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THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD

CHAPTER 10

THE WORD OF MICAH ; THE RELIGION OF SERVICE

    WHEN our troops made ready to sail across the seas the New York Bible Society distributed among them little Pocket Testaments, and asked me to write a message which should go with each Testament. I wrote as follows:

"The teachings of the New Testament are foreshadowed in Micah's verse: 'What more doth the Lord require of thee than to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.'

"Do justice; and therefore fight valiantly against the armies of Germany and Turkey, for these nations in this crisis stand for the reign of Moloch and Beelzebub on this earth.
"Love mercy; treat prisoners well; succor the wounded; treat every woman as if she were your sister; care for the little children, and be tender with the old and helpless.
"Walk humbly; you will do so if you study the life and teachings of the Savior.
"May the God of Justice and Mercy have you in His keeping."

The most perfect machinery of government will not keep us as a nation from destruction if there is not within us a soul. No abounding material prosperity shall avail us if our spiritual senses atrophy. The foes of our own household shall surely prevail against us unless there be in our people an inner life which finds its outward expression in a morality not very widely different from that preached by the seers and prophets of Judea when the grandeur that was Greece and the glory that was Rome still lay in the future.

In his Farewell Address to his countrymen, Washington said: "Morality is a necessary spring of popular government . . . and let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle."

Washington lacked Lincoln's gift of words; but not Lincoln himself possessed more robust common sense in the thought that lies back of words. In this case the thought is not new— only a few good thoughts are new; but it was given expression at a time when the European movement with which the American people were in most complete sympathy—the French Revolution—had endeavored to destroy the abuses of priestcraft and bigotry by abolishing not only Christianity but religion, in the sense in which religion is properly understood. The result was a cynical disregard of morality and a carnival of cruelty and bigotry, committed in the names of reason and liberty, which equalhd anything ever done by Torquemada and the fanatics of the Inquisition in the names of religion and order. Washington wished his fellow countrymen to walk clear of such folly and iniquity. As in all cases where he dealt with continuing causes his words are as well worth pondering now as when they were written.

Washington was certainly not thinking of dogmatic theology; and still less need we lay much emphasis upon it when we speak of the need of religion in our national life. How do I define religion? I use the term as it is used in Boutroux's "Science and Religion," in Bade's "The Old Testament in the Light of To-day." But I am not thinking primarily of the philosophers, or of those who, in Washington's phrase, possess "minds of peculiar structure." I am thinking of the rest of us, of those of whom Washington thought when he demanded a national morality based on religious principles. I am thinking of the mass of the men who make up this nation, who toil in time of peace and fight in time of war, and of the women who are their wives and helpmeets, and who toil and suffer and are brave and know the joy of life, as they go through the years beside their men.

These men and women profess many different creeds; and perhaps the priceless boon we have won here in America is the entire freedom to lead each the spiritual life which is demanded by his or her conscience, and to seek truth as that conscience demands. Yet normally a man can work best when he works with his fellows; and in religious matters this means that he must ordinarily find the outlet for his power and his sympathies, and the satisfaction for his spiritual hunger, in some church, whether that church be Protestant or Catholic, or as separate from most institutions of recognized orthodoxy as Charles Stelzle's Labor Temple or Felix Adler's Ethical Culture School.

