The Meaning of Faith Part 27

Thou who in times past didst pity the prayers of our forerunners, and especially of that suffering servant of Thine whom Thou hast made our Leader unto Thee! be pleased to strengthen us now, O Lord, to bear our lighter cross and surrender ourselves for duty and for trial unto Thee. Show us something of the blessed peace with which they now look back on their days of strong crying and tears, and teach us that it is far better to die in Thy service than to live for our own. Rebuke within us all immoderate desires, all unquiet temper, all presumptuous expectations, all ign.o.ble self-indulgence, and feeling on us the embrace of Thy Fatherly hand, may we meekly and with courage go into the darkest ways of our pilgrimage, anxious not to change Thy perfect will, but only to do and bear it worthily. May we spend all our days in Thy presence, and meet our death in the strength of Thy grace, and pa.s.s thence into the nearer light of Thy knowledge and love. Amen._--John Hunter.

COMMENT FOR THE WEEK

I

So far in our studies we have been dealing with the individual believer in his search for a reasonable faith. But we must face at last what from the beginning has been true, that there is no such thing as an individual believer. _All faiths are social._ However little we may be aware of each other's influence, however intangible the social forces which shape the convictions by which we live, no man builds or keeps his faiths alone. We may pride ourselves on our independent thought, but the fact remains as Prof. William James has stated it: "Our faith is faith in some one else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case."

The realm of religious conviction is not the only place where we hold with a strong sense of personal possession what has been given us by others, and often forget to acknowledge our indebtedness. We believe in democracy and popular education, not because by some gift of individual genius we are wiser than our unbelieving sires, but because, in the advance of the race, that faith has been wrought out by many minds, and, with minute addition of our own thought, we share the general conviction. As a man considers how rich and varied are the faiths he holds, how few of them he ever has thought through or ever can, and how helpless he would be, if he were set from the beginning to create any one of them, he gains new insight into Paul's words, "What hast thou that thou didst not receive? but if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory as if thou hadst not received it?" (I Cor.

4:7).

Indeed, this same truth holds in every relations.h.i.+p. Nothing is more impossible than a "self-made man." In no realm can that common phrase be intelligently applied to anyone. If in business one has risen from poverty to wealth, he has used railroads that he did not invent and telephones that he does not even understand; he has built his business on a credit system for which he did not labor and whose moral basis has been laid in the ethical struggles of unnumbered generations. For the clothes he wears, the food he eats, the education he receives, he is debtor to a social life that taps the ends of the earth and that has cost blood not his and money which he never can repay. If granting this, a man still say, "My power and the might of my hand hath gotten me this wealth" (Deut. 8:17), he may well consider whence his power has come. His distant ancestors stalked through primeval forests, their brows sloped back, their hairy hides barren of clothes, and in their hands stone hatchets, by the aid of which they sought their food. What has this Twentieth Century boaster done to change the habits of the Stone Age to the civilization on which his wealth is based or to elevate man's intellect to the grasp and foresight of the modern business world? All the power by which he wins his way is clearly a social gift, and any contribution which he may add is infinitesimal compared with his receipts.

By this truth all declarations of individual independence need to be chastened and controlled and all boasting cancelled utterly. Normal minds have their times of self-a.s.sertion in religion, when they grow impatient of believing anything simply because they have been told. As a college Junior put it: "I must clear the universe of G.o.d, and then start in at the beginning to see what I can find." But to a.s.sert a reasonable independence ought not to mean that one cut himself off from the support of history, the acc.u.mulated experience of the race, the insight of the seers, and in una.s.sisted isolation walk, like Kipling's cat, "by his wild lone." No man can do that anywhere and still succeed. Imagine a man, in politics, dubious of his old affiliations and disturbed by the conflicting opinions of his day. If, so perplexed, he should throw over all that ever had been thought or done in civic life, and in an unaided individual adventure attempt out of his own mind to const.i.tute a state, in what utter confusion would he land! No mind can begin work as though it were the first mind that ever acted, or were the only mind in action now. All effective thinking is social; contributions from innumerable heads pour in to make a wise man's knowledge. And to suppose that any man can climb the steep ascent of heaven all alone and lay his hands comprehensively on the Eternal is preposterous. No one ever apprehended a science so, much less G.o.d! Even Jesus fed his soul on the prophets of his race.

II

Indeed, Jesus' att.i.tude toward the fellows.h.i.+p of faith is most revealing, seen against the background of his nation's history. In the beginning, there was in Israel no such thing as individual religion.

