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The Church Amid Racial Tensions

Not only is the church set amid racial tensions, but there are racial tensions in the church, too. These racial tensions we bring in with us; they are the evidence of our unregenerateness. We do not like the thought that it may be our own unconvertedness, our own unregenerateness, that causes racial tension within the church. Therefore we sometimes choose to think it possible that God likes racial tension, that it is part of his creative plan. In the story of the Tower of Babel we find support.

Or, alternately, we choose to think that although God does not like racial tension, he knows how inevitable it is, and therefore he thinks that the races ought to stay away from one another. We can go a step further, too, and think that God thinks that if the races cannot be reasonable then they must be made to keep away from one another. And we can go yet another step and make a law to keep the races away from one another; and not only law, but a whole array of regulations, social arrangements, customs, traditions, to keep them away from one another.

One thing we can be grateful for -- it is getting very hard indeed for a Christian to think that God likes his race better than other races. A Christian may still like his own race better than others, but it is getting very hard to think that God agrees with him. And even if he does think that God agrees with him, it is getting very hard, almost impossible, to say it out loud.

Now what happens if you lose faith in these arguments, which when seen in darkness appear to the credulous to be dressed in God’s majesty? They are like kings in invisible clothes, and once laughed at can never again be revered. What happens next?

This is what happens next. You can say that you yourself personally have no race prejudice, that you personally have Jewish friends, and that you see no reason why Asia should not belong to the Asians. But in your own country you can’t go too fast. You have to consider local customs, local prejudices and last but by no means least the power of the state. You accept racial equality in theory, but you accept racial inequality in practice. In a thousand years things may be different.

You also have two other powerful arguments. These are geography and culture. Colored people often live in areas distinct from white areas; therefore geographically it would be difficult to have colored people in your church. Further, they are culturally different. They use different languages and have different customs. They like to have services lasting three hours, and you like services lasting one hour. You must not force them to do what they would not like to do.

Some Christians think that it is love that is impelling them to seek for a greater, more tangible, more visible unity among the races. But there are other Christians who doubt this, and who think that this "love" is really anything but love; it is guilt, it is busybodyism, it is patronage come back in a new and more subtle guise. Above all it is sentimentality, and what is worse, it is sentimentality that will actually defeat the ends of that true love that is so wise, so gracious, so intensely practical, so well controlled.

These are powerful arguments. So powerful are they that one may be pardoned for supposing that their strength often comes from somewhere else, from deeper motives whose existence we deny. These motives are fear and pride, seldom encountered in their pure state (though that can happen), but usually in compounds. And these compounds are at their most powerful when to them has been added a good dollop of love and consideration for others.

It is very difficult to counter these arguments; it is always very difficult to counter arguments that conceal emotional attitudes. You are very much in the position of a man who must comment on all the points of his friend’s sheep, when all the time he knows that inside it is a wolf. Nor does it help very much to know that it is quite a decent wolf.

Let us be honest: it is often not the inadvisability, the impracticability, of going faster that deters us, but the fear of it. This fear is of two distinct kinds. One is the fear we feel because we ourselves are unregenerate; the other is the fear we feel of the unregenerateness of others, especially of an unregenerate state.

All these attitudes are intensely human, but they are not noble, courageous or generous. They are cautious, calculating and cold. They rule out of court any possibility that God may be calling us to transcend differences of race and culture and calling us to assert our common sonship. In a race-ridden world, but more especially in a race-ridden country, God may be calling us to proclaim something far more ineffable, far more Christian, than race difference.

If the Lord of our faith and church, the Savior of mankind, if Robert Herrick’s "darling of the world" were to come to our state or country, what would he make of our laws and our arrangements? If people of every race and color flocked to see him, longed to touch him, would he be bound by our arrangements? Would he accept our segregated churches? Or could we suspend our arrangements while he was with us in person? Or would we beseech him to leave our coasts? Or would we crucify him?

Christians cannot ignore the problems created by racial tensions in their society, nor problems of geography and culture. There is not much danger that they will. The danger is that they will use the existence of these problems to excuse them from action, that they will use the unregenerateness of the world to excuse their own. The danger is that the church may consent to be used as an instrument to delay or prevent regeneration. It may, by overestimating the gravity of racial tensions, and by planning its course accordingly, help to entrench them.

One does not find that the church as a whole is enough concerned about the evil and unjust results of race discrimination and the color bar. It is not so concerned as its Lord in person would have been. One may condemn the evil results, but it is the color bar itself that needs our condemnation. And the best way for the church to condemn the color bar is to show that it has not got one. Now the church often says it has not got one. By this it often means that there is no physical color bar inside the physical church building; it means that Mrs. Jones will sit next to a black man in a church even though she wouldn’t in a cinema. I suppose that’s something, but it doesn’t seem to be much.

To remove the color bar from the heart is a much more difficult matter. It would truly be difficult to imagine an unsegregated church in a segregated community. But even in a highly segregated community, the church should be moving away from segregation. Alas, in many places this movement is hardly to be discerned.

The problems of race within any state or country are paralleled by problems of race and nationality in the world itself. About this great area of task and opportunity I know very little, except to know that world leaders of the churches feel the weight of their responsibilities. But of one thing I am certain -- the Christian churches of the world will face their task and their opportunity with a new authority, I dare to say with the divine authority, when they have faced squarely their own national tasks and opportunities. In some countries there is a danger that the churches, by having too great a respect for the prejudices of their own members, and for the prejudices of non-members, will make these difficulties greater than they are.

This seeking for a visible unity of Christians I believe to be good and right. I am not impressed by arguments for a spiritual unity which will not be visibly expressed. Much argument about the inadvisability and impracticability seems to me to conceal a reluctance to move. What I mean is, when I personally am too much aware of the impracticability, then I know that I personally am too reluctant to move. I also believe that when Christians are too reluctant to move it is mostly out of fear, to a lesser extent out of pride. On the other hand, that which moves them to move, I believe to be love; I do not believe it to be guilt, patronage or sentimentality. Because it is love it must be obeyed. In all simplicity and humility we must as Christians show our unity to the world; it is our witness to our Lord’s claim, and to ours, that he is truly the hope of the world.

After Twenty Years

I am the only living man in the Senate who voted against the declaration of war with Germany. In my service of about thirty-five years in Congress I have undoubtedly made many mistakes, but my vote against the declaration of war was not one of them. On that April day twenty years ago when the joint resolution declaring war was under debate in the Senate, I said:

"We are taking a step today that is fraught with untold danger. We are going into war upon the command of gold; we are going to run the risk of sacrificing millions of our countrymen’s lives in order that other countrymen may coin their life blood into money. And even if we do not cross the Atlantic and go into the trenches, we are going to pile up a debt that the toiling generations that come many generations after us will have to pay. Unborn millions will bend their necks in toil in order to pay for the terrible step we are now about to take. We are about to do the bidding of wealth’s terrible mandate. By our act we will make millions of our countrymen suffer, and the consequences of it may well be that millions of our brethren must shed their life blood, millions of broken-hearted women must weep, millions of children must suffer with cold, and millions of babes must die from hunger, and all because we want to preserve the commercial right of American citizens to deliver the munitions of war to belligerent nations.

"I know that I am powerless to stop it. I know that this war madness has taken possession of the financial and political powers of our country. I know that nothing I can say will stay the blow that is soon to fall. I feel that we are committing a sin against humanity and against our countrymen. I would like to say to this war god, You shall not coin into gold the life blood of my brethren. I would like to prevent this terrible catastrophe from falling upon my people. I would be willing to surrender my own life if I could cause this awful cup to pass. I charge no man here with wrong motives, but it seems to me that this war craze has robbed us of our judgment. I wish we might delay our action until reason could again be enthroned in the brain of man. I feel that we are about to put the dollar sign upon the American flag."

Is there any word in that speech which, in the light of all we know today, I shall recall? When I said we were about to put the dollar sign on the flag, I was severely condemned twenty years ago. Yet who can now doubt that we did so? The war hastened the process of concentrating the wealth of this country in the hands of the few; it is a process which has been going on at accelerated pace ever since.

How well do we know today, twenty years after, what some of us suspected on April 6, 1917. We know, for instance, that Germany did not "start the war," although she was culpable. But we know now that Russia, France and Great Britain had a hand in it, and were also culpable. We know that our allies came to us with hands outstretched and wet eyes, murmuring idealistic promises of a new order in the world. Justice was to be enthroned, and the Golden Rule was to supplant the old code of intrigue, deceit and distrust. And we know now that in their hands were rockets, while their own pockets were filled with secret treaties and plans for dividing the swag, which they carefully kept from us. We know this now.

For the thousands of our young men killed and maimed, for our billions spent, for the countless millions of heartaches, we have what? We have political corruption, such as was never dreamed of before. We have a new crop of millionaires such as the world has never before witnessed. We have a crime wave that staggers the imagination of the world. We have gigantic, war-grown combinations of trade and money that are squeezing billions annually out of the people who gave till it hurt. We have a national avariciousness and a sense of grab, grab, grab that cannot be eradicated from the national consciousness for generations to come. This we have. Why? Because the war did what a few of us believed it would do -- it stupefied and paralyzed the moral consciousness of the American people as nothing else could have done. And because it was a war of gigantic commercial interests from beginning to end.

We, with the balance of the world, are still suffering from that unjust and unnecessary struggle. The terrible condition we are now in and the terrible depression in which all classes of our people have suffered would affect us only in a minor degree if we had kept out of that war. It was a war where no victory was possible. The vanquished suffered no more than the victorious. It was a struggle where, so far as Europe was concerned, all parties to it were completely exhausted. We went into it with our allies, and, to a great extent through our efforts and our sacrifices, we were supposed to have obtained a victory. There was no victory. We are realizing every day that victory was only a name.

In that struggle, about one hundred thousand of our noblest and best gave up their lives. Many times that number are crippled and injured so that they are leading a life of suffering and misery. We know now that we will not get out from under the results of that struggle during our lives or during the lives of our children. Unborn generations will yet toil and suffer and sweat to pay for our participation in that catastrophe.

All wars are destructive. All wars are ruinous. But this war was more ruinous, more destructive than any which preceded it. For four years the largest armies ever known were engaged in the destruction not only of human life, but of property. Every student and every economist knows that the destruction of life and property must be paid for by humanity in toil and sacrifice.

I have always been and I am still an optimist. I believe that better days will come; that honesty in government will regain its foothold; that civilization will recover; and that men, women and children will some day be relieved from the struggle and will have the necessities, the comforts and even some of the luxuries of life. But before that day comes, we must continue in our struggle and in our sacrifices, with earnestness and with hope.

We went to war to end militarism, and there is more militarism today than ever before.

We went to war to make the world safe for democracy, and there is less democracy today than ever before.

We went to war to dethrone autocracy and special privilege, and they thrive everywhere throughout the world today.

We went to war to win the friendship of the world, and other nations hate us today.

We went to war to purify the soul of America, and instead we only drugged it.

We went to war to awaken the American people to the idealistic concepts of liberty, justice and fraternity, and instead we awakened them only to the mad pursuit of money.

All this, and more, the war brought us. It is our harvest from what we sowed.

The World Missionaiy Conference, 1910

Edinburgh, June 20, 1910

“About the biggest thing that ever struck Scotland,” said my Edinburgh host as we sat together in his drawing room talking over the conference which had brought me to his city, and on account of which a thousand Edinburgh homes have been thrown open to entertain delegates from all parts of the earth. Yes, and more than that, was the Archbishop of Canterbury’s response at the session that evening, for, said he, if men be weighed rather than counted this assemblage has, I suppose, no parallel in the history either of this or other lands.”

This assessment of the strategic and prophetic character of the World Missionary Conference is the common judgment of the entire body of 1,200 delegates. Everyone feels the presence in the conference of a power not ourselves, deeper than our own devices, Which is making for a triumphant advance of Christianity abroad. And not less are the delegates thrilled by the sense that the conference foreshadows a new era for the church at home.

Indeed one is safe in saying that there is no home problem which the church is today facing which is not forced to the foreground in the consideration of missionary expansion. And it is coming home to many with the force and surprise of a revelation that these home problems -- the problem of a socialized Christianity, and even the academic problems of criticism and theology -- wait for their solution until they are carried into the white light of missionary passion. . . .



This meeting in Edinburgh is a gathering of missionary specialists, in the main, who come together to exchange views on the ways and means of executing the Lord’s command to preach the gospel to the whole creation. The missionary conscience is assumed here. The church’s duty is taken for granted. Every delegate is already an ardent missionary believer.

