THE NEW OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH

I

SOME DANGERS AND DUTIES OF THE PRESENT HOUR

There is a military maxim in the First Book of Kings which we know from our own experience to be wise and just. "Let not him that girdeth on his armor boast himself as he that putteth it off." The hour when a man or a nation is about to engage in a great struggle is no time for relaxation and ease. There are three sure perils which confront men then, the peril of over confidence, the peril of underestimating the foe, and the peril of a lack of unity, foresight and vigilance and of willingness to pay all necessary costs. In the face of perils like these there is no room for self contentment or praise. Let these wait until the victory has been won. "Let not him that girdeth on his armor boast himself as he that putteth it off."

But we have discovered that the converse of this warn­ing is equally true. " Let not him that putteth off his armor boast himself as he that girdeth it on." The same perils that meet men and nations at the beginning of a war meet them at the end. There is the peril of over confidence. There is the peril of underestimating the task. There is the peril of a lack of unity, vigilance and prevision and of willingness to pay the price of peace. And men may succumb to these perils at the end who overcame them at the beginning. Again and again men and nations have lost after the struggle the very things which they entered and endured the struggle to achieve. "The morrow of victory," Mazzini said, "is more peril­ous than its eve." We begin to perceive this to-day. "Gentlemen," said Clemenceau a few days after the armistice was signed to a group of French senators who had waylaid him with congratulations, "our difficult time is just approaching. It is harder to win peace than to win war." We are realizing now that this is true and that if we are negligent we may lose in the hour of vic­tory some of the very things which the victory was won to achieve.

We see the dangers of these after-struggle times again and again in those authentic pictures of life of which the Bible as a transcript of life is full. A useful Christian minister in a recent sermon called attention to the vivid touch in Noah's history. The flood had washed the world clean. Old institutions, old lusts, old vices, old wrongs had been wiped out. Men had a chance to begin afresh and to build a now world. And where was the man to whom the duty and the glory of the reconstruc­tion came? Drunk and morally shameless in his tent. We come upon the same failure in Elijah. He had met the organized superstition and corruption of the nation in one dramatic encounter and had defeated it. The ground was cleared for a new order and instead of girding himself to his uncompleted task and establishing the foun­dations of righteousness, the old warrior who had not been afraid of the massed forces of fraud and wrong but single handed had overthrown them, is cowed by the threat of a bad woman and goes off alone, abandoning his work, to sit down under a bush in the wilderness and comfort himself with the thought of his spiritual isolation. Even so we face our dangers to-day, not less real or subtle or perilous than the dangers of the war. There is the danger of moral relaxation. Four days after the armistice was signed this warning was sent out from Washington:

"Cessation of hostilities in Europe and disappearance of the prospect of meeting the enemy on the battlefield has brought an immediate loss of morale among American troops at home that is regarded at the War Department as somewhat alarm­ing. It is understood that steps to deal with the situation already are being prepared.

"Reports from all divisions on Nov. 11, the date of the armistice, without exception contained glowing references to the high spirit of the men and to their evident desire for early embarkation. Upon news that the armistice had been signed, the mental attitude of the individual soldier is said to have undergone a marked change. Instead of bombarding his imme­diate superiors with queries as to the probable date of en­training for the seaboard, he became anxious as to the date of his release from service. More serious are reports by some commanding officers that their men are exhibiting a tendency to view themselves as already released from the strict routine of the camps."

In some camps the tidings of the armistice led to such disorder as men would have been severely punished for a fortnight before, but the outbreak was so general that nothing could be done. In New York City on the night of the celebration over the premature peace tidings more soldiers and sailors in uniform, it is said, were seen drunk on the streets than had been seen before in all the time since the war began. In the trenches the change which took place was revolutionary. Men had been on the keen edge of moral duty, strung to the highest tension of loyalty. They had cast up accounts and waited upon death. God seemed so near in that hour of deepest need and intensest life as almost to be within touch. Then in a moment this flamed up and passed. The common­ness of uninspired life returned. We feel this moral relaxation in ourselves and throughout the nation. Some­thing that was here is gone. Much of it, to be sure, had to go. We are better off with what self-discipline we can secure, than with state discipline under permanent military control.

We have not only undergone a relaxation of moral tone. We are witnessing sadly a dissolution of our unity. The war bound us together in a new tightness of national will and spirit. There are three things which unite men: a common love, a common task and a common danger. And the common danger seems to be necessary to focus the common love and to impose the common task. The common love is still here. It is pitiful that we do not still recognize the reality and urgency of the common task, as great now as the task in the war and more diffi­cult. But the common danger is past. And our unity is dissolved. It is a good thing to have the imprisoning shackles removed from our wonted American liberties, but it is tragic to see the schisms and partisanships re­opening and the forces divided in antagonism which should be united in common undertakings and against the common foes of the national character. And it is with a sad dismay that we see suspicion displanting our international confidence and trust.

