World Parliament of Religions Scrapbook 003

              #003 World Parliament of Religions Scrapbook, p. 043

fication by faith, and each one had fifteen min[-]
utes of questions all bearing upon faith to put to
him. By and by, when the candidate was in an
exhausted condition, one indiscreet examiner
said, "Well, what do you think of good works?"
"O," said the exhausted candidate, looking
around at his prosecutors, "I'll no say that it 
might not be weal enough to have a few of
them."
Here today we are aiming to have a few of
them. [Laughter.] We have tried to contrast
ourselves, as far as our natural humility would
permit, with those visitors from foreign lands.
We have tried to apply the test of our convic-
tions to theirs, with the universal feeling that
each one of them might have been a very respect-
able man if he had been brought up in our Sun-
day-school. [Laughter.] Suppose we try them
by the test of works at last, and try ourselves by
the same test. It is not enough for our admirable
Chairman to marshal us together and address us
like St. Anthony, who preached to the fishes in
the old German poem. That poem records how
eloquently the good saint addressed them and
how well they all listened to him. He explained
to the pickerel that they ought not to eat
each other; he told the trout they ought not to
steal each other's food, and he said the eel ought
not to go reeling around miscellaneously, getting
into all manner of mischief. It is recorded that
the fishes heard him in raptures, but at the end,
the poem says, at the end, after all—
"The trout went on stealing.
The eels went on eeling.
Much delighted were they,
But preferred the old way."
Let us guard against that danger, and how can
we guard against it so well as by a little mutual
humility when we ask ourselves how well any of
us have dealt with the actual problems of human
life? When it comes to that, after all, have any
of us so very much to boast of?
     Virtue of Trust and Confidence.
With the seething problems of social reform
penetrating all our community and raising the
question whether one day the whole system of
competition under which we live may not be
swept away as absolutely as the feudal system
disappeared before it; with the questions of 
drunkenness and prostitution in our cities; with
the mortgaged farms in our country, towns—with
all these things pressing upon us is it quite time
for us to assume the attitude of infallibility be-
fore the descendants of Plato and the disciples
of Gautama Buddha? [Applause.] The test
of works is the one that must come before us.
Every Oriental that comes to us—and curi-
ously enough I have heard half a dozen say the
same thing in different places—concedes to
us the power of organization, the power of
labor, the method in actual life which they lack.
I do not say that they deny us any virtue, except 
the knowledge of the true God. They don't seem
to think we have very much of that, and that
knowledge as they claim is brought to bear in
virtue of heart as well as the virtues of thrift, of
industry, of organization and the virtue of
prayer, in the virtue of trust, in the virtue of
absolute confidence in God.
A friend of mine in Chicago told me the other
day that when he was talking with one of our
Oriental visitors about some other place he was
going to the question arose as to whether he
could afford to go. The calm face of the Oriental
was utterly undisturbed during the discussion.
"O," he said, "I think I can go ; I think there
will be no trouble; I have $15 in my pocket."
Put any of us, put the greatest Christian saint
among us, 13,000 miles away from home with
only $15 in his pocket, and do you think that he
would be absolutely sure that unassisted divine
providence would bring him back without a call
at his banker's? [Laughter.] You find this curi-
ous combination of traits running through the
actual life and running through the spiritual
life, or what passes for such. We have come
here to teach and to learn. The learning is not
so familiar to most of us perhaps as the teaching,
but when it comes to actual life we might try a
little of both.
And in thanking once more our Chairman, as
we ought to thank him every moment of every
day, not alone for the way he has organized this
great parliament, but for the sonorous decision
with which he even shuts the door in our faces
when we particularly want to get in ; thanking him
for everything, I can only give him this parting
wish—that he may not be like that once famous
sportsman, who prided himself on his good shoot-
ing and boasted that in one instant the doer
which he brought in had been shot by himself
with a single bullet through the ear and through
the left off foot. His friend became a little so-
licitous about the statement and he turned to
his black servant and said: "Sambo, isn't it so?"
"Yes, massa," said Sambo. "But how did you
do it?" asked the incredulous. "Why," said
Sambo, "it was simple enough. De deer he just
scratched his ear wiv his off hoof and massa
shot him." There was complete triumph on the
huntsman's part and when his friends had gone
he said: "Sambo, you did that handsomely ;
thank you for getting me out of that." "Yes,
massa," said Sambo, "I did it once ; I brought
de ear and de off hind hoof togeder once, but I 
'spec' I never can do it again. [Laughter and
applause.]
"I am sorry," remarked Dr. Barrows,
"that Col. Higginson has ended his beautiful
address with a word of skepticism. I believe
what has been done once can be done again."
[Applause.]
     Social Question Is Now Foremost.
