First World War Centennial

IV

THE DUTY OF A LARGER CHRISTIAN COÖPERATION

The war has been in its noblest aspects an education of the world in some of the fundamental Christian prin­ciples. It has also been for the Church an extraordinary educational discipline. The Church has learned from its own experience what a penetrating and relentless teacher war is. War tests persons and ideals and insti­tutions in ways in which they have never been tested before. It reveals. It rejects. It demands. And there never was a war that did these things so penetratingly and relentlessly as the war which has now come to its end. We shall be examining the lessons of this war, and the experiences it has brought to us all the rest of our days, and men will be pondering them for many genera­tions yet to come. There is not a department of our national life that will not show the effects of this experi­ence. Our theology, our education, our politics, our social ethics, everything that is related to our life in any way will bear the impress of what we have been through.

I wish to single out here one aspect of the Church's experience—namely the lessons that have come through the Church's work in the war, that bear on the prin­ciple of interdenominational coöperation, its spirit, its limitations, and its possibilities. That is not the only one of the problems we face to-day. For there is first of all the spiritual problem and the lessons of the war relating to that. That is the fundamental problem of all. It is not the question of whether we can think out some new coordination and rearranging of activities and rela­tionships, but, are the dynamics here? Are the energy and the power now available which are adequate to do the work of to-day? We can think of many possible manipulations and adjustments. They will get us no­where unless God's men are now here, and God's power is in these men to do the work that waits to be done in this hour. One thinks back to the days after the Civil War. In many ways we are immeasurably in advance of those days. We shall not see in our time anything like the political corruption that followed the Civil War. Our civic life is projected on an entirely different level to-day. We have great moral forces beating through the nation now, vastly more powerful and beneficent than those the nation knew at the end of the Civil War. But one asks one's self again and again other questions. It seems to me one hears them wherever he goes. "Moody, where are you? Where is Moody?" One thinks he hears that voice coming out of the sky and from the problems on every hand. Where is he, the man of his faith, the man of his masterful power, of his creative leadership? Have we got such men here to-day? That is our first problem, and it would be well worth our while to spend thought on that problem.

Then there are problems of constitution and relationship which ought to be studied regarding every institution by itself and which inevitably are raised about institutions by others without and yet related to them. We have seen with joy one reaction of this sort among the great Lutheran bodies of this land, the war having undoubtedly advanced measures already under way looking toward the consolidation of three great Lutheran agencies into one of the most powerful and promising forces in America.

It is not of these things that I wish to speak here but of what we have learned concerning the question of inter­denominational coöperation, looked at from the angle, not of our present spiritual problem, although that is involved, nor from the angle of constitutional function and relationship, but from the plain point of view of activities and personal relationships and interdenomi­national policy. I wish to speak of five great lessons which I believe the experience of the war has taught us in regard to the problem viewed in this light. They are not new lessons but they have been newly brought home to us.

