The New Christianity; or, The Religion of the New Age

The history of the last nine hundred years in one, at least, of its most vital aspects is the history of the development of democracy. Perhaps in no other way can one so accurately discuss and estimate the progress achieved through this almost millennial period than in noting the successive conquests made by that great principle.

The first conquest was in the field of education. Modern democracy began with the rise of universities in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Education had been the monopoly of the clergy, not, indeed, through any such design on the part of the clergy, but through the ignorance of the Northern races which had overrun Southern Europe and almost extinguished its culture, and through the unsettled and harassed condition of Europe which had delayed the growth of a new culture. It was only the clergy who felt that education was necessary.

It is one of the many inestimable services that the monasteries have rendered the modern world, that they preserved from destruction some of the precious flotsam and jetsam of that Greco-Roman literature which had for the most part been submerged, and that in these quiet retreats there grew up the schools which were to lay the foundations of yet nobler literatures.

Eventually, when a measure of peace came at last to the lands so long in distress and turmoil, the irrepressible impulses of the human soul for knowledge asserted themselves. The youth of Europe, eager to know, flocked in increasing numbers to the teachers who began to be famous, and the university took its rise.

Education placed in the hands of the people the key to other doors. As a natural consequence, democracy found its way into the jealously guarded realm of religion. After innumerable abortive, but glorious and not wasted, struggles for the right of the individual to find his own religion and dispense with ecclesiastical guides and directors, Northern Europe established the principle of democracy in religion in the great revolt known as the Protestant Reformation. That uprising was a very complex movement. Many motives mingled in it, but of these the desire for a purer faith was, probably, on the whole not so influential as the democratic passion for intellectual and religious freedom.

Concurrent with the overflow of democracy into the realm of religion was its overflow into politics. The evolution of political democracy is the distinctive glory of England. It is her contribution to world civilization as that of the Hebrew was monotheism, that of the Greek culture, and that of the Roman organization and law.

The barons, primarily in their own interest, wrested the Great Charter from a King who more recklessly and oppressively than his predecessors played the despot. In the provision of Magna Charta that the King should levy no more taxes without consent of the taxed was found the necessity of the coming together, first of the barons and the spiritual lords, later of the knights of the shire, and finally of the burghers of the towns--separate assemblies which soon coalesced and by their unification formed the English Parliament. English constitutional history from the reign of Henry III. to the Revolution of 1688 is the history of the gradual supersession of the crown by Parliament, and of the ascendancy of the elective House of Commons over the hereditary House of Peers. The eighteenth century witnessed the development of Cabinet government; the nineteenth completed the great fabric of political democracy in those Franchise Acts which admitted to participation in the government--

In 1832, the propertied classes of the manufacturing towns;

In 1867, the artisan;

In 1884, the farm labourers;

In 1918, the women.

With these must be mentioned the Act of 1911 which constitutionally and decisively established the ascendancy of the popular House over the Peers.

England broke the trail which all other peoples that have accepted democracy have followed. The mobile and logical intelligence of France, slower through historical conditions to snap the feudal bonds, when it was at last aroused, at one bound outstripped England. Not content to limit, it swept away both monarchy and the House of Peers. A still more striking illustration of how the last may be first may yet be yielded by that great half-European, half-Asiatic people, so long, apparently, impenetrable to democracy, but now in the obscure throes of a revolution which despite its initial disorders and excesses, may, it is perhaps possible to hope, give to Russia the high honour of being the first nation to achieve the last conquest of democracy--its triumph in the economic realm. For it would seem impossible to doubt that that final triumph of democracy can be long delayed. Autocracy and aristocracy overthrown in politics cannot stand in economics.

He who will trace a river like the Mississippi from its source, and find it growing in hundreds of miles from a stream that may be waded to a great river a mile in width and a hundred feet in depth, does not need to actually follow the river to its mouth to be assured that it must reach the sea. Such a river cannot be diverted or dammed. Obstructions will only serve to make its current more violent.

This, then, would seem to be clear, that by an action as cosmic and irresistible as the movement of a great river, democracy is invading the industrial world. The time has passed for all temporary and makeshift expedients. A kindly spirit in the employer, improved hygienic conditions, rest rooms, better pay and shorter hours, will not secure equilibrium, though the spirit of good-will they tend to evoke may make further struggle less bitter. Profit-sharing furnishes no permanent resting place. It is merely a camping place on the journey. In the papers of Feb. 12, 1919, appeared a significant despatch from London of the same date, describing the acute labor situation.

"The labor situation reaches a crisis to-day in conferences between the government and three great unions, representing nearly 1,500,000 workers, the result of whose demands is awaited with keen interest by the entire labor world.

"The unions are the Miners' Federation of Great Britain, membership 800,000; National Union of Railway-men, membership 400,000; and the National Transport Workers' Federation, membership 250,000. The unions are acting together, and it is believed they have agreed on joint action if dissatisfied with the result of the conferences.

"The railwaymen's demands include a 48-hour week and control of railways by representatives of the managements and workers. This latter clause is considered a step toward nationalization, but an alternative has been prepared in the form of a commission of labor delegates and boards of directors.

"William Adamson, leader of the Labor party in the House of Commons, speaking on the industrial situation, said that it was almost as menacing and dangerous as the war itself. He said that the principal Labor amendment to the reply to the address from the throne would relate to the causes of industrial unrest.

"'I hope,' he continued, 'that no attempts will be made to disappoint the legitimate expectations of the working people. All sections of the people should understand that we have reached the stage when we have laid the cards upon the table and when the working classes will refuse longer to be treated as cogs in a machine or for mere profit-making purposes.'"

In short, nothing will now satisfy the workers but a share in the control. The most hopeful scheme of harmony would seem to be some such arrangement as the Whitley scheme which has been officially endorsed by the British Government. The essential features of the Whitley scheme are the organization of all the workers in any industrial area, the organization of all the employers, the creation of joint committees representative of both groups to fix wages and determine conditions of labor. And this is not the end but the beginning. The end, at least of this phase of industrial evolution, would appear to promise to be the disappearance of the capitalistic control of industry. So far as industries are not owned and managed by the community, they will be owned and managed by the workers that carry them on. The revolution will be accomplished when the men of inventive and organizing and directive ability recognize that their place is with the workers and not with the owners. Capitalistic control must pass away. It has, no doubt, played a necessary and useful part in the social evolution. It has shown courage and enterprise. But it has been, on the whole, rapacious and heartless, and its sense of moral responsibility has been often rudimentary. When the managers on whom it depends desert to the side of the workers, it will be patent how little capacity or service is in capitalism, and how little it deserved the immense gains it wrung from exploited labor and skill.

The process may be harder and slower than even the most sober-minded would estimate, or it may be much easier and quicker; but the process has begun, and there can be but one end. Feudalistic industry must follow feudalistic land holding. Feudalistic landlordism went because the feudal lords were enormously overpaid in proportion to their services. When organizing and directive ability breaks the artificial bond that has associated it with capital, it will be seen how slight is the service capital has rendered and how enormously it has been overpaid.

Management is, of course, entitled to its wages, and under present conditions those wages must be relatively high, for managing ability is not abundant. What might be called the wages of capital have been unjustly high and are destined to fall until no man can afford to be a mere capitalist. To gain a livelihood he will be obliged to develop some productive function.

So long as industry must be maintained on a capitalistic basis, those furnishing the capital are entitled to a fair return on their investment, but the fashion of this capitalistic age passeth away. The control of money and credit is destined to gradually become a function of government.

A check must be placed on the fatal fashion money has of breeding money. Wages of labor, wages of invention, wages of superintendence, are just; profits of capital must grow less and less to the vanishing point. The bitter conflict between capital and labor over the division of the profits will never be settled. It probably never can be settled. It will cease to be. Capital will cease to be a factor; only labor in the broadly inclusive sense of the term will remain.

The onward march of democracy, then, cannot be staid. It ought not. Democracy is nothing but the social expression of the fundamental Christian doctrine of the worth of the human soul. Democracies had found their way into human life before the revelation of the worth of the human soul in the redemptive work of Jesus Christ, but at their best, as in ancient Greece, they were restricted. Even that most glorious of all non-Christian democracies and, in some respects, most glorious as yet of all democracies non-Christian and Christian, the democracy of Athens, rested on a slave basis and excluded the man not possessing Athenian citizenship. But it was at least a noble anticipation, a sublime, if inconsistent, partial, and evanescent reaching-out after the democracy which Christianity can never be content till it has achieved, a democracy of religion, of culture, of politics, and of industry. The inherent dignity of every human soul must be recognized in every sphere of life. Heirs of God, joint-heirs with Christ--how is it possible to reconcile such august titles with servitude or subjection? A share in the control of church, community, industry is the Divine right of every normal man and woman.

A new social order is not more imperatively demanded than a new Christianity. Nothing less than this will suffice, nor will anything less be brought into being, in this crisis of transition. For while there are unchanging elements in Christianity, there are, it is equally certain, aspects that are constantly changing.