Prof. P. G. Peabody of Harvard University
was greeted with applause when he came for-
ward to read his paper on "Christianity and
the Social Question." The paper follows:
Each age in the history of human thought is
marked by one central problem which stands out 
from a distance against the horizon of the past 
as the outline of a mountain stands out miles 
away against the sky. In one age, as that of
Luther, the center of European thought lay in a 
problem of theology ; in another age, as in that
of Kant, this commanding interest was held by
a question of philosophy ; fifty years later, in the
time of Darwin, the critical problem
was one of science ; and now, fifty
years later still, with a distinct-
ness hardly reached before, a new era
finds its center of interest in a new problem.
We do not have to wait for the philosophic his-
torian to look back on our time as we looked
back on that of Luther, or Kant, or Darwin for
the mark which must always stamp the present
age. It is already passed a doubt what the
great master of the ages, in his division of labor
through the history of man, in proposing what
this special age of ours shall do. The center of
interest, alike for philosophers and agitators,
for thinkers and workers, for rich and poor, lies
at the present time in what we call the social
question. The needs and hopes of human society,
its inequalities of condition, its industrial con-
flicts, its dreams of a better order ; these are the
themes which meet us daily in the books and maga-
zines, the lectures and sermons, which speak the
spirit of the present age. Never before in the
history of the world was the moral sense of all
classes thus awakened to the evils of the present,
or the hopes of the future. Once the relation of
rich and poor, or of employer and employed,
were regarded as in large degree natural condi-
tions, not to be changed, but simply to be en-
dured. Now, with a great suddenness, there has
spread through all civilized people a startling
gospel of discontent, a new restlessness, a new
conception of philanthropy. The same sub-
jects are being discussed in workingmen's
clubs and in theological seminaries. It
is the age of the social question. And of this
concentration of attention in the problem of
human society there is one thing to be said at the
very start. It is to be counted by us who live in
this present ago as a great blessing. The needs
and hopes of society open indeed into very dif-
ficult questions, often into very pathetic ones,
sometimes into very tragic ones, but such ques-
tions have at least two redeeming traits which
make the age devoted to them a fortunate age.
They are very near questions and they are very
large questions.
        Mission of Healing the World.
We are called to think chiefly not of ourselves
but of others, and that gives us a large subject;
and we are called to think of others as bound up
with us in the social order, and that gives us a
near subject. Here is a situation which should,
first of all, make us glad. A time which thus re-
deems the mind from smallness and unreality
may be a time of special apprehensions and grave
demands, but it is a time, at least, in which it is
invigorating and wholesome to live. It has many
of the characteristics of the time when Jesus of
Nazareth, reading the signs of his own age,
opened the book of the Prophet Isaiah and
found the place where it was written: "The
spirit of the Lord is upon me because
he has anointed me to preach the
gospel to the poor: he has sent
me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliver-
ance to the captives and recovering of sight to
the blind, to set at liberty them that are bound,
to preach the acceptable year of the Lord." We,
too, are set free in these days from the remoter
controversies of theology and the narrower study
and tradition of law, and are anointed to a gos-
pel of social welfare and to the healing and re-
covering of the bruised and broken-hearted of the
modern world; and that is what makes this year
of the Lord to any thoughtful student of human
progress an acceptable year in which to live and
learn.
But now, as we thus observe the signs of the
times, a further question presses upon us. What
has religion to say to this problem of the modern
age? What has Christianity to do with these
things? What is the attitude of Christ's disciples
toward these various programs of reform? And
as we face this question there open before us,
first of all, the two ways in which Christians have
often tried to answer it—or,: to speak more ac-
curately, have often avoided the answering of it
and shirked the real issue in the case. On the
one hand, the Christian may try to dismiss the
question from his mind. Why, he may ask
himself, should such worldly problems as wealth
and poverty, capital and labor, intrude them-
selves into the sacredness of my worship? In the
church I am thinking of my soul; elsewhere, I
will think of my business. In worship let me
find peace with my God; peace with my employes,
my tenants, my hands is a matter not of
the church or of the Lord's day, but of the mar-
ket and the mill. Often enough have Christians
pursued this policy as to worldly affairs. Often
enough has religion been so guarded that, in a
very different sense from the prophet's, her
voice is not heard in the street. But the inevit-
able reaction has necessarily come.
If the Christian church is to have
no interest in the social distresses and
problems of the time, then those who are most
concerned with such distresses and problems will
have no interest in the Christian church.
    Working Classes Desert the Churches.
The simple fact which we have to face today is
this: that the working classes have, as a rule,
practically abandoned the churches and left
them to be the resorts of the prosperous; and the
simple reason for this desertion is the neutrality
of the churches toward the social problems of
the time. I asked that honest and temperate
leader of the working class in England, John
Burns, two years ago, what he thought would be
the future of religion in England, and he
answered: "I see no future for it. It plays no
part in the workingman's program." That is one
way for the Christian to stand toward the social
question. He tries to evade the responsibility
for it, and forthwith the Church of Christ is help-
less to reach and redeem the lives of a whole sec-
tion of mankind. But the opposite way is hardly
less vicious, and just now a more probable peril.
The pressure of these new interests is just now so
great that indifference to them is unlikely. The
churches are accepting these human questions as
a part of their religious duty. 
