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THE INESCAPABLE
CHRIST
BY
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1925
Theology Library
SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY
AT CLAREMONT
California
Copyricat, 1925, By
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
WHAT IS SELF-EXPRESSION P
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CHAPTER IV
II
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CHAPTER V
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midst of the world today as clear as was that
visible presence in Galilee long ago. What
85
THE INESCAPABLE CHRIST
answer do your hearts make to him?—that
is the one decisive question which the Church
ought to ask those who have not confessed his
name. What desire stirs in you when you
realize what Jesus Christ is like? Do you
want to try to come more close to him? Do
you feel your own souls rise up to acknowl-
edge the ideal which he presents? Do you
want to be pure with a purity like his?: Do
you want to be strong with strength like his?
Do you want to share his trust in God and his
faith in mene? Do you want to ally yourself
with some ideal of faithful service in the spirit
of him who came to build God’s kingdom here
upon the earth? Do you believe that no pos-
sible blessing could come to your life equal to
the blessing of having its thoughts and its pur-
poses leavened by the mindof Christ, and do
you sincerely want to make his mind your
own? If you do, then come exactly as the first
disciples came, answering the simple invita-
tion of the Lord to men who are ready to draw
near tohim. Of a great deal that may be true
of him, you may have very little glimmering
at first. But what of that? Come, follow the
impulse which you have. That is all the
Church requires, for that is all that was re-
quired by her Lord.
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THE SIMPLICITIES OF CHRIST
I know that this is not a description of
Christian discipleship which all will agree
with. There are some who cannot be content
with the method of their Lord. They will
not receive men into the Church, they will not
welcome them to canfirmation or communion,
unless they profess a thorough conformity
with all the articles of the creeds. Against
such a well-meant but tragically mistaken
dogmatism, we need to proclaim the liberty ¢of
Christ. We shall not treat with irreverence
duvthing in4 the precious heritage of those de-
veloped doctrines which the centuries have
handed down. Everything that men have
thought of Jesus Christ and every most ex-
alted conception of him which they have en-
shrined in the statements of their faith have
enduring worth. But they are not fixed bur-
dens to be laid upon men’s shoulders. They
are beckonings to lead them on. ‘This is
what Christian saints and seers and all great
souls, out of the deeps of their experience,
have believed concerning Jesus, the Church
should say. Not the letter of their formu-
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las, but the amplitude of their faith, must be
your inspiration. Ponder that teaching which
the Church hands on to you. Ponder it very
reverently, in order that your own wondering.
87
THE INESCAPABLE CHRIST
imagination may be roused; but remember al-
ways that the only vital use of creeds and for-
mulated doctrines is to inspire you to repro-
duce the spiritual experience to which they
testify. Come into the presence of Jesus, and
learn for yourself of him. Let your own
growing experience create for you the per-
sonal conviction which shall help to ee
ate the Church’s creed.
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CHAPTER VI
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THE INESCAPABLE CHRIST >
taught, and imagine instead that gain can
come out of a godless pursuit of selfish inter-
ests, with no idea whatever of human life or-
ganized according to the larger friendliness
of Jesus. They may suppose that this civili-
zation which is ours now, and which we pre-
sumably shall pass on to our children tomor-
row, can live with nothing better to hold
it together than the cynical disbeliefs, the lan-
guid self-indulgence, and the half-disguised -
paganism which is all that some of us who
claim to be its leaders are giving it now. But
the retribution of moral realities is a deadly
thing. No matter how imposing may be the
gilded fabric of our life, if once the corner-
stone of that fundamental conception of what
life means which Jesus furnishes is rejected,
the whole mass will come down in human
ruin. No nation can endure which is taught
from the top and is learning through all its
classes to shirk responsibility, to flout with
flippant disrespect the dignity of law, and to
preach and practice an undisciplined individ-
ualism instead of that noble co-operation by
which alone great societies can be built. The
principles of Jesus will not be defied. Life
as a holy trust from God, the relationship of
men as brethren through the consciousness of
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FORMIDABLENESS OF CHRIST
their Father’s purpose in them all, the King-
dom of God as the high ideal to which all
every-day work must be made to contribute,—
these are the living foundation-stones on which
our life can securely rest; and without these
all our boasted strength and pride will ulti-
mately go down into the dust.