But the past 100 years of missionary campaigning has brought to light an almost endless number of problems and difficulties about which these missionary workers -- both those at the front and those administering the enterprise at home -- have good reasons to hold divergent opinions. These problems form the subject matter for the discussions of the conference. A large hall like the Museum in Edinburgh or the Auditorium in Chicago is too vast for effective discussion of problems. Hence this Assembly Hall, seating the 1,200 delegates on the main floor, with galleries on four sides for wives of delegates and representative visitors, especially missionaries, is just suited to the purpose.

Let us go in at 9:45 some morning and observe and listen.

They are singing “Crown Him with Many Crowns” as we enter, and then a prayer is offered by Bishop Charles H. Brent of the Philippine Islands. He speaks with God in the simple speech of a child, and one knows whence is the secret of the great faith and enthusiasm that has called him to give his life to the establishment of pure Christianity in America’s new possession in the Orient.

The chairman is Mr. John R. Mott. Of course we should now say “Dr.” Mott, since he was thus decorated last Tuesday by the University of Edinburgh. The vice-chancellor characterized his name as one “honored and revered in all the universities and seats of learning throughout the world, for it is the name of a dauntless crusader who has found his mission in the advancement of the spiritual side of university life, of a great leader who has for years exercised an extraordinary ascendancy over the students of all countries.” Dr. Mott was elected as the chairman of the conference in committee, which means that he is the real executive chairman of the gathering governing its sessions from day to day.

Yonder among the delegates to the left is Lord Balfour, former secretary for Scotland in the British Cabinet and a leader in church and state. He is the president of the conference and has led in the two years’ preparation for the great gathering. His presidential address on Tuesday evening sounded a great note for the unity of the church. “The hope has sprung up in my mind,” he said, “that unity if it begins on the mission field will not find its ending there. It is a thought not without its grandeur that a unity begun on the mission field may extend its influence and react upon us at home and throughout the older civilizations. Surely there is much more that should unite us than keep us apart.”

In a seat halfway down the aisle there sits the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Church of England, in his knee breeches and gaiters, democratically taking his place beside a Methodist missionary from Korea. Across the aisle is Professor E. C. Moore of Harvard, whom a daily paper this morning described as “the very antithesis of the typical Yankee,” and behind him Lord William Gascoyne-Cecil, son of the late Lord Salisbury.

That eager-looking, bold-browed man on the other side of the area watching the speaker and listening to him with an intentness bordering on fascination is the Hon. William Jennings Bryan of the United States. He spoke yesterday on the significance of the educational ideal in mission work. People were glad to hear him. He spoke well -- splendidly, indeed. He said that Christianity’s character was nowhere better revealed than in its enthusiasm for spreading education around the globe. Our religion does not fear the light. Mr. Bryan is speaking many times in Edinburgh. He is announced to speak in Glasgow in a day or two and will visit other cities, bearing the inspiration of this great meeting to those who have not been able to attend it.

Just two more rows in front of us is the Hon. Seth Low, former mayor of New York City and formerly president of Columbia University. He is highly regarded in the conference. Sitting beside President A. McLean of the Disciples’ Foreign Missionary Society is Missions-Inspector Pastor .1. Warneck of Germany, worldwide authority on the animistic religions. Behind Editor J. H. Garrison of St. Louis is Dr. Robert E. Speer, Presbyterian missionary secretary in the United States, whom the University of Edinburgh honored with the degree of D.D. last Tuesday, in company with the Archbishop of Canterbury and President T. Harada of the great Christian Doshisha University, in Japan, who is sitting near the front.

There is George Sherwood Eddy, a young man of wealth who is supporting himself in mission work in India, speaking as effective a message to this conference as he did to the Chicago Laymen’s Congress a few weeks ago. The familiar face of S. B. Capen, president of the American Board, calls our attention to Dr. J. M. Buckley, “the bishop of Methodist bishops,” S. M. Zwemer, Presbyterian missionary to Arabia, Bishop W. H. Tottie of the Church of Sweden and President W. Douglas MacKenzie of Hartford Seminary, who sit in a row.

To the right of that post, a bit under the gallery, sits Bishop Anderson of Chicago, and two seats away is the saintly face of the Rev. Alexander Whyte of First St. George’s Church, Edinburgh, whom more American preachers love than any other living pulpiteer.

It is a great assemblage of the church’s greatest men. But all are on the same level. Germans, French, Americans, Englishmen, Scandinavians, Japanese, Chinese, Hindus, Africans -- all are here and mingle together in an easy equality. Missionaries, preachers, teachers, editors, statesmen, businessmen -- all come into the hall and sit where they happen to find a place, with no scale of precedence arranged for. It is an unparalleled confluence of the big men of the kingdom of God.

The most admirable feature of the conference is the thoroughness of the preparation that has been made by its leaders. A vast deal of thinking was done before the delegates assembled. You will note that many of the members hold in their hands a rather unwieldy document as the president rises to announce the work of the day. That document is the proof-sheet report of a commission of experts who have been at work for two years gathering materials on the problem which is to be the subject of discussion today.



Let us assume that we are visiting the conference on Saturday. The subject for the day’s consideration is “The Missionary Message in Relation to Non-Christian Religions.” It is a live question to every missionary. And since the science of comparative religion has grown up in the past quarter-century, it is a live question to every thoughtful person. We will hear some interesting talking. Let us hope that it may lead to fuller light!

Seven minutes is the limit for a speech. Chairman Mott is inexorable in enforcing the rule. Professor D. S. Cairns of the University of Aberdeen, chairman of the commission dealing with this subject, opens the discussion by calling attention to the salient features of the report. What attitude shall the messenger of Christianity take toward the religion of the people with whom he works? That is the point of the whole problem. Concluding, he says that the situation which the non-Christian nations present at the present moment is something like the spiritual situation which confronted Israel in the days of the rise of the great prophets. Israel had been getting on comfortably enough with the traditional religion and the inherited faith, until suddenly a shadow fell upon the whole Israelitish life. It was instinctively felt by her spiritual lea~iers that in the traditional religion there must be more than they had already attained, a reserve spiritual force which would enable the nation to meet the new and formidable emergency which had risen; and in the long and illustrious succession of Hebrew prophecy they saw the endeavor of the spiritual leaders to meet that new emergency by the broadening and intensifying of the nation’s sense of the living God. Did not the evidence disclose that today the Christian Church was face to face with a formidable situation? As one read the reports one seemed to be looking into the great workshop of history. One saw the forces that were making nations, that were making religions, and those who had eyes to see saw the forming of something very vast, very formidable, and full of promise. The inevitable question arose: Is the church at this moment fit and spiritually ready for this great emergency? Is it equal to the providential calling?

Pricked by this question, delegates from all over the house send up their cards to the chairman, asking to speak.

The first group of speakers talk on the animistic religions. . . . As an illustration of the diverse ways in which the animistic peoples approach Christianity, a speaker tells of one who became a Christian, moved at first by the desire to secure a decent burial for his body. All the speakers make vivid, however, what the gospel means to the animistic tribes -- that it breaks for them the spell of terror and introduces them to a life which is a jubilee of liberty and joy.

From the animistic the conference goes with a leap to the problem of Chinese religions. There the life of the nation has been molded by ancestor-worship to a cohesion which has outlived the changes of 5,000 years; and Christianity, when it demands that a man surrender that, demands that he become an outlaw from his own nation.

Dong King-en, a Chinaman in picturesque, flowing native garb, urges the necessity of Christianity’s making itself more indigenous to China by making its converts study their own language and literature. This theme -- the necessity of Christianity’s making its contact with a heathen people at such points as to insure its becoming an indigenous religion and not just an accidental importation -- becomes the thesis of the day.



A striking contribution is made by Dr. K. Chatterji, a converted Hindu. . . . he states in beautiful and soft English what difficulties a Hindu experiences in becoming a Christian. He had long stumbled at the doctrine of Atonement. The Hindus have a vivid sense of punishment due each individual for his wrongdoing, and it is inconceivable to them that another should suffer for their sins. At a previous session a speaker had called for the preaching of the “old-fashioned gospel in the old-fashioned way.” Dr. Chatterji gives the effective reply. He makes the conference realize the great harm done by unethical representations of the doctrine of the Atonement, and how pathetically missionaries are handicapped who do not appreciate the inner life of the people whose religion they wish to supplant.

Dr. Campbell Gibson, Presbyterian missionary to China, a master spirit in the conference, testifies to the responsiveness of the Chinese mind to spiritual truth. The Rev. Mr. Lloyd of Foochow gives it as his opinion that the idea of God as Father presented the most natural point of contact with the Chinese mind because filial piety was the highest of all the graces in China.

Dr. Mackichan, principal of Wilson College, Bombay, emphasizes the importance of approaching the mind of India along the avenues of its own thought. This does not mean that they are to adapt the content of their message to suit Indian thought. Their philosophy is based on metaphysical thinking of the highest order, yet it has not reached a saving conclusion. They have had to tell the Indians that they sympathize with their failure, and that Christ satisfies their unfulfilled longings.

So the discussion runs on during the whole day. Probably 40 persons speak. Yet Chairman Mott announces at the end that he had in his hand 42 names which time would not permit him to call upon. Dr. Robert E. Speer is given 15 minutes to make the closing speech, as vice-chairman of the commission. He fearlessly counsels the frankest, comparison of Christianity with other religions. This because we are sure -- absolutely sure -- that such a comparison can result only in the enhancement of the glory of our holy faith.

Many other things are said. What I can write is but a sip of the overflowing cup of good things. The theme of Christian unity is running through the whole conference like a subterranean stream. It breaks through the ground of any subject the conference may be considering, and bubbles on the surface for a time. It is almost the exception for a speaker to sit down without deploring our divisions. The missionaries are literally plaintive in their appeal that the church of Christ re-establish her long lost unity. But tomorrow is to be given over to a discussion of the whole subject, and my heart thrills with expectancy and eagerness to hear the great words that I cannot doubt will surely be spoken. . . Charles Clayton Morrison.(Author of this article.)

The World Missionary Conference

Edinburgh, June 20, 1910

"About the biggest thing that ever struck Scotland," said my Edinburgh host as we sat together in his drawing room talking over the conference which had brought me to his city, and on account of which a thousand Edinburgh homes have been thrown open to entertain delegates from all parts of the earth.

Yes, and more than that, was the Archbishop of Canterbury’s response at the session that evening, for, said he, "if men be weighed rather than counted this assemblage has, I suppose, no parallel in the history either of this or other lands."

This assessment of the strategic and prophetic character of the World Missionary Conference is the common judgment of the entire body of 1,200 delegates. Everyone feels the presence in the conference of a power not ourselves, deeper than our own devices, which is making for a triumphant advance of Christianity abroad. And not less are the delegates thrilled by the sense that the conference foreshadows a new era for the church at home.

Indeed one is safe in saying that there is no home problem which the church is today facing which is not forced to the foreground in the consideration of missionary expansion. And it is coming home to many with the force and surprise of a revelation that these home problems the problem of Christian union, the problem of Christian education, the problem of a socialized Christianity, and even the academic problems of criticism and theology -- wait for their solution until they are carried into the white light of missionary passion.

But I must not indulge in this kind of writing now. There will be time enough later on for these reflections. The readers of The Christian Century wish to see the conference itself, and I will try to set it forth as well as I can with my pencil, in a forenoon of self-denying absence from a most tempting session.

The Assembly Hall of the United Free Church is the meeting place. It is not the largest hall in Edinburgh, but it is admirably adapted to the purposes of this conference. It must be remembered that this is a conference. It is not the same sort of a missionary meeting as that held in Chicago in May when 5,000 men gathered to hear great missionary addresses. The purpose of that Laymen’s Congress was to quicken missionary enthusiasm, to develop a missionary conscience, to make the church feel her duty to carry the gospel to the ends of the earth.

This meeting in Edinburgh is a gathering of missionary specialists, in the main, who come together to exchange views on the ways and means of executing the Lord’s command to preach the gospel to the whole creation. The missionary conscience is assumed here. The church’s duty is taken for granted. Every delegate is already an ardent missionary believer.

But the past hundred years of missionary campaigning has brought to light an almost endless number of problems and difficulties about which these missionary workers -- both those at the front and those administering the enterprise at home -- have good reasons to hold divergent opinions. These problems form the subject matter for the discussions of the conference. A large hall like the Museum in Edinburgh or the Auditorium in Chicago is too vast for effective discussion of problems. Hence this Assembly Hall, seating the 1,200 delegates on the main floor, with galleries on four sides for wives of delegates and representative visitors, especially missionaries, is just suited to the purpose.

Let us go in at 9:45 some morning and observe and listen.