I. First of all, we have been taught clearly the absolute indispensableness of an adequate unselfish instrumentality for coöperation, in the name of the Church and with the consciousness of the Church in its richest historic and spiritual significance. I have chosen all these words care­fully. Let us eliminate the word unselfish for the mo­ment. I will return to it later. Let us first concentrate our thought on what the year has shown us concerning the absolute indispensableness of an adequate instrumen­tality for coöperation in the name of the Church, and with the richest Church consciousness. The year has taught us that lesson beyond all cavil or question. It has shown us that there are ways in which we are abso­lutely necessary one to another, that we need one an­other's encouragement and inspiration and faith. One body will have a vision that has been hidden from an­other body which was meant to get it from this body. This man in one communion will see an obligation clearly. It is meant of God that other communions should catch the vision from him. There are men to-day who can tes­tify to the vision that came to their communion last year through the encouragement, through the challenge, may be through the spiritual rebuke they received as they compared what they were attempting to do with what other bodies were planning. We need our mutual faith and encouragement that both our collective and our individual purpose may be what otherwise it could not be. We have discovered also that coöperation is necessary to protect ourselves from one another's mis­takes. No communion by withdrawing itself can escape the consequences of the mistakes of others. It will simply sacrifice the great gains that would accrue from coopera­tion. It will not relieve itself from any of the hardships and difficulties that come from errors made anywhere in the field of Christian action. We realized during the war that for simple self-protection it was necessary for all the Christian bodies working in the war problem to work closely together. We see now that churches can reject the benefits of coöperation but they can not escape the penalties of separation. In the third place we were driven to coöperation because the nation had been forced to unite. It would have been an intol­erable thing if Christian elements in the nation, bodies that had everything in common, a bond of unity more deep than anything else on earth, in spite of all that may divide, could not work together. Also the churches realized from the beginning that we had a task bigger than all of us together could do and parts of which were indivisible. I mean that there were sections of the task that could not be denominationalized. There were duties which had to be done that could not be taken up by anybody in isolation. They had to be dealt with by all. It would be an easy thing to multiply these grounds of evidence of the indispensableness of an adequate instrumentality of interdenominational coopera­tion.

All of these reasons still remain. We still need mutual encouragement and help as we face the tasks of peace. The tasks of peace are vastly more intricate and difficult than the tasks of war. Whatever necessity there was during the time of war that we should help one another by the measure of our discernment of duty, that we should bring to one another the support of our mutual faith, we have to-day under much more trying and exacting circumstances than in the days of the war. We have to protect ourselves to-day against one an­other's mistakes and we will have to do it more and more as the days go by. Anybody who tries to draw himself off will not escape the sure penalty that is going to follow the blunders any of us may make. In spite of the dissolution of the unity of war the nation will pull itself together again before its tasks of peace. New communities of interest are growing up in our national life. These unities must not be allowed to rebuke us. Whatever pressure there was upon the Church in the days of war to lead the nation and the world into a large and deeper unity, that pressure is on us still. The tasks we face now are greater than the war tasks. You can exchange every task we had to face in war with a greater task still that we must face in peace, and with the added duty of supplying now resources of moral unity other than war with its mechanical pressure of outward danger to the life of the nation can provide. We have learned afresh through the experience of the war the indispensableness of an adequate continuing agency of interdenominational coöperation in the name of the Church and with the richest consciousness of all that the Church historically and spiritually stands for in our deepest life. We have seen also that coöperation must include three things. It must include obviously the coordination of the forces which aim at common ends and of programs which cover common ground. Whatever coöperation we have, whatever instrumentality of coöperation, must secure this first of all. It must bring together forces that will be more in their aggregate than the total of these forces added together separately. The principle of unity itself increases the sum of the units. It must bring together programs in the making rather than in the days of hard­ened completion. Secondly it must provide full inter­change of knowledge and purpose. It must secure full liaison among the Christian forces. That is a word that the war has brought into a new significance, an old and sinister word to which the war has given a new and abiding meaning. It was the essential condition of efficiency in every department of our national and inter­national experience these last three years. You can write the history of these years in the effort of men to achieve this kind of correlation, the interchange of knowledge, of plan and of sympathetic purpose. The churches made some progress in this matter during the war. We may thank God for the friendships that had been pre­pared against this hour between men who stood in places of responsibility in the denominational and interdenomi­national services of the war time, between whom there were relationships of a generation of understanding and love so that it was possible to maintain by personal relationships an interchange of knowledge, plan, and pur­pose, without which problems would have arisen the grav­ity of which can hardly be exaggerated. We must delib­erately plan permanently for this liaison in the future. I do not know how this can be done, whether by some coor­dinating committee of men who know and absolutely trust one another, who can throw strands across the chasms that divide these great moving activities of our day and keep them in constant personal touch one with another or in some other way. It is not altogether a matter of trust. In part it is simply a matter of magnitudes. No one man is in position to keep in touch with all that is going on. We must secure either in existing agencies or by some new piece of machinery a correlation of knowl­edge and plan between the different denominations and the interdenominational agencies which will meet this second need in an adequate instrumentality of coöperation. I say we must have an instrumentality of coöperation which will provide first for a coordination of interpenetrating forces and overlapping programs; in the second place for an interchange of intelligence, for a complete and trusted liaison between the agencies operating in these fields, and in the third place which will supply a wise, collec­tive guidance. We need a collective guidance. No one of us has wisdom enough to handle his own duty alone. There are problems rooted in all the fiber of humanity that cannot be dealt with by segments of humanity or of the Church. We must think out a method of wise, capable and trusted leadership that will supply the collec­tive wisdom we need to confront the problems of this day.