2. In the second place, there is that aspect
of our life which has to do with the relation
of nations one to another. We have referred
to that already in considering examples of the
past. We may well think of it again as we
look to the tendencies of the future.
When this nation of ours was founded, it
was founded by men of ideals. Religion
shaped the purposes of the men of Jamestown
and the men of Massachusetts. Their spirit
was like that which is quaintly written con-
cerning Harvard College in the old chronicle
entitled New Englana’s First Fruits.
“After God had carried us safe to New Eng-
land, and wee had builded our houses, provided
necessaries for our livelihood, reard convenient
places for God’s worship and setled the civill
government, one of the next things we longed for
and looked after was to advance learning and per-
petuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an illiter-
ate ministery to the Churches when our present
ministers shall lie in the dust.”
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THE INESCAPABLE CHRIST
As far as they knew how, they tried to make
the purpose of God, as Christianity had
taught them to conceive it, the foundation
on which their achievements should rest.
We live now in a larger and more com-
plex world. We live also in a time when
the implications of Christianity are more
clearly understood than they were by men
three hundred years ago. It is a thrilling fact
of our century that never have the words and
ideals of Jesus shone upon the imaginations of
men with a more revealing light than they do
now. We have entered more deeply than our
fathers into the meaningof the Kingdom of
God. We have seen that the gospel is not
only an individual, but also a social message,
and that all our widest human relationships
must be ordered accordingto the ideals of
Jesus if Christianity is to be made real. Our
knowledge is beginning to be sufficient. The
question is as to whether we shall have the |
spiritual power to carry our knowledge into
action. For religion will not be allowed with-
out opposition to lay hold upon our national
and international affairs. There are many
who say that these are the realm of practical
politics with which religion has nothing to do.
They deliberately assert that the relation of
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FORMIDABLENESS OF CHRIST
one nation to another is not governed by any
moral or ideal considerations, but rather by
the blind pressure of economic necessity, by
trade rivalries which know no other law than
the survival of the strong, and by the old un-
tamed instinct of survival which makes might
the only final right. Europe for a long time
was full of that philosophy, and in its witch’s
cauldron it brewed the war. We used to
think that in America we were relatively free
from it. We thought that we were conspicu-
ous in the world as a friendly and pacific na-
tion, depending for our greatness not upon
vast armaments, but upon the compelling
ideals of that confident life which we were de-
veloping here. Much of that old instinct of
the real America is in us still; but against it
there is rising another influence. We have
drunk too deep both of power and of riches
after the great war for our spirit to be quite
as simple as it was before. From the com-
radeship of the war years we withdrew into
our isolation, and with a larger army and a
vastly more powerful navy than we have ever
had before, we are beginning to suppose that
upon this wealth and power of ours, our dom-
inance among the nations can be established.
But the awful influence of the Crucified is still
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THE INESCAPABLE CHRIST
a fact to control the destinies of men. We
cannot make our own spirit content to follow
a policy of armed selfishness. Neither we
nor any other nation can defy that instinct of
human solidarity which the spirit of Jesus has
put into the hearts of men. The peoples of
this earth must work out their mutual needs
with him, for without him they will be de-
stroyed. When the rulers of the nations un-
derstand that in this universe of ours, ideas
are more powerful than things, that the desire
of the human spirit for life and peace and joy
which can bring men together, is more im-
portant than the shrewd little advantages for
which so-called statesmen snatch and plunder
in their diplomatic games, when they learn
that the business of our leaders is to lift the
peoples above the plane of the struggle of the
brute into that organized and intelligent co-
operation which befits the family of the sons
of God,—then our civilization will be built
upon the living stone of the meaning of Jesus
Christ; and if we reject or forget that founda-
tion, we do it at our mortal peril.