The devotion to the Lord Jesus Christ, which is the central and determinative principle of Christianity, is the least variable element; the institutions and dogmas by which that devotion is expressed and seeks to act upon the world, are the most variable.

Institutional Christianity is even more variable than dogmatic Christianity. It has varied greatly, is still changing, and its history shows that it is subject to the same influences as fashion the changing social order. This illuminating principle helps us to understand the past and to forecast the future of the Church.

During the last twelve hundred years or more, the Christian Church and the social order in Western lands have developed on parallel lines. Each has passed through two great phases and is now entering on a third.

I. The aristocratic or feudalistic phase, A.D. 700-1500.

The three centuries (roughly reckoning) from, let us say, A.D. 400 to A.D. 700 were, probably, the darkest in the history of civilization--darker even than the struggle of the last five years. They were the centuries of a struggle not so colossal in its apparatus of destruction, but seeming, even more than this struggle in its darkest hours, to threaten the extinction of civilization.

The Northern barbarians that had been pressing against the defences of the Roman Empire, as the yellow tides of the North Sea against the dykes of Holland, from the time of the inroads of the Cimbri and Teutons in the last decade of the second century before Christ, at last found entrance A.D. 378 when the Visigoths, who had been permitted to cross the Danube to find an asylum from the Huns, defeated the Roman armies and slew the Emperor in the great battle of Adrianople. From that year, with varying intervals of quiet, armies, or rather hordes, of men from the inexhaustible forests of Germany and Scandinavia, from the steppes of Russia and Central Asia, swept over lands for centuries accustomed to peace and weakened by bureaucratic despotism, inequitable and crippling systems of taxation, and, most debilitating of all, the essentially demoralizing influence of slavery. The mighty legions that had so long kept the frontiers inviolate vanished like a dream. The superb Roman roads and bridges fell into ruins. Fertile fields relapsed into wilderness. Towns decayed. Laws were forgotten. Cultivated languages with great literatures were replaced by barbarous jargons.

It was as when a country-side is devoured by a flood, and trees are uprooted, houses and barns dissolved or swept away.

Only one institution of the old Greco-Roman world withstood the waves, uprose above the yeasty flood in indestructible sovereignty--the Roman Catholic Church.

Out of the welter of overrunning barbarism--no law, no government, no protection except by superior force--the feudal system arose. The deep instinct for order and peace asserted itself. The strong man found a following. His tribe or clan, if he were a chieftain, his neighborhood, in any case, gave him service and maintenance, and he on his part gave the fullest measure of protection he was able to furnish. He became the feudal lord of a district. Through those stormy centuries that followed, when the savage people fought each other, and western Europe as it slowly struggled into order again was assailed by the Viking pirates on the North and West, by Hun-like Magyars on the East, and by the Saracens on the South, the feudal system was the only method by which over large areas any measure of security could be achieved. The strong man with his fighting force lived in his castle, and huddled under its walls lived the tillers of the soil, whom he at once in varying ratio protected and oppressed.

Some kind of relationship established itself among these feudal lords. One who by conquest or marriage had secured possession of specially large territories might out of these allot subordinate holdings to faithful followers, or by the same methods establish an overlordship over other lords. Eventually the deep and irrepressible instinct for unity and order lifted one of these families to the kingship of a group of feudal districts.

The feudal system was a varying system, the theory of which was never fully carried out, a system that had different origins in different countries and underwent different developments. The chief characteristic of it, as far as this reference to it is concerned, was its aristocratic character. Those men only counted who had enough land to support themselves and a body of fighting men. Whatever authority there was lay in their hands. The men who tilled the soil and practised the rude handicrafts of the age and carried on such beginnings of commerce as were possible, could find such imperfect security as there was only in accepting the despotic rule of one of these lords, knight or baron or count or duke as it might be, or more happily for them, in some respects, a bishop or monastery abbot. All sovereignty was in the mailed hands of these men or in those of the king, who in most of the countries slowly but surely established his control over his turbulent and recalcitrant feudatories.

It was the lowest form of order, the smallest degree of security, that feudalism provided. Legalized anarchy it has been happily called. But the measure of order and security it secured was probably all that was possible under such conditions, conditions under which an aristocratic system was the best system and, probably, the only and the inevitable one. Whatever judgment one may pass on the inadequacy and unserviceableness of aristocratic and monarchical forms of Government to-day, it ought never to be forgotten that we owe the beginnings of modern civilization to aristocracy, and its farther development to that outgrowth of aristocracy, monarchical government. Democracy in such a stage of civilization would have meant nothing but anarchy.

As under such semi-savage conditions no other kind of social organization could possibly arise than an aristocratic, so no other kind of ecclesiastical organization could meet the religious needs than an aristocratic. A democratically organized church could not have fulfilled the mission of the Church, could not, indeed, have existed. With great hordes of half-savage people precipitating themselves upon the Empire and almost extinguishing the ancient civilization, the only kind of Church that could grapple with the problem--the most formidable and appalling that civilization and Christianity ever had to face--was a Church organized on thoroughly aristocratic principles. Such a Church had been providentially prepared in the Roman Empire before its downfall. It has been already remarked that the one institution of the old shattered and submerged Greco-Roman civilization which survived the barbarian deluge was the Roman Catholic Church. We owe that Church, which has laid mankind to the end of time under unforgettable obligations, to the conditions which surrounded primitive Christianity and to the organizing, governing genius of the Latin mind.

Primitive Christianity, the devotion to the supreme Jew, Jesus Christ, we owe to the Hebrew mind. Transplanted among the Greeks, the simple, ethical, comparatively untheological and unorganized faith developed its latent philosophical implications. The Greeks gave it a creed. Transplanted simultaneously among the Latins, it was given an organization by that race whose superb and unexampled genius for government had made it mistress of all the countries around the Mediterranean.

The turmoil of erratic speculation within the infant churches with their motley converts gathered in from all kinds of religious and philosophic cults, and the ferocious persecutions from time to time launched at the helpless followers of the Christ, with their terrific temptations to apostasy or dangerous compromise, developed an aristocrat form of government. War and danger always call for the strong command. Christianity, threatened by erratic thinking and divisive controversy within and by deadliest attacks on the constancy of its people from without, found its salvation, as far as human agency was concerned, in the episcopacy, in large powers intrusted to the man who in the judgment of the individual Church was the wisest and ablest leader. The rule of the bishop was as natural and inevitable under such conditions as the rule of the captain on the ship at sea, the rule of the commanding officer in a fighting unit, the authority of the man recognized as leader in an unorganized group of farmers fighting a prairie fire. It is not wonderful that the bishops came to be regarded with veneration and their office as essential to the Christian Church. The episcopal office has earned the regard which it has enjoyed. The more fully one understands the historical conditions under which the belief in the indispensableness of episcopal organization grew up, the more reasonable one finds such a belief even if one is unable to admit its validity.

The same Roman genius for government which gave the principle of episcopacy its great place in the Church gave the Church also the papacy, and by a development as natural and, probably, as inevitable. The same necessity in troublous and dangerous times for large powers of command being held by the ablest man in the individual congregation or, later, in the group of Churches which came to be known as the diocese, developed the over-bishop, or archbishop, or metropolitan, or patriarch, as over-bishops were variously known, and over these again the supreme bishop, the bishop of bishops, the bishop of the great capital, Rome, who came at last to monopolize the title of Papa, or Pope, which originally had been given to every bishop.

The Papacy corresponds to the united command of the allied armies on the western front, which so swiftly and irresistibly transformed the war in that decisive area, and which will make illustrious till the Great War is forgotten the names of the great war-minister, Lloyd George, who so wisely and magnanimously brought it about, and the great general, Marshal Foch, who so magnificently justified it.

The Roman Catholic Church is the sublimest achievement of the organizing powers of mankind, and the unifying element in it, the capstone of that mighty structure, the key stone of the arch, is the Papacy. The Roman Catholic Church, or, as it might appropriately be designated, the Papal Church, is a greater construction than even the Roman Empire, of which it is the spiritual counterpart--vaster, more enduring, more firmly-knit, and infinitely more beneficent. The Pope corresponded to the Emperor; the bishops, to the provincial governors; the invincible legions which carried the Roman eagles into the swamps of Germany and the mountains of Caledonia, were surpassed in their daring and the tenacity of their conquests by their spiritual counterpart, the missionary monks.

It was this organization which had been providentially prepared for the anarchic and desolating period of the barbarian invasions, as Noah's ark for the Deluge, and not only as a shelter for the precious salvage of the submerged Greco-Roman civilization, but as a spiritual army which should conquer the conquerors, and on the debris of the greatest landslide of history fashion new gardens and habitations.