All this has been a great gain. It never can be an open question again as to whether the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ or something that fills that ground is an absolutely indispensable necessity. It is settled once and for ever by the experience through which we went in the war that we must have an agency of denominational coöperation that will be adequate to supply these needs of which I have been speaking.

II. In the second place the experience of the war has thrown a great deal of light on the principles and prob­lems of this interdenominational service and coordination which is necessary. It has shown us how we need it for the ends to which I have just referred. It has shown us also how it can be secured, and that it is not by re­adjustments of constitutional relationships nor by deter­mination of theoretical allotments of power and authority. These have their place. But this problem which the churches are facing now is a problem of service and per­sonal relationship and cooperative adjustment, and we will get off on false quests if we follow the other lines. If we solve the problems of service and friendship the other problems will work themselves out wisely, and in order that that may be done, may I bring out that word unselfish already spoken of. It is evident that the only kind of instrumentality that will adequately meet this need and fill this field must be one that is marked by institutional disinterestedness. One recalls the three qual­ifications of leadership of which Emerson speaks in his essay on Courage,—first, disinterestedness, second, prac­tical power, and third, courage. These are the three qualifications of leadership in individual men and they are the qualifications of leadership in movements and insti­tutions as well. Let anybody have the credit. The important thing is that any agency that sets out to do work for the churches should lose its life in the doing of it. It should seek no honor whatever of its own. Some of our problems spring from our forgetting that. Let honor be given where honor is due. It is no sign of strength or efficiency to seek to monopolize glory. "In honor preferring one another." We remember what comes next! There is no intimation whatever that this honoring recognition of others impairs one's efficiency in his own task. "In honor preferring one another, not slothful in business." They go together inevitably. They go together in personal leadership. I am not speaking now of that. Thank God that there is so much disinterested personal service. But they go together in institutional leadership.

We have learned through the war one other thing, namely, that the churches must frankly face and solve the problem of supplying among themselves a leadership that is neither too strong nor too weak. You can not have a leadership that is too strong and that breaks away from its following or coerces it, nor too weak to fill Emerson's third requirement of leadership, that there must be courage in it.

Now these are not easy things to bring about. They are difficult because they run down into fundamental principles. They lead us into difficulty but that is the only place that it is worth while for us to go, because our problem is not one of mechanics, nor of external adjustments, but the hard problem of love, of confidence, of the freedom, power and strength that invariably go with life. This is the second thing the churches have learned.