They are singing "Crown Him with Many Crowns" as we enter, and then a prayer is offered by Bishop Charles H. Brent of the Philippine Islands. He speaks with God in the simple speech of a child, and one knows whence is the secret of the great faith and enthusiasm that has called him to give his life to the establishment of pure Christianity in America’s new possession in the Orient.

The chairman is Mr. John R. Mott. Of course we should now say "Dr." Mott, since he was thus decorated last Tuesday by the University of Edinburgh. The vice-chancellor characterized his name as one "honored and revered in all the universities and seats of learning throughout the world, for it is the name of a dauntless crusader who has found his mission in the advancement of the spiritual side of university life, of a great leader who has for years exercised an extraordinary ascendancy over the students of all countries." Dr. Mott was elected as the chairman of the conference in committee, which means that he is the real executive chairman of the gathering, governing its sessions from day to day.

Yonder among the delegates to the left is Lord Balfour, former secretary for Scotland in the British Cabinet and a leader in church and state. He is the president of the conference and has led in the two years’ preparation for the great gathering. His presidential address on Tuesday evening sounded a great note for the unity of the church. "The hope has sprung up in my mind," he said, "that unity if it begins on the mission field will not find its ending there. It is a thought not without its grandeur that a unity begun on the mission field may extend its influence and react upon us at home and throughout the older civilizations. Surely there is much more that should unite us than keep us apart."

In a seat halfway down the aisle there sits the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Church of England, in his knee breeches and gaiters, democratically taking his place beside a Methodist missionary from Korea. Across the aisle is Professor E.C. Moore of Harvard, whom a daily paper this morning described as "the very antithesis of the typical Yankee," and behind him Lord William Gascoyne-Cecil, son of the late Lord Salisbury.

That eager-looking, bold-browed man on the other side of the area watching the speaker and listening to him with an intentness bordering on fascination, is the Hon. William J. Bryan of the United States. He spoke yesterday on the significance of the educational ideal in mission work. People were glad to hear him. He spoke well -- splendidly, indeed. He said that Christianity’s character was nowhere better revealed than in its willingness to run the risk of educating the inferior people of the world. Our religion does not fear the light. Mr. Bryan is speaking many times in Edinburgh. He is announced to speak in Glasgow in a day or two and will visit other cities, bearing the inspiration of this great meeting to those who have not been able to attend it.

Just two more rows in front of us is the Hon. Seth Low, former mayor of New York City and formerly president of Columbia University. He is highly regarded in the conference. Sitting beside President A. McLean of the Disciples’ Foreign Missionary Society is Missions-Inspector Pastor J. Warneck of Germany, world-wide authority on the animistic religions. Behind Editor J.H. Garrison of St. Louis is Dr. Robert E. Speer, Presbyterian missionary secretary in the United States, whom the University of Edinburgh honored with the degree of D.D. last Tuesday, in company with the Archbishop of Canterbury and President T. Harada of the great Christian Doshisha University, in Japan, who is sitting near the front.

There is George Sherwood Eddy, a young man of wealth who is supporting himself in mission work in India, speaking as effective a message to this conference as he did to the Chicago Laymen’s Congress a few weeks ago. The familiar face of S.B. Capen, president of the American Board, calls our attention to Dr. J.M. Buckley, "the bishop of Methodist bishops," S.M. Zwemer, Presbyterian missionary to Arabia, Bishop W.H. Tottie of the Church of Sweden and President W. Douglas MacKenzie of Hartford Seminary, who sit in a row.

To the right of that post, a bit under the gallery, sits Bishop Anderson of Chicago, and two seats away is the saintly face of the Rev. Alexander Whyte of First St. George’s Church, Edinburgh, whom more American preachers love than any other living pulpiteer.

It is a great assemblage of the church’s greatest men. But all are on the same level. Germans, French, Americans, Englishmen, Scandinavians, Japanese, Chinese, Hindus, Africans -- all are here and mingle together in an easy equality. Missionaries, preachers, teachers, editors, statesmen, business men -- all come into the hall and sit where they happen to find a place, with no scale of precedence arranged for. It is an unparalleled confluence of the big men of the kingdom of God.

The most admirable feature of the conference is the thoroughness of the preparation that has been made by its leaders. A vast deal of thinking was done before the delegates assembled. You will note that many of the members hold in their hands a rather unwieldy document as the president rises to announce the work of the day. That document is the proof sheet report of a commission of experts who have been at work for two years gathering materials on the problem which is to be the subject of discussion today.

There are eight of these commissions. To each of them the conference devotes one day, taking as the basis for its discussions the report prepared by the commission, the proof sheets of which were put into the hands of some of the delegates some time before they left their homes for Edinburgh. Note the subjects with which the commissions deal: "Carrying the Gospel to All the Non-Christian World"; "The Church in the Mission Field"; "Education in Religion to the Christianization of National Life"; "The Missionary Message in Relation to Non-Christian Religions"; "The Preparation of Missionaries"; "The Home Base of Missions"; "Missions and Governments"; "Co-operation and the Promotion of Unity."

The very titles show the vastness and sweep of the missionary enterprise. And some conception of the work of these commissions may be gained if we look at the report of one of them in some detail as revealing and illustrating the character and method of the other seven. Commission I, under the chairmanship of Dr. John R. Mott, has as its subject the evangelization of the world. Dr. Robson of the United Free Church of Scotland and Dr. Julius Richter are vice-chairmen. Associated with them are missionary experts such as Dr. Dennis of New York, Dr. Eugene Stock of London, and Bishop Montgomery, secretary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel of the Church of England. In addition to these are missionaries in active service and representatives of the British and Foreign Bible Society, the Student Missionary Movement and the YMCA.

Three sections of this commission have been at work one in London, one in New York, one on the Continent. After agreement upon certain questions dealing with vital missionary problems, these questions were sent to over two hundred representative missionaries and leading native Christians all over the world for their deliberate replies. So large was the response to these that for this one commission thirty clerks were kept busy for three weeks in order that one set of replies might be sent to each member of the commission. Each member reported to the chairman, who had a draft report of the whole prepared and sent for revision to the sections of the commission sitting in Great Britain and America and on the Continent. After full and careful criticism the draft report has been revised, and it is this carefully prepared report which is now published as a paper of the conference.

Let us assume that we are visiting the conference on Saturday. The subject for the day’s consideration is "The Missionary Message in Relation to Non-Christian Religions." It is a live question to every missionary. And since the science of comparative religion has grown up in the past quarter-century, it is a live question to every thoughtful person. We will hear some interesting talking. Let us hope that it may lead to fuller light!

Seven minutes is the limit for a speech. Chairman Mott is inexorable in enforcing the rule. Professor D.S. Cairns of the University of Aberdeen, chairman of the commission dealing with this subject, opens the discussion by calling attention to the salient features of the report. What attitude shall the messenger of Christianity take toward the religion of the people with whom he works? That is the point of the whole problem. Concluding, he says that the situation which the non-Christian nations present at the present moment is something like the spiritual situation which confronted Israel in the days of the rise of the great prophets. Israel had been getting on comfortably enough with the traditional religion and the inherited faith, until suddenly a shadow fell upon the whole Israelitish life. It was instinctively felt by her spiritual leaders that in the traditional religion there must be more than they had already attained, a reserve spiritual force which would enable the nation to meet the new and formidable emergency which had risen; and in the long and illustrious succession of Hebrew prophecy they saw the endeavor of the spiritual leaders to meet that new emergency by the broadening and intensifying of the nation’s sense of the living God. Did not the evidence disclose that today the Christian Church was face to face with a formidable situation? As one read the reports one seemed to be looking into the great workshop of history. One saw the forces that were making nations, that were making religions, and those who had eyes to see saw the forming of something very vast, very formidable, and full of promise. The inevitable question arose: Is the church at this moment fit and spiritually ready for this great emergency? Is it equal to the providential calling?

Pricked by this question, delegates from all over the house sent up their cards to the chairman, asking to speak.

The first group of speakers talk on the animistic religions, the backward and childlike sort of religion possessed by such peoples as those who inhabit parts of Africa. Dr. Wardlaw Thompson, missionary to Africa, contrasts the attitude of high-caste, cultured Hindus toward the missionary with that of the primitive or barbarous peoples, where the missionary is admittedly one of a "superior" race. This docility of the "inferior" race is at once the missionary’s opportunity and peril.

As an illustration of the diverse ways in which the animistic peoples approach Christianity, a speaker tells of one who became a Christian, moved at first by the desire to secure a decent burial for his body. All the speakers make vivid, however, what the gospel means to the animistic tribes -- that it breaks for them the spell of terror and introduces them to a life which is a jubilee of liberty and joy.

From the animistic the conference goes with a leap to the problem of Chinese religions. There the life of the nation has been molded by ancestor-worship to a cohesion which has outlived the changes of 5,000 years; and Christianity, when it demands that a man surrender that, demands that he become an outlaw from his own nation.

Dong King-en, a Chinaman in picturesque, flowing native garb, urges the necessity of Christianity’s making itself more indigenous to China by making its converts study their own language and literature. This theme -- the necessity of Christianity’s making its contact with a heathen people at such points as to insure its becoming an indigenous religion and not just an accidental importation -- becomes the thesis of the day.

A striking contribution is made by Dr. K. Chatterji, a converted Hindu. With his patriarchal gray beard, a benign expression and a complexion which might be of the West, he states in beautiful and soft English what difficulties a Hindu experiences in becoming a Christian. He had long stumbled at the doctrine of Atonement. The Hindus have a vivid sense of punishment due each individual for his wrongdoing, and it is inconceivable to them that another should suffer for their sins. At a previous session a speaker had called for the preaching of the "old-fashioned gospel in the old-fashioned way." Dr. Chatterji gives the effective reply. He makes the conference realize the great harm done by unethical representations of the doctrine of the Atonement, and how pathetically missionaries are handicapped who do not appreciate the inner life of the people whose religion they wish to supplant.

Dr. Campbell Gibson, Presbyterian missionary to China, a master spirit in the conference, testifies to the responsiveness of the Chinese mind to spiritual truth. The Rev. Mr. Lloyd of Foochow gives it as his opinion that the idea of God as Father presented the most natural point of contact with the Chinese mind because filial piety was the highest of all the graces in China.

Dr. Mackichan, principal of the Wilson College, Bombay, emphasizes the importance of approaching the mind of India along the avenues of its own thought. This does not mean that they are to adapt the content of their message to suit Indian thought. Their philosophy is based on metaphysical thinking of the highest order, yet it has not reached a saving conclusion. They have had to tell the Indians that they sympathize with their failure, and that Christ satisfies their unfulfilled longings.

So the discussion runs on during the whole day. Probably forty persons speak. Yet Chairman Mott announces at the end that he had in his hand forty-two names which time would not permit him to call upon. Dr. Robert E. Speer is given fifteen minutes to make the closing speech, as vice-chairman of the commission. He fearlessly counsels the frankest comparison of Christianity with other religions. This because we are sure -- absolutely sure -- that such a comparison can result only in the enhancement of the glory of our holy faith.

Many other things are said. What I can write is but a sip of the overflowing cup of good things. The theme of Christian unity is running through the whole conference like a subterranean stream. It breaks through the ground of any subject the conference may be considering, and bubbles on the surface for a time. It is almost the exception for a speaker to sit down without deploring our divisions. The missionaries are literally plaintive in their appeal that the church of Christ reestablish her long lost unity. But tomorrow is to be given over to a discussion of the whole subject, and my heart thrills with expectancy and eagerness to hear the great words that I cannot doubt will surely be spoken.

And my first impulse, of course, will be to tell The Christian Century readers all about it.

The Quest for Unity

The Conference on Faith and Order which has been in session in this city since August 3 seems, in outward appearance, like an adjourned sitting of the Oxford Conference on Church, Community and State. I would guess that more than one-half of the personnel is the same. The vice-chairmen, representing, as well as four men can be said to do so, the larger units of world Christianity -- Orthodox, Anglican, Presbyterian and Free Churches -- are the same. The chairmanship alone is different. At Oxford, the presiding officer was the Archbishop of Canterbury, but after the opening formalities he relinquished his duties to Dr. John R. Mott, who managed the deliberations of the conference and directed its procedure. Here in Edinburgh this function is discharged by the Archbishop of York (Dr. William Temple), who presides at all sessions. But there is the same picturesqueness of dress and tonsorial adornment (?) which made the Oxford assemblage a happy hunting ground for photographers.

