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Page 66
I think the fear is not well grounded. What is the use of preaching
social service to the almost total neglect of setting forth the
intellectual and emotional concept of the servant? It is the quality
of the doer which determines the value of the deed. Why keep on
insisting upon being good if our hearers have never been carefully
instructed in the nature and the sanctions of goodness? Has not the
trouble with most of our political and moral reform been that we have
had a passion for it but very little science of it? How can we know
the ways of godliness if we take God Himself for granted? No: our
chief business, as preachers, is to preach the content rather than the
application of the truth. Not many people are interested in trying
to find the substance of the truth. It is hated as impractical by
the multitude of the impatient, and despised as old-fashioned by
the get-saved-quick reformers. Nevertheless we must find out the
distinctions between divine and human, right and wrong, and why they
are what they are, and what is the good of it all. There is no more
valuable service which the preacher can render his community than to
deliberately seclude himself from continual contact with immediate
issues and dwell on the eternal verities. When Darwin published _The
Descent of Man_ at the end of the Franco-Prussian War, the _London
Times_ took him severely to task for his absorption in purely
scientific interests and hypothetical issues. "When the foundations
of property and the established order were threatened with the fires
of the Paris Commune; when the Tuileries were burning--how could a
British subject be occupying himself with speculations in natural
science in no wise calculated to bring aid or comfort to those who
had a stake in the country!" Well, few of us imagine today that
Darwin would have been wise to have exchanged the seclusion and the
impractical hours of the study for the office or the camp, the market
or the street.
Yet the same fear of occupying ourselves with central and abstract
matters still obsesses us. At the Quadrennial Conference of the
Methodist Episcopal Church held recently at Des Moines, thirty-four
bishops submitted an address in which they said among other things:
"Of course, the church must stand in unflinching, uncompromising
denunciation of all violations of laws, against all murderous child
labor, all foul sweat shops, all unsafe mines, all deadly tenements,
all excessive hours for those who toil, all profligate luxuries, all
standards of wage and life below the living standard, all unfairness
and harshness of conditions, all brutal exactions, whether of the
employer or union, all overlordships, whether of capital or labor,
all godless profiteering, whether in food, clothing, profits or wages,
against all inhumanity, injustice and blighting inequality, against
all class-minded men who demand special privileges or exceptions on
behalf of their class."
These are all vital matters, yet I cannot believe that it is the
church's chief business thus to turn her energies to the problems
of the material world. This would be a stupendous program, even
if complete in itself; as an item in a program it becomes almost a
_reductio ad absurdum_. The _Springfield Republican_ in an editorial
comment upon it said: "It fairly invites the question whether the
church is not in some danger of trying to do too much. The fund of
energy available for any human undertaking is not unlimited; energy
turned in one direction must of necessity be withdrawn from another
and energy diffused in many directions cannot be concentrated. Count
the adjectives--'murderous,' 'foul,' 'unsafe,' 'deadly,' 'excessive,'
'profligate,' 'brutal,' 'godless,' 'blighting'--does not each involve
research, investigation, comparison, analysis, deliberation, a heavy
tax upon the intellectual resources of the church if any result worth
having is to be obtained? Can this energy be found without subtracting
energy from some other sphere?"
The gravest problems of the world are not found here. They are
found in the decline of spiritual understanding, the decay of moral
standards, the growth of the vindictive and unforgiving spirit, the
lapse from charity, the overweening pride of the human heart. With
these matters the church must chiefly deal; to their spiritual
infidelity she must bring a spiritual message; to their poor thinking
she must bring the wisdom of the eternal. This task, preventive not
remedial, is her characteristic one. Is it not worth while to remember
that the great religious leaders have generally ignored contemporary
social problems? So have the great artists who are closely allied
to them. Neither William Shakespeare nor Leonardo da Vinci were
reformers; neither Gautama nor the Lord Jesus had much to say about
the actual international economic and political readjustments which
were as pressing in their day as ours. They were content to preach the
truth, sure that it, once understood, would set men free.
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