Latin Christianity, then, represents a distinctively aristocratic type of Christianity, the priest dominating the congregation and not controlled by them, the bishop dominating the priest, the Pope at the summit responsible to none but God. Such fashioning that great Church had received at the hands of men wise to give the Church such organization as the conditions demanded. It was this Church which the barbarian onset could neither shatter nor overpower. It was this Church which met the barbarians with a force and a sovereignty beyond their own. It asserted its moral and intellectual superiority. It overawed the men who, with the passions of men, had often the heart and still oftener the brain of the child. It put these turbulent warriors to school and struck to their hearts the fear of God and of the devil and of the Church.

No Church but an aristocratic one could have dominated such a situation. The very qualities which the modern man most resents in the Roman Catholic Church--its authority, its dogmatism, its spiritual powers of intimidation--were the qualities which enabled it to evangelize the vast heathen and barbarian masses. As in the state so in the Church, the centuries from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Protestant Reformation were centuries which called, though, it must be recognized, with lessening emphasis and with sporadic but multiplying exceptions, for the aristocratic principle. Feudalism and Roman Catholicism were the only possible systems.

II. The bourgeois or plutocratic or capitalistic phase, A.D. 1500-1914.

Gradually, however, there arose in the aristocratically organized middle age a new power. This was the trading and manufacturing classes. As soon as the feudal nobility gave any measure of security, and much more extensively when kings grew strong enough to stretch the royal power over their turbulent feudatories, the irrepressible trading instinct asserted itself. English wool found its way to Flanders, French wine to England, the silks and spices and gems of the East to Europe. Busy and wealthy cities sprang up in districts favorable for manufacture and along the great trade routes between East and West. Kings, eager to assert their sovereignty over the anarchic barons, allied themselves with this new burgher class, which was on its part glad to support a power that promised it deliverance from such very imperfect and costly protectors as the feudal lords had shown themselves to be.

The Crusades, especially, stimulated trade and in the nearly two centuries (A.D. 1096-1270) during which the crusading spirit was active, the most notable feature of the social evolution of Europe was the rise of the towns.

The rise of the towns meant the liberation of the people. No buildings in Europe have more sacred associations than the old city halls of the medieval cities of the Low Countries, France, and Germany. They were the birth place of modern freedom.

Trade loves freedom and abhors all restrictions except such as are sometimes short-sightedly imposed by itself. The towns, wearied of the exactions of their castellated tyrants, won their freedom by purchase or by fighting, or co-operated with the king in reducing the barons to some measure of good behavior.

During the last five hundred years, and especially since the Industrial Revolution effected by the use of machinery, the merchant and manufacturing classes have been steadily climbing into power. They have superseded or absorbed the pre-existing aristocracy. The old families have died out or been transformed by a profitable and strengthening admixture of rich plebeians. The bulk of even such an imposing aristocracy as that of Britain is composed of creations of the last two or three generations, and these so largely from the ranks of wealthy brewers that there is truth as well as wit in the saying that the British peerage is the British beerage. The sale of titles at the price of large contributions to political funds is admitted and defended. Even in Great Britain, with its impressive array of ancient names, aristrocracy has been largely converted into plutocracy.

In a constitutionally democratic nation like the United States there is no other aristocracy.

Now, if Church and State undergo a parallel development and re-act in the same way to conditions governing them both alike, what we might expect to find would be that, with the growing ascendancy in the social structure of the trading and manufacturing class (or to use a single term, though unfortunately one with a flavor of resentment about it, bourgeoisie), there would be a parallel ascendancy of the same class in the Church.

This is exactly what we do find. The aristocratic form of Christianity, which fitted into the feudalistic age, which was called for by the social conditions of that age, which was, indeed, probably, the only kind of Christianity that could have existed in that age, did not suit the freedom-loving, self-reliant, self-asserting, ambitious burghers. They resented the control which the clergy exercised over them, alike when it was well-meant and when it was selfish and tyrannical. Especially they resented the enormous sums which were extracted from them by the fees and taxes of priests, bishops, and the Papal Court at Rome. They resented, too, the Church's prohibition of interest. This condemnation, based on the Mosaic prohibition of interest, had not been found so unfair or vexatious prior to the sixteenth century when money was borrowed mainly for unproductive consumption, as for example, for war and for extravagance. Now when, in the great commercial development of that century, money was being borrowed for business with the prospect, almost the certainty, of profit, and interest became merely the sharing of profits, the Church's refusal of absolution to those guilty of taking interest was a serious factor in the growing hostility between the cities and the Church.

The Church, moreover, favoured sumptuary laws,--the minute regulation of purchases and prices. As this well-meant legislation tended to restrict trade, it was disliked by the traders.

The immense capital locked up in vast ecclesiastical buildings and estates was naturally, also, the object of envy. Clerical immunities from municipal taxation, and episcopal jurisdiction over otherwise free towns added to the general irritation.

It might possibly have been foreseen that, sooner or later, a revolt would come and a new sort of Church would take form. That revolt came under Luther. Many motives conspired in it. With Luther himself and many of his followers the motive was a genuinely religious one. It was a revolt against the legalistic interpretation of Christianity and against the moral failure of the Roman Catholic Church. But with the mass of the city people, who were the main support of Luther, the motive was mainly a passion for freedom and only subordinately and sporadically a passion for a purer faith or a holier life.

In the new Church that was fashioned in varying forms in the northern races where the revolt was most general and thorough-going, one feature naturally predominated--the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie. That Church, or rather group of Churches which by seeming accident, but, perhaps, by that deeper philosophy which moves even through the seeming accidents of history, came to be known as the protesting or Protestant Church, was the Church which suited a predominately middle class society as Roman Catholicism suited a feudal society.[#] Protestantism, in a word, is bourgeois Christianity. It is the Christianity of the middle, or trading, classes. It was born where these classes were strongest--in Germany, Holland, Switzerland, England, France. It has exalted the middle classes and the middle classes have exalted it. It has been with them in their struggle and has shared their triumph. It sanctions their ethical standards, falls in with their tastes, emphasizes their virtues, is indulgent toward their faults, condemns their aversions.

[#] "The 'true inwardness' of the change of which the Protestant Reformation represented the ideological side, meant the transformation of society from a basis mainly corporative and co-operative to one individualistic in its essential character. The whole polity of the middle ages, industrial, social, political, ecclesiastical, was based on the principle of the group or the community--ranging in hierarchical order from the trade-guild to the town-corporation; from the town corporation through the feudal orders to the imperial throne itself; from the single monastery to the order as a whole; and from the order as a whole to the complete hierarchy of the Church as represented by the papal chair. The principle of this social organization was now breaking down. The modern and bourgeois conception of the autonomy of the individual in all spheres of life was beginning to affirm itself."--Belfort Bax: The Peasants' War, p. 19.

It would almost seem that it was a consciousness of its specific class limitations which led the new movement promptly and decisively to turn away from the claims of the lowest class, though the distinct refusal of German Protestantism to champion the cause of the oppressed peasants in 1524 may be credited to the imperfect sympathies of Luther and his jealousy for the reputation of the new movement. Luther was a peasant's son, but his attitude to other peasants was one almost of contempt, mingled later with fear.[#]

[#] "The wise man saith: food, a burden, and a rod for the ass; to a peasant belongs oat straw. They hear not the word and are mad; then must they hear the rod and the gun and they get their due. Let us pray for them that they obey; otherwise there need be no pity for them. Let only the bullets whistle around them. Otherwise they are a hundred fold more evil."--Letter to Rühel. De Wette. Vol. II., p. 619.

Luther's glorification of the liberty of a Christian man, his stirring appeals to the German nobility to shake off the rapacious tyranny of Rome found response in other hearts than those he was addressing. His impassioned words, like hot coals kindling a fire whereever they fell, helped to bring to a head the discomfort which had been growing among the peasants. This was due, in part, to the increased cost of living, a fifty per cent. advance, it has been estimated, from 1400 to 1415, for which the increased output of silver from the mines in the Tyrol and elsewhere was chiefly responsible. But the chief cause was the increased exactions of the German princes, sustained in their oppressive claims by the growing recognition of the Roman law, which found no place for the peasants except as slaves. Eventually, in 1524 the peasants drew up twelve demands which they submitted to Luther with an appeal for his support. Luther found the demands mainly just and urged the princes to make concessions, but strongly condemned any effort, in case the reforms were not granted, to secure them by violence. The demands were refused and the peasants rose. They were successful at the outset, as most of the professional soldiers of the princes were in Italy with the Emperor, Charles V., then at war with the Pope. On their return, these trained forces scattered the undisciplined bodies of peasants, already demoralized by wine and plunder and lack of leadership. The princes took a ferocious revenge. It is estimated that from one hundred to one hundred and fifty thousand peasants were slaughtered; many more were blinded and maimed.

Luther, angered and terrified by the uprising, had urged the princes on to the slaughter in words that are an ineffaceable blot on his memory.