In the earliest strata of the Bible's revelation, we find no indication of a faith that brought G.o.d and each of his people into intimate relations.h.i.+ps. Jehovah was the G.o.d of the nation as a whole and not of the people one by one. When he spoke, he spoke to the community through a leader; "Speak thou with us and we will hear," the people cried to Moses, "but let not G.o.d speak with us lest we die"

(Exodus 20:19). It was at the time of the Exile, when the nation fell in ruins, and the hearts of faithful Jews were thrown back one by one on G.o.d that individual trust, peace, joy, and confidence found utterance. It was Jeremiah (Chap. 31) and Ezekiel (Chap. 18) who saw men individually responsible to G.o.d, and who opened the way for loyal Jews to be his people even when the nation was no more. And what they began Jesus completed. He lifted up the individual and made each man the object of the Father's care. "It is not the will of your Father ... that _one_ of these little ones should perish" (Matt 18:14). "What man of you, having a hundred sheep, and having lost _one_ of them ..."

(Luke 15:4). "The very hairs of your head are all numbered" (Matt.

10:30). As for religion's inner meaning, it became in Jesus' Gospel not a national ritual but a private faith: "But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thine inner chamber, and having shut thy door, pray to thy Father who is in secret" (Matt. 6:6).

While Jesus, however, so emphasized the inward, individual aspects of religion, he did not leave it there, as though persons could ever be like jugs in the rain, separate receptacles that share neither their emptiness nor their abundance. He bound his disciples into a fellows.h.i.+p. He joined their channels until, like interflowing streams, one contributed to all and the spirit of all was expressed in each. He braided them into friends.h.i.+p with himself and with each other, so close that the community did what no isolated believer ever could have done--it survived the shock of the crucifixion, the agony of sustained persecution, the frailties of its members, and the discouragements of its campaign. On that _group_ the Master counted for his work: "The gates of Hades shall not prevail against it" (Matt. 16:18). And when the New Testament Church emerged, the fellows.h.i.+p which Christ himself had breathed into it was clear and strong. Men who became Christians, in the New Testament, came into a new relations.h.i.+p with G.o.d indeed, but into a new human fraternity as well. They were "builded together for a habitation of G.o.d through the Spirit" (Eph. 2:22), and even when death came that fellows.h.i.+p was not destroyed. They were still "the whole family in heaven and on earth" (Eph. 3:15). John Wesley was right: "The Bible knows nothing of a solitary religion." In the Old Testament religion was predominantly national; in the New Testament, individuals rejoicing in the "Beloved Community" could not describe their life without the reiteration of "one another." They were to "pray one for another" and "confess sins one to another" (James 5:16); they were to "love one another" (I Pet 1:22), "exhort one another"

(Heb. 3:13), "comfort one another" (I Thess. 4:18); they were to "bear one another's burdens" (Gal. 6:2) and in communal wors.h.i.+p "admonish one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs" (Col. 3:16).

So when they thought of their faith, they never held it in solitary confidence; they were "strong to apprehend _with all the saints_ what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which pa.s.seth knowledge" (Eph. 3:18).

III

When a modern believer endeavors to interpret this spirit in the New Testament in terms of his own wants, he sees at once that he needs fellows.h.i.+p for the _enriching_ of his faith. Cooperation for achievement is a modern commonplace, but when Paul prayed, as we have quoted him, that the Ephesians might be "strong to _apprehend_ with all the saints," he was stating the more uncommon proposition that men must cooperate for knowledge. He saw the divine love in its length, breadth, depth, and height on one side, and on the other a solitary man endeavoring to understand it. Impossible! said Paul; the divine love in its fulness cannot be known in solitude, it must be apprehended in fellows.h.i.+p.

At first nothing seems more strictly individual than knowledge. To know is an intimate, personal affair; it cannot be carried on by proxy. But even casual thought at once makes clear that in solitude we cannot know even the physical universe. No man can go apart and through the narrow aperture of his own mind see the full round of truth. For astronomers study the stars, geologists the rocks, chemists know their special field and physicists know theirs; each scientist understands in part, and if one is to know the breadth and length and height and depth of the physical world he must be strong to apprehend with all the scientists.

In religion this necessity of cooperation in knowing G.o.d may not at first seem evident. In the secret session behind closed doors, as Jesus said, one finds his clearest thought of G.o.d, and in the individual heart the divine illumination comes. So some insist; and the answer does not deny, but surpa.s.ses the truth in the insistence.

