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Page 37
The Kingdom _protests_ against any features in prevailing conditions
that do not disclose Christlike love. It scans the industrial world of
today, and finds three fundamental evils in it: competition as a motive,
arraying man against man, group against group, nation against nation, in
unbrotherly strife; gain-seeking as the stimulus to effort, inducing men
to invest capital, or to labor, primarily for the sake of the returns to
themselves; and selfish ownership as the reward of success, letting men
feel that they can do as they please with their own. Certain callings,
upon which the Christian Spirit has exerted a stronger influence, have
already been raised above the level of the commercial world. It is not
good form professionally for physicians, or ministers, or college
professors to compete with each other and seek to draw away patients,
parishioners or pupils; to exercise their callings mainly for the sake
of financial gains; nor to regard as their own their skill, or
inspiration, or learning. But as yet the butcher, the baker, the grocer,
the banker, the manufacturer, the promoter, are not supposed to be on
this plane. They are urged to compete, even to the extent of putting
their rivals out of business, in defiance of an old Jewish maxim, "He
that taketh away his neighbor's living slayeth him," and in face of the
Lord's Prayer in which we ask not for "my daily cake," but for "_our_
daily bread." They are expected to consider profits, dividends, wages,
as the chief end in their callings; and if out of their gains they
devote a portion to public uses, that is charity on their part. A few
individuals are undoubtedly superior to the ideal set before them, and
are as truly dedicated servants of the community as any physician or
minister of the gospel, but they are a small minority; and the false
ideal ruins characters, and renders the commercial world a battlefield,
instead of a household of co-working children of God.
It scans international relations, and finds patriotism still a pagan
virtue. Mr. Lecky calls it "in relation to foreigners a spirit of
constant and jealous self-assertion." When a tariff is under discussion,
high, low or no duties are advocated as beneficial for the industries of
one's own country, regardless of the welfare of those of other lands.
The scramble for colonies with their advantages to trade, the
imperialistic spirit that seizes possessions without respect to the
wishes of their inhabitants, the endeavor to secure in other countries
special concessions or large business orders at an extraordinary profit,
are all sanctified under the name of patriotism. The peace of the world
is supposed to be maintained by keeping nations armed to the teeth, so
that rival powers will be afraid to fight, and huge armies and navies
are labelled insurance against war. A sentence in a letter of Erasmus
has a singularly modern sound: "There is a project to have a congress of
kings at Cambrai, to enter into mutual engagements to preserve peace
with each other and through Europe. But certain persons, who get
nothing by peace and a great deal by war, throw obstacles in the way."
The armament argument for peace has been given its _reductio ad
absurdum;_ but it is by no means clear that the world-wide war will free
the nations from the burdensome folly of keeping enormous armies and
navies. As Christians we must protest without ceasing that international
relations, based on mutual fear and maintained by the use of brute
force, can never furnish the peace of Christ.
It scans the system of justice in its treatment of the wrong-doer, and
declares that the crude attempt to fit the punishment to the crime, and
to protect society by deterrent penalties, is not the justice of Him who
is "faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all
unrighteousness." Divine justice is redemptive; and society, if it
wishes to be Christian, must pay the heavy cost of making all its
contacts with the imperfect transforming.
It scans the educational institutions of our land, and sees many
students viewing learning only with reference to its immediate
commercial availability, spurning all studies as "unpractical" which do
not supply knowledge that can be coined into financial returns; and it
sees many others without intellectual interest, prizing schools and
colleges merely for their social pleasures, lazily choosing courses
which require a minimum of labor, and disesteeming the great
opportunities of culture and enrichment provided by the sacrificial
studies and labors of the past. It insists that a moral revival is
needed for an intellectual renaissance. All students must be baptized
with a passion for social service, before studies that enrich the mind
and enlarge the character will be pursued with eager devotion. The
blight of irresponsibility is almost universal upon the students in the
higher educational institutions of our country.
So the Christian social order contrasts itself with every phase and
aspect of our present life, and exposes the impoverishing absence of the
Spirit of God. Its protest is reinforced by widespread social
restlessness and the feeling that the existing state of things has gone
into moral bankruptcy.
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