III. In the third place we have learned even more clearly that the pathway of cooperative advance lies through the field of action and embodied activity and serv­ice, rather than through the field of discussion or of the at­tempt to settle the theoretical principles of such activities and service. We are united as together we face tasks and by the magnitude and urgency of the tasks are drawn together to their doing. Not that I do not appreciate theory. In the last analysis that is all it comes down to. A friend said recently that the more he saw of what we were trying to do, the more convinced he became that the only thing the Church needs is the theologian, and in the highest sense that is true. I have been thankful for a word spoken a year or two ago at a meeting of alumni at Princeton when some reflection or discredit had been cast on the idea and all value had been attributed to action, and Dr. Richardson had quoted in reply the saying of Jesus, "The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life." We will ever be brought back to this even if we do not start from it. But what we have learned this year is the power of embodied undertakings. We have been discussing a great deal the matter of enlisting young men for the Christian ministry. How are we going to get them? We are not going to get them simply by laying before them prin­ciples. That will do very well to help a man, but it is not going to win him to unaccustomed action. We are not going to get him by telling him the reasons why a man should live his life unselfishly. We will get him as the nation got him. We have to go to young men and say to them, "You can not go to France to-day, but you can finish the war which is still unfinished by going out into the world and building Christ's Kingdom, by accomplishing other tasks which are as real and as neces­sary as those you were going to France to accomplish." I think we are going to get men in just that way. One has thought a good deal—every one must have thought—why it was that the nation was able to secure such sacrifice and service in the war, while the Church has not been able to get it before the war or now. How did the nation succeed in getting men to give themselves away, in getting the nation itself to give everything, its money, its life? It succeeded, some say, because it asked for everything. But the nation did not ask for everything, and it did not get everything. There were areas of men's minds atrophying in the camps, which the nation did not ask for at all. Many of the very finest aspects of life the nation did not ask for, and couldn't use. It did ask for men's bodies. I believe when you get down to the truth that that is the explanation. This is what St. Paul asked for: "I beseech you by the mercies of God that you present your bodies a living sacrifice." That is what we may reverently say God had to have in his greatest piece of work—a body. The Incarnation was God in a body. The Atonement demanded the body of Christ's flesh through death. The Resurrection included the resurrection of His body. All had to be done through a body. We see clearly from this point of view the reason for the emphasis on certain types of sin, the sin of evil speech, the sin of theft. Evil speech is the one sin you can bite. Stealing is the one sin you can do only with your hands. In many lands the punishment for theft is cutting off the hand so that men can not steal any more. Sin and re­demption alike are done in the body. Our Saviour needed a body to reach us. He reaches us in our bodies. By the same principle we deal best with our problem of coöperation as we embody our ideals, objectify our ends, and set before men tasks to be done, ends actually to be traveled to, and arrived at.

The war has laid before us with luminous clearness more of these tasks that demand one approach through action. Let us pick out four or five of these before which the churches will be impotent if we can not adequately deal with them in coöperation. There is the problem of the rightful place of religion in the American Army. It is one of the distressing problems which the churches still confront. I wonder whether we are one inch ahead of where we were when the war began. It took months and months before the churches could get, against in­difference or opposition, one chaplain to every twelve hundred men, and then we did not get them. There never was one chaplain to every twelve hundred men in the army. We should have had almost to double the maximum number of chaplains we had in France before we would have had one to twelve hundred. The chaplain has been able to get no status. Every other branch of the army in the United States has a satisfactory relationship which army chaplains have not been able to get. Maybe it can be secured when General Pershing and the Chaplains' organization in France come back from the other side but we simply have not had it here and we seem unlikely ever to get it unless the churches seek it unitedly in some different way. Indeed they have hindered themselves by such division in their approach to the problem as there was during the war.

In the second place there is the problem of recruiting men for Christian service. There were nearly five mil­lion young men in the army and navy of the United States. Practically all of the men that we are going to need for the Christian ministry, for foreign missionary work, for the Association secretaryship, for all of the other forms of Christian and philanthropic service were there in these five million young men in the army and navy. The churches never had before such a chance with all the body of supply physically brought together and under psychological conditions such as we had not known before, to reap such a harvest of leadership as had never been garnered in the history of the nation. There were also the men in the camps on this side who never got to France and who are rapidly being sent back to their homes. There are among them many men cast down and filled with disappointment and chagrin. They are going back to their homes in a few days or weeks and they will be asked, "What battle were you in? What were your experiences in France?" And they will have to say, "I was never in France." They laid all they had on the altar of the nation in utter and absolute sacrifice and never had the chance to have that gift used in actual service. There is going to be perma­nent moral damage done to some of these men if their great impulse of sacrifice and devotion can not be given an adequate object, if we can not supply something that will atone for the bitterest disappointment of their lives. We can go to them to-day and say: "Men, you do not need to be cast down. The war is not over. The hardest part of the war is yet to be fought, the part that calls for the highest heroism, the deepest courage, the hardest sacrifice. The war is just beginning. Will you not throw your­self into it now for life and death?"