There is, however, an inward difference between the two gatherings. This difference has to do with the subject matter of the conferences. At Oxford the church was considered in its relations with the secular order -- the nation, the state, the economic system and the educational process. At Edinburgh our problem is found within the church itself. It arises out of the fact of the church’s disunity. We stand at the end of a long era whose most conspicuous feature has been the proliferation of schisms. But the world is too strong for a divided church. The church cannot perform the task envisaged at Oxford unless it can recover its lost unity. Yet how can such diverse elements, ranging all the way from the Eastern Orthodox to the Congregationalists -- not to mention the Quakers -- join together in anything worthy to be called one church? At first blush it seems like a hopeless undertaking. But there is a conscience in the churches which refuses to allow appearances to decide the possibilities. It is determined to explore below the surface of our variety and see if there are not great stretches of agreement sufficiently fundamental to afford a foundation for a genuine and a visible unity.

In this conscience the Edinburgh Conference has its roots. Twenty-seven years ago -- in 1910 -- by a coincidence so singular that many of us regard it as a providence -- three American denominations, the Protestant Episcopal, the Disciples of Christ and the Congregationalists, in the same month, in two instances on the same day, in their respective general assemblies, without advance knowledge of one another’s purpose, proclaimed that the hour was come to do something on a wide scale to recover the lost unity of Christendom. The Episcopalian manifesto was the most definite. It called for a world conference on the subject of Christian unity. Certain of its leaders, notably the late Bishop Charles H. Brent, were set apart to undertake plans for such a conference. This movement materialized in 1927 as the Conference on Faith and Order held at Lausanne. The outcome was none too encouraging. Indeed there were elements of unhappiness in the aftermath of that gathering. Other churchmen had meantime come to believe that the approach to unity through faith and order was a wrong approach. They held that a more promising approach was through the church’s life and work. Led by Archbishop Nathan Soderblöm of Sweden, a conference had been held, in 1925, at Stockholm, from whose deliberations the matters of creed, sacraments and orders were excluded. The deliberations centered upon the practical questions of interchurch co-operation in life and work. The results of this effort were none too inspiring. A general mood of discouragement set in, and though both Lausanne and Stockholm were kept alive by means of continuation committees, there was little enthusiasm among the churches.

Within the past three years, however, a wholly new mood has been defining itself throughout Christendom. With a suddenness which is unprecedented in Christian history the whole body of Christian believers in every part of the Western world has awakened to the consciousness that the entire secular order of the modern world, instead of moving steadily toward the acceptance of Christianity, has been for centuries moving steadily away from it. The whole domain of Western culture, in its political, economic, intellectual and ethical aspects, is seen as ruled by ideologies which have no affinity with the Christian faith. Our most realistic minds have become aware of the fact that the church has been giving away both itself and its treasures in its compromises with secular philosophies. Others have seen this surrender as due mainly to the preoccupation of the divided churches with their fractional apprehension of Christian truth, which left each sect an easy prey to the encroachment of an aggressive secularism.

In the preparations for the Oxford Conference, which has just been held, the Faith and Order movement took on new life. It became clear that the church could not assume a functional responsibility of the magnitude envisaged at Oxford while its faith and order were broken into sectarian compartments. Christianity could not presume to speak an authoritative word to a broken and dismembered civilization if its own body was dismembered. A sectarian church could not mend the sectarianism of society. Thus the world situation forced home to the Christian intelligence the anomaly and sin of a divided church. The lonely prophets of Christian unity whose voices have cried in the wilderness of our sectarian complacency for many decades now began to be heeded. The forthcoming Conference on Faith and Order thus took on a more realistic character in the minds of those engaged in preparing for it. But even so, there was a general disposition to discount the significance and promise of the Edinburgh Conference which was to open one week after the adjournment at Oxford.

With deep gratitude I am able to say that the doubts and misgivings which many of us took to Edinburgh have entirely vanished. The Conference on Faith and Order is proving to be in no respect second to the Oxford gathering in significance and promise. Instead of eclipsing Edinburgh, Oxford has vitalized it. By defining the task of the church in terms of Christianity’s social responsibility, Oxford has turned the church’s mind inward upon its own condition. Edinburgh sees the Christian Church as a chaos of regional and sectarian provincialism. Such a church is not only impotent in the face of a civilization which worships the many gods of humanistic secularism, but its own life is threatened. Again and again this note of desperation is being struck. The Bishop of Lichfield in his sermon at St. Giles last Sunday said plainly that the Christian Church has its back to the wall. Its divisions have weakened its character. They render it susceptible to the seductions of secularism on the one hand, or push it into a sterile pietism or hollow formalism on the other. The situation was described in the opening address of the conference by the Archbishop of York. He said:

How can the church call men to the worship of one God, if it calls them to rival shrines? How can it claim to bridge the divisions in human society -- divisions between Greek and barbarian, bond and free, between white and black, Aryan and non-Aryan, employer and employed -- if, when men are drawn into it, they find that another division has been added to the old ones -- a division of Catholic from Evangelical, or Episcopalian from Presbyterian or Independent? A church divided in its manifestation to the world cannot render its due service to God or to man.

Dr. Temple went on to admit for himself that he belongs to a church which still maintains a barrier against completeness of union at the Table of the Lord. "But I know," he said, "that our division at this point is the greatest of all scandals in the face of the world. I know that we can only consent to it or maintain it without the guilt of unfaithfulness to the unity of the gospel and of God himself, if it is a source to us of spiritual pain, and if we are striving to the utmost to remove the occasions which now bind us, as we think, to that perpetuation of disunion."

It should be "horrible" to us, he concluded, to speak or think of any fellow Christian as "not in communion with us." "God grant that we may feel the pain of it and under that impulsion strive the more earnestly to remove all that now hinders us from receiving together the one Body of the One Lord that in him we may become One Body -- the organ and vehicle of the One Spirit."

I quote at length from the Archbishop of York because of the penetrating insight which his words disclose, and also because he announced the theme or motif which has run through the entire conference up to this hour. There is no squeamishness here about the phrase "organic unity." That specifically and confessedly is the goal to which this conference is oriented. Nothing will satisfy the spirit of Edinburgh short of a visibly united church. This does not mean that co-operation or federation of our denominations is unesteemed, but all such measures are seen as way-stations toward a unity that is both spiritual and structural.

What Edinburgh is seeking for is ecumenical faith and the ecumenical body. This word "ecumenical," and its substantive, "ecumenicity," are on all our lips. We are an "ecumenical movement"; both Oxford and Edinburgh are its expression. It is an old ecclesiastical word, of course, used commonly by the Roman and Orthodox churches, but new in the ordinary nomenclature of Protestantism. It represents the very opposite of Protestantism, which has been an expression of centrifugal and separatist rather than centripetal and unitive impulses. "Ecumenical" means about the same as "catholic," and I suppose has gained popular usage as descriptive of the present movement because it is free of the ambiguity attaching to the word "catholic" which, besides being a description of the whole body of Christ, is also the name of a particular branch of the church.

The use of this word "ecumenical" gives a measure of the magnitude of the task which the church of our time confronts. We are in search of the ecumenical or catholic church. Some say it already exists and only needs to be made manifest. Others say that it has been broken by our divisions and must be recreated. I incline to the latter conception. But my view has few supporters here. Edinburgh is under the spell of the idealistic philosophy which is able to treat ideals as actual existences. The question is not important, however, at this stage, and it would be both academic and pedantic to make a point of it. The important thing is that the church shall become conscious of its unity and build a structure which shall embody that unity. This Edinburgh is striving to do.

As at Oxford, it was difficult to choose one’s section, because the subject matter of every section was so intriguing. Take the first section, for example. Its specific theme was "The Grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ." This was the title under which the basic faith of the church was to be expounded. Here was a new approach to the ecumenical faith. I am aware that the category of grace was held to be fundamental at the Lausanne Conference ten years ago, but it was not put forward as the comprehensive concept presumed to contain the essentials of the Christian revelation as we have it here in Edinburgh.

The more I reflect upon it, the more am I convinced that the whole of our gospel is involved in this concept of divine grace, that it plumbs the depths of Christian truth and leaves out nothing that is truly ecumenical in Christian belief. True, the historic creeds -- Apostles’ and Nicene -- are presupposed in all our discussions, but there is profound significance in the fact that when a modern ecumenical conference goes in search of a conception which will set forth the essential content of historic Christianity, it does not expect to find it in a philosophical speculation about God, but in a revelation of his character and his disposition toward man. God’s grace revealed in Jesus Christ -- can you imagine anything more fundamental and all-inclusive? I hear that section number one has been able to reach a unanimous formulation, and that it adjourned its final session last night by singing, "Now thank we all our God"!

So much for "faith." One hardly dares to hope that there will be such unanimity or such progress toward unity when it comes to "order." This involves the conception of the church itself, its ministry and its sacraments. It is here that the really acute issues arise. Yet I believe that my own section is in process of making a distinct contribution, and I hear that section two is drawing the two wings of catholicity and evangelicalism together in a statement concerning the church. There is a vast gulf to be bridged between Western Protestantism and the rest of Christianity on the question of the church. Our American conception is local and pragmatic, for the most part, and its representatives feel modest and unaggressive in the presence of the scholarship of the Orthodox and Anglican communions. Besides, we know in our hearts that our ultra-congregational conceptions are totally inadequate both as a reflection of historic Christian reality and as a basis of competency in face of the world situation. There is a kind of wistfulness in the minds of leaders of the so-called free churches, and a disillusionment with respect to their irresponsible independency. This keeps them from putting forward their "system" as a possible basis for the ecumenical church.

The Common Faith

1. One cannot gain even a little acquaintance with the early church—which means, one cannot do even a little reading in the New Testament—without recognizing not only the importance of what the word "Christ" stands for in its life, but also the richness and manifoldness of this same reality. If we examine the Christian community’s experience, I believe that the reality with which we are concerned appears under no fewer than three aspects. First it refers to the event or slowly knit series of events in and through which God made himself known. This includes the whole complex of what happened in connection with Jesus (including the cultural setting and background, Jesus Himself. His relations with His disciples and others. His death, His resurrection, the coming of the Spirit, the creation of the church). Secondly, it refers to the person who was the center of that event or complex of events. Finally, it refers to the community which both came into existence with the event and provided the locus of it. As a matter of fact, none of these three meanings—person, event, community—ever stands alone in Christian usage; all are present in some degree of relevance whenever the word "Christ" (or any equivalent term like "Jesus Christ" or "the Lord") appears. The word has this rich and varied meaning, not because one wants it to have it, or believes that it ought to have it, but simply because on cannot talk about the Christian life without using the term "Christ" in this manifold way.

2. If follows from this that the Christological question does not need to be construed as a question about the person: it can just as appropriately be thought of as a question about the event or the community. And it is when we ask the question in one of the latter forms that the large and significant agreement in belief, not only among early Christians but among all Christians, is most likely to emerge. Let us suppose, for example, that we were accustomed to ask the question primarily about the event; that when we asked, "What think ye of Christ? We meant, not "Who is He?" or "Whose son is He?" (Matt. 22:42), but "What has occurred? How are we to understand this thing that has happened among us?" If this were the question, would not the answer have been something like this: "In Christ, God has visited and redeemed us. The same God who made a covenant with Abraham has made a new covenant, calling into being a new people. He who made known His ways to Moses, His acts to the children of Israel, has acted now in the fullness of time to deliver mankind from all its enemies, from the guilt and power of sin and the fear and doom of death. This deliverance, God has brought about in our history and has made available in the new community of the Spirit to all who will receive it in penitence and faith." Would not this have been the unanimous early-Christian answer if the question had been asked in this form, and would it not have been the answer in every part of the church in all the ages since?

3. Or suppose the Christological question had been primarily a question about the community: "What is the reality in which these persons who knew Jesus and now remember Him participate, and which constitutes the essential principle of the community’s existence?" Would not the answer have been rather similar? Something like: "That reality is God’s own presence and love—that is, His Spirit. Through the remembered event God has acted to bring into being this community, into which these persons have been called; in this community the One they remember is know as a living Presence, and in it are found the forgiveness, the healing, the security, the hope they need. All of this is found there because God Himself is present and active there and has chosen to bestow it there. It is the community of His Spirit." And would not this answer have been as unanimously given, through all the centuries, as the other?