"First, they [the peasants] have sworn to their true and gracious [!] rulers to be submissive and obedient, in accord with God's command (Matt. 22:21), 'Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's,' and (Rom. 13:1), 'Let every soul be subject to the higher powers.' But since they have deliberately and with outrage abandoned obedience, and in addition have opposed their lords, they have thereby forfeited body and soul, as perfidious, perjured, mendacious, disobedient rascals and villains are wont to do."

[Later, Luther approved and justified the revolt of the Protestant princes against the Emperor to whom they had sworn obedience--so early had Protestantism one standard for the lowly and another for the high.]

* * * * *

"It is right and lawful to slay at the first opportunity a rebellious person, known as such, already under God and the Emperor's ban. [Luther himself was certainly under the latter ban and, in the judgment of Roman Catholics, under the former.] For of a public rebel, every man is both judge and executioner.

"Therefore, whosoever can should smite, strangle, and stab, secretly or publicly, and should remember that there is nothing more poisonous, pernicious, and devilish than a rebellious man [much more devilish in Luther's judgment than an oppressive prince!] Just as when one must slay a mad dog; fight him not and he will fight you, and a whole country with you.

* * * * *

"If the civil government thinks proper to smite and punish those peasants without previous consideration of right or fairness, I do not condemn such action, though it is not in harmony with the Gospel, for it has good right to do this.

* * * * *

"Therefore let him [a prince or lord] not sleep, nor shew mercy and compassion. Nay, this is the time of sword and wrath, not the time of mercy.

* * * * *

"Such wonderful times are these that a prince can more easily win heaven by shedding blood than others with prayers."

He even makes the extraordinary statement, "In 1525 the elector John of Saxony asked me whether he should grant the peasants their twelve articles. I told him, not one," (Michelet, p. 448)--revealing a callousness which can only be characterized as brutal.[#]

[#] "The Lutheran Reformation, from its inception in 1517 down to the Peasants' war of 1525, at once absorbed, and was absorbed by, all the revolutionary elements of the time. Up to the last-mentioned date it gathered revolutionary force year by year. But this was the turning-point. With the crushing of the Peasants' revolt and the decisively anti-popular attitude taken up by Luther, the religious movement associated with him ceased any longer to have a revolutionary character. It henceforth became definitely subservient to the new interests of the wealthy and privileged classes, and as such completely severed itself from the more extreme popular reforming sects."--Bax; Peasants' War, pp. 28, 29.

Luther completed the severance of the new faith from the proletariat when he deliberately handed over his new Church to the control of the princes. In his complete distrust of the common people, it seemed to him that there was no other authority that could replace that of the bishops. So, despite the remonstrances of Melanchthon, a more oppressive tyranny was imposed on the Lutheran Church in Germany than had been exercised by the bishops, and the foundation was laid for that estrangement of the proletariat from the Church which has had such fatal results on both proletariat and Church in our time. On Luther rests the responsibility of converting the German Church into a branch of an autocratic government, as such distrusted and detested by the laborer in the country and the worker in the town, and of thus bringing about a condition of things which has earned for Protestant Prussia the reproach of being the least religious country of Europe.

Protestantism, then, by its very origin is Christianity shaped to suit the trading and manufacturing class. Now, what are the characteristics of members of this class? They are keenly but, in general, superficially intelligent, alert, watchful, ambitious, pushful, courageous, energetic, industrious, self-reliant, independent, freedom-loving, intensely individualistic. They are honorable according to the standards of their class, often generous when the business struggle is not involved, but in the struggle itself they tend, almost of necessity, to become hard and selfish. Their great aim has been to "get on," to make money, to rise to as high a social position as possible, amid the vast opportunities of modern business to win and retain great power.

Protestantism fits a people of such characteristics like a glove. It exalts the rich man. It consults him and honors him, puts him forward on every possible occasion, suitable or scarcely suitable. Knowing his sensitiveness, it deals with him tactfully and deferentially.

It emphasizes the virtues conducive to business success,--industry, thrift, sobriety, self-control, honesty, at least as far as the law commands or as far as dishonesty would be plainly imprudent.

It disapproves the sins that hinder success or impair respectability,--such as indolence, profanity, intemperance, licentiousness, and all overt transgressions of the law.

What would be the sensations of an audience to which a millionaire manufacturer or broker or promoter was unfolding the secret of his success, if he were to say, "I owe my success and any distinction I have been able to achieve to my honest effort to carry out the Sermon on the Mount!"

For good and for evil, at the outset doubtless more for good than for evil, now more for evil than for good, Protestantism is intensely individualistic.

Christianity has its individualistic aspect. Protestantism has emphasized this. Christianity has also its social aspect. Protestantism has largely ignored this.

Above all, Protestantism has lacked humility and pity. Naturally so. They are the two virtues least called for in the business struggle, the two virtues, indeed, most liable to prove embarrassing.

Here is where, probably, Protestantism most sharply differs from Primitive Christianity and from the Christianity which was in the mind of Jesus.

Protestantism is a fighting faith. It trains men to be self-reliant and hard. Fair play is its substitute for brotherliness, and it often finds it difficult to get as high as that.

The divine note of love is faint. Protestantism has never caught the passion for brotherhood. So it is not strange that, where the reviving spirit of brotherhood, which is the divinest movement in modern life, is strongest, there is the least drawing to Protestantism.

It is in the proletariat to-day that the sense of brotherhood is keenest. It is the proletariat which is the increasing despair of the Protestant Churches. Perhaps it is not too bold a generalization that, on this Continent at least,--it does not seem so widely true in England--the working man who is most interested in the Church is least interested in labor organizations. He is the ambitious, individualistic workingman who is bent on emerging from his class. He is least class-conscious. He hopes to become affiliated with the master class.

The workingman who is most class-conscious, whose heart is set on the betterment of his class, is usually very slightly affiliated with the Church, if at all, and that affiliation is due, generally, to the appeal the Church and Sunday School make to his wife and children. Very frequently his attitude to the Church is one, not of indifference, but of resentment and distrust. He feels, though perhaps subconsciously, that the prevailing temper of the Church is one of self-advancement. The leading men in the Church are mostly those who have been most successful in strenuous self-advancement. Any man whose heart has been stirred with the passion for the common good is liable to be disappointed in seeking in the Church for the encouragement and sympathy that he craves.

Neither the Protestant nor the Roman Catholic Churches can claim to have inspired the Labor movement. At best it can only be said that, when the movement had struggled through the early days of conflict and persecution, the Churches reached out hesitatingly and half-heartedly a hand of fellowship in a spirit, partly of genuine desire to make amends for past dereliction, partly of condescension, and partly of fear.

But during the severity of Labor's early struggle, Protestantism, except in isolated and unofficial representatives, gave no assistance, not even its blessing, to what was the most profoundly Christian movement of the nineteenth century.

When it did not frankly sympathize with the masters in their difficulties with their unreasonable and discontented employees, it maintained a cautious neutrality. The first step to right relations between the Churches and Labor would be a frank confession that they failed to give Labor their help when Labor deserved and needed it most.

But perhaps this sympathetic attitude to Labor was too much to expect of a form of Christianity which had such an origin and such associations as Protestantism. Like the form of Christianity which it largely displaced in the freedom-loving northern races of Europe and America, it has rendered great services. Like that again, it was, perhaps, the only sort of Christianity possible under the conditions under which it took its form. It has helped to train an energetic, daring, self-reliant, and relatively honorable people. It has been the Christianity of a bourgeois epoch, and with the passing of that epoch it, too, will pass away or undergo a profound metamorphosis. It is a very different sort of Christianity that will meet the religious needs of the new epoch that the world is entering.

The Labor phase, A.D. 1914--

We have seen how the trading and manufacturing towns pushed their way up during the later period of the medieval age and eventually overthrew aristocracy in state and Church, substituting a social and political order and a Church dominated by the business class. Similarly, since the middle of the last century, a new force has been pushing up in the bourgeois regime, destined, it now seems clear, to effect a similar transformation. This is organized Labor.

The most significant feature in the social development of the last hundred years has been the patient, persistent, oft-defeated, yet insuppressible struggle of the proletariat of the western world for human rights. The dead weight of the bygone ages was upon it. When had the men and the women who did the rough and necessary work of the world, smoothed the highways, dug the drains, built the houses and the bridges, carried the burdens over the mountains and across the seas, tilled the fields and cared for the herds and the flocks--when had they been other than the despised, ill-paid, ill-housed servants of the classes who through their fighting-power or their money-power could command the services of the toilers? What right had they to overturn the ancient order, an order which history recognized and the Church was willing to consecrate? Against the established order, against religious sanctions, against the combined authority of wealth and rank, against the legislative and military powers of governments, the workers had to carry on their new, uncharted, and desperate struggle unaided and alone. The Universities from their academic heights looked down on it with calm scientific interest. If any feeling was stirred, it was oftener contempt than pity. Even the Church of Christ was, with a few illustrious exceptions, unfriendly or timidly neutral. Nevertheless, in spite of calamitous setbacks, the movement made way against the public opinion of the dominant classes, against hostile legislation, against anarchic injunctions, against police and soldiers, and to-day Labor is the mightiest organized force in the world.

