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That, then, which is a central force in religion, the sense of the inscrutability of human nature, the feeling of awe before the natural processes, what Paul called the mystery of iniquity and the mystery of godliness, tends to disappear. Wonder and confident curiosity succeed humility and awe. That which is of the essence of religion, the sense of helplessness coupled with the sense of responsibility, is stifled. Whatever else the humane sciences have done, they have deepened man's fascinated and narrowing absorption in himself and given him apparent reason to believe that by analyzing the iron chain of cause and effect which binds the process and admitting that it permits no deflection or variation, he is making the further questions as to the origin, meaning and destiny of that process either futile or superfluous. So that, in brief, the check to speculative thinking and the repudiation of central metaphysical concepts, which the earlier movement brought about, has been accentuated and sealed by the humane sciences and the new and living problems offered them for practical solution. Thus the generation now ending has been carried beyond the point of combating ancient doctrines of God and man, to the place where it has become comparatively indifferent, rather than hostile, to any doctrine of God, so absorbed is it in the physical functions, the temporal needs and the material manifestations of human personality.

Before going on, in a future chapter, to discuss the question as to what kind of preaching such a world-view, seen from the Christian standpoint, needs, we are now to inquire what the effect of this humanistic movement upon Christian preaching has already been. That our preaching should have been profoundly influenced by it is inevitable. Religion is not apart from the rest of life. The very temperament of the speaker makes him peculiarly susceptible to the intellectual and spiritual movements about him. What, then, has humanism done to preaching? Has it worked to clarify and solidify the essence of the religious position? Or has preaching declined and become neutralized in religious quality under it?

That there is truth in such comfortable and affable preaching is obvious; that there is not much truth in it is obvious, too. To what extent, and in what ways, nature, red with tooth and claw, indifferent, ruthless, whimsical, can be called the expression of the Christian God, is not usually specifically stated. In what way man, just emerging from the horror, the shame, the futility of his last and greatest debauch of bloody self-destruction, can be called the chief medium of truth, holiness and beauty, the matrix of divinity, is not entirely manifest. But the fatal defect of such preaching is not that there is not, of course, a real identity between the world and its Maker, the soul and its Creator, but that the aspect of reality which this truth expresses is the one which has least religious value, is least distinctive in the spiritual experience. The religious nature is satisfied, and the springs of moral action are refreshed by dwelling on the "specialness" of God; men are brought back to themselves, not among their fellows and by identifying them with their fellows, but by lifting them to the secret place of the Most High. They need religiously not thousand-tongued nature, but to be kept secretly in His pavilion from the strife of tongues. It is the difference between God and men which makes men who know themselves trust Him. It is the "otherness," not the sameness, which makes Him desirable and potent in the daily round of life. A purely ethical interest in God ceases to be ethical and becomes complacent; when we rule out the supraphenomenal we have shut the door on the chief strength of the higher life.

Second: modern preaching, under this same influence and to a yet greater degree, emphasizes the principle of identity, where we need that of difference, in its preaching about Jesus. He is still the most moving theme for the popular presentation of religion. But that is because He offers the most intelligible approach to that very "otherness" in the person of the godhead. His healing and reconciling influence over the heart of man--the way the human spirit expands and blossoms in His presence--is moving beyond expression to any observer, religious or irreligious. Each new crusade in the long strife for human betterment looks in sublime confidence to Him as its forerunner and defense. To what planes of common service, faith, magnanimous solicitude could He not lift the embittered, worldlyized men and women of this torn and distracted age, which is so desperately seeking its own life and thereby so inexorably losing it! But why is the heart subdued, the mind elevated, the will made tractable by Him? Why, because He is enough like us so that we know that He understands, has utter comprehension; and He is enough different from us so that we are willing to trust Him. In what lies the essence of the leadership of Jesus? He is not like us: therefore, we are willing to relinquish ourselves into His hands.

So runs the thrice familiar argument. Of course, we have gained something by it. We may drop gladly the old dualistic philosophy, and we must drop it, though I doubt if it is so easy to drop the dualistic experience which created it. But I beg to point out that, on the whole, we have lost more religiously than we have gained. For we have made Jesus easy to understand, not as He brings us up to His level, but as we have reduced Him to ours. Can we afford to do that? Bernard's mystical line, "The love of Jesus, what it is, none but His loved ones know," has small meaning here. The argument is very good humanism but it drops the word "Saviour" out of the vocabulary of faith. Oh, how many sermons since, let us say, 1890, have been preached on the text, "He that hath seen me, hath seen the Father." And how uniformly the sermons have explained that the text means not that Jesus is like God, but that God is like Jesus--and we have already seen that Jesus is like us! One only has to state it all to see beneath its superficial reasonableness its appalling profanity!