4. In the actual course of Christological reflection however, the question (except possibly at the very first) has not been asked in either of these forms, and consequently the wide and deep agreement among all Christians about the meaning of Christ has been to some extent obscured. The characteristic Christological question has been a question about the person: "Who was this person? What shall we call Him?" How shall we define His nature and His work? Whose son was He?" This preoccupation with the person can be partly explained by the fact that Christianity moved very early into Greek environment. For the Hebrew it was natural to think of God as revealing Himself chiefly in events occurring within a communal history; God had always made Himself known primarily in mighty acts. The Greek, however, characteristically thought of revelation in less dynamic terms—as theophany, the appearance of the divine in human form. The Greek was also more interested than the Jew in speculative metaphysical questions, in questions about the nature of things, in distinctions between form and substance, and the like. But although such facts as these may help explain some of the directions that reflection upon the person of Christ took in the ancient church, they do not account for the initial emphasis upon the person. This emphasis was inevitable from the start. The event had centered in the person and career of Jesus, and the church’s memory of it was largely a memory of Him. The event had happened in and around Him, and the community had come to pass among those who had known Him. He was the divine personal center of the church’s life (empirically identical with the Spirit). moreover, the moment in which event and community met—the one culminating, the other emerging—was conceived of as the resurrection of this same person from the dead. All of this being true, it was inevitable, I repeat, that the Christological question should have become almost at once a question about Him and that the earliest statement of faith, the first "creed," should have been a statement about Him.

5. The New Testament leaves us in no doubt both as to what that "creed" was and as to the unanimity with which it was accepted and used among the churches. It was: "Jesus is Lord and Christ." The constant collocation of these three terms in various parts of the New Testament—sometimes in the form of quasi-creedal statement (as in Acts 2:36; Phil. 2:11), more often in such a phrase as "Jesus Christ our Lord" or "the Lord Jesus Christ"—bears witness to its prevalence. Thus, the common faith of early Christianity involved a considerable measure of agreement not only as to the significance of the event and the meaning of the community, but also as to the nature and role of the person: Jesus was Lord and Christ. It is important to note, however that this agreement about the person was possible only because that category (that is the person) was subordinate to the other two in the sense that the terms in which He was first defined were terms provided by the event and the community respectively and constituted hardly more than a reassertion of the empirical values that the event and the community had proved to have. Only because this was true, we may believe, were the terms so unanimously acceptable. To call Jesus "Christ" and "Lord" was to say something about Him, but only because it was to say something also about the event and the community. May I try to show that this is true?

II.

6. First, then, to say that Jesus was "Christ" was to say something about the event. Now there can be no doubt as to the importance of Jesus in (or to) the event. The event happened around Him; He dominated it completely. It was what it was in its concrete character in large part, because He was what He was; and the memory of it was, as we have seen, largely the memory of Him. An event of a highly distinctive kind and of incalculable creative power occurred in first century Palestine; it was remembered as centered in and taking its character largely from a certain Jewish teacher and prophet. Contemporary, or almost contemporary, records confirm the memory both of the event as a whole and of the central decisive position of Jesus within it. The fact that both the event and the community have, from the very beginning, been called by His name bears witness to this same centrality.

7. But although it was undoubtedly the actual personal life and character of Jesus that in large part determined the actual concrete character of the event in the more objective sense, the relationship between person and event is, in a way, revered when we consider the faith of the church. It was the meaning the event had provided to have in the experience of the primitive community that largely determined the earliest theological significance of Jesus. The situation in the early church was not that the event was regarded as the eschatological event, because Jesus was believed to be the Christ but rather that Jesus was called Christ because he had been the decisive center of what was empirically realized to be the eschatological event. The very first Christian theological question (essentially Christological) was, "What has God done?" And the answer was (to repeat what had been said already in other words): "He has reconciled the world to Himself. He has put sin under sentence of doom. He has got us the victory. He has destroyed Him who had the power of death. He has delivered us from the dominion of darkness. He has brought life and immortality to light. He has given us the kingdom." Now these are all descriptions of the eschatological fulfillment, for which other men had only wished, or at best only vaguely hoped. But for the early Christians, God had already acted to bring all this to pass. The consummation, to be sure, was still to come: but the thing had in principle been accomplished. He had already given His Spirit, the "guarantee of their inheritance" and they had already entered upon the experience of sonship. Their hope was not mere hope, but hope that had already begun to pass into realization. The final decisive event of human history had occurred. This was the empirical fact and was the real ground of the belief that Jesus was the Christ. How could he not be when the event that he so completely dominated had proved to be the eschatological event? The statement of faith that Jesus was the Christ was really, in its basic intention, an affirmation that the event the church remembered was the supremely significant event of human history. God’s final act of redemption.

8. But much the same kind of thing can be said also about the lordship of Jesus, as this was first affirmed. To say that Jesus was "Lord" was to say something about Him, to be sure, but only because it was to say something about the community. It was a statement of belief only the shortest step removed from the actual experience of the church—hardly more than a description of that experience. No wonder it could be a common and universal faith. The earliest Christians found themselves belonging to a new community in which their memory of Jesus as human Master and Lord was now reinforced and enriched by their knowledge of Him as living and present in the church—still their Master and lord, but in a new sense. Yet the sense was not altogether new. The hushed cry of one disciple to another when at the end of a long night of fruitless labor at their nets they see the risen Jesus on the shore, "It is the Lord!" (John 21:7), serves admirably to remind us of the continuity of the lordship of Jesus as well as to suggest, at least, its fresh meaning after the Resurrection. They recognized Him as their Lord—so they have called Him all along—but now He is "the Lord" in a sense both more transcendent and more intimate. He is the ruler of the church just as He had been the leader of His little band of followers: He is the head (or, we would say, the heart) of the church just as He had been the center of interest and unity among them; He is the object of devotion, even worship, in the church just as He had been the object of His disciples’ loyalty. But whether at one time or the other, to speak of Jesus as Lord as to speak of a relationship in which he stood to the community, and was to say therefore as much about the community as about Him. He was "Jesus Christ our Lord." He could be known as the Lord only by members of the community; or, to say precisely the same thing in different words, no one could "say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit." (I Cor. 12:3).

9. We are dealing in these paragraphs with what I believe to be the most primitive faith. Once Christianity was established on Hellenistic soil, the term "Lord" tended to take its meaning primarily from its use to ascribe divine honors to emperors or to the gods who presided over the mystery cults, not to mention its use in the Greek Bible to render the unspeakable name of Yahweh. At the same time the world "Christ" tended to lose its meaning as the name of a function or office and to become a part of "Jesus’" own personal name. Thus, "Lord" came to carry something like the whole meaning formerly conveyed by the two names together. But in the beginning the titles were distinct and answered to the dual relationship (that is, with the event and the community) that we are now considering; and their primitive meaning was never completely lost. Jesus is still the Christ and our Lord.

10. As was pointed out in the preceding chapter, all early attempts to describe what is usually called the "work" of Christ are in the same way attempts to set forth the empirical realities of the new communal life. The "work" of Christ is the issue of the event. He is believed to have "overcome the world" and the power of sin has been broken. He is believed to have "tasted death for every man," because the members of the community find themselves walking in "newness of life" and filled with the hope of "the life everlasting." He is "Savior," because the event has proved to be in fact the saving event and the community the saving community. All the earliest names of Jesus are functional names; they are ascriptions to Him, as source or mediator, or the values that have been empirically received in consequence of the event and in the actual life of the community. They say only in various other ways that Jesus was Christ and Lord.

11. This Christ and Lord was, of coruse, believed in as divine. He was of "the nature of God;" He shared "the throne of God;" He was "at God’s right hand;" He was "God’s Son;" He was the divine "Logos." These terms cannot be pressed to yield definite and consistent conceptions of Christ’s "nature;" if any such conceptions were formed in the earliest period, no one of them was generally shared. But they do indicate the common faith that the Lord of the church was, in effect, Emmanuel, "God with us." There is no convincing evidence that He was called "God" in the first century, and indisputable evidence that He was not generally called by that name; but it is clear that He was thought of as being related to God as no other man could be. (This is best represented by the statement that Jesus Christ was an act of God—or, if one prefers, that in Him took place the revealing act of God.) But again this belief in the divinity of Jesus rested on the experience of the divine in the life of the community and on the recognition of the divine significance of the event. The position was not that the earliest Christians believed that the event and the community were divine because they also believed that Jesus was divine; but rather He was seen to be divine, because of the way in which He was related to an event and a community whose divine significance was a matter of intimate and indubitable conviction. Must Jesus not have been divine to have been the center of so divine an event?

12. Not only was that the first way, it is also the true way, to ask the Christological question just as the true way to ask the question about the Resurrection is, "Must not Jesus have arisen from the dead, since He is the present living center of the church’s life?" When the divine meaning of the event is made to depend upon views of Jesus’ divinity and when the presence of Christ in the church is made to depend upon a belief in the Resurrection, we cut the solid ground out from under the whole Christian position; we invest the purely speculative with an importance it does not possess and rely on it to perform a function it cannot perform; and we open the door to discord and division. The common faith of the church—even though it is expressed in terms of belief about the person—rests always, and only, upon the common memory of the event and the common experience of the Spirit. On this ground the common faith of primitive Christianity was firmly based.

III

13. Thus far in this chapter two things have been attempted: first, to show that the primitive Christian faith could be a common faith, because it was grounded in the very existence of the primitive church; and secondly, to indicate its basic structure. It was expressed, we have seen, in the formula; Jesus was Lord and Christ: that is, He was supremely significant in the community’s own life (Lord) and in human history ("Christ"). But this is only the basic structure of a faith which, even in New Testament times, underwent considerable development and was found in many diverse forms. It is important that this fact be borne in mind even when we are discussing the "common faith." Only in basic structure was the faith common; as elaborated and articulated, it assumed a great variety of forms.

14. This was true, because the church was not content to say simply that the event of Christ was in the mysterious providence of God, the supremely significant event of history, since through it God had brought into being the new community of His love in which sin and death are overcome and life and peace can be found—the community of the Spirit, of which the church is the anticipatory embodiment. It went on—inevitably, as things were—to ask why this particular event had had this particular effect and this question, because it was a purely speculative question, unanswerable on the basis of the experience of the early church, was susceptible of almost as many answers as there were theologians to ask it. To raise this question is to assume that the secret of the significance of the event can be found within the event itself; whereas this secret lies in Him who acted in and through it. One who raises this question of "why" must seek to answer it by breaking down the event and the new common life into their "parts" and then correlating the several elements of the one with the several elements of the other, as, for example, the death of Jesus with the forgiveness of sins, when really the event (like the new life itself) is one and indissoluble, and there is as little chance of our knowing the "why" of its affects as there is our understanding why God does anything else He does in His creation in the precise way He does it. But speculation of this kind, for all its divisiveness, was inevitable; and agreement in the early church on what we have called the "basic Structure" of faith did not prevent it.

Non-Violence and Racial Justice

It is commonly observed that the crisis in race relations dominates the arena of American life. This crisis has been precipitated by two factors: the determined resistance of reactionary elements in the South to the Supreme Court’s momentous decision outlawing segregation in the public schools, and the radical change in the Negro’s evaluation of himself. While southern legislative halls ring with open defiance through "interposition" and "nullification," while a modern version of the Ku Klux Klan has arisen in the form of "respectable" white citizens’ councils, a revolutionary change has taken place in the Negro’s conception of his own nature and destiny. Once he thought of himself as an inferior and patiently accepted injustice and exploitation. Those days are gone.

The first Negroes landed on the shores of this nation in 1619, one year ahead of the Pilgrim Fathers. They were brought here from Africa and, unlike the Pilgrims, they were brought against their will, as slaves. Throughout the era of slavery the Negro was treated in inhuman fashion. He was considered a thing to be used, not a person to be respected. He was merely a depersonalized cog in a vast plantation machine. The famous Dred Scott decision of 1857 well illustrates his status during slavery. In this decision the Supreme Court of the United States said, in substance, that the Negro is not a citizen of the United States; he is merely property subject to the dictates of his owner.

After his emancipation in 1863, the Negro still confronted oppression and inequality. It is true that for a time, while the army of occupation remained in the South and Reconstruction ruled, he had a brief period of eminence and political power. But he was quickly overwhelmed by the white majority. Then in 1896, through the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, a new kind of slavery came into being. In this decision the Supreme Court of the nation established the doctrine of "separate but equal" as the law of the land. Very soon it was discovered that the concrete result of this doctrine was strict enforcement of the "separate," without the slightest intention to abide by the "equal." So the Plessy doctrine ended up plunging the Negro into the abyss of exploitation where he experienced the bleakness of nagging injustice.

Living under these conditions, many Negroes lost faith in themselves. They came to feel that perhaps they were less than human. So long as the Negro maintained this subservient attitude and accepted the "place" assigned him, a sort of racial peace existed. But it was an uneasy peace in which the Negro was forced patiently to submit to insult, injustice and exploitation. It was a negative peace. True peace is not merely the absence of some negative force -- tension, confusion or war; it is the presence of some positive force -- justice, good will and brotherhood.