There is also a surrender of idealism. With some it is not a surrender. It is only the open disavowal of sentiments which they never shared but which the tide of the national spirit compelled them to respect while the war was going on. Some indeed ventured to deride the Quixotic idealism which prevailed but they paid it the respect of making their derision anonymous, like "the American Jurist" in his articles in the New York Times which so pleased the Germans because they were the frank application to American politics of the German notion of the superiority of the State to any obligation except that of its own material interest. Now, however, men who rejected the idealism which awakened the nation and sustained its soul in the war do not hesitate openly to repudiate the very ends for which we fought. They propose that we should now belie our professions and betray the good faith of the nation toward the dead who died not for national interest but for principle and for humanity and for a new world.

As against these dangers, and the other dangers than these which peace has brought, we need two things. We need first the loyalty and patriotism of peace, a more difficult even though less glorious thing than the patriot­ism and loyalty of war, by as much as it is harder to live for a cause than to die for it. It was for such loyalty and patriotism that Lincoln appealed in his Gettysburg speech: "It is for us the living to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion." War did its part. Is peace now to fail and be faithless where war was faithful? There is need still of the same loyalty and love of country which was given in war and which the nation needs not less in peace. And, secondly, we need the desire or purpose of a new world. Mr. Lloyd George expressed the need in an exhortation to a labor deputation in the midst of the war: "Don't always be thinking of getting back where you were before the war. Get a really new world. I firmly believe that what is known as the after-the-war settlement will direct the destinies of all classes for gen­erations to come. I believe the settlement after the war will succeed in proportion to its audacity. The readier we are to cut away from the past the better we are likely to succeed. Think out new ways, new methods, of deal­ing with old problems. I hope no class will be harking back to the pre-war conditions. If every class insists upon doing that then God help this country. Get a new world." "The triumphant close of the great war," says Secretary of State Lansing, "does not solve all the prob­lems. Society has been shattered in many places. We must rebuild it on a better foundation. Materialism was largely responsible for this war. We must not sink back again to the same level. A strong and vital spirit­uality ought to dominate mankind, so that we may rise above the greed and selfishness which have corrupted mankind and distorted the ideals and purposes of life." The war grew out of the past but it was not fought for the past, it was fought for the future, to clear the way for a different and better world.

Whether we shall have a better world or not depends upon how we meet now the dangers and duties of peace and whether we do as effectively the work of winning this better world as we did the work of winning the war. And for what was the war won if it was not for the sake of a better world? What does anybody want with a war? Why should anybody want to win it? What will he do with it? He wins it to be done with it. What he wants when he has won it is to lose it. The thing to be kept is the thing which the war stood in the way of and had to be fought through to make possible—the new world behind and beyond it.

And our present practical question now is what Christian men and women and the Christian Church can do to win a better world out of the war.

We can believe a better world to be possible. All about us now are the practical men who ridicule the idea that war can be destroyed, militarists, munition makers, political and commercial imperialists, and theologians who think that to try to get rid of war and pestilence is to vitiate the authority of the Bible, and a host of others who think and say that the world we had before the war is the only kind of world we shall have after it. The war did nothing, they say, and some of them say it was intended to do nothing, but defeat Germany. Now that that end has been achieved other things will continue as they were. By the blood of the eight million men who died to make a better world possible they shall do noth­ing of the kind. It is quite true that the war did not introduce the millennium. There were some people who held that the millennium had begun in the Nineteenth Century. But they were mistaken. It had not begun then and it has not begun now. But our effort to make the world better does not have to await the coming of the millennium before it can hope to accomplish anything. Christendom has got rid of legalized polygamy and slav­ery. It is doing away with the saloon and the brothel. The time has come when it can get rid of war. If we do not it will be our own fault. If we don't want to be rid of war it will stay. If we prepare for it we shall have it. But if we want to be done with it we can be. If we prepare for peace it will be peace we shall have. The way to get a world where it prevails, a world of righteousness and truth and progress is to believe in such a world as a possibility, to cherish large and generous thoughts of what can be by man's good will and the grace of God. And as Lloyd George says there is no reason why we should not be bold about it. We can do now just what we want done and will pay the price for and are willing to let God do through us. There are laws of human progress and of social change, no doubt, but the laws that shall operate now will be laws of relapse and of immobility or they will be laws of progress, as we shall decide. We may indeed drop back into the old world and carry its principles of suspicion, rivalry, self-interest, on into the future, or we can believe in the possibility of something better. Why not now? We have discarded the authority of the old limitations in nature. As the Panama Canal diggers' song declares:

"Got any rivers they say are uncrossable?

