01.09. CHAPTER IX - THE PASSION OP THE CHURCH

CHAPTER IX - THE PASSION OP THE CHURCH

If one were asked what should be the passion of the church, there could be but one answer from progressive or conservative, and that would be “to serve the world.” The Master’s thrilling challenge would rise to our lips, “Ye are the light of the world, ye are the salt of the earth. “ The church ought not to be divided into two camps when it conies to the application of this great principle. At heart, we believe, the Church is really one, though it has often happened that, as in the old story, men looking at different sides of the same shield have called it silver or gold and have fallen to blows over their differences, when if each had taken the viewpoint of the other, their differences would have disappeared. May we venture an irenic word with the hope that it may serve in the end to make matters a little clearer and to unite for a common purpose forces which have seemed at times to be arrayed against each other? A little careful thought will show that there is no antagonism between a personal and a social gospel. It is no doubt true that men have been slow to realize that in addition to the burden which rests upon them from a sense of personal wrong-doing, they are also face to face with corporate iniquities and national selfishness and organized brute force, and that somebody is to blame for it. “We are all diseased and with our surfeiting and wanton waste have brought ourselves into a burning fever, and we must bleed for it.’ 7 It is doubtless true that a conscience awakened to responsibility in social guilt will soon focus itself upon the more immediate circle of life about its possessor and bring to sight the hideous consequences of his own self-seeking, unfairness, indulgence and distrust. But it is also true that in most cases, the conscience does not become awakened to a sense of social guilt until it has become sensitive, by a personal touch with Him who is the illumination of the soul. We do not come to love God through love to men, but we come to love men through love to God, and then the two are seen to be in essence one. The great task which the church has is to bring men first to loyalty to Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord; from that will flow the second loyalty to God’s world, to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with Him, and with that will go the passion to spend and to be spent for those for whom Christ thought it not beneath Him to go himself to the cross, and who said, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up Ms cross daily and follow me.” There is a third loyalty to which our attention is called, namely, loyalty to the Church, to prayer, the study of the Bible, the worship of God’s house, the fellowship which comes with a life of love. No one will accuse Henry Sloane Coffin of Union Theological Seminary with not having the modern viewpoint. He says: * ’ Religion is not primarily something useful, but something fruitful. It is not a means of improving mankind alongside of other means, such as education, art, politics and morality; it is the parent of them all their fountain of life. It is not one among several factors cultivating the soil of humanity, it is the source of its fertility. We are busy today directing the flow of Christian motives into many trenches to irrigate tracts of life which hitherto have been desert. And the church must stand then, through its ministry, not simply as a mere instructor imparting facts; the pulpit stands for the application of truth to create character. The minister preaches not to make men wise about books, or scientific discoveries, but to give them the power and grace of an endless life. The final test in preaching does not then lie in the fact imparted, but in the use of any fact to create an ennobled life.” Dr. Crooker has well said, “When the teacher has set a fact in the mind, like a brick in the wall, he has practically finished his work, but the preacher must plant that fact in the soil of the soul to grow as the seed of a new life.’ 7 It is true that the great need of the time is a social conscience, but what is a social conscience? Is it something concerned only with hours and wages and profits and conveniences’?

We certainly need a corporate conscience, so that we will not permit corporations to do what individuals have no right to do. But the social conscience that we need is one that shall concern itself primarily with those social duties and obligations out of which grow a noble life a conscience about prayer and worship and Christian nurture, and not a social conscience that only concerns itself in a fair division of things. The stability of society is not dependent primarily on industrial conditions but on religious duties and spiritual ideals.

Dr. Roberts truly says, “There are such things as social or collective sins, but conscience does not deal with them on that plane Sin is an intensely individual thing and the man who ha.s had a controversy with his conscience knows that it is the ambassador within him, not of a certain social order, but of the moral order of the whole universe. It is not the mere reverberation in a man’s soul of a social order evolved by way of a natural selection; conscience is native, elemental, primitive. It is impossible to get behind the beginning of it. The thing which invests wrong with wrongness, and right with rightness and speaks in the imperative mood is an indigenous thing, antecedent to the most primitive society/’

Roger Babson affirms: “ Religion is both the anchor and the rudder of prosperity. The real security of the nation is not its militia, but its religion. The real protectors of our homes are not the policemen but rather the preachers. Only as religion saves the world, can we save ourselves. A religious spirit makes better employers, better workers, and a better public spirit with which to deal. Furthermore, without such a religious spirit, all legislative, cooperative and other plans are of no avail. Religion is to the world what a spring is to a watch, and the sooner it is generally recognized the more people will be healthy, happy and prosperous.” This man of business makes bold to say that the three things which the business world, the world of labor and of capital need are not the nostrums of socialism but spiritual power, faith and prayer. We hear, and properly, a very great deal about the material form in which Christianity should express itself, but are we not in danger of putting so much emphasis on works that we forget the source of conduct? If we are to have fruit, must we not realize that fruitage depends upon rootage? What will the hand do if the heart ceases to beat? If we have no wealth of soul to give, of what use will mechanics be?