Then circumstances made it necessary for the Negro to travel more. From the rural plantation he migrated to the urban industrial community. His economic life began gradually to rise, his crippling illiteracy gradually to decline. A myriad of factors came together to cause the Negro to take a new look at himself. Individually and as a group, he began to re-evaluate himself. And so he came to feel that he was somebody. His religion revealed to him that God loves all his children and that the important thing about a man is "not his specificity but his fundamentum," not the texture of his hair or the color of his skin but the quality of his soul.

This new self-respect and sense of dignity on the part of the Negro undermined the South’s negative peace, since the white man refused to accept the change. The tension we are witnessing in race relations today can be explained in part by this revolutionary change in the Negro’s evaluation of himself and his determination to struggle and sacrifice until the walls of segregation have been finally crushed by the battering rams of justice.

The determination of Negro Americans to win freedom from every form of oppression springs from the same profound longing for freedom that motivates oppressed peoples all over the world. The rhythmic beat of deep discontent in Africa and Asia is at bottom a quest for freedom and human dignity on the part of people who have long been victims of colonialism. The struggle for freedom on the part of oppressed people in general and of the American Negro in particular has developed slowly and is not going to end suddenly. Privileged groups rarely give up their privileges without strong resistance. But when oppressed people rise up against oppression there is no stopping point short of full freedom. Realism compels us to admit that the struggle will continue until freedom is a reality for all the oppressed peoples of the world.

Hence the basic question which confronts the world’s oppressed is: How is the struggle against the forces of injustice to be waged? There are two possible answers. One is resort to the all too prevalent method of physical violence and corroding hatred. The danger of this method is its futility. Violence solves no social problems; it merely creates new and more complicated ones. Through the vistas of time a voice still cries to every potential Peter, "Put up your sword!" The shores of history are white with the bleached bones of nations and communities that failed to follow this command. If the American Negro and other victims of oppression succumb to the temptation of using violence in the struggle for justice, unborn generations will live in a desolate night of bitterness, and their chief legacy will be an endless reign of chaos.

The alternative to violence is non-violent resistance. This method was made famous in our generation by Mohandas K. Gandhi, who used it to free India from the domination of the British empire. Five points can be made concerning nonviolence as a method in bringing about better racial conditions.

First, this is not a method for cowards; it does resist. The non-violent resister is just as strongly opposed to the evil against which he protests as is the person who uses violence. His method is passive or non-aggressive in the sense that he is not physically aggressive toward his opponent. But his mind and emotions are always active, constantly seeking to persuade the opponent that he is mistaken. This method is passive physically but strongly active spiritually; it is non-aggressive physically but dynamically aggressive spiritually.

A second point is that non-violent resistance does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding. The non-violent resister must often express his protest through non-co-operation or boycotts, but he realizes that non-co-operation and boycotts are not ends themselves; they are merely means to awaken a sense of moral shame in the opponent. The end is redemption and reconciliation. The aftermath of non-violence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.

A third characteristic of this method is that the attack is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who are caught in those forces. It is evil we are seeking to defeat, not the persons victimized by evil. Those of us who struggle against racial injustice must come to see that the basic tension is not between races. As I like to say to the people in Montgomery, Alabama: "The tension in this city is not between white people and Negro people. The tension is at bottom between justice and injustice, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. And if there is a victory it will be a victory not merely for 50,000 Negroes, but a victory for justice and the forces of light. We are out to defeat injustice and not white persons who may happen to be unjust."

A fourth point that must be brought out concerning nonviolent resistance is that it avoids not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love. In struggling for human dignity the oppressed people of the world must not allow themselves to become bitter or indulge in hate campaigns. To retaliate with hate and bitterness would do nothing but intensify the hate in the world. Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can be done only by projecting the ethics of love to the center of our lives.

In speaking of love at this point, we are not referring to some sentimental emotion. It would be nonsense to urge men to love their oppressors in an affectionate sense. "Love" in this connection means understanding good will. There are three words for love in the Greek New Testament. First, there is eros. In Platonic philosophy eros meant the yearning of the soul for the realm of the divine. It has come now to mean a sort of aesthetic or romantic love. Second, there is philia. It meant intimate affectionateness between friends. Philia denotes a sort of reciprocal love: the person loves because he is loved. When we speak of loving those who oppose us we refer to neither eros nor philia; we speak of a love which is expressed in the Greek word agape. Agape means nothing sentimental or basically affectionate; it means understanding, redeeming good will for all men, an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. It is the love of God working in the lives of men. When we love on the agape level we love men not because we like them, not because their attitudes and ways appeal to us, but because God loves them. Here we rise to the position of loving the person who does the evil deed while hating the deed he does.

Finally, the method of non-violence is based on the conviction that the universe is on the side of justice. It is this deep faith in the future that causes the non-violent resister to accept suffering without retaliation. He knows that in his struggle for justice he has cosmic companionship. This belief that God is on the side of truth and justice comes down to us from the long tradition of our Christian faith. There is something at the very center of our faith which reminds us that Good Friday may reign for a day, but ultimately it must give way to the triumphant beat of the Easter drums. Evil may so shape events that Caesar will occupy a palace and Christ a cross, but one day that same Christ will rise up and split history into A.D. and B.C., so that even the life of Caesar must be dated by his name. So in Montgomery we can walk and never get weary, because we know that there will be a great camp meeting in the promised land of freedom and justice.

This, in brief, is the method of non-violent resistance. It is a method that challenges all people struggling for justice and freedom. God grant that we wage the struggle with dignity and discipline. May all who suffer oppression in this world reject the self-defeating method of retaliatory violence and choose the method that seeks to redeem. Through using this method wisely and courageously we will emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man into the bright daybreak of freedom and justice.

God Lets Loose Karl Barth

"Beware," warns Emerson, "when the great God lets loose a thinker in this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city and no man knows what is safe or where it will end.’’ Nothing less than conflagration appears to have broken out in the religious thought of Europe. Many incendiaries may be pointed to, but there is one whose torch seems to have burned more brightly and to have been applied more effectively than that of any of the others.

Five years ago one began to hear, at the tables of the student clubs and restaurants of Germany, the name of Karl Barth. A young theologian recently called from Switzerland had made an amazingly impressive debut at the University of Göttingen. His chair-- that of Reformed or Calvinistic theology-- was subsidized in part by American Presbyterians, and was not in itself sufficiently exalted to catch the eye of Lutheran Germany. This circumstance made only the more significant the number of students who soon crowded his lecture hall, and the number of students, professors and townspeople who filled and overflowed any church where he had been advertised to preach.

He was remembered by many as having been himself a student in Tübingen and Berlin little more than twelve years before. Even then he had been marked as a man of unusual, if not wholly conventional, vitality. Born in Basel, in 1886, he had returned at the end of his university career to be the minister of the church in the little town of Protestant Aargau, north of Lucerne; and there, during the war period, he had preached on Sunday mornings before the good peasant folk, to the antiphonal booming of guns in near-by Alsace. The sombre thought of guns and of the stricken and perplexed Europe, governed then by guns, gave him long hours in his study. He studied, dreamed and wrote, until, almost simultaneously with the armistice, was announced the publication of his commentary on the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans. It was this which elicited his call to Germany.

Of all the commentaries which have appeared since the birth of biblical criticism, this is the weirdest. It is in reality 500 pages of pithy sermons upon the verses of the epistle taken in order. Of learned exegesis it is innocent, though not contemptuous. Of mighty feuilletons of etymology and textual apparatus there is no trace. It is a veritable Koran for paradox and want of sequence. But by the scholarly and lay world alike it was found fascinating. For four years, until his departure for his present eminent position at Munster, Professor Barth remained at Göttingen, and during that time he saw his theology, set forth in further books and in lectures and addresses, sweep through the universities of Germany, and today there seem to be hardly more than two classes of religious thinkers in the country, Barthians and anti-Barthians.

It is little wonder that Barth has been called by Count Keyserling the man who saved Protestantism in Germany. In the year that he took his seat on the faculty at Göttingen, no less than 246,302 nominal Lutherans, under the new laws of the support of the churches by taxation, professed atheism. Whether or not the work of Barth and his friends Gogarten, Thurneysen and others directly affected the drift of popular opinion in the republic, it is nonetheless true that the turn of the tide back toward the churches was almost synchronous with the beginning of the Barthian movement.

As for the world of thought, the very furor the young theologian has aroused in academic Protestant circles proclaims him a portent of the first magnitude. Harnack, the Zeus of the historical critics, has broken the seclusion his years would seem rightly to permit him to indite a series of essays against the new movement. Professor Troeltsch -- whose too-early death is lamented on every hand -- and Professor Julicher, two other Olympians of the last great generation, have treated Barth with seriousness and apprehension. For every critical Oliver, the Barthian theology has an admiring Roland. Young Germany hears the new gospel gladly. And Professor Lange, whose painstaking researches in Reformation and post-Reformation history make his utterance authoritative, does not hesitate to call Barth "the greatest man since Schleiermacher." Among Roman Catholic writers are found almost as many eager friends of the new thought as among Lutherans and Calvinists. In general they seem to accept it as far more cousinly to their own doctrines than anything else Protestantism has produced since the days of the Reformation.

But the crowning tribute to the man Barth is the almost universal acknowledgment of religious debt which even his critics have made to him. The acrimonious words which are likely to flash from any debate, and which have not been wholly absent from this, are smothered beneath the expressions of generous gratitude with which opponent after opponent prefaces his discussion.

One of the secrets of the swift access the new theology has found into the life of the Continent is that it takes its beginning from the scene in the local church rather than in the university library. Barth, like Schleiermacher, and unlike many of the book-theologians of the last decades, has enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a pastoral contact with real people. His approach to the problem of life and the beginnings of his "theology of crisis" were made when as a minister he first realized the utter impossibility of communicating to his hearers the faith by which he himself was animated.

According to Barth, man is safe upon the sea that lies between God and the world as we know it because the sea is God’s and he made it, but he persistently tries for the Godward shore, and is usually either expecting to reach it or deluding himself that he has already done so. Security is his aim and illusion -- economic security, religious security, moral security, intellectual security. But there is no way from man to God.

For man to attempt to know God and to solve the problem of life is to set sail upon this infinite sea. His best hope will be to beat back and forth into the wind, but what can it profit him? Philosophy is only an endless oscillation, a dialectic never finished.

Professor Barth’s ethics are such as to delight the realist without disturbing the idealist, the search for the morally right being a form of hopelessness, but a thoroughly sanguine form. Its object is always attainable but never attained. Here Professor Barth is the embodiment of the continenta1 reaction to associating Christianity with a particular social movement, whether it be "kultur," pacifism, socialism or anything else. His part of Switzerland had been heavily under the influence of Ragaz of Zurich, the blazing prophet of social Christianity who, like his friend Walter Rauschenbusch, saw in the labor movement the greatest single contemporary salient of the advancing kingdom of God. Barth gathers the questionings of his friends into one gigantic interrogation point, and flings down to ethical theory the demand that it base itself not upon the conscious will of man but on the uncertainly, though actually, felt will of God. The truest rallying cry that can be used by any leader, he would say, is that suggested by Carlyle for Margaret Fuller, "I don’t know where I am going; follow me!"

There is a trend in morality which corresponds to the dogmatic movement in thought. We become superior, and if we are honest with ourselves we will recognize our superiority -- but the shorter name for conscious superiority is pride.

Pride being the hatefullest of the virtues, the human spirit now turns away from this certain-sure morality, though it has nothing else in particular to turn to. It begins to ride loose to all current ethical forms. It loses squeamishness about the decencies. It extols freedom as an end in itself. It becomes emancipated. It bobs its conscience. It blows ideals as smoke rings. It hates Eighteenth Amendments because they are constitutional. It will maintain its emotional integrity. It will follow its own desire. But no mood is more perfectly unsatisfactory to the morally in earnest. They do not wish to follow their own desire; they wish to follow God’s.

There is nothing left but to fall back on paradox -- to seek God’s will zealously with the conclusion foregone that God’s will cannot be found -- to join the contemporary crusades for righteousness with the conviction that they will be one day proved, like the great Crusades, to have been ill advised and wrong! This is not discovering God’s will, but it is, after all, acknowledging it.

Professor Barth’s animadversions upon worship are the very dissidence of dissent. To him the ordinary service of the church is the maddest of all man’s efforts to reach God. One can expect from it only an unedifying oscillation between fictitious spiritual tranquillity and honest skepticism.