The two factors ot the problem before us are
the eternal needs of the soul in worship, and the
pressing question of the day, the churches on the
one hand and the world on the other. Christ and
the social question stand unadjusted and op-
posed. And so we return again to our original
question: Is there no organic normal relation 
between the two? When the Christian turns to 
the social question, is he on the one hand turning
away from the themes of the Christian church, or
is he on the other hand sacrificing Christ to so-
ciety, or is there, lastly, any law laid down by
Christ himself which directs a Christian in his
study of such affairs? That is the question with
which we turn to Christ, and he gives us a clear 
and often-reiterated reply. 
One of the first things which strikes one as he 
reads the gospel is that Jesus Christ was 
a great individualist. His appeal is always 
to the single life, his central doctrine of hu-
manity is that of the infinite worth of each single
soul. Nothing can make up for the loss of the
individual. The shepherd goes out after the one
lost sheep, the woman sweeps the house to find
the one bit of money. The gain of the world is
nothing if a man loses his own soul. Thus Christ
and his teachings stand forever over against the
schemes which are going to redeem the world
by any impersonal, mechanical, wholesale plan.
He seeks to save men one at a time. His king-
dom is within. He calls his disciples singly.
He calleth his own sheep by name and leadeth
them out. It is a personal relation, an individual
work.
         New Value of Individual.
This personal method of Jesus has been taken
up into the history of the world. The new value
of the individual has become the key of modern
thought, a new brotherhood, a new philanthropy,
sprang from this root of the worth of even the
humblest soul. The Protestant reformation was
an appeal to the individual reason. Modern phi-
losophy, modern jurisprudence, all alike have
accustomed us to this sense of the individual as
the center of concern. "The movement of pro-
gressive societies," says Sir Henry Maine in his
ancient law, "has been uniform in one respect.
The individual is steadily substituted for the
family as the unit of which civil laws take ac-
count."
So far then the method of Christ seems to stand 
apart from the problem of society. It seems to
confirm Christians in their neutrality towards
social questions and needs. What has the church
from this point of view to do with social ques-
tions? The church has but to deliver the message
of Christ to the saving of the individual soul.
But in reality there is one whole side of the
teaching of Jesus which such a view entirely
ignores. Suppose one goes on to ask: "Why
does Christ thus appeal to the individual? Why
is the single soul of such infinite worth to him?
Is it for its own sake? Is there this tremendous
significance about my little being and doing that
it has its own isolated worth? Not at all;
a man's life taken by itself is just
what it seems—a very insignificant affair.
What is it that gives significance to
such a single life? It is its relation to the whole
of which it is a part. Just as its minutest wheel
is essential in some great machine, just as the
health of each slighted limb or organ in your 
body affects the vitality and health of the whole, 
so stands the individual in the organic life 
of the social world. We are members one of an-
other. We are one body in Christ. No man liveth
or dieth to himself. So runs the Christian
conception of the common life.
And in this organic relationship the individual
finds the meaning and worth of his own isolated
self. What is this conception in Christ's own
language? It is his marvelous ideal of what he
calls the kingdom of God—that perfected world
of humanity in which as in a perfect body each
part should be sound and whole and thus the
body be complete.
      Coming of the Kingdom of Heaven.
The kingdom of heaven is the one thing to de-
sire. It is the good seed of the future. It is the
leaven dropped into the mass of the world. It is
the hidden treasure, the pearl of great price. It
may come slowly, as servants look for a reckoning
after years of duty done. It may come suddenly
as virgins awake to meet the bridegroom. How-
ever and wherever this Christian commonwealth,
this kingdom of God arrives, then and there
only will the hopes of Jesus be fulfilled. "Thy
kingdom come" is the central prayer of the dis-
ciple of Christ. What does this mean, then, as
to Christ's thought of society? It means that a
completed social order was his highest dream.
We have seen that he was the great individualist
of history. We now see that he is the great social-
ist as well. His hope for man was a universal
hope. What he prophesied was just that en-
larged and consolidated life of man which many
modern dreams repeat, where all the conflicts of
selfishness should be outgrown, and there should
be one kingdom and one King, one motive—that
of love. One unity—that of the spirit. One law
—that of liberty.
Was ever socialistic prophet of a revolutionized
society more daring or sanguine, or, to practical
minds, more impracticable than this visionary
Jesus with his assurance of the coming king-
dom of God? But how can it be
we go on to ask once more, that the
same teacher can teach such opposite truths?
How can Christ appeal thus to the single soul
and yet hope thus for the kingdom? How can he
be at once the great individualist and the great
Socialist of history? Are we confronted with an
inconsistency in Christ's doctrine of human life?
Is Christ divided? On the contrary, we reach
here the very essence of the gospel in its relation
to human needs. The two teachers, that of the
individual and that of the social order, that of
the part and that of the whole, are not exclusive
of each other, or opposed to each other, but are
essential parts of the one law of Christ.
Why is the individual soul of such inestimable
value? Because of its essential part in the or-
ganic social life. And why is the King-
dom of God set be fore each individ-