3. Finally, the words of Jesus concern our
estimate of the Church. Here, surely, it
ought to be plain that the spirit of Jesus must
be the foundation of everything which we at-
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_ FORMIDABLENESS OF CHRIST
tempt to build. Yet as a matter of fact we
know that often it is not. Instead of the spirit
of Jesus, the Church is prone to substitute all
sorts of other things,—old dogmas concerning
secondary matters, brittle prejudices left from
the theological strife of other years, divisive
sectarianism and narrow ecclesiastical pride.
Against a Church built on these things, that
instinctive recognition of the meaning of Jesus
which shapes itself in the heart of the common
man, becomes a weapon of repudiation.
Those ideals of Jesus which the Church is
supposed to express are the heart of her
power when she is obedient to express them;
but the inner forces gather dreadfully for her
destruction if her sins or her stupidities put
barriers in their way. Fire within the engine,
and steam within the boilers, are the living
energy of the machine which uses them, but
when they are clogged and denied their outlet,
they will tear the thing that holds them into
fragments. The electric current conveys its
instant miracle of light and power; but let the
open channels which convey it become short-
circuited, and it becomes a scorching and de-
stroying flame. So the spirit of Jesus working
through his Church, can make it the one su-
preme instrument for the redemption of our
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THE INESCAPABLE CHRIST
human life. But if the Church obstructs that
spirit, barricades it with our stupid literal-
isms, smothers it in our smug conventions,
then the spirit will pass from the smitten body
of the Church to find its free course in other
ways. What is the Church doing to bring the
mind of Jesus to bear upon all the actual issues
of our modern life? What is the Church. do-
ing to show that nothing in our civilization is
built securely unless it is built upon the foun-
dation of the purposes of Jesus? If the
Church removes that foundation from be-
neath her own conception of her life, then no
matter how ostentatious be her seeming fabric,
it will go down into ruinous disaster.
Here, then, there stand again the solemn
words of the formidableness of Christianity.
“Whosoever shall fall upon that stone shall be
broken, but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will
grind him to powder.” No man, no nation,
and no Church can defy the ultimate author-
ity of those realities of the spirit which Jesus
has revealed.
Yet, on the other hand, there shines the
positive proclamation, “The stone which the
builders rejected, the same is become the head
of the corner.” Chattering voices of disbelief
may imagine that the ideals of Jesus do not
122
FORMIDABLENESS OF CHRIST
count; the little blindness of a short-sighted ir-
religion may think that it does not matter
whether or not life rests upon the great certi-
tudes of God; but deeper than any question-
ing, abides the eternal fact that upon the truth
of life as it is in Jesus, all our hopes for per-
manent achievement must be built. “Other
foundation can no man lay than that is laid,
which is Jesus Christ.”
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CHAPTER VII
men prayed.
Pilgrims they were; and it did not trouble
them that it was their own stern preoccupa-
tion which made a barrenness of earth’s pleas-
ant land through which they went.
Every great expression of the human spirit
needs to be understood in relation to the con-
ditions which called it forth. The mood of
Calvinism was stern, but so were the times
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THE INESCAPABLE CHRIST
which bred it. A century which held the Diet
of Worms, the papal bulls of excommunica-
tion against the heretics of the Reformation,
the Huguenot wars and the massacre of St.
Bartholomew, was no time when men of pur-
pose were like to look upon life debonairly.
Those who were determined to maintain the
freedom of their consciences and the integrity
of their souls had to gird themselves for com-
bat unto blood and death. In an age when
men must be militant, the softer and sweeter
values of the world must suffer. There is a
stripping for action of the soul, as well as of
the body, in which the more gracious aspects
of life must be sacrificed; and in the face of
high necessity, the sacrifice becomes a virtue.