Got any mountains you can't tunnel through?

We specialize on the wholly impossible

Doing the thing that no man can do."

Why not discard the authority of the old limitations in moral and social achievement? Samuel C. Armstrong discarded them after the Civil War and began a new era of racial education. We may begin a new era of racial and national relationship if we will. The limita­tions and hindrances are not in God or in nature but in us. We can help to win a new world by seeing clearly the evils which are to be overthrown and the enemies who still remain to be vanquished. The war has for a season vividly revealed these. War inflames. It also illumines. The inflammations are dying down. Let us hope that the illuminations may not fade. They showed us what iniq­uity is and what also is its sure fruitage. Incarnated in German militarism and its principles and methods of war we saw just how hideous and deadly certain ideas and moral qualities really are. And well nigh the whole world rose up in horror and self-defense against what we saw. But now that German militarism has been defeated and the war won we need to beware of los­ing the horror and the sense of the need of protection against these same ideas and iniquities. If they were wrong in Germany in the war they are not less wrong anywhere else in peace. They are wrong if they exist in us, and they will as surely bring punishment upon us as they brought it on Germany. Furthermore the war demonstrated to the nation that certain social evils are fatal to the creation and maintenance of an army and that these evils are not invincible. Drink and lust were seen to be deadly enemies of efficiency in war and the nation shut them off from the army. Always before, men said that this could not be done, that soldiers must be fed on drink and lust. Now we know that it is not true. But if drink and lust are bad for soldiers why are they not bad for civilians too? If the nation can not afford to tolerate them in time of war how can it afford to tolerate them in time of peace? The same ideal of effective service needed in war is needed now in the civil and industrial life of the nation. As General Pershing said in a message to the home churches through the Federal Council: "We expect not only to vindicate the cause of justice and honor and righteousness but also to lay a solid foundation for world peace. We dare not claim that, as an Army, we have yet achieved that high standard of manhood and conduct upon which the largest human effectiveness should be built, but the ideal of the Nation and of the churches is constantly before us. With sincerity and firm purpose we set our faces toward the goal. After all, it is a common fight—yours there and ours here. What is necessary for the manhood of the soldier is necessary for the manhood of the citizen." By seeing this and insisting now upon the continuing and universal validity of the moral ideals essential to the life of the nation in peace as well as in war, we can help on a different order. It is quite true that men cannot be made moral by law, but immorality can be made difficult and help can be given to that which is not bad, but only weak.

We can help by supporting the men, the measures and the movements which are directed to bringing in new times. We can begin this in our own community. Each community is a microcosm of the nation. It is the nation in miniature. In our own community we can support the men and the movements that look forward and not back. We can ask regarding each local measure. Would this, magnified to the scale of the nation help or hinder? Would it sustain the new time? This demand for different ways does not cover everything. The fund of our solid moral and economic achievement is not to be destroyed. Progress is not the dissolution of organiza­tion. It is its development. The human society which represents the highest amount of mutual interdependence, while most difficult, will in the end be the happiest. St. Paul's ideal of humanity is a human body, the most intricate organization which we know. Names ought not to terrify us, nor the inequality of men in other days to meet the demands which some day men must meet if the will of God is to be done on the earth. The men who discredit unselfishness, who hold by mercantile principles alone, who disbelieve in any but the old world, although the old world itself was new in its time, and has only now worn out, who are willing to lead us no­where but backward must understand that the faces of those who once followed are turned in the other direction and that they intend to move forward.