There are the men on the other side, doctors, lawyers, teachers, ministers, from all classes and occupations at home, foot-loose now, as men have never been, to give themselves to the unselfish service of mankind, who are coming home rapidly. Let me quote a few paragraphs from a letter from a friend who is a Lieutenant Colonel in the Medical Corps in France:

"With the end of the war and the actual signing of the peace compacts, which is now surely not far off, all the mil­lions of men in our armies will be, sooner or later, returned to the home-land, to face the problem of their future employ­ment or activities. Among them will be some thousands of medical men. Most of these men will return with their old positions and practices calling for them, but still footloose. Many of them, and especially the younger ones, will come back to begin life entirely anew, free as no like body of medical men in our experience have ever been to choose the field of their activities. All of them will return with wider views of life and of the possibilities of their work than have heretofore been common among medical men.

"There can be no doubt that the world will be open as a field for the efforts of these men. You know how many places have been waiting for the end of the war to release the medical men they are in need of. The question of deepest interest to us is how many of them can be enlisted in the missionary service, how many the mission societies are prepared to seek and employ.

"I know well that the problem of the extent and character of the medical work that could properly be made part of the missionary effort has long been the subject of much study and consideration on your part. It seems to me that this calls for definite decisions of the utmost importance to the future of missions at this time. There is no doubt that if the Church is ready to go forward, there is an opportunity the like of which will never within our lifetimes come again. Never again will there be so many men, peculiarly fitted by their experience to listen to the call to world-wide service and also qualified by their experience to meet the call with unusual ability. The question the Church must face is how far it is prepared to go in enlisting medical men for work in foreign fields and also what scope it will seek to give to the men it secures."

We have our chance to present to these men the ideal of going forward with that with which they had begun.

And there were the lads in our colleges and universi­ties. Never were the colleges more open to appeals offer­ing men unselfish service, the moral equivalent of war, as they were at the time of the demobilization of the Students' Army Training Corps. Unless one was with them then he can not imagine the state of mind in which these boys were. If ever they were ripe for some great and heroic appeal they were ripe for it then. You could not denominationalize the appeal to them. They had heard the united voice of their country speaking and they replied to that united voice. If the churches wanted those lads for Christian service to-day, it was necessary for them to approach the problem unitedly with one heart and one appeal. The boys would have found their own appropriate place of personal service afterwards if we could have made the command adequate enough and spoken to them with an adequately appealing and united voice. As a matter of fact the opportunity was allowed to pass by. In the third place there is the problem of Christianity and education. He is a blind man who does not see that one great lesson that this war has taught is the importance of education to national character and purpose. Never again will the State be willing to allow the education of the nation to slip out of its fingers as it has let it slip out in the past. "What is the next lesson of the war?" asked Lloyd George in a speech at Manchester, and he answered, "We must pay more attention to the school. The most formidable institution we had to fight in Germany was not the arsenals of Krupp or the yards in which they turned out submarines, but the schools of Germany. They were our most formidable competitors in business and our most terrible opponents in war. An educated man is a better worker, a more formidable warrior and a better citizen. That was only half com­prehended here before the war." What some have been criticizing in Japan is just what we may anticipate that many nations will seek to do in the days that lie ahead of us. We see what the education of a nation skillfully guided can accomplish. Processes, carefully thought out by men who know the principles of genetic psychology as this war has illustrated them afresh, are going to play on us and our children after us. State supervision and other secular administration of these processes and of the ordinary forms of education are inevitable. The Christian churches are facing a problem the right solution of which is vital to the very life of Christianity. And we are never going to solve that problem along our old lines of division and separation, of not bringing our forces together in a way to meet the consequences of secularized education with which we shall have to deal. I have a friend who has taught for some years in the philosophical faculty in one of our five largest American universities. This friend has told me that out of twenty-six professors and associate professors of philosophy there were only two in the faculty who did not teach a mechanistic view of life. And this university is perhaps doing as much as any other to shape the educational life of America. And it is only too representative. The Christian churches have to deal unitedly with the problem of Christian education, if they do not want the ground cut from under them by processes of secularized education which will teach philosophical theories that are absolutely fatal to all which we most dearly believe both in politics and in religion, and if the work of a moralized American educa­tion of all the people is to be achieved.