_Is yours the only heart where G.o.d is to be found? Does the sea of his grace exhaust itself in what it can reveal in your bay?_ Rather, in how many different ways men come to G.o.d, how various their experiences of him, and how much each needs the rest for breadth and catholicity of view!

One man comes to G.o.d by way of intellectual perplexity and he knows chiefly faith's illumination of life's puzzling problems; another comes through the experience of sin and he responds to such a phrase as "G.o.d our Saviour" (I Tim. 1:1); another comes to G.o.d through trouble and has found in faith "eternal comfort and good hope through grace" (II Thess. 2:16); and another by way of a happy life has found in G.o.d the object of devoted grat.i.tude. One, a mystic, finds G.o.d in solitary prayer; another, a worker, knows him chiefly as the Divine Ally. Some are very young and have a child's religion; some are at the summit of their years and have a strong man's achieving faith; and some are old and are familiar with the face of death and the thought of the eternal. How multiform is man's experience of G.o.d! Some compositions cannot be interpreted by a solo. Let the first violinist play with what skill he can, he alone is not adequate to the endeavor.

There must be an orchestra; the oboes and viols, the drums and trumpets, the violins and cellos must all be there. So faith in G.o.d is too rich and manifold to be interpreted by individuals alone; a fellows.h.i.+p is necessary. Even Paul, in one of his most gloriously mixed-up and yet revealing sentences, prays for fellows.h.i.+p that his faith may be enriched: "I long to see you, that I may impart unto you some spiritual gift, to the end ye may be established; that is, that I with you may be comforted in you, each of us by the other's faith, both yours and mine" (Rom. 1:11, 12).

Poverty of faith, therefore, is not due only to individual lapses of character and perplexities of mind; _it is due to neglect of Christian fellows.h.i.+p_. One who with difficulty has clung to his slender experience of G.o.d, goes up to the church on Sunday. Even though it be a humble place of prayer, if the wors.h.i.+p is genuine, the hymns, the prayers, the Scriptures gather up the testimony of centuries to the reality of G.o.d. Here David speaks again and Isaiah answers; here Paul reaffirms his faith and John is confident that G.o.d is love. Here the saints before Christ cry, "Jehovah is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer" (Psalm 18:2), and the sixteenth century answers, "A mighty fortress is our G.o.d"; and the nineteenth century replies, "How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord!" We go up to the church finding it hard to sing, "_My_ Jesus, _I_ love thee, _I_ know thou art _mine_"; we go down with a _Te Deum_ in our hearts:

"The glorious company of the apostles praise thee; The goodly fellows.h.i.+p of the prophets praise thee; The n.o.ble army of martyrs praise thee; The holy Church throughout all the world doth acknowledge thee."

In the rich and varied faiths of the Church we find a far more fruitful relations.h.i.+p with G.o.d than by ourselves we ever could have gained. Without such an enriching experience men can only with difficulty keep faith alive. Twigs that snap out of the camp-fire lose their flame and fall, charred sticks; but put them back and they will burn again, for fire springs from fellows.h.i.+p. Amiel, after an evening of solitude with a favorite book on philosophy, wrote what is many a Christian's prayer: "Still I miss something--common wors.h.i.+p, a positive religion, shared with other people. Ah! when will the church to which I belong in heart rise into being? I cannot, like Scherer, content myself with being in the right all alone. I must have a less solitary Christianity."

IV

Men need fellows.h.i.+p, not only for the enrichment of their faith, but for its _stability_. No man can successfully believe anything all alone. Let an opinion in any realm be denied, despised, neglected by common consent of men, and not easily do we hold an unshaken conviction of its truth. But let it be agreed with, supported and endorsed by many, especially by men of insight, and with each additional testimony to its truth our faith grows confident. A fundamental experience of man is that his faiths are socially confirmed.

Authority of some sort, therefore, never is outgrown in any province of knowledge, and strugglers after faith have solid right to the sustenance which it can give. For one thing the authority of the _expert_ is acknowledged everywhere. When a great astronomer speaks about the stars, most of us put our hands upon our mouths and humble ourselves to listen. If in science, expert knowledge has this authority--not artificial, infallible, and externally enforced, but vital, serviceable, and real--how much more in realms where insight and spiritual quality are indispensable! Such authority comes in the spirit of Paul: "Not that we have lords.h.i.+p over your faith, but are helpers of your joy" (II Cor. 1:24).