It is enthroned despotically in Petrograd and Moscow above the shattered ruins of the most imposing monarchy of the modern world. It is the strongest element in that welter of confusion and uncertainty to which the most powerful and compactly organized nation of modern times has been reduced by its insane ambition, the indignation of mankind, and the justice of God.

Labor is the uncrowned king of Great Britain. Wisely led, there seems no reasonable aim it cannot realize.

In the United States in the Summer of 1916, in a straight issue between Labor and one of the most powerful capitalistic groups, the President and Congress of the United States wisely and justly capitulated to Labor.

The futility of trying to "smash the Labor unions" or to arrest the progress of the Labor movement is now sufficiently clear. As well try to smash a forty mile wide Alaskan glacier or arrest its onward march to the sea. Old precedents have lost their authority, old calculations and presuppositions fail or mislead. It is a new age the world is entering. As the determining factor in the social structure of Europe from 800 A.D. to 1500 was feudalism, and from A.D. 1500 to 1900 capitalism, so from 1900 onwards to the dawn, it may be, of still vaster changes as yet undescried, the dominant factor will be organized Labor.

If Labor, then, is to be the dominating factor in the age just opening, it becomes a question of deepest interest to discover the principles of the Labor movement.

A full answer to this question would be lengthy and might have elements of uncertainty, but the essential outstanding principles of the Labor movement are neither doubtful nor difficult to determine. They are three:

1. Every man and every woman a worker.

The Labor movement has no place except for workers. Its essential demand is that every man and woman shall, during the normal working years, make a just contribution to the welfare of the social organism. It is determined that there shall be no place in society for idlers or exploiters. It is the deadly enemy of parasitism in all its Protean forms.

2. The right of every worker to a living wage.

This is nothing other than the assertion, in the only form that makes it more than iridescent froth, of the great Christian principle of the worth of the soul. It is a very modest and restricted assertion of that great principle, but it is a more substantial and significant assertion than has been made anywhere else. The Christian doctrine of the infinite worth of the human soul becomes claptrap where this principle is not admitted.

3. Union.

The Labor movement is based on the solidarity of the workers. It abhors competition. It represents the triumph of the we-consciousness over the I-consciousness. It organizes in unions. There have been few things in history that had more of the morally sublime in them than the way in which the individual has been called upon by the Labor movement to risk, not his comfort merely or his advancement, but his livelihood, in defence of some one whom he would never know but with whom he was linked in the sacred cause of Labor.

And these principles of the Labor movement are at the same time the characteristics of the corresponding Christianity of the new age. For, as we found an aristocratic type of Christianity in the aristocratic medieval period, the social conditions demanding the aristocratic organization in Church and State and permitting no other, and as, in the age which succeeded the feudal, a freedom-loving, competitive, individualistic class imposed its character on the social and the ecclesiastical organization, so institutional Christianity will undergo a third transformation and, in a society dominated by Labor organizations, will become democratic and brotherly.

Protestantism must pass away. It is too rootedly individualistic, too sectarian, to be the prevailing religion of a collectivist age. It is passing away before our eyes. Everywhere it reveals the marks of decay or of transformation. It must change or die.

Not to Protestantism, not to Roman Catholicism, belongs the age now dawning, but to a new Christianity which will, indeed, have affinities with them both but still more deeply with the Christianity of Jesus.

This Christianity, indeed, is already here. Like its Master when He came, it is in the world and the world knows it not. It is still immature, undeveloped, unconscious even of its own nature and destiny. It will receive large and valuable contributions from both the great historic forms of Christianity, not improbably from the Eastern, or Greek Christianity, as well. But in promise and potency the coming Christianity is more fully and truly here in the Labor movement than in any of the great historic organizations. Perhaps a more accurate statement would be, that the Labor movement needs less radical change than the great Church organizations to become the fitting and efficient Christianity for the new age.

It needs, in the main, but two great changes.

1. It must broaden.

It must open its doors, as the British and Canadian Labor Parties are now doing, to include all kinds of productive work, of hand or brain. It must make room for all who contribute to the feeding, clothing, housing, educating, delighting of the children of men. It must include the inventor, the research scientist, the manager, as well as the manual worker; the men who grow things or who distribute them as well as those who make them; the professional class, who, on their part, must cease to regard themselves as other than men and women of labor. Labor must become, in short, the category to which all belong who really earn their living and do not seek to "make" more than they earn.

2. Labor must recognize the Christianness of its own principles.

I do not say Labor must become Christian. It is profoundly and vitally Christian in its insistence on the right of the humblest man or woman to human conditions of life, in its corresponding denial of the right of any human being to live on the labor of others without rendering his own equivalent of service, in its devotion to the fundamental Christian principle of brotherhood.

The Draft Report on Reconstruction, for example, prepared near the close of 1917 for the Labor party of Britain, is not only the ablest and most comprehensive programme of social reconstruction so far drawn up, but in its aims and methods and spirit it is profoundly Christian, a thousand times more Christian than the ordinary ecclesiastical pronouncement, though the name of Christ does not occur in it. The need is not so much that Labor become Christian, as that it become clearly conscious that it is Christian and can realize itself and win its triumph only on Christian lines.

It is not strange, after all, that among working men should arise the Church which is to give the truest interpretation of Christianity. The Lord Jesus was Himself a working man and brought up in a working man's home; His chief friends and chosen apostles were mostly working men. How can He be fully understood except through a working man's consciousness? The high, the served, the rich, the mere scholars, as such, are not fitted to understand Christianity. Individuals of exceptional character and insight may escape the limitations of their environment and education, but in any large community interpretation the working man's consciousness would seem to be essential. And, on any large scale, Christianity has never found such an expression as the Labor movement promises to give it--so essentially and predominately democratic and brotherly.

Labor and Christianity, then, are bound up together. Together they stand or fall. They come into their kingdom together or not at all. It is the supreme mission of the prophetic spirit at this fateful hour to interpret Labor to itself, that it may not in this hour of consummation miss the path. To turn away from Christianity now would be for Labor to turn away from the throne. But it will not. Mankind is in the grasp of divine currents too strong to be resisted.

It will help us, perhaps, to understand still more clearly the religious revolution which is going on to-day concurrently with the social revolution if we survey the evolution of Christianity from another standpoint,--the racial. In the preceding chapter the effort has been to show that Christianity in its organization and even in its spirit has been profoundly affected by its social environment and has changed as that has changed.

The most superficial study of the history of Christianity reveals, moreover, that Christianity has been, also, deeply affected by the characteristics of each race among which it has made its home.

1. Jewish Christianity.

The earliest form of Christianity was that which sprang up in Jerusalem immediately after the Resurrection and the ingathering at Pentecost. It was the Christianity of the apostles and of the first disciples. Perhaps it might be called a Christianized Judaism rather than a Jewish Christianity, for it was the old Judaism unchanged except by the acceptance of Jesus of Nazareth as the fulfilment of the national hope. The apostles remained good Jews, even stricter than before in their discharge of the duties of the old faith, and commanding through their strictness the respect of the Jews, James the brother of Jesus, in particular, being held in high esteem for his devoutness.

The chief characteristic of Jewish Christianity, it might almost be said, was its lack of almost all the features which have since been counted essential to a Church.

The ancient Jew, as has often been noted, markedly resembled the modern Englishman in many things, notably in an indifference to theological or philosophical speculation and in a strong sense of the value of the ethical and practical. These earliest Jewish Christians, accordingly, did not seek to analyze and systematize their faith. They did not seek to draw out its philosophical implications. They were interested in the construction neither of a creed nor of a theological system. They were content to hold their faith in Jesus as a vital loyalty and a great hope. Jesus was to them the long desired Messiah who would redeem Israel and establish the Kingdom of God upon the earth. That glorious consummation would take place when He returned, as they confidently expected He would, in the immediate future. Meanwhile, the door into the Kingdom of God stood open to all Jews who would accept Jesus as the Christ, and to such Gentiles as were willing to receive circumcision and identify themselves with Israel.

Overshadowed with the imminence of the Parousia, this Jewish Church of the first years had no interest in a reflective interpretation of its faith or in the elaboration of its organization. The apostles preached; alms were distributed to those of the disciples who were in need. No programme was drawn up for the future; no propaganda among the Gentiles was even dreamed of. The whole attitude was one of almost passive expectancy that clung to the ancient capital, the holy city, where the long-expected Hope of Israel would shortly, descending from the heavens, establish His throne.

Jewish Christianity had only the rudiments of a creed, only the simplest organization, and the most unelaborated and democratic form of worship. It was a seed with the germinating impulse unawakened, a bark launched and rigged but that had no thought of venturing out of the harbour.