Third: we may see the influence of humanism upon our preaching in the relinquishment of the goal of conversion. We are preaching to educate, not to save; to instruct, not to transform. Conversion may be gradual and half-unconscious, a long and normal process under favorable inheritance and with the culture of a Christian environment. Or it may be sudden and catastrophic, a violent change of emotional and volitional activity. When a man whose feeling has been repressed by sin and crusted over by deception, whose inner restlessness has been accumulating under the misery and impotence of a divided life, is brought into contact with Christian truth, he can only accept it through a volitional crisis, with its cleansing flood of penitence and confession and its blessed reward of the sense of pardon and peace and the relinquishment of the self into the divine hands. But one thing is true of either process in the Christian doctrine of conversion. It is not merely an achievement, although it is that; it is also a rescue. It cannot come about without faith, the "will to believe"; neither can it come about by that alone. Conversion is something we do; it is also something else, working within us, if we will let it, helping us to do; hence it is something done for us.

Now, this experience of conversion is passing out of Christian life and preaching under humanistic influence. We are accepting the Socratic dictum that knowledge is virtue. Hence we blur the distinction between the Christian and the non-Christian. Education supplants salvation. We bring the boys and girls into the church because they are safer there than outside it; and on the whole it is a good thing to do and really they belong there anyway. The church member is a man of the world, softened by Christian feeling. He is a kindly and amiable citizen and an honorable man; he has not been saved. But he knows the unwisdom of evil; if you know what is right you will do it. Intelligence needs no support from grace. It is strange that the church does not see that with this relinquishment of her insistence upon something that religion can do for a man that nothing else can attempt, she has thereby given up her real excuse for being, and that her peculiar and distinctive mission has gone. It is strange that she does not see that the humanism which, since it is at home in the world, can sometimes make there a classic hero, degenerates dreadfully and becomes unreal in a church where unskilled hands use it to make it a substitute for a Christian saint! But for how many efficient parish administrators, Y.M.C.A. secretaries, up-to-date preachers, character is conceived of as coming not by discipline but by expansion, not by salvation, but by activity. Social service solves everything without any reference to the troublesome fact that the value of the service will depend upon the quality of the servant. Salvation is a combination of intelligence and machinery. Sin is pure ignorance or just maladjustment to environment. All we need is to know what is right and wrong; the humane sciences will take care of that; and, then, have an advertising agent, a gymnasium, a committee on spiritual resources, a program, a conference, a drive for money, and behold, the Kingdom of God is among us!

Fourth, and most significant: it is to the humanistic impulse and its derived philosophies that we owe the individualistic ethics, the relative absence of the sense of moral responsibility for the social order which has, from the beginning, maimed and distorted Protestant Christianity. It was, perhaps, a consequence of the speculative and absolute philosophies of the mediaeval church that, since they endeavored to relate religion to the whole of the cosmos, its remotest and ultimate issues, so they conceived of its absoluteness as concerned with the whole of human experience, with every relation of organized society. Under their regulative ideas all human beings, not a selected number, had, not in themselves but because of the Divine Sacrifice, divine significance; reverence was had, not for supermen or captains of industry, but for every one of those for whom Christ died. There were no human institutions which were ends in themselves or more important than the men which created and served them. The Holy Catholic Church was the only institution which was so conceived; all others, social, political, economic, were means toward the end of the preservation and expression of human personality. Hence, the interest of the mediaeval church in social ethics and corporate values; hence, the axiom of the church's control of, the believers' responsibility for, the economic relations of society. An unjust distribution of goods, the withholding from the producer of his fair share of the wealth which he creates, profiteering, predatory riches--these were ranked under one term as avarice, and they were counted not among the venial offenses, like aberrations of the flesh, but avarice was considered one of the seven deadly sins of the spirit. The application of the ethics of Jesus to social control began to die out as humanism individualized Christian morals and as, under its influence, nationalism tended to supplant the international ecclesiastical order. The cynical and sordid maxim that business is business; that, in the economic sphere, the standards of the church are not operative and the responsibility of the church is not recognized--notions which are a chief heresy and an outstanding disgrace of nineteenth-century religion, from which we are only now painfully and slowly reacting--these may be traced back to the influence of humanism upon Christian thought and conduct.

In general, then, it seems to me abundantly clear that the humanistic movement has both limited and secularized Christian preaching. It dogmatically ignores supersensuous values; hence it has rationalized preaching hence it has made provincial its intellectual approach and treatment, narrowed and made mechanical its content. It has turned preaching away from speculative to practical themes. It was, perhaps, this mental and spiritual decline of the ministry to which a distinguished educator referred when he told a body of Congregational preachers that their sermons were marked by "intellectual frugality." It is this which a great New England theologian-preacher, Dr. Gordon, means when he says "an indescribable pettiness, a mean kind of retail trade has taken possession of the preachers; they have substituted the mill-round for the sun-path."