An amateur stands before a picture like Turner's "The Building of Carthage" and either does not notice the details, or noticing sees no special meaning there. But when Ruskin, Turner's seer, begins to speak--how wonderful the children in the foreground sailing toy boats in a pool, prophecy of Carthage's future greatness on the sea!--one by one the details take fire and glow with meaning as our eyes are opened. Such is the service of a real authority. It does not, as Weigel says, put out a person's eye and then try to persuade him to see with some one else's. It rather cures our blindness and enables us to see what by ourselves we were incapable of seeing. Christ supremely, when allowed to be himself, has helped men thus. He has not oppressed the mind with burdensome authority, denying us our right to think. He has come appealing to our little insight with his own clear vision, "Why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?" (Luke 12:57). Things which we see dimly he has clarified; things which we did not see at all, he has made manifest. He has been what he called himself, the Light, and his people have said of him what the man in John's ninth chapter said, "He opened mine eyes" (John 9:30). A struggler after faith may well count among his a.s.sets the insight of the seers and of the Seer. As another states it: "Our weak faith may at times be permitted to look through the eyes of some strong soul, and may thereby gain a sense of the certainty of spiritual things which before we had not."

Beside the authority of the seers, there is _the authority of racial experience_, to which indeed no mind ought slavishly to subject itself, but from which all minds ought to gain insight and confidence.

Tradition has done us much disservice. Oppressions that might long before have been outgrown have been counted holy because they were h.o.a.ry. There must be something to commend an opinion or a custom beside its age, and all progress depends upon recognizing that

"Time makes ancient good uncouth."

But if out of the past have come evils to be overthrown, out of the past also have come the best possessions of the race. "Traditional"

has grown to be an adjective of ill repute; it signifies in common parlance the inheritance of oppressive ideals and inst.i.tutions that hold the "dead hand" over hopes of progress. But our best music also, our poetry, and our art are traditional; the discoveries of our scientists on the long road from alchemy to chemistry, from magic to physics are traditional; all that each new generation begins with, fitted out like the well-favored child of a provident father, is traditional. No one can describe the utter barrenness of life, if we could not build on the acc.u.mulations of our sires, using the result of their toil as the basis of our work, their hardly won wisdom as our guide. To discount anything because it is traditional is to discount everything, except that comparatively minute addition which each new generation makes to the slowly acc.u.mulating wisdom and wealth of the race. As Mr. Chesterton has put it: "Tradition may be defined as the extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all cla.s.ses, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father."

Now racial experience is dubious at many points and at very few does it approach finality. But on one matter it speaks with a unanimity that is nothing short of absolute. _Man cannot live without religion_--like the earth beneath the mountain peaks this universal experience of the race underlies the special insights of the seers.

When during the mid-Victorian discomfiture of faith at the first disclosures of the new science, Tennyson's "In Memoriam" appeared, Prof. Sidgwick wrote of it, "What 'In Memoriam' did for us, for me at least in this struggle, was to impress on us the ineffable and irradicable conviction that _humanity_ will not and cannot acquiesce in a G.o.dless world." That conviction is confirmed by the whole experience of the race. To be sure religion, like love, exists in all degrees. From degraded l.u.s.t to the relations.h.i.+p of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, love is infinite in variety; it takes its quality from the character of those whom it affects; yet through all its changes it is itself so built into the structure of mankind, that though there be loveless individuals, life as a whole is unimaginable without it. So religion runs the gamut of human quality. In a Hindu idolater it performs disgusting rites to placate an angry G.o.d, and in Rabindranath Tagore it cries: "If thou speakest not I will fill my heart with thy silence and endure it. I will keep still and wait like the night with starry vigil and its head bent low with patience. The morning will surely come, the darkness will vanish, and thy voice pour down in golden streams, breaking through the sky." In Torquemada it is cruel; in Father Damien it becomes a pa.s.sion for saviorhood. Religion helped Sennacherib to his campaigns and Isaiah to his prophecies; it preached the Sermon on the Mount and it dragged Jesus before Pilate.

Can the same spring send forth sweet water and bitter? But religion does it, for religion is life motived by visions of G.o.d; it is tremendous in strength, but with man's unequal power to understand the Divine, it is ambiguous in quality. Like electricity, it is magnificent in blessing or terrible in curse. Yet through all its degrees man's relations.h.i.+p with the Invisible is so essentially a part of his humanity that lacking it he has never yet been discovered, and without it he cannot be conceived. It was this impressive witness of racial experience that made John Fiske, of Harvard, say, "Of all the implications of the doctrine of evolution with regard to man, I believe the very deepest and strongest to be that which a.s.serts the Everlasting Reality of Religion."