In the fourth place consider this great complex of problems which are developing on the home mission hori­zon. The new home mission responsibilities need to be interpreted in the richest way. It will be a great loss if after the war we do not accept a far ampler view of the functions of all our home mission agencies. We can easily name some of the problems. Again and again to-day we refer to the problem of the returning soldier. The problem of the returning soldier can not be handled in a divided way by a score of competing denominations. Of course the soldier who goes back to his own communion will be welcome there, but there are tens of thousands of these men who had no denominational attachment be­fore they went abroad. Are they all to be scrambled for by the churches, each one offering its own wares?

The problems can be met only as with a comprehensive spirit and united approach, the Church of this land deals with them in sincerity and unselfishness.

And the problems are far more complex than the mere issue of associating the soldier with a particular Christian organization upon his return to his community. Is he to be a different sort of citizen in the light of his experi­ence, different in his own ideals and demands, different in his contribution to the community and the nation? And the problem of the community to which he returns is a greater problem than he is. Is it to be the same kind of community it was before and what is the Church going to do to deal with it? Are the old American ideals of democracy, tolerance and respect to be perpet­uated? There is the problem of community Christian education. There are hopeful experiments already being made in this field to effect the adequate coordination and guidance of all Christian forces. The day has gone by when the denominational Sunday School alone, one of our most valuable Christian forces, isolated from other agen­cies and unsupported by all the Christian energies which can be poured into it, can cope with the problem of re­ligious education in the American community. And there is the problem of community Christian service as well as of community Christian education. Some are foolishly proposing schemes which involve the abrogation of the home as a Christian and social institution, but between the home and the nation there do lie areas of social life covered vaguely by the term "community" which are to be Christianized. The community to be sure is not a unit. It has its horizontal and its vertical stratifications but these do not conform to the denomina­tonal divisions and they are unified by common inter­ests and common social issues which require of the Church a community consciousness and a community approach. There is also and on a national scale the problem of our moral and social health. The churches can handle such a problem only as they handle it unitedly. The war has given them such an opportunity. It has shown that certain things are essential to the highest efficiency of soldiers, that if we are going to fight a successful war, we can not do it with drunken and diseased men. If we can not fight a great war with that kind of men, can we build a great nation in time of peace with that kind of men? We have discovered that the type of man we need in time of war is the type of man we need in time of peace. We see new ideals in this matter and not only new ideals but new possibilities as well. We have real­ized that there are certain moral achievements not to be left in the realm of the impracticable; that it is possible to wipe out the saloon and that it is possible to wipe out the brothel. If for eighteen months of war it was demon­strated that it was possible to keep the brothel and saloon five miles away from our men in the Army, why shall it not be possible to destroy them and keep them away from the young men outside of the Army for all time? But who dreams that it can be done by disunited effort? And there is the problem of the unification of the national spirit and the true American education of all the foreign elements in the national body. We may describe it in all sorts of terms, assimilation, Americanization, nation­alization. It is a common task that can be worked at of course by all kinds and groups of people, but they can work it out efficiently only as they unwastefully coordi­nate their forces in a common service and to one great end, and as they face the economic and psychological elements of the problem in the spirit and with the principles of Christianity. How otherwise are just grievances of the negro race and of those who suffer from economic in­justice to be dealt with and cleared away?