The whole world today tends toward a monstrous egotism. Man's attention is centered on himself, his temporal salvation, his external prosperity. Preaching, yielding partly to the intellectual and partly to the practical environment, has tended to adopt the same secular scale of values, somewhat pietized and intensified, and to move within the same area of operation. That is why most preaching today deals with relations of men with men, not of men with God. Yet human relationships can only be determined in the light of ultimate ones. Most preaching instinctively avoids the definitely religious themes; deals with the ethical aspects of devotion; with conduct rather than with worship; with the effects, not the causes, the expression, not the essence of the religious life. Most college preaching chiefly amounts to informal talks on conduct; somewhat idealized discussions of public questions; exhortations to social service. When sermons do deal with ultimate sanctions they can hardly be called Christian. They are often stoical; self-control is exalted as an heroic achievement, as being self-authenticating, carrying its own reward. Or they are utilitarian, giving a sentimentalized or frankly shrewd doctrine of expediencies, the appeal to an exaggerated self-respect, enlightened self-interest, social responsibility. These are typical humanistic values; they are real and potent and legitimate. But they are not religious and they do not touch religious motives. The very difference between the humanist and the Christian lies here. To obey a principle is moral and admirable; to do good and be good because it pays is sensible; but to act from love of a person is a joyous ecstasy, a liberation of power; it alone transforms life with an ultimate and enduring goodness. Genuine Christian preaching makes its final appeal, not to fear, not to hope, not to future rewards and punishments, not to reason or prudence or benevolence. It makes its appeal to love, and that means that it calls men to devotion to a living Being, a Transcendence beyond and without us. For you cannot love a principle, or relinquish yourself to an idea. You must love another living Being. Which amounts to saying that humanism just because it is self-contained is self-condemned. It minimizes or ignores the living God, in His world, but not to be identified with it; beyond it and above it; loving it because it needs to be loved; blessing it because saving it. In so doing, it lays the axe at the very root of the tree of religion. Francis Xavier, in his greatest of all hymns, has stated once for all the essence of the Christian motive and the religious attitude:

"O Deus, ego amo te Nec amo te ut salves me Aut quia non amantes te Aeternis punis igne.

"Nee praemii illius spe Sed sicut tu amasti me Sic amo et amabo te Solem, quia Rex meus est."

What, then, has been the final effect of humanism upon preaching? It has tempted the preacher to depersonalize religion. And since love is the essence of personality, it has thereby stripped preaching of the emotional energy, of the universal human interests and the prophetic insight which only love can bestow. Over against this depersonalization, we must find some way to return to expressing the religious view and utilizing the religious power of the human spirit.

EATING, DRINKING AND BEING MERRY

That disintegration is sufficiently advanced so that we can see the direction it is taking and the principle that inspires it. Humanism has at least the value of an objective standard in the sense that it sets up criteria which are without the individual; it substitutes a collective subjectivism, if we may use the term, for personal whim and impulse. Thus it proclaims a classic standard of moderation in all things, the golden mean of the Greeks, Confucius' and Gautama's law of measure. It proposes to bring the primitive and sensual element in man under critical control; to accomplish this it relies chiefly upon its amiable exaggeration of the reasonableness of human nature. But the Socratic dictum that knowledge is virtue was the product of a personality distinguished, if we accept the dialogues of Plato, by a perfect harmony of thought and feeling. Probably it is not wise to build so important a rule upon so distinguished an exception!

But the positive defect of humanism is more serious. It likewise proposes to rationalize those supersensuous needs and convictions which lie in the imaginative, the intuitive ranges of experience. The very proposal carries a denial of their value-in-themselves. Its inevitable result in the humanist is their virtual ignoring. The greatest of all the humanists of the Orient was Confucius. "I venture to ask about death," said a disciple to the sage. "While you do not know life," replied he, "how can you know about death?" Even more typical of the humanistic attitude towards the distinctively religious elements of experience are other sayings of Confucius, such as: "To give oneself earnestly to the duties due to men, and while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them may be called wisdom." The precise area of humanistic interests is indicated in another observation. "The subjects on which the Master did not talk were ... disorder and spiritual beings." For the very elements of experience which humanism belittles or avoids are found in the world where pagans like Rabelais robustly jest or the high spaces where souls like Newman meditate and pray. The humanist appears to be frightened by the one and repelled by the other; will not or cannot see life steadily and whole. That a powerful primitivistic faith, like Taoism, a sort of religious bohemianism, should flourish beside such pragmatic and passionless moderation as classic Confucianism is inevitable; that the worship of Amida Buddha, the Buddha of redemption and a future heaven, of a positive and eternal bliss, should be the Chinese form of the Indian faith is equally intelligible. After a like manner it is the humanism of our Protestant preaching today from which men are defecting into utter worldliness and indifference on the one hand and returning to mediaeval and Catholic forms of supernaturalism on the other.