Shall one then enjoy God in worship, when the naked essence of such worship is a selfish self-hypnosis? -- or shall one, in want of any certainty, eschew the life of prayer entirely? The paradox, once more, is our refuge: let a man realize at once his infinite need for finding God, and the infinite futility of his search, and in the clash of those two infinities within his soul, the God of the infinities will be adumbrated -- but only adumbrated

Many of his critics have harassed the young professor of Münster for what they name his desperate pessimism. "There is no way from man to God." They forget his other theme: "There is a way from God to man." It is in this thought that his paradoxes are ultimately resolved; since any attempt to use God, even for purposes of describing him to others, throws us into dilemma, we must allow him to use us.

"There is a way to come into relation with the righteousness of God. This way we enter not by speech, nor reflection, nor reason, but by being still." God, in a word, takes the initiative and reveals himself. Allow him then to do so, preaches Barth. It is only when you are agonizedly aware of the failure of your own effort that God begins to move upon you.

Karl Barth, in a word, is a reincarnation of John Calvin. His message, in nuce, is the Sinaitic sovereignty of God. Only when you ultimately confess the poverty of your own thought, only when you acknowledge yourself a bewildered sinner in his sight, only when you know yourself, even at the gate of death, to be the shadow of a breath, will the vast Transcendence make you miraculously aware of himself in you. He will come to you as strange content of reality, rather than form, for form is only your manner of adopting him. Give him form, and his presence shrinks back into a hint. Add nothing to him, and he will remain to you the dreadful Perfect.

To the German people, stunned by the war and the consequences of defeat, their former optimism shattered and spent, shuddering to contemplate the debt-darkened years of the future, Barth in the phase of his dreadful insight into the futility of all search for security must seem a veritable Jeremiah, and his teaching an evilly perfect rationalization of their indigence and perplexity. But in the phase of his harking back to the perfect sovereignty of the ruler of this world and all worlds, his words must seem an embodiment of their one hope.

Professor Barth has recently been introduced personally to a paradox which he is not the first man in history to have discovered: he now knows that the people stone their prophets. On the occasion of his being called to succeed the venerable Doctor Ludemann in the chair of systematic theology in Bern, such a storm of protest arose from an articulate group of Bernese churchmen as would have dismayed the doughtiest. There is "culture-Protestantism" elsewhere than in America. Its devotees in Switzerland do not relish this theologian’s suggestion that the modern worship of the state or even of the family, instead of God, has the same effect as the worship of the "beast of the bottomless pit" or of some "voracious idol." They join with others in their own country and in Germany in condemning his thought as "desperado-theology." To Barth, being such a one as saith among the trumpets, Ha Ha! the very protest must have made the call more tempting; but he declined.

As an immense counterblast in his behalf, the voice of the friends of the new viewpoint was lifted up throughout the German-speaking world. There is a vast company of folk in stations high and low who find his paradoxes singularly satisfying and alive. They feel in them a hint of "Reality" -- of a Reality which we cannot reach but which can reach us. Among this company many of our English poets and thinkers would, I am persuaded, have numbered themselves. This is hardly strange in view of the long-standing influence of Calvin among us.

The Church Faces Its World

At such a gathering as the World Conference on Church, Community and State -- the title currently used almost to the exclusion of "Life and Work" - in such a place as Oxford, it requires a little time for the mid-American participant, even if he is not unfamiliar with the scene, to adjust his mind to the serious and urgent issues of the conference. Oxford always works magic on any visitor who is worthy of the privilege of being a visitor. Its beauty and its history conspire to weave a spell. And the personnel of the conference, though mostly clad in the common garments of international commerce and convention, has its sartorial highlights -- Eastern Orthodox archbishops with flowing robes and patriarchal beards, Russian priests with towering headdresses, Anglican bishops in aprons and gaiters, Lutheran bishops who wear their gowns and pectoral crosses even at the breakfast table. It is well to have these visible symbols of the variety of cultures within the one church. They reveal the problem of making it effectively one as at once more difficult and more significant than it appears in a conference among those who wear identical clothes, have their hair cut in the same style and speak the same language.

Diversities of language are indeed a serious hindrance to mutual understanding. English, French and German were the official languages of the conference, and the interpreters were wonderfully competent in both translation and condensation. But a two-minute translation of a ten-minute speech comes under suspicion of incompleteness. The explanation that "we translate only the ideas, not all the words" is sometimes but not always adequate. Seldom was a speaker who understood the three languages quite satisfied with the version of his speech in the other two. But we must continue to pay for the presumption of the builders of Babel.

Languages may diverge in discussion, but they converge in worship. The services of devotion, held morning and evening in St. Mary’s Church, have been a vital factor in the conference. There the Una Sancta becomes a reality. The three languages are used in rotation, without translation or the need of it. Even the Russian choir spoke intelligibly to all, though in an unknown tongue. In prayer and hymn the miracle of Pentecost is repeated, and each hears in the language in which he was born.

The range of concrete materials with which the conference deals is suggested by the titles of the five sections into which the delegates were divided for simultaneous sessions of intensive discussion: "The Church and the Community" (meaning by "community" what the Germans mean by Volk, society in its larger units viewed with reference to its cultural and racial coherence rather than its political organization); "Church and State"; "The Church and the Economic Order"; "Church, Community and State in Relation to Education"; "The Universal Church and the World of Nations." It is evident that these comprehensive categories could easily cover discussions and pronouncements upon every phase of the church’s function and responsibility in relation to the modern world. They were indeed intended to do no less. It is equally evident that the treatment of these topics could not proceed without some critical scrutiny both of the social facts and of the past and present behavior of the church in relation to those facts as well as of the secular powers in relation to the church.

This is a very large order, even for four hundred learned delegates assisted by an equal number of no less learned associates, having the advantage of careful preliminary studies and giving undivided attention to the problems for a period of two weeks in the congenially contemplative atmosphere of Oxford. The difficulty of mobilizing the intellectual resources of such an assembly is very great. A new U. S. Congress does not get much done in the first two weeks, even with the advantages of a continuing organization, a body of guiding precedent, a fairly general mutual acquaintance and a single language. To ask the members of an ecumenical conference to give, within a fortnight, a diagnosis of the world’s ills, an evaluation of the church’s previous and present efforts to cure them, a statement of the rights and duties of the church in relation to political and cultural organizations, and a prospectus for future action which will satisfy the legitimate claims of both and promote the welfare of all mankind -- that seems to be asking the impossible. Yet something like that was what was asked of the Oxford Conference; and something like that, it may be said subject to certain limitations, is what the conference accomplished. At least it made significant advance in that direction.

No achievement whatever would have been possible without the careful groundwork that had been done in advance -- largely by Dr. Oldham, Dr. Shillito, Mr. Henriod and, for the American section, Dr. Leiper, and their colleagues too numerous to name—and without the technique of procedure that was chiefly in the hands of Dr. Mott. The preparatory work made possible findings which were studies rather than improvisations. The technique of the conference, while it had some steam-roller qualities, gave the maximum opportunity for the expression of the widest variety of opinions, kept the business moving and brought the discussions within the necessary limits of time. Doubtless many a delegate is leaving Oxford with undelivered speeches curdling within him. Doubtless most of these would have been good speeches. But let those who thought the chairman cruel remember the U. S. Senate and reflect upon the horrors of unlimited debate.

The complexity of the problem faced by the conference is not fully stated when mention has been made of the range and magnitude of its topics. There is the added fact that to every important question there were two contrasting lines of approach. They may be called the dogmatic and the pragmatic; or the a priori and the empirical; or the theological and the sociological; or, as one speaker defined them, a dogmatism which makes an absolute separation between the world and God and refuses to let the church be held responsible for anything that happens in the world, and a "pseudo-religious activism" which would make the church the servant of every benevolent or reforming impulse.

Let us suppose that some phase of the relation of church and state is to be considered. One approach insists upon beginning with definitions and general concepts. What is the chief end of man? What is the essential nature of the church? Is the state a gift of God or a human instrument? It tends to answer these questions in terms of complete divine transcendence, a mystical and pre-existent church (Una Sancta) which can do no wrong though its human agents can and do, and a sinful world in which the only absolute duty is to choose the course that is least wrong. The other approach, considering church and state as concrete phenomena sufficiently defined by their observable characteristics, asks: How may their relations be adjusted so that human liberty may be safeguarded, social order may be preserved and religion may have its proper place in life?

I offer no commentary upon the relative merits of these two types of approach, but it can scarcely be denied that the attempt to satisfy the demands of both of them at once was the source of no little difficulty in the discussions and of some confusion in the reported findings. But since both points of view exist within the churches which have here been trying to express and deepen their unity, a body of findings which ignored either would fatally misrepresent the situation.

In view of the conviction of so large an element -- including all the Eastern Orthodox and most of the Continentals and Anglicans -- that the relation of the church to the world, or of the Christian man to society, can be profitably discussed only after a sound theological foundation has been laid, it is doubtless wise that steps should be taken toward the merging of "Life and Work" and "Faith and Order" in a permanent organization which shall constitute a single ecumenical federation of churches. Such steps were taken at Oxford by the appointment of seven representatives to confer with an equal number who, it is hoped, will be appointed at Edinburgh.

Any attempted summary, in a few paragraphs, of the findings of the Oxford Conference in its five fields of study would be too fragmentary to be serviceable. Only a few detached and striking items can be mentioned.

The relationship of men in communities and races was viewed as a gift of God; but the elevation of Volk into an object of supreme devotion and the claim of superiority for one race over another and discriminations on the ground of race or color were declared to be contrary to the spirit of Christ. (A Dutch delegate from South Africa said that the denunciation of racial discriminations would give great offense to his people, but his protest fell on deaf ears.) Anti-Semitism was specifically repudiated.

Any totalitarian program for the state was declared to be hostile to the liberty of the church and, what is more, hostile to the liberty of human personality. The church is under no less obligation to protest when the rights of others are invaded by the state than when its own rights are denied. An attempt was made to secure the adoption of a clear-cut statement that the church has no rights for which it can properly demand recognition by the state except such as can be stated in terms of the rights of citizens to freedom of thought, expression, assembly and organization; but the idea of special rights for the church as a divine institution was too strongly entrenched. It was declared that the church has a right to demand from the state "freedom to determine the nature of its government and the qualifications of its ministers and members, so far as it desires." Even this guarded statement, as amended by the addition of the final clause, was held by a Swedish Lutheran delegate to be a demand for what is impossible in an established church. He may be right. It is an inescapable fact that when free-church men and established-church men undertake to frame a joint statement about the relations of church and state, they can come to agreement only by a studied ambiguity or by a cautious avoidance of controversial aspects of the question. There was not much ambiguity in the statement as adopted, but there was plenty of avoidance.

The absence of the German delegates was deeply regretted. A message of sympathy was adopted and a delegation was authorized to convey this message in person and carry a report of the conference. The spirit which prompted this action is above criticism, but it may reasonably be doubted whether the coming of such a deputation from Oxford to visit those who were not permitted to go to Oxford will not exasperate the German government and provoke reprisals.

But there were German delegates at Oxford -- three representing the federation of evangelical free churches. On the platform of the conference Methodist Bishop Melle testified to the gratitude of the free churches of (Germany for the "full liberty" which they enjoyed; following the injunction of St. Paul they pray for all who are in authority, and they are grateful "that God in his providence has sent a Leader" who was able to "banish the danger of Bolshevism in Germany and to rescue a nation of from sixty to seventy millions from the abyss of despair to which it had been led by the World War and the Treaty of Versailles and its wretched consequences, and to give this nation a new faith in its mission and in its future." Before this speech there had been whispered rumors that if these free-church delegates spoke their sentiments they might not be permitted to return to Germany. After it, there seemed no reason to doubt the cordiality of their reception by the department of propaganda upon their return.

The declaration on war was eagerly awaited. It did not fail to declare war is "a particular demonstration of the power of sin in this world" but it did not say that any specific war is a sin or that participation in it is sinful. Man is "caught in a sinful situation," in which "the best that is possible falls far short of the glory of God and is, in that sense, sinful." Avoiding commitment as to any specific attitude which the church and Christian men ought to adopt toward war when war comes, the conference report contented itself with exhibiting the various views which Christians actually hold on that subject and with saying that while the church could neither affirm that any one of these was right and the others wrong nor acquiesce in the permanent continuance of these differences, it should promote the study of the problem with a view to a better understanding of the purpose of God.

From the pacifist standpoint, this was a pretty weak outcome of the deliberations. It represents no advance. "Dick" Sheppard, Canon of St. Paul’s, was quite willing to be quoted as saying that, whether considered as the statement of a Christian attitude toward war, as an announcement to governments of the church’s judgment upon war or as a guide for Christians in deciding what their own course should be in case of war, it is a total loss. When asked what he and his fellow pacifists would do about it, he replied, with characteristic smiling earnestness: "Blow it up! In a debonair manner, of course."