This testimony of the spiritual seers and this c.u.mulative experience of the race have a right to play a weighty part in any consideration of religious faith. Even a rebellious youth might pause before he scoffs at a mature and thoughtful mind, letting his Church, his Scripture, and his Christ speak impressively to him about the reality of G.o.d. What we all do in every other realm, when we are wise, this mind is doing in religion. His individual grasp on truth he sets in the perspective of history. He does not feel himself upon a lonely quest when he seeks G.o.d; rather he feels behind him and around him the race of which he is a part and which never yet has ceased to believe in the Divine, and he sees his own insights illumined by those supreme spirits who have talked with G.o.d "as a man talketh with his friend."

He knows as well as any youth that authority has been stereotyped in theories of artificial infallibility, to which no mature mind for a moment can weakly surrender its right to think, but he refuses to give up a real authority because some have held a false one. The authority of the dictionary is one thing--literal and external. But the authority of a good mother moves on a different plane. It is not artificial and oppressive. It is vital and inspiring. She has lived longer, experienced more than her children; she is wiser, better, more discerning than they. A man who has had experience of great motherhood comes to feel that if his mother thinks something very strongly and very persistently, he would better consider that thing well, for the chances are overwhelming that there is truth in it. How much more shall he feel so about the age-long experience of the saints with G.o.d!

In this respect at least there still is truth in Cyprian's words, "He that hath G.o.d for his Father, hath the Church for his Mother."

V

Faith needs fellows.h.i.+p not alone for enrichment and stability, but for _expression_. For faith, as from the beginning we have maintained, is not an effortless acceptance of ideas or personal relations.h.i.+ps; it is an active appropriation of convictions that drive life, and Christian faith especially has always involved a campaign whose object is the saving of the world. Such an expression of religious life involves cooperation; men cannot effectively support the "work of faith" (I Thess. 1:3) apart from fellows.h.i.+p.

The necessity for this cooperative expression of religion is clear when we consider the _one in whom we believe_. How anyone can expect in solitude to believe in Christ is a mystery. For Christ, with overflowing love to those who shared his filial fellows.h.i.+p with G.o.d, said, "No longer do I call you servants ... I have called you friends"

(John 15:15); his care encompa.s.sed folk who never heard of him and whom he never saw, "Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring ... and they shall become one flock, one shepherd" (John 10:16); and beyond his generation's life his love reached out to followers yet unborn, "Them also that believe on me through their word" (John 17:20). Whatever other quality a movement sprung from such a source may possess, it must be social. Moreover, Jesus' faith was active; the meaning of it he himself disclosed, "All things are possible to him that believeth" (Mark 9:23). In such a spirit, both by himself and through his followers, he sought the lost, healed the sick, preached the Gospel, and expectantly proclaimed an earth transformed to heaven. Such a character cannot be known in contemplation under the trees in June or through the pages of an interesting book. If Garibaldi, leading his men to the liberation of Italy, had found a devotee who said, I believe in you; I love to read your deeds, and often in my solitary, meditative hours I am cheered by the thought of you--one can easily imagine the swift and penetrating answer! That you believe in me is false; no one believes in me who does not share my purpose; the army is afoot, great business is ahead, the cause is calling, he who believes follows. Such a spirit was Christ's. The hermits, whether of old time in their cells, or of modern time with their unaffiliated lives, are wrong. _The final test of faith in Christ is fellows.h.i.+p in work._

The Church itself has been to blame for much undedicated faith.

Correctness of opinion has been subst.i.tuted, as a test, for fidelity of life. "Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved,"

has been interpreted to mean: accept a theory about Christ's person and all is well. But one need only go back in imagination to the time when first that formula was used to see how vital was its import. To believe in Christ then meant to accept a despised religion, to break ties that men value more than life, to face the certainty of contempt and the risk of violence. To believe in Christ then meant coming out from old relations.h.i.+ps and going to a sect where one was pilloried with derision, that one might work for the things which Christ represents. No one did that as a theory; it required a tremendous thrust of the will, a decision that reached to the roots of life. All this was involved in believing on Christ, and our decent holding of a theory about him, in a time when all lips praise him, is a poor subst.i.tute for such vital faith. John tells us that once a mult.i.tude of Jews professed belief in Jesus, but the Master, hearing their affirmations, saw the superficial meaning there. "Many believed on his name," says John--"but Jesus did not trust himself unto them" (John 2:23, 24). How many believe in Christ in such a way that he cannot believe in them! They forget that while the test of a man is his faith, the test of faith is faithfulness. An apostolic injunction needs modern enforcement, "that they who have believed G.o.d may be careful to maintain good works" (t.i.tus 3:8).

