The New Christianity Part 9

And it is just these things the Western world needs in this crisis--the spirit of the little child, the spirit of brotherhood, the sense of the pre-eminence of religion, the idealism that will risk everything for a dream.

The first movements of the awakened Russian may be unsteady. His new found freedom may act on him with intoxicating, almost deranging power.

But they know little of the real Russian soul who dread the liberation of that long-prisoned soul and its free play on the Western world.

In the material ground-work of our civilization, its farming, its mining, its building of steams.h.i.+ps, of railroads, of modern cities, the Teutonic races have taken the lead. They have builded the house. Now, it may be, when the finer problems arise of living in the home in harmony and helpfulness and in a high and holy spirit, it is the Slav who, in his turn, will take the lead. The Greek, the Italian, the Frank, the Spaniard, the Anglo-Saxon have successively held the premier place. The day of the Slav may now be dawning.

Nor yet is our forecast of the Great Christianity complete. It may be that there awaits us, though in a more distant future, a still more striking ill.u.s.tration of how G.o.d chooses for honor the despised things of the world. Of all races the most despised, the most oppressed, has been the African, and that not for generations or centuries but for millenniums. Europe, Asia, and America have all made Africa their servant. The dark Continent stands pre-eminent in suffering and in service. But it is in suffering and in service that He, too, the Coming King, has been pre-eminent. One reason why Africa has been the hunting ground of the slaver from immemorial times is because in the African nature immemorially and inextinguishably is the readiness to serve. All other races love to rule; some of them, like the Latin and the Teutonic, have been intensely proud, greedy of power, and averse from service.

The African race is the one race which has by nature the spirit of Him who came not to be ministered unto but to minister. The African race, too, is of all races the most child-like, the most care-free, the one most ready to delight in simple things and the things of to-day. The white races, in comparison, are old, vigilant, suspicious, anxious, care-worn. There is no question which, in these respects, is nearest the ideal of Jesus. The greedy, ambitious spirit of the Western nations, never contented, their delight in to-day always poisoned by the fear or the fascination of to-morrow, is far from the spirit of Jesus. It may be that the white man will yet have to sit at the feet of the black, and that, when Christ is glorified, it will be that race that has, beyond all other races, trodden Christ's path of suffering and service which, beyond all others, will be glorified with Him.

The re-action of the uncounted millions of Asia on Christianity--the contributions of the ancient and deeply experienced brown and yellow races to that religion in which alone they can find their fullest development--is another fascinating subject for enquiry and speculation; but these influences, potent and inescapable as they promise to be, fall outside the limits of the period considered by this book.

CONCLUSION

The task before Western civilization to-day, it is probable, is the greatest civilization has ever faced. It is a complete reconstruction that is demanded. It must be accomplished with speed. All the Western nations are involved. There have been other reconstructions as drastic, but either they have been permitted a much longer period of development, or they have been confined to much smaller areas.

The struggle will not be over religious opinions, or political theories, though both are involved. It will be over what touch men ordinarily much more deeply, their livelihood and their profits, and the war has seemed to show that men will sacrifice their lives more readily than their profits. It will be a struggle no cla.s.s can escape.

The readjustments would be difficult enough in themselves if men engaged in them in the calmest and kindliest spirit. But many who will be foremost in the task of reconstruction bring to the problems the bitterness and distrust engendered by centuries of cruel wrong.

Nothing but Christianity can carry the Western peoples through this unparallelled crisis. But it must be Christianity in its purity and its fulness, not a Christianity wasting its energy on doctrinal controversy, broken by denominational divisions, or absorbed in taking care of its machinery. It must, in short, be a Christianity neither intellectualized nor sectarianized nor inst.i.tutionalized.

It must be a Christianity, born as at the first in the hearts of the common people, simple, democratic, brotherly; like a tree, its top in the sky but its roots deep in common earth; treating inst.i.tutions, even the most venerable, as the mere temporary contrivances that they are; with the faith of Jesus in the human heart and in the ultimate triumph of love, and a willingness, like His, to find a throne in a cross.