In this actual world a churchless community, a community where men have abandoned and scoff at or ignore their religious needs, is a community on the rapid down grade. It is true that occasional individuals or families may have nothing to do with church or with religious practices and observances and yet maintain the highest standard of refined ethical obligation. But this does not affect the case in the world as it now is, any more than the fact that exceptional men and women under exceptional conditions have disregarded the marriage tie without moral harm to themselves interferes with the larger fact that such disregard if at all common means the complete moral disintegration of the body politic. In the pioneer days of the West we found it an unfailing rule that after a community had existed for a certain length of time either a church was built or else the community began to go down hill. In those old communities in the Eastern States which have gone backward, it is noticeable that the retrogression has been both marked by and accentuated by a rapid decline in church membership and work; the two facts being so interrelated that each stands to the other partly as a cause and partly as an effect. This has occurred not only in the "poor white" communities of the South, but in the small hamlets of the "abandoned farm" region of New England and New York. As the people grow slack and dispirited they slip from all effective interest in church activities; and on the other hand, the building up of a strong country church or Young Men's Christian Association in such a community often has an astonishing effect in putting such virile life into them that their moral betterment stimulates a marked physical betterment in their homes and farms. For all those whose lives are led on a plan t above the grimmest and barest struggle for existence church attendance and church work of some kind mean both the cultivation of the habit of feeling some responsibility for others and the sense of braced moral strength which prevents a relaxation of one's own fiber.

That man is unfortunate who has not owed much, in teaching and in companionship, to hardworking priest or hard-working parson. In my own experience I recall priest after priest whose disinterested parish work has represented one continuous battle for civilization and humanity. Out of my own experience I recall case after case where the clergyman and his wife—who have themselves enjoyed no rest on Sunday— are engaged all the week long in a series of wearing and important and humdrum tasks for making hard lives a little easier and gray lives a little brighter; and both this man and this woman, in the vast majority of cases, are engaged in constant self-denial, are doing much for humble folk, of whom few of us think, and are keeping up a brave show on narrow means. Surely the average man ought to sympathize with such work and help such workers; and he cannot do this if his attitude is merely that of an unsympathetic outsider.

The church must fit itself for the practical betterment of mankind if it is to attract and retain the fealty of the men best worth holding and using. The betterment may come in many ways. The great exhorter or preacher, the priest or clergyman or rabbi, the cardinal or bishop or revivalist or Salvation Army commander, may, by sheer fervor and intensity, and by kindling some flame of the spirit which mystics have long known to be real and which scientists now admit to be real, rouse numbed conscience to life and free seared souls from sin; and then the roused conscience and the freed soul will teach the bodies in which they dwell how to practice the great law of service. But such stormy awakening of the spirit, though often of high usefulness, loses all savor unless, in the times of calm which follow on the storm, the workaday body makes good in its round of life and labor the promise given by the spirit in its hour of stress. Far more often the betterment must come through work which does not depend on the gift of tongues; that is, through consistently persistent labor conducted with wary wisdom no less than with broad humanity. This may take the old form of individual service to the individual; of visiting and comforting the widow and the fatherless and the sore-stricken; of personal sympathy and personal aid. It may take the form of organized philanthropy—a form not merely beneficial but absolutely essential where a dense population increases the mass of suffering and also the mass of imposture and of that weakness of will which, if permitted, becomes parasitic helplessness; but a form which needs incessant supervision lest it lose all vitality and become empty and stereotyped so as finally to amount to little except a method of giving salaries to those administering the charity.

Under the tense activity of modern social and industrial conditions the church, if it is to give real leadership, must grapple zealously, fearlessly and cool-headedly with the problems of social and industrial justice. Unless it is the poor man's church it is not a Christian church at all in any real sense. The rich man needs it, heaven knows; and is needed by it. But, unless in the church he can work with all his toiling brothers for a common end, for their mutual benefit and for the benefit of those without its walls, the church has come short of its mission and its possibilities. Unless the church in a mining town or factory town or railway center is a leading force in the effort to secure cleaner and more wholesome surroundings, moral and physical, for the people, unless it concerns itself with their living and working conditions, with their workshops and houses and playgrounds, with their chance to open a cleft upward into the life of full development, it has forfeited its right to the foremost place in the regard of men. By their fruits shall ye know them! We judge a man nowadays by his conduct rather than by his dogma. And, to keep its hold on mankind the church must, as in its early days, obey the great law of service; for it shall not live by ceremonial and by dogmatic theology alone.