For the primitive in man is a beast whom it is hard to chain nor does humanism with its semi-scientific, semi-sentimental laudation of all natural values produce that exacting mood of inward scrutiny in which self-control has most chance of succeeding. Hence here, as elsewhere on the continent, and formerly in China, in Greece and in Rome, a sort of neo-paganism has been steadily supplanting it.

To the study of this neo-paganism we now address ourselves. It is the third and lowest of those levels of human experience to which we referred in the first lecture. The naturalist, you may remember, is that incorrigible individual who imagines that he is a law unto himself, that he may erect his person into a sovereign over the whole universe. He perversely identifies discipline with repression and makes the unlimited the goal both of imagination and conduct. Oscar Wilde's epigrams, and more particularly his fables, are examples of a thoroughgoing naturalist's insolent indifference to any form of restraint. All things, whether holy or bestial, were material for his topsy-turvy wit, his literally unbridled imagination. No humanistic law of decency, that is to say, a proper respect for the opinions of mankind, and no divine law of reverence and humility, acted for him as a restraining force or a selective principle. An immediate and significant example of this naturalistic riot of feeling, with its consequent false and anarchic scale of values, is found in the film dramas of the moving picture houses. Unreal extravagance of imagination, accompanied by the debauch of the aesthetic and moral judgment, frequently distinguishes them. In screenland, it is the vampire, the villain, the superman, the saccharine angel child, who reign almost undisputed. Noble convicts, virtuous courtesans, attractive murderers, good bad men, and ridiculous good men, flit across the canvas haloed with cheap sentimentality. Opposed to them, in an ever losing struggle, are those conventional figures who stand for the sober realities of an orderly and disciplined world; the judge, the policeman, the mere husband. These pitiable and laughable figures are always outwitted; they receive the fate which indeed, in any primitive society, they so richly deserve!

How deeply sunk in the modern world are the roots of this naturalism is shown by its long course in history, paralleling humanism. It has seeped down through the Protestant centuries in two streams. One is a sort of scientific naturalism. It exalts material phenomena and the external order, issues in a glorification of elemental impulses, an attempted return to childlike spontaneous living, the identifying of man's values with those of primitive nature. The other is an emotional naturalism, of which Maeterlinck is at the moment a brilliant and lamentable example. This exchanges the world of sober conduct, intelligible and straightforward thinking for an unfettered dreamland, compounded of fairy beauty, flashes of mystical and intuitive understanding intermixed with claptrap magic, a high-flown commercialism and an etherealized sensuality.

"... well pleased to recognize In nature, and the language of the sense The anchor of my purest thought, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being."

"Pleasure will be paid some time or other."

Here is a philosophy which obviously may be both as antihumanistic and as irreligious as any which could well be conceived. Here is license in conduct and romanticism in expression going hand in hand with this all but exclusive emphasis upon relativity in thought. Here is disorder, erected as a universal concept; the world conceived of as a vast and impenetrable veil which is hiding nothing; an intricacy without pattern. Obviously so ungoverned and fluid a universe justifies uncritical and irresponsible thinking and living.

We have tried thus to sketch that declension into paganism on the part of much of the present world, of which we spoke earlier in the chapter. It denies or ignores the humanistic law with its exacting moral and aesthetic standards; it openly flouts the attitude of obedience and humility before religious mandates, and, so far as opportunity offers or prudence permits, goes its own insolently wanton way. Our world is full of dilettanti in the colleges, anarchists in the state, atheists in the church, bohemians in art, sybarites in conduct and ineffably silly women in society, who have felt, and occasionally studied the scientific and naturalistic movement just far enough and superficially enough to grasp the idea of relativity and to exalt it as sufficient and complete in itself. Many of them are incapable of realizing the implications for conduct and belief which it entails. Others of them, who are of the lesser sort, pulled by the imperious hungers of the flesh, the untutored instincts of a restless spirit, hating Hellenic discipline no less than Christian renunciation, having no stomach either for self-control or self-surrender, look out on the mass of endlessly opposing complexities of the modern world and gladly use that vision as an excuse for abandoning what is indeed the ever failing but also the ever necessary struggle to achieve order, unity, yes, even perfection.

To them, therefore, the only way to conquer a temptation is to yield to it. They rail nonsensically at all repression, forgetting that man cannot express the full circle of his mutually exclusive instincts, and that when he gives rein to one he thereby negates another; that choice, therefore, is inevitable and that the more exacting and critical the choice, the more valuable and comprehensive the expression. So they frankly assert their choices along the lines of least resistance and abandon themselves, at least in principle, to emotional chaos and moral sentimentalism. Very often they are of all men the most meticulously mannered. But their manners are not the decorum of the humanist, they are the etiquette of the worldling. Chesterfield had these folk in mind when he spoke with an intolerable, if incisive, cynicism of those who know the art of combining the useful appearances of virtue with the solid satisfactions of vice.