In the fifth place there are the new demands for coop­eration and coordination in connection with the foreign missionary undertaking and the need of the organic con­solidation of whatever can be organically consolidated. We started the foreign missionary work in America with a great ideal, with the ideal that one organization might operate foreign missionary work for the American churches, and the American Board for some years embod­ied that ideal. It proved premature. And there has been enormous gain in the last one hundred years from the denominational differentiation of foreign missionary re­sponsibility, but we may be coming around now to a re­turn in part at least to those great ideals with which we began. We are clear at any rate that there ought to be the closest consolidation of our approach to the non-Christian world. There is also the whole problem of missionary education at home. We are coming to unity of mind in this matter, for the missionary obliga­tion is one obligation. The motives that lead Methodists to give to the support of foreign missions are identical with those that lead the Presbyterians and Baptists to give to the support of foreign missions. In effecting the full pressure of the missionary obligation on the Church at home, only united action can avail. It is the universal Christ who is to be made known to the world. The views of all of us about Him are still less than He, and our combined apprehension of Him alone can furnish adequate and commanding motive to any group or division. The war revealed in many different spheres the power of united pressures.

And further, there is the necessity in the United States of our supplying through the foreign missions' concep­tions the ideas that must underlie the basis of peace which must be laid if this war is not to have been waged in vain. It is the foreign missionary enterprise which is the custodian of the principles on which alone the League of Nations can ever be built up. These principles can not be isolated as the property of any one group. No one group can adequately proclaim them. If they belong to one they belong to us all. It is what is the property of us all in those principles which can alone sustain a friendly world order and by as much as we believe in that, by as much as we believe that the blood of eight million men will have been shed in vain unless that is to be achieved, by that much are we under obli­gation to accomplish any new pressure of coordination necessary to our supplying to the world the fundamental conceptions that underlie a new and brotherly interna­tional relationship.

The third lesson from the last year accordingly is that we have before us certain great indivisible tasks; that these tasks if we will attack them together will supply us with the most effective path of advance in denomina­tional coöperation.

IV. A fourth lesson which the experience of the year has taught the churches relates to the processes and the forms of their cooperative action. There has not been any new discovery. There has been only a larger application of what had already been ascertained and was already existent in the forms of organization and service in the Federal Council of the Churches. Only the emphasis was changed somewhat. There had been two types of associated action through the commissions of the Federal Council. In one the Federal Council selected individuals and brought them together in a commission with considerable freedom of action and with responsibility to the Federal Council alone. In the other method the attempt to correlate the organic activities of the denominations and to bring them together did not give the same freedom that the first method did, but it did give a larger weight of responsibility. The General War Time Commission of the Churches, the central war agency of the churches, made use chiefly of this second method during the war. The committees which it estab­lished, the Committee on Training and Recruiting Men for the Ministry, the Committee on War Production Communities and the work which they did constituted some of the best work of the war. They represented the attempt to bring together the organic activities of denomi­nations. There has been during the last few years a great growth of the sense of denominational personality and we do not want to break that down unless there is some­thing better to take its place. The danger is that it is breaking down and dissolving in some directions before it has entirely fulfilled its functions. In the war work of the churches the effort was honestly made to conserve all that is good. Some said that the churches were mak­ing a mistake and emphasizing denominationalism. All that those who ever acted for them were trying to do was to bring together in an effective cooperative way the really responsible denominational agencies. That method may hold back some of the more far-visioned and en­thusiastic men. Perhaps it is wise that they should be held back a little, while we keep together the men who represent the organic responsibility of the different com­munions and seek by mutual interchange to get forward. And it will be a great pity if as we go forward we do not conserve all the gains of the past in this regard, even if it makes some of us impatient because the progress is not so rapid as it might be if we might detach ourselves from these responsible relationships. The Foreign Mis­sions Conference of North America and the Home Mis­sions Council of the United States illustrate the strength of this method of coöperation.