There are plenty of clergymen of all denominations who do obey this law; they render inestimable service. Yet these men can do but little unless keen, able, zealous laymen give them aid; and this aid is beyond comparison most effective when rendered by men and women who are themselves active participants in the work of the church. It was aid thus rendered which enabled Dr. Rainsford to give St. George's Church a leadership in service which at the time was equalled by no other Protestant Church in New York City; it is aid thus rendered which has rendered the St. Vincent de Paul Society, when it is under the lead of a man like Judge de Lacy of Washington, a potent force against the "foes of our own household." Such churches and church organizations foster a fine feeling of fellowship. Surely if our churches are not democratic the root of the matter is not in us; and therefore the church is beyond all other places that in which men of every social grade and degree of wealth should come together on a footing of brotherhood and of equality of rights and obligations. There, arrogance and envy are equally out of place; there, every sincere man should feel stirred to exceptional effort to see questions at issue as his brother sees them, and to act toward that brother as he would wish, under reversed conditions, the brother to act toward him. Surely half of our labor troubles 'would disappear if a sufficient number of the leaders on both sides had worked for common ends in the same churches and religious organizations, and approached one another's positions with an earnest desire to understand them and respect them.

One important thing for the layman interested in church work to do is to make the church an instrument for securing the healthy happiness of young people. The influence of the Puritan has been most potent for strength and for virtue in our national life. But his somber austerity left one evil: the tendency to confound pleasure and vice, a tendency which, in the end, is much more certain to encourage vice than to discourage pleasure—a tendency especially strong among the rigid formalists, including the ultra-sabbatarian formalists, who remain true  only to  what  is  least desirable  in  Puritanism.

Let every layman interested in church work battle against this tendency. Let him proceed on the assumption that innocent pleasure which does not interfere with things even more desirable is in itself a good; that this is as true of one day of the week as of another; and that one function of the church should be the encouragement of happiness in small things as well as in large. No general rules can be laid down in such a matter; the customs and feelings and peculiar conditions of each community must be taken into account and so far as possible respected. Therefore I can on this point speak only of my own experience. I have known a village baseball nine, which, because after church on Sunday afternoons it held games in a field a mile away, was a potent help in keeping young men out of the "blind pig" saloons. It is only very backward church organizations that now object to music. But many good people still put dancing under a ban. I believe that dancing, like all other healthy and proper pastimes, should be encouraged in the parish house; and this because I dread the professional dance hall, where liquor can be obtained and where foolish girls go with foolish or vicious young men, while there are no older men and women to look after them. If the natural desire of young people for pleasure is not given a healthy outlet it is only too apt to find an unhealthy outlet.

If good people feel that in what I have said I have slurred dogma and unduly exalted conduct, I am sorry; but each man must bear testimony as his soul bids; and the teachings to which I turn are those which impress this lesson.

Isaiah, the seer, the man of the vision, condemned ritual and formalism, and exalted conduct, when he thundered: "Hear the word of the Lord; to what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? I delight not in the blood of bullocks. Your appointed feasts my soul hateth. Cease to do evil; learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow."

Amos—no son of a prophet, but a laboring man, a herdsman and a gatherer of sycamore fruit—said: "Hear ye the Word; I despise your feast days; I will not accept your burnt offerings. But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream; hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate." What is this but insistence on the great law of service? In peace and in war we must spend and be spent, in the endless battle for right against wrong; deeds, not words, alone shall save us.

"By their fruits ye shall know them," is a teaching of the Sermon on the Mount; and James, spurning the unctuous professions of righteousness by those who do not make good what they preach, by those who profess a faith which is dead—which was never alive—because it bears no fruit in works, sums up the matter by insisting that we must be doers and not hearers only, because "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world."

I know not how philosophers may ultimately define religion; but from Micah to James it has been defined as service to one's fellow men rendered by following the great rule of justice and mercy, of wisdom and righteousness.