Such naturalism is sometimes tolerated by those who aspire to urbane and liberal judgments because they think it can be defended on humanistic grounds. But, as a matter of fact, it is as offensive to the thoroughgoing humanist as it is to the sincere religionist. They have a common quarrel with it. Take, for example, the notorious naturalistic doctrine of art for art's sake, the defiant divorcing of ethical and aesthetic values. Civilization no less than religion must fight this. For it is as false in experience and as unclear in thinking as could well be imagined. Its defense, so far as it has any, is based upon the confusion in the pagan mind of morality with moralizing, a confusion that no good humanist would ever permit himself. Of course, the end of art is neither preaching nor teaching but delighting. For that very reason, however, art, too, must conform--hateful word!--conform to fixed standards. For the sense of proportion, the instinct for elimination, is integral to art and this, as Professor Babbitt points out, is attained only with the aid of the ethical imagination. Because without the ethical restraint, the creative spirit roams among unbridled emotions; art becomes impressionism. What it then produces may indeed be picturesque, melodramatic, sensual, but it will not be beautiful because there will be no imaginative wholeness in it. In other words, the artist who divorces aesthetics from ethics does gain creative license, but he gains it at the expense of a balanced and harmonious expression. If you do not believe it, compare the Venus de Milo with the Venus de Medici or a Rubens fleshy, spilling-out-of-her-clothes Magdalen with a Donatello Madonna. When ethical restraint disappears, art tends to caricature, it becomes depersonalized. The Venus de Milo is a living being, a great personage; indeed, a genuine and gracious goddess. The Venus de Medici has scarcely any personality at all; she is chiefly objectified desire! The essence of art is not spontaneous expression nor naked passion; the essence of art is critical expression, restrained passion.

You may wonder why we, being preachers, have spent so much time talking about it. Folk of this sort do not ordinarily flock to the stenciled walls and carpeted floors of our comfortable, middle-class Protestant meeting-houses. They are not attracted by Tiffany glass windows, nor the vanilla-flavored music of a mixed quartet, nor the oddly assorted "enrichments" we have dovetailed into a once puritan order of worship. That is true, but it is also true that these are they who need the Gospel; also that these folk do influence the time-current that enfolds us and pervades the very air we breathe and that they and their standards are profoundly influencing the youth of this generation. You need only attend a few college dances to be sure of that! One of the sad things about the Protestant preacher is his usual willingness to move in a strictly professional society and activity, his lack of extra-ecclesiastical interests, hence his narrow and unskillful observations and perceptions outside his own parish and his own field.

Moreover, there are other forms in which naturalism is dominating modern society. It began, like all movements, in literature and philosophy and individual bohemianism; but it soon worked its way into social and political and economic organizations. Now, when we are dealing with them we are dealing with the world of the middle class; this is our world. And here we find naturalism today in its most brutal and entrenched expressions. Here it confronts every preacher on the middle aisle of his Sunday morning congregation. We are continually forgetting this because it is a common fallacy of our hard-headed and prosperous parishioners to suppose that the vagaries of philosophers and the maunderings of poets have only the slightest practical significance. But few things could be further from the truth. It is abstract thought and pure feeling which are perpetually moulding the life of office and market and street. It has sometimes been the dire mistake of preaching that it took only an indifferent and contemptuous interest in such contemporary movements in literature and art. Its attitude toward them has been determined by temperamental indifference to their appeal. It forgets the significance of their intellectual and emotional sources. This is, then, provincialism and obtuseness and nowhere are they by their very nature more indefensible or more disastrous than in the preacher of religion.

Let us turn, then, to those organized expressions of society where our own civilization is strained the most, where it is nearest to the breaking point, namely, to our industrial and political order. Let us ask ourselves if we do not find this naturalistic philosophy regnant there. That we are surrounded by widespread industrial revolt, that we see obvious political decadence on the one hand, and a determination to experiment with fresh governmental processes on the other, few would deny. It would appear to me that in both cases the revolt and the decadence are due to that fierce, short creed of rebellion against humane no less than religious standards, which has more and more governed our national economic systems and our international political intercourse. Let me begin with business and industry as they existed before the war. I paint a general picture; there are many and notable exceptions to it, human idealism there is in plenty, but it and they only prove the rule. And as I paint the picture, ask yourselves the two questions which should interest us as preachers regarding it. First, by which of these three laws of human development, religious, humanistic, naturalistic, has it been largely governed? Secondly, by what law are men now attempting to solve its present difficulties?