This simple, undeveloped, undogmatic, unorganized, and Judaistic character of primitive Jewish Christianity is strikingly displayed in the early chapters of the book of the Acts and in the Epistle of James, which on most, at any rate, of the different hypotheses as to date and authorship is, at least, a witness to early Jewish Christianity.[#]

[#] A later form of Jewish Christianity, the obscure Ebionitism of the second century, does not fall within the limits of this sketch. It was, probably, not so much a development of Christianity as a perversion of it.

2. Greek Christianity.

But the expansive forces residing in this undeveloped Christianity could not long remain inactive.

An important element in the population of Jerusalem in the time of our Lord was the Hellenist. This name was applied to the Jews who for various reasons, mainly for trade, had made their home in the commercial cities of the Levant. Here they had learned to speak the prevailing language of the countries around the Eastern Mediterranean, Greek, and had been, to a varying extent, intellectually broadened and quickened by contact with the Greek world. Large numbers of them returned to Jerusalem for educational purposes or to gratify their devout feelings, but they were regarded by the Palestinean Jews with something approaching contempt for their willingness to live away from the sacred soil of Palestine.

It was in the Hellenist mind, thus stimulated and developed by the Greek spirit, that the first development of Christianity occurred. To the Hellenist Stephen, the first thinker, the first controversialist, and the first martyr of Christianity, belongs the honor of first discovering the universal principle of Christianity, and his interpretation of Christianity brought about his own death and kindled a persecution which scattered the Christians of Jerusalem up and down the Syrian coast of the Mediterranean.

To some of these fugitive Hellenist Christians, partakers of the thought of the martyred Stephen, belongs the not less lofty honor of being the first to overleap the jealously guarded barriers of Judaism and to open the door of Christianity to the Gentiles. "They therefore that were scattered abroad upon the persecution that arose about Stephen travelled as far as Phoenicia and Cyprus and Antioch, speaking the word to none save only to Jews. But there were some of them, men of Cyprus and Cyrene [and therefore Hellenists] who, when they were come to Antioch, spake unto the Greeks also, preaching the Lord Jesus." Acts 11:19-20.

It is to be noted that it was, probably, this influx of Greeks into the Church hitherto composed only of Jews which made necessary a new name applicable to the composite body, and so it came about that "the disciples were called Christians first at Antioch."

A Church, in part Jewish but, probably, in still larger part Gentile, thus sprang up in Antioch, which became the mother city of Gentile, or world-wide, Christianity. From this centre the greatest of all Hellenist Jews, Saul of Tarsus, fired by that very universalism which had at first aroused the hatred of his bitter Jewish particularism, carried Christianity westward through Asia Minor, Greece, Italy and, possibly, even to Spain.

Thus transplanted from the deeply and exclusively religious and ethical Hebrew mind to the predominantly speculative mind of the Greek, Christianity began to undergo an immediate transformation. The Greek mind, probably never equalled for its curiosity, its acuteness, its subtlety, could never be content to ask, what? It must also ask, why, and how? To it we owe science, philosophy, all our ordered thinking. Christianity, as a mere affection felt for Jesus Christ or purely as a code of conduct, could not satisfy the Greek mind. The Greek mind, at first contemptuous of it as a mere vulgar superstition, fascinated at length by its rational monotheism, its lofty ethics, and, above all by the charm of its central figure, flung itself with ardor on the task of adapting this naive and untutored but fascinating religion to its own tastes and habits of thought.

A place was found for the Jewish Messiah in the philosophical world of the Greeks as the Logos, or Reason, of God, a familiar philosophical conception. Plato and Zeno were made His forerunners. The principles of His teaching were dissected out of the traditions of His ministry and organized into a coherent body of doctrine. The acutest minds of Greek Christianity disengaged the great problems which were involved in the worship paid to Christ and, after centuries of speculation and of strife (not always intellectual only), achieved those great solutions which, whether in every respect permanently satisfactory or not, must forever be recognized as among the sublimest constructions of the philosophic intellect,--the creeds of Nicaea and Chalcedon.

For good and for ill the simple, almost creedless Christianity of the Sermon on the Mount and of the Epistle of James had become through Paul, the author of the Fourth Gospel, the still more mysterious author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and countless Greek dialecticians and theologians, the elaborately and authoritatively dogmatic system which has, almost till to-day, treated unorthodox opinion as the deadliest of sins.

The undue emphasis on the intellectual element in Christianity, the tyrannical control of human thought we to-day must deplore, but he who repudiates Greek Christianity must also deny that Christianity had any mission to the Greek mind, and that men have any right to think out their religious beliefs and adjust them to the rest of their thinking.

3. Latin Christianity.

Latin Christianity cannot altogether be classed as a later stage than Greek Christianity. It was to a large extent a concurrent development. As far as its theological features were concerned, it was little more than the uncritical acceptance of dogmas worked out by the Greeks. But, eventually, the distinctive gifts of the Latin race asserted themselves and those races which had built up the Roman Empire, or as subjects of it had become embued with its spirit, applied their organizing genius to the Christian Church and moulded the Church of the West into a replica of the Empire, and in such closely-knit fashion that, when under its own inherent weaknesses and through the irruption of the northern barbarians, that mightiest of all organizations of antiquity collapsed, the Church that came eventually and fittingly to know itself as Roman took its place and proved itself an even mightier organization, subduing restless and fierce peoples on which Imperial Rome had never been able to impose her yoke.

The Latin mind, then, with its reverence for order and law, its genius for government, its detestation of lawless individualism, discerned the possibilities of the Christian Church as an organization, and out of the simple piety of Jesus and the reasoned theology of the Greeks fashioned the mightiest instrument of discipline and order the world has ever seen.

Here, again, there may be a protest. This Latinization, or imperialization, of Christianity may be indignantly termed a perversion rather than a development. This only need be said in reply, that it would be difficult for anyone who has studied, without prejudice, the period between the overthrow of the Western Empire and the Protestant Reformation to deny the providential character of Latin Christianity. No other form of Christianity has as yet rendered so great a service to the race. It is questionable whether any other form of Christianity, even if it had been in existence, could at that stage have rendered so great a service. It was precisely those features in the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church towards her people which are most uncongenial to the Protestant temper which were the disciplinary agencies needed by the lawless, seething Europe of the Dark Ages to qualify it for the personal liberty the vindication of which has been the faith and service of Protestantism.

4. Teutonic Christianity.

The Greek mind moulded Christianity into a reasoned and systematized theology; the Latin, into an organization closely knit and marvellously efficient for the end to which Latin Christianity was largely and, perhaps, inevitably content to aim,--external control. Now, at least, we can see how inevitable it was that a third development of Christianity should take place after it had been transplanted among the Teutonic peoples. That development was slower in taking place than either the Greek or Latin forms. Those northern races which, until their conversion to Christianity, had stood almost completely outside the circle of ancient civilization, coming under the spell of a powerful religion and a civilization, even in its decay, majestic, were brought so thoroughly under the yoke that for centuries they were content to be ruled by a spiritual imperialism enthroned at Rome.

But that authority never ceased to be regarded by the northern races as a foreign one. The Teutonic peoples whose home lay outside the limits of the old Roman Empire were never Latinized in spirit. When they attained intellectual maturity and sought the free development of their own nature, they shook off the authority of Rome and brought to light those free and individualistic and spiritual germs in Christianity which, hitherto, in the luxuriant and stately growth of Greco-Roman Catholicism had remained almost dormant.

The Protestant Reformation, as has been noted, was a complex movement. It involved many factors. But fundamentally it was the outcome of the determination, not always clearly conscious, of the Teutonic peoples to discover a Christianity which should be consonant with that passion for freedom and that high sense of personal dignity which from the beginning had characterized the men of the Teutonic stock.

It is an interesting illustration of this that the movement of reform, or, rather, of revolt, which swept like a prairie fire over all Teutonic Europe that had never been permanently subdued by the Empire, flickered and died as soon as it crossed what had been the boundary of the old Empire, and that that boundary is still the dividing line between those countries of Western Europe which are preponderatingly Protestant and those which are preponderatingly Roman Catholic. The Roman Church held only what the Roman Empire had won. Only where the old Teutonic love of liberty had been subdued by centuries of the masterful and, on the whole, beneficent rule of old Rome did it cease to feel the spiritual rule of the new Rome alien and irksome.

Another illustration of how essentially Teutonic is the spirit of Protestantism is in the slight influence Protestantism has had on the Celtic peoples islanded in the Teutonic populations. Celtic Brittany is the most fervidly Catholic part of France to-day. Celtic Ireland remains solidly and deeply Catholic. Celtic Scotland, despite overwhelming Protestant influences, is still largely Catholic. Celtic Wales has become wholly Protestant, but it has seized and developed the least prominent and least Protestant of all the elements embraced in Protestantism,--the emotional and the mystical.