One of the most illuminating of modern writers has said, “The most urgent demand is not for service, but for spirituality. A soul fed from on high will certainly how down and lift the lowly, hut a generation that has lost faith in Grod and ceased to love Jesus will not serve humanity. “ The gospel of Jesus was nothing more nor less than the gospel of the inner life. His whole inaugural, the declaration of His purpose in the world could he condensed into a single sentence, “I am come that they might have life and that they might have it more abundantly.” The beatitudes are not blessings upon belief, they even go deeper than conduct and service; they go down to the roots of life What are His parables nothing more nor less than pictures of life; the leaven, the mustard seed, the wise virgin, the used talents, the good Samaritan. The abundance of the soul life is the thing which He came to bring, and so far as Jesus Himself was concerned, it was not His teachings though they were the most sublime ever uttered but the spirit of His life. When He examined Peter for his ordination, He did not ask him questions of creed or ethics, or doctrines of any sort; the only question which He asked, and that He repeated again and again, was “Lovest thou me?”

It was the things that Jesus stood for that won the disciples at the first, or in any other age* of the world’s history. It was a life. It was He who said, “I am the life.” The world has had many great teachers, but who goes to a life of self-denial along a path so hot as to blister their feet because of these teachings? What was it that sent Father Damien to the leper, Paton to the South Sea Islands, Morrison to China, Livingstone to Africa, Grenfell to Labrador? Nothing but a personal love for a personal Saviour. May we always remember that we must give ourselves to the needy and to the oppressed. A Unitarian has written, “ There is more danger that the source of personal piety will dry up than that children will starve or go naked,”

There is deep wisdom in the words of Paterson Smith in his “People’s Life of Christ”: “Men are teaching laws of economics and principles of utilitarianism and ethical persuasions on the duty of doing good, but they are leaving out Christ; and they are not succeeding and they know it. Our political and industrial and social leaders feel their impotence, their lack of some great spiritual impulse to make their projects work. It is religion that is needed. It is not enough to tell us to do right. “We want a pressing motive and a power.”

There is only one challenge I wish to give ’’Is thy heart as my heart? If it be, give me thy hand.” There is room for almost infinite differences of opinion but there can never be any difference in the matter of a whole-hearted devotion to the Kingdom of God. The dying Scott said to Lockhart, his son-in-law, “Give yourself royally.”

Paul, speaking of Jesus Christ, says in a verse that is matchless and stupendous, “ Christ gave himself.” Dying millionaires have given away their millions only when Death, the grim archer, had sent his arrow to their hearts and the rigors of death had loosed their grasp upon their treasure. But Jesus spent His life in giving himself.

If, after having spent a life in ease and selfindulgence, in toying with our tasks and in shirking all we could, we should come up to the heavenly gate, over which is written, “These are they who came out of great tribulation,” would we have the effrontery to pass in? “Would we not ask for some lesser gate where we might hide our selfish and diminished head? But Heaven has no such gate. Its twelve gates are all alike, one motto is over them and one word is the password at each. When a rich man died a neighbor asked, “How much did he leave,” and the village wag replied, “He left every cent.” All you can hold in your cold dead hand is what you have given away!

Well says Bishop Quayle, “The angel at the gate of life will make inquiry of every comer, ’Did you spend all your estate?’ “ When Ian MacLaren’s “Doctor of the Old School” was dying, he faintly murmured, “I am tired to death!” He had used up every ounce of his strength and ability to help those to whom he ministered as a good physician.

There is Whitefield utilizing the last bit of his strength, stopping on the stairs on the way to his chamber to preach a last message to the crowd at Newburyport, and then going upstairs to die.

There is Wesley, riding more miles for the Master than any man who ever bestrode a beast, giving all he had of money and energy and time, and at the last leaving, as his biographer says, “a good library, a well-worn clergyman’s gown, a much abused reputation and so the Methodist Church. “ Paul used that gigantic word of his Lord, “He emptied Himself” to the last drop of His blood, and as for Paul himself, hear his own modest epitome of his service “In stripes above measure, in prisons more frequent, in deaths oft. Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one. Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I have been in the deep. In journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by mine own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren, in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness.”

Let us put that up against the spirit of our own devotion that it may be a challenge that shall nerve us in times when the fire burns low and the path of dalliance seems to be strewn with flowers. Which shall we choose to be, an Ananias or a Paul, au Ananias keeping back part of the price and dying of shame, or to empty ourselves for a time and be filled of God’s grace for all eternity? The apostle says, “What things were gain I counted lost for Christ.” He takes no credit to himself, but he says, “Though I preached the gospel I have nothing to glory of, for necessity is laid upon me. Yea, woe is unto me if I preach not the gospel. ’? Having seen the vision, he must be true to it, and the one thing that glorified his life down to Jhe time when he said, “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith,” was the blessed fact that he “was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision,” Do we not need to have something of his burden?

We are not to misunderstand this. We shall know something of what he said, that though he was cast down, he was not forsaken; though he was poor, he was making many rich; though he was in tears, yet was he also in bounding joy. The very measure of his anxiety and longing became, on the other hand, the measure of his delight and victory when the desire of his heart was accomplished. So we would hear him saying, “I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart, for I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh.” It is the same spirit which a father knows when he would rather have lost his life than that his own son should be killed, the same spirit which a mother feels when she will gladly wear herself out for the sake of her child, and will not leave him even at the prison door or the scaffold’s step. It is for this spirit that we yearn. When the world sees it, it will be no longer faithless but believing.