The present industrial situation is the product of two causes. One of them was the invention of machinery and the discovery of steam transit. These multiplied production. They made accessible unexploited sources of raw material and new markets for finished goods. The opportunities for lucrative trading and the profitableness of overproduction which they made possible became almost immeasurable. Before these discoveries western society was generally agricultural, accompanied by cottage industries and guild trades. It was largely made up of direct contacts and controlled by local interests. After them it became a huge industrial empire of ramified international relationships.

The second factor in the situation was the intellectual and spiritual nature of the society which these inventions entered. It was, as we have seen, essentially humanistic. It believed much in the natural rights of man. The individual was justified, by the natural order, in seeking his separate good. If he only sought it hard enough and well enough the result would be for the general welfare of society. Thus at the moment when mechanical invention offered unheard-of opportunities for material expansion and lucrative business, the thought and feeling of the community pretty generally sanctioned an individualistic philosophy of life. The result was tragic if inevitable. The new industrial order offered both the practical incentive and the theoretical justification for institutional declension from humane to primitive standards. It is not to be supposed that men slipped deliberately into paganism; the human mind is not so sinister as it is stupid nor so cruel as it is unimaginative nor so brutal as it is complacent. For the most part we do not really understand, in our daily lives, what we are about. Hence society degenerated, as it always does, in the confident and stubborn belief that it was improving the time and doing God's service. But He that sitteth in the heavens must have laughed, He must have had us in derision!

For upon what law, natural, human, divine, has this new empire been founded? That it has produced great humanists is gratefully conceded; that real spiritual progress has issued from its incidental cosmopolitanism is manifest; but which way has it fronted, what have been its characteristic emphases and its controlling tendencies? Let its own works testify. It has created a world of new and extreme inequality, both in the distribution of material, of intellectual and of spiritual goods. Here is a small group who own the land, the houses, the factories, machinery and the tools. Here is a very large group, without houses, without tools, without land or goods. At this moment only 7 per cent of our 110,000,000 of American people have an income of ,000 or more; only 1 1/4 per cent have an income of ,000 or more! What law produced and justifies such a society? The unwritten law of heaven? No. The law of humanism, of Confucius and Buddha and Epictetus and Aurelius? No. The law of naked individualism; of might; force; cunning? Yes.

Here in our American cities are the overwealthy and the insolently worldly people. They have their palatial town house, their broad inland acres; some of them have their seaside homes, their fish and game preserves as well. Here in our American cities are the alien, the ignorant, the helpless, crowded into unclean and indecent tenements, sometimes 1,000 human beings to the acre. What justifies a pseudo-civilization which permits such tragic inequality of fortune? Inequality of endowment? No. First, because there is no natural inequality so extreme as that; secondly, because no one would dare assert that these cleavages in the industrial state even remotely parallel the corresponding cleavages in the distribution of ability among mankind. What justifies it, then? The unwritten law of heaven? No. The law of humanism? No. The law of the jungle? Yes.

There is only one end to such naturalism and that is increasing anarchy. It means my will against your will; my appetite for gold, for land, for women, for luxury and beauty against your appetite; until at length it culminates in the open madness of physical violence, physical destruction, physical death and despair. There can be no other end to it. If men dare not risk being the lovers of their kind, then they must choose between being the slaves of duty or the slaves of force. What are we reading in the public prints and hearing from platform and stage? The unending wail for "rights"; the assertion of the individual. Ceased is the chant of duty, forgotten the sacrifice of love!

The events which have transformed the world since 1914 are an awful commentary upon such naturalism and a dreadful confirmation of our indictment. Before the spectacle that many of us saw on those sodden fields of Flanders, both humanist and religionist should be alike aghast. How childish not to perceive that its causes, as distinguished from its occasions, were common to our whole civilization. How perverse not to confess that beneath all our modern life, as its dominating motive, has lain that ruthless and pagan philosophy, which creates alike the sybarite, the tyrant and the anarch; the philosophy in which lust goes hand in hand with cruelty and unrestrained will to power is accompanied by unmeasured and unscrupulous force.

It is incredible to me how men can take this delirium of self-destruction, this plunging of the sword into our own heart in a final frenzy of competing anarchy and deck it out with heroic and poetic values, fling over it the seamless robe of Christ, unfurl above it the banner of the Cross! The only contribution the World War has made to religion has been to throw into intolerable relief the essentially irreligious and inhumane character of our civilization.

Of course, the men and the ideals who actually fought the contest as distinguished from the men and ideals which precipitated it and determined its movements, fill gallant pages with their heroism and holy sacrifice. For wars are fought by the young at the dictation of the old, and youth is everywhere humane and poetic. Thus, if I may be permitted to quote from a book of mine recently published:

"Our sons were bade to enter it as a 'war to end war,' a final struggle which should abolish the intolerable burdens of armaments and conscription. They were taught to exalt it as a strife for oppressed and helpless peoples; the prelude to a new brotherhood and cooperation among the nations, and to that reign of justice which is the antecedent condition of peace.