And a new order is to be won, not by change only but also by a steadfast immovableness. There must be men and women who will stand fast for absolute moral principles without yielding or compromise. It goes with­out saying that there will be need of compromise as to method and process. Compromise in these things is only another name for patience. But when it comes to prin­ciple, progress is made not by abatement or surrender but by unbending loyalty. And inferior men with clear vision of right principles and high ideals are better men for us than the clever sophists who repudiate the theo­logical doctrine of human depravity and whose political philosophy nevertheless uses that doctrine to justify what no theology in which Christian men have ever believed can be got to condone. As we face the issues of this time when men have to choose between courses of action decisive in their result for many years to come, we need the creative spirit of the binding grip of right principle which holds fast and will not make sacrifice or com­promise. We need the Webster of January 26, 1830, not the Webster of March 7, 1850. It is good for our weakness and timidity to turn back to these two great days, and to pray that the God of truth may keep us from Webster's mistake on that tragic seventh of March when the foundations slipped and the strong tower stood fast no more. Not now the flashing lightning and the rolling thunder of the answers to Calhoun and Hayne but only a great mountain sliding in the rain! And Webster knew that the blunder had been made. Thenceforth, as Mr. Lodge says, "he was disturbed and ill at ease. He never admitted it, even to himself, but his mind was not at peace, and he could not conceal the fact. Pos­terity can see the evidences of it plainly enough, and a man of his intellect and fame knew that with posterity the final reckoning must be made. No man can say that Webster anticipated the unfavorable judgment which his countrymen have passed upon his conduct, but that in his heart he feared such a judgment cannot be doubted. If the 7th of March speech was right, then all that had gone before was false and wrong. In that speech he broke from his past, from his own principles and from the principles of New England, and closed his splendid public career with a terrible mistake." So far as the past has rested on wrong principles the time has come for breaking from it. So far as the present needs new principles the time has come for asserting them. It should be done in the new peace. As Life remarked recently, we want none of the old style diplomatic doc­tors around now sewing sponges in the wounds which they are closing up, to fester and breed new trouble and disease. The world wants a clean and just piece of work done now and done once for all.

And a clean and just piece of work needs to be done in each one of us. We can best bring in a better world by being ourselves better men. As Mr. Balfour remarked when the war was nearing its end, we want a new world but can only have it as we ourselves get new hearts. The limitations of human nature are constantly urged as an insuperable objection to the efforts and the vision of the moral idealists, but those men will worry least about these limitations in events who are most conscientiously seeking to transcend them in their own lives. While the broad social forces are at their renovating work under the hand of God, our personal privilege is to augment them by our own renewal in the image of Christ, the one Right Man and the Head of Humanity. His kind of world, the Kingdom of God on earth, can only be built on His kind of men. If I want a new world I must be the kind of a man I want the new world to be. If I am not willing to pay this price what honesty is there in my talk of a Golden Year? As Newman challenges us:

"Thou to wax fierce
In the cause of the Lord!
Anger and zeal
And the joy of the brave,
Who bade thee to feel,
Sin's slave?"

If men honestly want a world of good will and brother­hood let them be the men St. Paul demands in his de­scription in First Thessalonians of the Christian citizen—a man of purity, honesty, holiness, brotherliness, in­dustry, modesty, thrift, courage. In personal life and social relationships, in family and business, each of us has his chance to hasten a new human order, by intro­ducing here in the ranges nearest him the principles of a new time, the old principles of Jesus, the Carpenter, the Teacher, the Friend, the Saviour, the whole great Personality and Power whom Isaiah foresaw—we be­lieve it of Him, every word—Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

If the new world is not to be brought nearer then what was the war all about?

"With fire and sword the country round

Was wasted far and wide

And many a gentle mother then

And new born baby died.

"They say it was a shocking sight,

After the field was won.

For many thousand bodies here

Lay rotting in the sun.

"But what good came of it at last?

Quoth little Peterkin,

'Why that I cannot tell,' said he,

'But 'twas a famous victory.'"

Yes, and the victory had to be won at any cost to end what refused to die till it was slain. But the men who gave their lives to this end had more than this end in view. They were dying, with more or less clear appre­hension of it, to end an old order and to begin a new. And their sacrifice is calling to us to finish what they began.

A group of American soldiers were billeted in a little village in Northern France and became warmly attached to the village folk and the villagers to them. At last the lads were called into action and one of them was brought back in the evening to be laid to rest in the soil of France. The village folk spoke to their priest about it and asked permission to bury the body in their own consecrated ground. But the priest said it could not be done. He was a good lad but he had not been of their faith. So they dug him a grave just outside the cemetery wall and laid him to rest there as close as might be to their own dead. The next morning the villagers went by and to their wonder and delight they found the grave within the wall. The old priest had risen in the night and moved the wall.

The new order makes its demand. The walls must be moved out. There must be room for the spirit of eight million men who died for a larger world. They bid us to let the old evils go and to bring in the new good, to ring out the slowly dying cause, the ancient forms of party strife, the want, the care, the sin, the faithless coldness of the times, the old shapes of foul disease, the thousand wars of old, and to ring in the nobler modes of life, the love of truth and right, the common love of good, redress to all mankind, the thousand years of peace. The dead ask this of us. They have a right to ask it and to threaten to stir beneath the Flanders poppies if we will not hear. And another and greater One has a right to ask it who taught us to pray, and meant that the prayer should be sincere and true,—Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done on earth,—in America and in the world—to-day, as it is in heaven. It is of man's dis­obedience and failure, not of God's will, if that Kingdom is not brought nearer now by many a long year.