We should learn to-day from the war a further lesson as to the process of leadership that one might not per­haps learn so readily in days of peace. The problem in the war has been not so much to create energies, as to guide and shape them. The war split open the soul of America, and great tides of moral and spiritual power have come gushing out which needed only wise guidance and relationship. This may not be so true in the future days of peace, but for the present these tides are still run­ning. The next great step which is to be accomplished in the name of the Church and under the guidance of some agency of the Church which represents the full con­sciousness of the Church, is to bring these forces to­gether in this time. It is amazing how many of them there are loose to-day in American life and the need is great of drawing them together and giving wise guidance to these energies. There is also much bewilderment in America to-day. Is there one who has not been hearing from the younger men in the ministry of the perplexity with which they are facing their problems? Some device must be set up which will accomplish the correlation of all these energies and give men's minds wise and united guidance in the common task.

V. And lastly, there is a fifth lesson. We have learned from this war that men have no business going into a war unless they intend to stay in it until it has been won. There was a time, some months ago, when the President recommended a "peace without victory," but his recom­mendation was not accepted by one section of those to whom it was addressed. The section willing to accept the suggestion reminds us of the story of the two women who appeared before Solomon. One of them, we re­member, was ready for a peace without victory. And we remember which one it was. If anybody had ad­dressed to the President after we had entered the war such an exhortation he would have met it exactly as the allied nations of Europe met it from him. We know that a nation has no business to go into a war if it is not ready to choose between two alternatives, either to win the war or to be destroyed. Only the willing­ness to make such a choice can justify the extremity of war. And I believe we went into it on that prin­ciple. Once we had gone into it nothing until the end of time would have brought us out until the war had been won or we had been utterly overthrown. I remem­ber a conference which we had with one of our visitors from Great Britain a short time ago, just after his arrival here, when we were discussing this matter. He was feeling exceedingly despondent. He did not be­lieve that Germany ever would be defeated. He believed that the war would end without any decisive triumph for the principles for which we were contending. We said he did not understand America. America might have a reputation for mercurial and changeable spirit but it was not so and once she had set her hand to a task like this she would never take her hand off until the task was done. And now the same principle holds in all spheres of action. We have started on certain relationships in the attempt to accomplish certain tasks. There is no withdraw­ing from them. We have set out as a Christian Church in a great war. There is no holding back and there is no stopping until we get through, absolutely none. This move­ment of closer coordination and coöperation is never going to stop. It is going to grow year by year with increasing power. We may make mistakes. It is conceivable that we should make such colossal mistakes as to destroy any existing agencies of coöperation so that new agencies would have to be set up in their stead, but as sure as there will be a sunrise to-morrow another agency would be set up in their stead, because we are moving in a great progress from which we can never draw out or be drawn back. The only question we face to-day is whether we are going to be courageous enough, disinterested enough, wise enough to discern our time and to pass into this time with instrumentalities which we are called upon to devise and control and direct that are adequate for the tasks of this day. All of the great values that have come out of the war with us call upon us for this thing—the realization of how much more powerful great moral ideals are than all things else, the discovery of how the sense of something better ahead can command anything from men, and, what is in one sense more wonderful even than all of these, and what the soldier feels to have been the greatest thing that the war has brought to him, the sheer glory of an unwithholding comradeship. In the camps, in the trenches, wherever the soldiers were, this was the splendid achievement of their great experience, the communized consciousness of a brotherhood that shares everything, that has pooled men's life blood, that has made them one in one great sacrificial, national en­deavor. Can we not match that and surpass it in the body of Christ? Do not hours come when we know we have matched it, when we feel the glow in our own hearts, the longing to cross the chasms between man and man, to produce at last here in the midst of our nation to-day a fellowship so real, so commanding, that in the atmos­phere of it we do not need to solve our problems, for we shall find that they have disappeared?