"They did their part. With adventurous faith they glorified their cause and offered their fresh lives to make it good. Their sacrifice, the idealism which lay behind it in their respective communities--the unofficial perceptions that they, the fathers and mothers and the boys, were fighting to vindicate the supremacy of the moral over the material factors of life--this has made an imperishable gift to the new world and our children's lives. When an entire commuity rises to something of magnanimity, and a nation identifies its fate with the lot of weaker states, then even mutilation and death may be gift-bringers to mankind.

"But it is more significant to our purpose to note that the blood of youth had hardly ceased to run before the officials began to dicker for the material fruits of conquest. Not how to obtain peace but how to exploit victory--to wrest each for himself the larger tribute from the fallen foe--became their primary concern. So the youth appear to have died for a tariff, perished for trade routes and harbors, for the furthering of the commercial advantages of this nation as against that, for the seizing of the markets of the world. They supposed they fought 'to end business of that sort' but they returned to find their accredited representatives contemplating universal military service in frank expectation of 'the next war.' They strove for the 'self-determination of peoples' but find that it was for some people, but not all. And as for the cooperation among nations, Judge Gary has recently told us that, as a result of the war, we should prepare for 'the fiercest commercial struggle in the history of mankind!'"

Is it not clear, then, today that behind the determining as distinguished from the fighting forces of the war there lay a commercial and financial imperialism, directed by small and powerful minorities, largely supported by a sympathetic press which used the machinery of representative democracy to overthrow a more naked and brutal imperialism whose machinery was that of a military autocracy? Motives, scales of value, methods and desired ends, were much the same for all these small governing groups as they operated from behind the various shibboleths whose magic they used to nerve the arms of the contending forces. The conclusion of the war has revealed the common springs of action of the professional soldier, statesman, banker, ecclesiastic, in our present civilization. On the whole they accept the rule of physical might as the ultimate justification of conduct. They are the leaders and spokesmen in an economic, social and political establishment which, pretending to civilization, always turns when strained or imperiled by foreign or domestic dangers to physical force as the final arbiter.

It is truly ominous to see the gradual extension of this naturalistic principle still going on in the state. The coal strike was settled, not by arbitration, but by conference, and "conferences" appear to be replacing disinterested arbitration. This means that decisions are being made on the principle of compromise, dictated by the expediency of the moment, not by reference to any third party, or to some fixed and mutually recognized standards. This is as old as Pythagoras and as new as Bergson and Croce; it assumes that the concept of justice is man-made, produced and to be altered by expediences and practicalities, always in flux. But the essence of a civilization is the humanistic conviction that there is something fixed and abiding around which life may order and maintain itself.

Progress rests on the Platonic theory that laws are not made by man but discovered by him; that they exist as eternal distinctions beyond the reach of his alteration. Again, an unashamed and rampant naturalism has just been sweeping this country in the wave of mean and cruel intolerance which insists upon the continued imprisonment of political heretics, which would prohibit freedom of speech by governmental decree and oppose new or distasteful ideas by the physical suppression of the thinker. The several and notorious attempts beginning with deportations and ending with the unseating of the New York assemblymen, to combat radical thinking by physical or political persecution--attempts uniformly mean and universally impotent in history--are as sinister as they are stupid. The only law which justifies the persecution and imprisonment of religious and political heretics is neither the law of reason nor the law of love, but the law of fear, hence of tyranny and force. When a twentieth-century nation begins to raise the ancient cry, "Come now and let us kill this dreamer and we shall see what will become of his dreams," that nation is declining to the naturalistic level. For this clearly indicates that the humane and religious resources of civilization, of which the church is among the chief confessed and appointed guardians, are utterly inadequate to the strain imposed upon them. Hence force, not justice, though they may sometimes have happened to coincide, and power, not reason or faith, are becoming the embodiment of the state today.

You may say such extra-ecclesiastical strictures are unsympathetic and ill informed. But here is what Washington Gladden wrote in January, 1918: "If after the war the church keeps on with the same old religion, there will be the same old hell on earth that religious leaders have been preparing for centuries, the full fruit of which we are gathering now. The church must cease to sanction those principles of militaristic and atheistic nationalism by which the rulers of the earth have so long kept the earth at war." Thus from within the sanctuary is the same indictment of our naturalism.

"George W. Wickersham, formerly United States attorney-general, says in an interview that there is nothing incompatible between Christianity and modern business methods. A leading lay official of the Episcopal Church declares that what the churches need more than anything else is a strong injection of business method into their management. 'Some latter-day Henry Drummond,' he said, 'should write a book on Business Law in the Spiritual World.'"