One cannot but feel that on this as on many other points the theologians considered the doctrine of original sin as a very present help in trouble. "To all human institutions clings the taint of sin." "Each man must bear his share of the corporate sin which has rendered impossible any better course." "Some . . . believe that in a sinful world the state has the duty, under God, to use force when law and order are threatened." The apology for doing un-Christian things for the defense of Christian principles in a sinful world is called being "realistic." But the sections on international relations contain also many strong affirmations of the duty and opportunity of the church to serve as a unifying force among the nations and as an advocate of those principles of justice and liberty which, if generally observed, would prevent the clash of arms.

Limitations of space do not permit adequate comment on the findings of the commission on "The Church and the Social Order." It should be read in full, and there will be early opportunity to read it. It contains much enlightened and liberal social doctrine, and countenances no complacency with things as they are. It warns against being "deceived by the utopian promises of new social faiths," for "because of the sinfulness of the human heart and the complexities of social life none of the programs for the reconstruction of the economic order can be trusted without qualifications." The report as prepared by the commission and adopted by the conference has the appearance of having been written by men who, rather radical themselves, were aware that it would have to be adopted, if at all, by the votes of those less so.

A list of the pioneer leaders whose faith and vision created the first conference on Life and Work and paved the way for this second was presented in a memorial. To these deserving names I venture to add another the absence of which leaves a wide gap in the record -- the name of Peter Ainslie. He was neither patriarch nor archbishop, and it is not always easy for those who direct the affairs of assemblies involving high ecclesiastical dignitaries to estimate adequately the services of those who have been the prophets rather than the high priests of such a movement.

The conference has closed, leaving in the mind of every member a more vivid sense of the ecumenical character of the church even now, in spite of its divisions. "Our unity in Christ is not a theme for aspiration," says the closing message; "it is an experienced fact." There is a large measure of truth in these words. There was no unseemly argument about a joint communion service, as in the final days at Lausanne. It was avoided by the expedient of having an Anglican service, conducted by Anglican ministers, to which "all baptized believers" were invited. This is something less than perfect "unity in Christ." Non-Anglicans were present as guests, rather than as members of the family. It was an act of gracious hospitality, duly appreciated as such; but it was a symbol of the separateness of churches as well as of the unity of Christians. There are important aspects of unity which are still a theme for aspiration.

The Sense of God’s Reality

Our modern world is headed straight for some gigantic disappointments. Never were such splendid plans afoot in human history before; never were there so many men and women of high hope and far-seeing expectancy at work on schemes for human betterment so vast in scope and so promising in outlook. Statesmen dare to plan for organized international cooperation; workingmen dare to expect within this generation the launching of industrial democracy; churchmen plot campaigns that marshal millions into a united force.

Nothing is more clear, however, in the light of history, than this: new political, economic and ecclesiastical machinery does not alone solve problems; it creates problems, and, above all, it puts a strain on moral foundations, on spiritual resources, that must successfully be met or the best-laid plans come down in ruin. You cannot build a new forty-story business block on the old three-story foundations. With every expansion of the structure, with every elevation in the plans, the underlying bases become not less but more important. It takes far more brotherly spirit to run a League of Nations than to run a village; it takes far more personal unselfishness and reliability to make industrial democracy a success than it does to conduct the present order; and if the extensive Christian plans now afoot are to achieve their aims, the Christian faith in God must grow accordingly.

Amid all the creak and clatter of our far-flung Christian plans, therefore -- the commissions, committees, campaigns, surveys, federations and budgets -- all thoughtful Christians who are interested to avoid the disillusionment which the failure of so much splendid effort would inevitably cause will bear down hard upon the central matter: the achievement of a deeper sense of God’s reality. That is the foundation of all our building. If that weakens, the excellence of the superstructure does not matter. That is the dynamic. If that fails, the skillful workmanship of the engine is effort thrown away.

Now, the sense of God’s reality is a different experience from belief that God exists. All men believe that natural beauty exists, but some men feel it vividly, rejoice in it heartily, while others are never moved by it at all. From the chords of one man’s heart every sound and sight and scent on an autumn day will draw music like a symphony. He knows what Keats meant when he sang:

Oh, what a wild and harmonious tune

My spirit struck from all the beautiful!

But here is another man who does not vividly perceive in nature any beauty whatsoever. He wishes that he did. He reads Wordsworth to see if he can find the secret, but it continually eludes him. He reads radiant descriptions of sunsets in the poets where the sun rides the western sea like a "golden galleon" or

Throws his weary arms far up the sky,

And with vermilion-tinted fingers

Toys with the long tresses of the Evening Star.

Then he goes out to see a sunset, and he does not see anything like that at all.

That is the contrasting experience of men with reference to God, which is, of all others, most baffling. Atheism is not our greatest danger, but a shadowy sense of God’s reality. We do not disbelieve that God exists, but we often lack a penetrating and convincing consciousness that we are dealing with him and he with us. This is the inner problem of prayer. And it cannot be amiss for any man or woman, concerned with the movements of the churches, to consider with what insights he can surround and penetrate his praying, so that in it all a vital consciousness of the divine presence shall make glory at the center.

The troubles of our generation which so urgently demand of us a fresh consciousness of God can help us to the very experience for which they cry. For God is like water -- the intense reality of it is never appreciated by one who has not known thirst. So God’s unreality to us in part is due to our easy-going way of taking him for granted, with little sense of dire and dreadful need. Before the war, how many of us, conventionally religious, were dealing with God so! Then the war broke out, and who could light-heartedly take God for granted any more! We needed him too vitally to take him for granted. This world was a wilder place than we had used to think. Its boisterous currents showed bewildering power when they had overflowed their banks, and all our little human preventions were washed away like piles of sand that children raise against the onset of the tides.

Even now dismal possibilities lie ahead -- upheaval, anarchy, violence; it may be the League of Nations spoiled by opposition, apathy or treachery, and the whole world going on with this military business, using all inventive genius for destructive ends and making a worse hell of it all than the Stone Age a thousand times over. Or, on the other side, what glorious possibilities! What hopes worth praying, toiling, fighting for! If only this world were meant to enshrine a better order; if only creation were moral to the core; if only -- God! For if creation is not basically moral, no God at all, and we with unaided human fingers are trying to make an ethical oasis in a spiritual desert, where no oasis was ever meant to be, then we are beaten at the start. Soon or later the desert will heave its burning sands against us and hurl its blistering winds across us, and all that we have dreamed and done will come to naught.

Tremendously, we need God! For tasks inward and outward, personal and international, against sins deep-seated, inveterate and malign, we need God. Let the need, like thirst, make its own satisfaction real! Let the beatitude on those athirst and hungry be fulfilled! For until a man comes to God in such a mood there is no possibility of reality in prayer.

The great social needs and the projected social crusades of our days, which so depend on faith in God, may well themselves create the atmosphere in which we find God. It is a grievous misinterpretation to suppose that God’s reality dawned on men, like the Old Testament prophets, in mystical aloofness from the social needs and social movements of their time.

Moses came face to face with the Eternal in the Wilderness? To be sure, but the journey that so ended in a lonesome place before the face of God did not start in solitude at all. It began in Egypt amid a suffering people. He heard whips whistling over the backs of the Hebrews until he winced. He saw women staggering under the loads of bricks to build Pharaoh’s treasure cities, until he could tolerate the infamy no longer. One day his scorching indignation burst all bonds. A brute of an Egyptian laying the knout upon a Hebrew! Furiously the son of Pharaoh’s daughter ripped his dignities and titles off. Only one thing mattered -- just one thing: Israel must be free! There, in a high hour of social passion and sacrifice, began the road that, leading out from fury to wisdom, brought him at last to God.

No pathway into the consciousness of God’s reality has been trodden by nobler men than this road of social devotion and sacrifice. God’s greatest souls have often started like Elijah, determined that at whatever cost he would denounce and defeat the tyranny of Ahab, and they have ended like Elijah, on the mountainside, listening to the still small voice of God. They have started like Dante, with a passion to save Italy from chaos, and they have ended like Dante, standing with Beatrice before the Great White Throne. They have started like Lincoln, vowing that if ever he had a chance to hit slavery, he would hit it hard, and they have ended like Lincoln, saying, "Many times I have been driven to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go."

Such an open road to the vivid sense of God’s reality is waiting for every eager and prophetic heart today. The needs of men, the sins that must be blasted with concerted indignation, the causes that invite our ardent championship -- these are not alien from the problem of prayer. They are a blazed trail into the secrets of prayer. The great prophets of God have moved along this path into a vivid sense of God’s reality. Sacrifice for social weal unveiled the face of the Eternal.

The sense of God’s reality is a vital experience, and like every other vital experience we don’t so much learn it, or achieve it, or clamber up to it; we catch it by contagion. Some things never can be taught, no matter with what skilled witchery of words the case is stated and the lessons analyzed. Courage, for example! There doubtless is a theory of courage, but no careful learning of it would make anyone courageous. Indeed, in any situation, like the front line trenches at the zero hour, when courage is an absolute necessity and every man with all his heart is ardently desiring all of it that he can get, the one intolerable thing would be to talk about it.

But an example of it -- how welcome and contagious! Bravery is fire; it kindles a kindred conflagration in every heart that has tinder in it. We not only learn what courage is by its incarnations, but we are set ablaze by it ourselves, and all the courage that we ever had we neither generated nor achieved; we caught it.

When men in trouble seek for fortitude, they will not find it in an exhortation. But some Bunyan, writing Pilgrim’s Progress in a prison where it was so damp that, as he cried, "The moss did verily grow upon mine eyebrows"; some Kernahan, born without arms and legs, but by sheer grit fighting his way up until he sat in the House of Commons; some Henry M. Stanley, born in a workhouse and buried in Westminster Abbey; some Dante, his Beatrice dead, he himself an exile from the city of his love, distilling all his agony into a song that became the "voice of ten silent centuries", or some more obscure and humble life close at hand where handicaps have been mastered, griefs have been built into character, disappointments have been turned into trellises, not left a bare, unsightly thing -- such incarnations of fortitude and faith have infectious power. We win fortitude by falling in love with it. We are not taught it. We catch it.

Let a man in his thinking use such reasonable ways of conceiving God that he may help and not hinder his growing sense of God’s reality. There was a time when God’s immediate presence in our lives was not readily pictured. When men argued about God they said that the world was like a watch. It presupposed somebody who made it. That is, God was a mechanician; he had made this watch of a world and had gone off and left it to run by its own mainspring. God was a carpenter. He had built this house of a world and had left it to stand by its own laws. God was an engineer. He had thrown open the throttle of this world, had leaped the cab, and now the locomotive of itself goes thundering down the rails. Where is God? Back there somewhere!

We have no right to hold such a caricature of God. God is no man in the moon. God is in this world as we are in our bodies. Where are you? Is your hand you? Your eye? Is any part of your body you? We cannot see without our eyes, but we are not our eyes. We cannot see without the optic nerve, but we are not the optic nerve. We cannot see without the temporal lobe of the brain, but we are not the lobe of the brain. Where are we? All through our bodies we seem to be; yet nowhere in our bodies can we locate ourselves.

"God is a spirit," we read, and the mystery of it seems very great. But man is a spirit. Manifestly man is here; the evidence of his presence is on every side; nothing are we more certain of than that man is here -- yet we cannot find man anywhere. Bring the scalpel and dissect; where is he? Bring the microscope and look; where is he? As truly about man as about God, could one cry, "Oh, that I knew where I might find him!"

As we are in our bodies, but not of them, so is God in his world. And the greatest event in man’s life is the vital apprehension of that not as theory but as experience. A man perceives at last that he is like an aeolian harp. Fit the harp’s frame to the window ever so carefully, yet it is not at all fitted -- not until the invisible winds make music on its strings. So man fits his body to the framework of this physical world, fits nerves to comfortable circumstances and mind to information, but the whole man is not so adjusted. Conscience, love, ideals, thoughts that "break through language and escape," faiths and hopes that make us men indeed -- not till the invisible so makes music in us are we completely fitted to this world.

And the longer a man lives the more it becomes clear that all other adjustments are for the sake of this highest adjustment. This is a spiritual world, then, at its center. God is here, playing upon our lives. After that vision, clearly seen, one does not go out to seek God again. Shall man sally forth to hasten the sunrise? What has he to do with that? Let him go home and cleanse the windows. The sun is rising. It will find him out even in his little home and make him radiant if the way is clear. Shall a man go out to make the tides come in? What power has he? Let him rather take the sands away from the harbor’s mouth. The tides are rising. They will come in if there is a way.

This, indeed, is the conclusion of the whole matter. God is seeking us. We do not need to search for him. He is the shepherd; we are the sheep. We need to let him find us.