The necessity for a cooperative expression of religion is evident again in the _truth which we believe_. Take in its simplest form the Gospel which Christianity presents, that G.o.d is in earnest about personality, and what urgency is there for a.s.sociated work! For personality is being ruined in this world. False ideas of life, idolatry whether to fetishes in Africa or to money here, irreligion in all its manifold and blighting forms, are destroying personality from within, and from without sweatshops, tenements, war, the liquor traffic, industrial inequity, are engaged in the same task of ruin.

The common contrast between individual and social Christianity is superficial. The one thing for which the Christian cares is personal life, and in its culture and salvation he sees the aim of G.o.d and G.o.dlike men. Whatever, therefore, affects _that_ is his concern, and what is there that does not affect it? What men believe about life's meaning and its destiny strikes to the core of personal life, and the houses in which men live, the conditions under which they work, the wages that they are paid, and the environments which surround their plastic childhood--these, too, mould for good or ill the fortunes of personality.

The Christian, therefore, who intelligently holds the faith that he professes cannot be negligent either of evangelism, education, and missionary enterprise upon the one side, or of social reformation on the other. These are two ends of the tunnel by which the Gospel seeks to open out a way for personality to find its freedom. A man who says that he believes in Jesus Christ, and yet is complacent about child labor and commercialized vice, poor housing conditions and unjust wages, the trade in liquor and the butchery of men in war, stands in peril of hearing the twenty-third chapter of Matthew's gospel brought up to date for his especial benefit by the same lips that spoke it first. The indignation of the Master falls on priests and Levites who, speeding to the temple service, "pa.s.s by on the other side" the victims of social injury.

Isolated Christians, however, cannot further this campaign for personality redeemed from inward ills and outward handicaps. _Evil is organized, and goodness must be, too._ As wisely would a single patriot shoulder a rifle and set out for France as would an unaffiliated Christian set his solitary strength against the ma.s.sed evil of the world. Men increase effectiveness by a large per cent through fellows.h.i.+p, as ancient Hebrews saw: "Five of you shall chase a hundred, and a hundred of you shall chase ten thousand" (Lev. 26:8).

VI

Many secondary fellows.h.i.+ps offer to a Christian opportunity for a.s.sociated service; no cooperative endeavor to make this a better world for G.o.d to rear his children in should lack Christian sympathy and support. But the primary fellows.h.i.+p of Christians is the Church.

Some indeed would have no church; they would have man's spiritual life a disembodied wraith, without "a local habitation and a name." But no other one of all man's finer interests has survived without organized expression. Justice is a great ideal; any endeavor to incarnate it in human inst.i.tutions sullies its purity. One who dwelt only on the lofty nature of justice, who thought of it uncontaminated and ideal, might protest against its embodiment in the tawdry ritual and demeaning squabbles of a law court. Between the poetry of justice and the recriminations of lawyers, the perjury of witnesses, the fumbling uncertainty of evidence, the miscarriages of equity, how bitterly a scornful mind could point the contrast! But a reverent mind, sorry as it may be at the misrepresentation of the ideal in the human inst.i.tution, is ill content with scorn. He who with insight reads the history of jurisprudence, perceives how the courts of law, with all their faults, have conserved the gains in social equity, have propagated the ideal for which they stand, have made progress sometimes slowly, sometimes with a rush like soldiers storming a redoubt, and in times of stress have been a bulwark against the invasion of the people's rights. The poetry of justice would have been an idle dream without equity's laborious embodiment in codes and courts.

Some minds dwell with joy upon the spiritual Church. Its names are written on no earthly roster, but in the Book of Life; its wors.h.i.+p is offered in no earthly temple, but in the trysting places where soul meets Over-soul in trustful fellows.h.i.+p; its baptism is not with water but with spirit, its eucharist not with bread but with the shared life of the Lord. Or, ranging out to think of the Church as an ideal human brotherhood men dream as Manson did in "The Servant in the House":