Such na?ve opportunism and frantic immediacy would seem to me conclusive proof of the disintegration and anarchy of the spirit within the sanctuary. It is a part of it all that everyone has today what he is pleased to call "his own religion." And nearly everyone made it himself, or thinks he did. Conscience has ceased to be a check upon personal impulse, the "thou shalt not" of the soul addressed to untutored desires, and become an amiable instinct for doing good to others. The Christian is an effusive creature, loving everything and everybody; exalting others in terms of himself. We abhor religious conventions; in particular we hasten to proclaim that we are free from the stigma of orthodoxy. We do not go to church to learn, to meditate, to repent and to pray; we go to be happy, to learn how to keep young and prosperous; it is good business; it pays. We have a new and most detestable cant; someone has justly said that the natural man in us has been masquerading as the spiritual man by endlessly prating of "courage," "patriotism"--what crimes have been committed in its name!--"development of backward people," "brotherhood of man," "service of those less fortunate than ourselves," "natural ethical idealism," "the common destinies of nations"--and now he rises up and glares at us with stained fingers and bloodshot eyes! In so far as we have succumbed to naturalism, we have become cold and shrewd and flexible; shallow and noisy and effusive; have been rather proud to believe anything in general and almost nothing in particular; become a sort of religious jelly fish, bumping blindly about in seas of sentiment and labeling that peace and brotherhood and religion!

Here, then, is the state of organized religion today in our churches. They are voluntary groups of men and women, long since emancipated from the control of the church as such, or of the minister as an official, set free also from allegiance to historic statements, traditional, intellectual sanctions of our faith; moulded by the time spirit which enfolds them to a half-unconscious ignoring or depreciation of what must always be the fundamental problem of religion--the relationship of the soul, not to its neighbor, but to God. Hence the almost total absence of doctrinal preaching--indeed, how dare we preach Christian doctrine to the industry and politics and conduct of this age? Hence the humiliating striving to keep up with popular movements, to conform to the moment. Hence the placid acceptance of military propaganda and even of vindictive exhortation.

Has not the time arrived when, if we are to find ourselves again in the world, we should ask, What is this religion in which we believe? What is the real nature of its resources? What the real nature of its remedies? Do we dare define it? And, if we do, would we dare to assert it, come out from the world and live for it, in the midst of the paganism of this moment? Is it true that without the loaves and the fishes we can do nothing? If so, then we, too, have succumbed to naturalism indeed!

THE UNMEASURED GULF

You may remember that when Daniel Webster made his reply to Hayne in the Senate he began the argument by a return to first principles. "When the mariner," said he, "has been tossed for many days in thick weather and on an unknown sea, he naturally avails himself of the first pause in the storm, the earliest glance of the sun, to take his latitude, and ascertain how far the elements have driven him from his true course. Let us imitate this prudence and before we float further on the waves of this debate, refer to the point from which we departed." He then asked for the reading of the resolution.

It is to some such rehearsing of our original message, a restatement of the thesis which we, as preachers, are set to commend, that we turn ourselves in these pages. The brutal dislocations of the war, and the long and confused course of disintegrating life that lay behind it, have driven civilization from its true course and deflected the church from her normal path, her natural undertakings. Let us try, then, to get back to our charter; define once more what we really stand for; view our human life, not as captain of industry, or international politician, or pagan worldling, or even classic hero, would regard it, but see it through the eyes of a Paul, an Augustine, a Bernard, a Luther, the Lord Jesus. We have already remarked how timely and necessary is this redefining of our religious values. If, as Lessing said, it is the end of education to make men to see things that are large as large and things that are small as small, it is even more truly the end of Christian preaching. What we are most in need of today is a corrected perspective of our faith; without it we darken counsel as we talk in confusion. So, while we may not attempt here a detailed and reasoned statement of religious belief, we may try to say what is the fundamental attitude, both toward nature and toward man, that lies underneath the religious experience. We have seen that we are not stating that attitude very clearly nowadays in our pulpits; hence we are often dealing there with sentimental or stereotyped or humane or even pagan interpretations. Yet nothing is more fatal for us; if we peddle other men's wares they will be very sure that we despise our own.

Over against this reasonable and disciplined view of man and of his world stands naturalism. It exploits the defects of the classic "virtue"; it is, so to speak, humanism run to seed. Just as religion so often sinks into bigotry, cruelty and superstitition, so humanism, in lesser souls, declines to egotism, license and sentimentality. Naturalism, either by a shallow and insincere use of the materialistic view of the universe, or by the exalting of wanton feeling and whimsical fancy as ends in themselves, attempts the identification of man with the natural order, permits him to conceive of each desire, instinct, impulse, as, being natural, thereby defensible and valuable. Hence it permits him to disregard the imposed laws of civilization--those fixed points of a humane order--and to return in principle, and so far as he dares in action, to the unlimited and irresponsible individualism of the horde. Inevitably the law of the jungle is deliberately exalted, or unconsciously adopted, over against the humanist law of moderation and discipline.

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