarantee that all measures for keeping the peace would be tried, before the last issue, that of arms, should be joined. We know now that that hope has been justified. [Note: Dean Alford, Truth and Trust, 72.]
Is it a will-o’-the-wisp, or is dawn breaking,
That our horizon wears so strange a hue?
Is it but one more dream, or are we waking
To find that dreams, at last, are coming true
Aye, surely, in that golden glimmer streaking
The cloudy sky-line of the life of man,
We see the blessed day he has been seeking
In all directions since the world began.
Sign to each struggling and exhausted nation
Of hope fulfilled, redemption and release;
Sign of the end of needless tribulation,
And the beginning of the reign of Peace.
Country with country, brother with his brother,
Content to share, and not to grab and steal;
Ceasing the wild-beast battle, each with other,
To work in concert for the common weal.
No class-strife more, neighbour with differing neighbour;
No waste or want, to breed the plague of crime;
No soul-debasing pomp and sordid labour,
No wars, no famines, in the coming time!
But swords of slaughter—valour and brains and money—
Turned into ploughshares for the lands redeemed,
To fill men’s homes, as full as hives of honey,
With wealth unknown and happiness undreamed.
Great Art no more the plaything of the idle,
But nurse and minister to every need;
Nature no longer cowed with bit and bridle;
Conscience enfranchised and Religion freed.
All round our darksome isle the tide encroaches,
Distant and dim as yet, but spreading fast.
The reign of Love and Liberty approaches!
The heirs are coming to their own at last! [Note: Ada Cambridge, The Hand in the Dark, 55.]
5. The future is ours. In spite of all glories of what we look back to, and all discouragements in what we see now, Christianity ever claims the future for its own. If we have the spirit of our religion, it is on the future that we must throw ourselves in hope and purpose. But if we dare to hope in the future for a greater triumph for Christianity than the world has ever seen (and why should we not if we believe our own creed?) we shall come to see that the language of the New Testament has not yet lost its meaning. For the world is not to be won by anything—by religion, or empire, or thought—except on those conditions with which the kingdom of heaven first came.
Some time ago I was standing with a friend near a fir wood high up above the valley of the Tweed. Some of his workmen had been excavating there for him, and had begun the opening of a prehistoric grave, and we had gone up to examine what might be in it. As we stood looking into the cist at our feet, we saw some white specks of bone, which were all that remained of what had once been a man; and our thoughts went back to the savage mourners who had been around that grave face to face with the great mystery of death the last time that it was open to the sun. We thought of those poor savage men living their life under “the terrible conditions of prehistoric times,” hating their fellow-men, and living at enmity with them in perpetual tribal war. Then we looked around us at the wide, sunny valley that we both knew so well. We saw the smoke of many homes ascending in the clear winter air, and thought of the honest, faithful human lives that were being lived under those humble roofs. We looked at the cultivated fields around us, and thought of all that science had done to make the ground fruitful. We were living in a world of which in a measure we had learned the secrets—the hidden forces of the earth and of the sky and in the depths of the human heart. Now, the same wealth was around the poor savage man, but he was not able to take it in. The electric forces were there; the coal was there; and deep in the human heart there were treasures of fidelity, honour, truth, and love; but he had not the clue to them. They were all riches that were waiting for him. Is not that a parable of what is around you and me? There is a great wealth of love and of victory over death and chance and time waiting for us in Almighty God. We are but beginning to learn the profound secret of simple confidence and trust in His absolute power and love and liberty to help man. And, surely, too, there is a great wealth of noble inspiration lying around us in human hearts which we have as yet to discover. [Note: D. S. Cairns, in Friends and the War, 85.]
—Beyond the war-clouds and the reddened ways,
I see the Promise of the Coming Days !
I see His Sun arise, new-charged with grace
Earth’s tears to dry and all her woes efface !
Christ lives! Christ loves! Christ rules !
No more shall Might,
Though leagued with all the Forces of the Night,
Ride over Right. No more shall Wrong
The world’s gross agonies prolong.
Who waits His Time shall surely see
The triumph of His Constancy ;-
When, without let, or bar, or stay,
The coming of His Perfect Day
Shall sweep the Powers of Night away ;-
And Faith, replumed for nobler flight,
And Hope, aglow with radiance bright,
And Love, in loveliness bedight,
Shall greet the morning light.[Note: J. Oxenham, Bees in Anther, 12.]