The rule of Rome under the Emperors and under the Popes had been the rule of the machine--a superb machine, ingeniously contrived for what were conceived as the best ends, and operated with indomitable pertinacity and boundless devotion, but still a machine; and Protestant, or Teutonic, Christianity, in the last analysis, was the overthrow of the machine. To the Teutonic race belongs the honor of being the first on a racial scale to establish a religion without ceremonial or a priesthood or any privileged class whatever. Hebrew prophetism with its magnificent protest against ritual, and its culmination in the democratic simplicity of Jesus, now for the first time found recognition on a national scale.

Teutonic Christianity is the exaltation of the individual. It was born of individualism and glorifies individualism. It affirms the right and duty of individual judgment, the supremacy of the individual conscience, the privilege of the individual access to God. It finds the authority and proof of the Christian religion in its consonance with, and its satisfaction of, the capacities and needs of the individual soul.

The distance between the spirit of Latin and that of Teutonic Christianity, and, also, it should be noted, the distance between the twelfth century and the sixteenth may be seen in the two appeals of Abelard and Luther. Peter Abelard, a great and pathetic and only a little less than a heroic figure, was a Protestant, and in the best sense of the term, a free thinker, three hundred years before the Renaissance and four hundred years before Luther. Accused of heresy by the saintly but censorious and bigoted Bernard, and brought to trial before a tribunal carefully packed by his relentless and unscrupulous adversary, Abelard, despairing of a fair hearing, refused to defend himself and appealed to the Pope. Another monk charged with heresy four hundred years later, inferior to Abelard in clearness and energy of thought but of more heroic moral fibre, before the most august assemblage Europe could gather, closed his defence with the undying words, "It is not safe for a man to do aught against his conscience. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me, Amen."

Abelard appeals to the Pope, Luther to his conscience. That is the supreme contrast between Latin and Teutonic Christianity.

American Christianity.

Since the revolt of the Teutonic peoples, the most remarkable phenomenon of Christian history has been the growth of a branch of Teutonic Christianity under the novel political and social conditions of the new world.

This has been a transplantation of Christianity quite as significant as any of its transplantations in the past, and the new soil has produced just as unmistakably new a growth.

Doubtless none of the great phases of Christianity in the past knew themselves to be new. Neither Greek nor Latin Christianity was conscious of any departure from primitive Christianity. Indeed, to this day, in their conception of the history of the Church, they persist in impressing their own type on that primitive and undeveloped type.

Teutonic Christianity took centuries to come to clear consciousness of itself and of its irreconcilability with Latin Christianity. It is not wonderful, therefore, that hitherto, as far as I am aware, American Christianity has been, if at all, very dimly and imperfectly conscious of the difference between its spirit and that of the Teutonic Christianity of the old world.

American Christianity has not yet arrived. It is only on the way. It has not yet found itself. It is not yet conscious of its own individuality, not yet self-reliant, independent. It is a youth, but a youth rapidly approaching manhood. Perhaps the characteristics that are unfolding themselves can be most clearly brought out by an attempt to show wherein it resembles, and wherein it differs from, each of the four great phases of Christianity which have just been under consideration.

a. American Christianity compared with Jewish.

Compared with Jewish Christianity, American Christianity resembles the latter in its simplicity of creed, its emphasis on the practical and ethical, and (to a distinct and growing degree) in its brotherliness and democratic equality.

But its creedal simplicity is not the same as that of the primitive Jewish Church. That Church was wise in the brevity and simplicity of its creed, but it did not know its own wisdom. American Christianity is wise and knows its wisdom. It will not, like the Jewish Church, allow itself to be seduced into interminable theological controversies and into the superstition of orthodoxy. Seventeen hundred years of bitter wrangling and bloody conflict and cruel persecutions have taught it something. It has a short and a simple creed, not because it knows so little, but because it knows so much.

It differs, again, in its extensive and manifold organization, in the variety and elaborateness of its forms of worship, and, most markedly of all, in its attitude toward the present life. Primitive Jewish Christianity had no interest in the present social order. Intoxicated with apocalyptic visions, it stood on tiptoe awaiting with outstretched arms the return of the Saviour and the overthrow of this whole order by supernatural power. Its primary interest was eschatological. Its deepest feeling was expressed by St. Paul when he relegated all social relations and arrangements to the region of unimportance. "But this, I say, brethren, the time has been cut short, that henceforth both those that have wives may be as though they had none; and those that weep, as though they wept not; and those that rejoice, as though they rejoiced not; and those that buy, as though they possessed not; and those that use the world, as not using it to the full: for the fashion of this world is passing away." Cor. 7:29-31.

In this respect American Christianity is at the opposite pole. It does not look for the end of the world. It has largely ceased to believe in such a future and, where it still professes the apocalyptic faith, for the most part, it allows that faith little or no influence in actual life. American Christianity believes in the progressive and aggressive amelioration of things. It believes in this life and its glorious possibilities. It is bent on attaining them as no other sort of Christianity ever was before. It is steeped in optimism. It believes that the leaven of Christianity possesses the power to leaven all the relations and institutions of civilization. It believes that the fulfilment of our Lord's prayer, that God's Kingdom may come and His will be done on earth as it is in heaven, rests with the Church. Its real and, to an ever-increasing extent, its conscious and avowed faith is expressed by Dr. Henry Burton in the fine hymn:

There's a light upon the mountains and the day is at the spring,

When our eyes shall see the beauty and the glory of the King:

Weary was our heart with waiting, and the night-watch seemed so long,

But His triumph-day is breaking and we hail it with a song.

In the fading of the starlight we may see the coming morn;

And the lights of men are paling in the splendours of the dawn:

For the eastern skies are glowing as with light of hidden fire,

And the hearts of men are stirring with the throbs of deep desire.

He is breaking down the barriers, He is casting up the way;

He is calling for His angels to build up the gates of day:

But His angels here are human, not the shining hosts above;

For the drum-beats of His army are the heart-beats of our love.

b. American Christianity compared with Greek.

Of all the great historic forms of Christianity, it is the Greek from which American Christianity might seem, at first sight, farthest removed. The punctilious orthodoxy of the former, its bitter doctrinal polemic are utterly abhorrent to American Christianity. American Christianity is more and more indifferent to theological agreement, more and more tolerant of wide doctrinal differences. And it has little interest in the great historic creeds.

Yet it is not so far away from the Greek spirit after all. It is inquisitive and speculative and as interested as the Gnostics in great sweeping theories of the universe. America is of all Christendom, past and present, the most tolerant country, yet it is, at the same time, a hotbed of religious speculation, even of religious vagaries. But, at last, there has been born a kind of Christianity which can think and let think, which is interested in thinking, but does not believe that opinions determine a man's character here or his destiny beyond.

It should not be overlooked in comparing Greek and American Christianity that American Christianity in its most thoughtful form would have felt a great sympathy with the bold and free and comprehensive thought of the great Alexandrians, Clement and Origen. It is the later and narrower and bigoted Greek Christianity, which fittingly chose for itself the designation, the Orthodox Church, that I have been contrasting with American Christianity.

c. American Christianity compared with Latin.

The comparison of American and Latin Christianity is much more complex.

No two kinds of Christianity could well be more sharply opposed than these two in regard to the exalted claims of the clergy in the Latin Church. American Christianity is deeply and intensely democratic. Sacerdotalism in any form it instinctively rejects. The very idea of priest is passing out of its thought. The preacher it can appreciate. The competent ecclesiastical manager has its respect. The religious leader and pastor it can thoroughly understand and cordially recognize where genuine. But that any class of men should occupy a mediating position between God and man or possess a monopoly of any spiritual gifts is foreign to the American consciousness. "Kings and priests unto God and the Father." Those who are taught from childhood that they are kings are quite as conscious that they are also priests. The essential democracy of primitive Christianity has never established itself in any land before. This is the gift--and a great one--of American democracy to the Church.

What has been said of sacerdotalism holds true, to a still greater degree, of that thin, shadowy form of sacerdotalism, clericalism. The way in which the garb and badges of clericalism are disappearing in America is symbolical of the disappearance of the idea.

Latin Christianity, as we have seen, on account of the conditions of its origin and early history intensely autocratic, has always given a very humble place to the laity. Obedience and money were all that was required of them. The High Church theory, indeed, of the Roman Catholic Church and of the so-called High Church section of the Church of England is not a High Church theory at all. It is a High Clerical theory. The Church has been virtually identified with the clergy. Against the over-weening claims of Boniface VIII., Philip of France protested that "Holy Church, the spouse of Christ, is made up not of clergy only but of laymen." But that is not the working theory of Latin Christianity. A quaint medieval preacher suppressed what he thought was an undue bumptiousness on the part of his people by a sermon from the text Job 1:14, "The oxen were plowing and the asses feeding beside them," which, he showed his too forward hearers, clearly indicated the functions of the clergy, who were typified by the oxen, while the duty of the laymen was set forth by the feeding asses.

Luther's flight to the monastery when he became alarmed about his salvation was partly prompted by a picture which made a profound impression on him as a boy and haunted him for years. It was "an altar-piece in a Church, the picture of a ship in which was no layman, not even a King or a Prince; in it were the Pope with his Cardinals and Bishops, and the Holy Ghost hovered over them, directing their course, while priests and monks managed the oars and the sails, and thus they went sailing heavenwards. The laymen were swimming in the water beside the ship; some were drowning, others were holding on by ropes which the monks and priests cast out to them to aid them. No layman was in the ship and no priest was in the water." (Cambridge Mod. Hist. II., 109-110.)

American Christianity is bent on an ever larger place for the laity in the Church and an ever-growing activity. The Y.M.C.A. and Y.W.C.A., the Young People's Society of Christian Endeavor and the Epworth League, the Laymen's Missionary Movement, the Men and Religion Movement, all illustrate the increasingly practical and lay aspect of American Christianity.

The Papacy, too, is another feature of Latin Christianity peculiarly out of harmony with characteristic American thought. The remoteness of the United States from the cradle of that institution, the hostility with which Washington inspired the young republic in regard to entangling alliances with European nations, its intensely American and democratic consciousness, all conspire to make the idea of a foreign ruler uncongenial to the American mind. The national consciousness of the United States is as exacting as religion. Its first commandment is, Thou shalt have no other country and no other ruler than the United States.

The authority of the Pope in the United States is maintained by being carefully withheld from all danger of challenge. The American Catholic is not conscious of any restraint in the tie that binds him to Rome because the rope is always paid out as freely as his movements require.

Again, it would seem that the Roman Catholic exaltation of the contemplative life over the active can never be accepted by American Christianity. There are no Catholics to whom the monastic life makes so faint an appeal as the Catholics of the United States. Perhaps a stronger admixture of the spirit of Mary might be beneficial, but American Christianity is emphatically a child of Martha.

On the other hand, however, there is much in Latin Christianity that appeals strongly to the American. His extraordinary genius for organization, in which he probably surpasses even the modern German whose great organizing capabilities have less of individual initiative, and the ancient Roman with whom, again, it was the characteristic of a class rather than of a people, dispose him to appreciate the great organizing skill that has always been shown by the Roman Catholic Church.

Further, the catholicity of that Church, its wonderful power to assimilate and build up within itself all races and languages and classes, cannot but appeal to a people engaged in solving a parallel problem. Modern American Christianity, moreover, is more and more unsectarian, even anti-sectarian. It does not glory in division and isolation. There is in it a growing passion for unity, a growing yearning for a strong, commanding, national type of Christianity that is much more akin to the imperialism of the great Popes, like Gregory VII. and Innocent III., than to the parochialism and sectarianism that have generally and naturally been associated with Protestantism. American Christianity is fast losing all interest in denominationalism. All this is bringing it nearer to the temper of Latin Christianity.

d. American Christianity compared with Teutonic.

It may seem absurd to try to compare Protestantism and American Christianity, since the American Christianity that is here being discussed is mainly the Protestantism of America. But it is not exclusively the Protestantism of America. The Roman Catholicism of the United States shows, though less markedly, the same traits. And within the Protestant Churches of America another kind of Christianity is growing up as the butterfly develops within the chrysalis. And, moreover, it is not wholly within the organized Protestantism of America that the new Christianity is developing. There is an unknown but vast amount of the new American Christianity outside the organized Churches of America. A part of this was once in the organized Churches but has lost interest in their spirit and aims. A part of it has never been attracted by the organized Churches. Another great--probably the greatest--element in the coming American Christianity is the Labor movement which, as it has been suggested, needs only to be broadened and more consciously spiritualized to be identical with the coming true and indigenous Church of America. It is, indeed, a grave question whether the coming American Christianity will gradually capture and transform the present Churches or whether, as in the Protestant Reformation, the new wine will have to be poured into new bottles, and a new Church arise distinct from, and even in conflict with, the present Churches.

One thing, at least, is clear.

Protestantism in its present form will not survive. The very name is inadequate. It is not self-explanatory. It can only be understood by reference to another and earlier Church. It is negative. It has no positive or vital content. It carries with it the unhappiness and partialness of division. It is essentially and incurably sectarian. The more extensive and comprehensive the body becomes, the less intelligible becomes the name. If Protestantism should become really catholic, that is, universal, the name would become a complete misnomer.

American Christianity, so far as it still calls itself Protestant, only continues to bear the name through unthinking habit. As soon as it reflects upon the name, it must disown it. American Christianity is too essentially catholic and comprehensive, too little concerned with the past, too impatient of the old outworn disputes, to be content with a name that must always convey a flavor of division and controversy.

Protestantism, sectarian in its nature as in its name, is inadequate to express the genius of American Christianity. The dominating principle of Protestantism has been individualism, and the dominant note of American Christianity is fraternity. America is the chosen home of fraternal societies. It is Rudyard Kipling, I think, who has said that of the famous revolutionary motto, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, the Frenchman cares only for equality, the Englishman is resolute for liberty and despises both equality and fraternity, while the American who knows neither liberty nor equality will forgive a man for anything if only he is a good fellow. The American loves a "good mixer." A shrewd French observer nearly twenty years ago in "La Réligion dans la Société aux Etats-Unis" caught the spirit of this nascent American Christianity.

He found it, first, a social religion, and, as such, concerning itself more with society than with individuals; secondly, a positive religion, in its interest in what is human rather than in what is supernatural. It stands chiefly, he thought, for the idea of morality. It encourages a strong recognition of the fact that good people, without professing the same faith, are governed by the same rules of conduct, and that, if dogma divides, morality unites.

"The Americans," he said, "make fraternity, the actual form of which is social solidarity, the essence of Christianity. The moral unity for which they strive under the name of Christian unity is only the co-operation of all for the increased establishment of fraternity and solidarity. High above sects whose diversity seems a matter of indifference to them, they organize a religion which pervades society throughout its length and breadth, and tends towards being only a social spirit touched by the evangelical feeling.

* * * * *

"This moral unity is indeed a religious unity and a Christian unity; this positivism is a Christian positivism. American humanism has received from Christianity all the traditional, sentimental, and poetical elements which distinguish a religion from a philosophy. American positivism is only a Christianity which has evolved.... The American religion may be called a Christian positivism or a positive Christianity. It has received from the past the traditional and the evangelical spirit. Traditional, it preserves the names and the forms of the Churches even when it changes their customs; it develops them from the interior. Evangelical, it keeps the figure of Jesus Christ before all, even when it does not recognize his divinity.

* * * * *

"Therefore it is not Protestantism.... The title of Christianity is the only one broad enough to designate it; yet this must be taken in its evangelical sense.... The American religion is living and fruitful because it is national."

To discern a distinct American Christianity in 1902 showed much more insight than its recognition indicates to-day. American Christianity has developed greatly since then and is now developing still more rapidly under the forcing conditions of the war and the great reconstruction. The work of reconstruction will not have been carried very far before the incongruity of this new type of Christianity with the hard, individualistic, militant spirit of Teutonic Christianity will become apparent to all.

When American Christianity comes to full and clear self-consciousness, when it, so to speak, finds itself, it will be found to have a very simple and brief and intelligible creed. Not a shallow creed, however, but a deep and vital one. It will put, probably, no other question to candidates for membership than the Apostolic Church put, Dost thou believe in the Lord Jesus Christ?

Its emphasis will be where Jesus placed it, not on opinions, but on spirit, the spirit of brotherhood.

Democratic it will, therefore, be as well, for democracy is bound up with brotherhood.

Finally, with a little creed it will have a big programme. It will live to establish the Kingdom of God on the earth. Its helpful, healing, redeeming, Christ-like activities will be infinite in the Christian and in the heathen lands.

And as pre-eminently practical, clericalism will die out of it. Preachers, teachers, missionaries there will be, but the gulf that has divided these from the laity will be closed. Sacerdotalism, even in its most attenuated and vestigial forms, will disappear.

Throughout this chapter, it is, perhaps, hardly necessary to add, the word, American, is used in its proper continental sense. By American Christianity is meant the new and distinct type of Christianity which is developing in the Protestant churches of the United States and Canada and also, though less markedly, in the Roman Catholic. Politically distinct as these countries are likely to remain, socially and religiously they cannot escape the influences of neighborhood.

In some respects, as has been noted, the United States, on account of its republican constitution, its political rupture with the old world, and its more strongly developed self-consciousness, has been more favorable than Canada to the growth of that new form of Christianity, yet signs are not wanting, especially in that western section in which the coming Canada seems to be most clearly discernible, that the younger and smaller and so, perhaps, the more mobile country may outstrip her older and greater neighbor in the formation, out of, at least, the Protestant denominations, of a national Christianity, simple, yet free and varied, practical, democratic, brotherly, in a word, truly catholic. Institutions which have outlived their usefulness usually retain an appearance of strength until the hour of collapse. Denominationalism in Canada is still a stately tree, but the heart is dust.