Against the background of all the facts, one
may clearly perceive, in spite of all their
harshness, the essentially heroic quality in the
Calvinist and the Puritan.
But it is often the case that religious tradi-
tion perpetuates the outward aspect, which the
dullest can imitate, rather than the inner
spirit, of a great religious mood. It is easier
to copy the Puritan’s frown than to recapture
his ennobling inner seriousness; easier upon
occasions to wear his black cloak than to carry
anew the high look of his eyes. So it comes
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THE GLADNESS OF CHRIST
about that many persons have the idea that
religion is fundamentally antagonistic to glad-
ness, and that even a rudimentary Christian
should know that it is proper to go sombrely
through this vale of tears.
Yet against this conception—and miscon-
ception—of Christianity, arising as it did out
of confused reversion to Old Testament rather
than to New Testament standards in centuries
when men’s theologies were being fashioned
in the midst of danger and strife—a deep and
persistent instinct has always struggled, and
now in our own day is rising to prevailing ex-
pression. Despite the gloomiest prophets of
sackcloth and ashes, something in the human
spirit has insisted upon believing that this
earth and the life upon it are goodly things.
Outward circumstances may explain it, and
under certain great historical environments
may have made it inevitable, but nevertheless
there is something essentially abnormal in
the kind of Christianity which has seemed to
make the joys of life into the forbidden land
from which the pilgrim must avert his gaze.
The healthy-mindedness of our time will turn
away from a dour religion. It accounts
cheerfulness so indispensable an element in
the rightly-furnished spirit that the cultiva-
129
THE INESCAPABLE CHRIST
tion of it becomes itself a religious duty for all
who mean now to be religious. In The Ce-
lestial Surgeon, Robert Louis Stevenson
tightly prayed that God might stab the spirit
wide awake
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CHAPTER VIII
I
_ By a parable, first, the significance of the
Church may be expressed.
On the maps of certain great tracts of our
western country, one may find the marks
which indicate a river. Go there in the sum-
mer, or in the fall, look for the river, and
what will you see? A great scar on the prai-
ries, with ragged banks, perhaps, and the bot-
tom of it cast into sandy ridges, with long
lines of wave marks which show that swirling
waters have been there. But now the whole
bed of the river is as dry as sun-baked brick.
Once the rain had fallen in the region from
which the river flows, but long before the sum-
mer came, with its need for irrigation, the wa-
ters had poured away. Wherever the hills are
barren, or wherever they are being made so
by the ruthless cutting of the forests, there is
a vast wasting of the waters which might
have accumulated from the rains and the win-
ter snows. Only the covert of trees can protect
the ground and the moisture in the ground.
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THE INESCAPABLE CHRIST
It offers the sponges of soft earth into which
the rains may sink and seep far down until
they feed the underlying springs. And as the
living trees, and all the protection of their
leaves, is needful for the conservation of the
rains, so also leaves which have died and
fallen in unnumbered previous years, and
have formed, little by little, the mold of the
forest’s floor, are an inestimable agency in
holding the moisture and preserving it from
wasteful flood. Once let the forests go, then
the soft mold, left unprotected, is washed
away by the rain. On the hard clay or bar-
ren rock of the denuded slope, nothing is left
to absorb the waters, and great wastes of
ravaging floods, and long months of drought
to follow, are, henceforth, the history of the
year.
So it is also with the Church in its relation-
ship to the influences which nourish the life
of men. The long development of historic
worship is like the growth of the protecting
forests. The thoughts and aspirations, the liv-
ing forms of worship and devotional expres-
sion, make a covert like that of the interlacing
trees. ‘The influences of God come down and
sift through the experience of the Christian
fellowship; they seep into those underlying
162
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CHURCH
springs which presently well forth in the se-
rene waters of a tested faith. It is a slow pro-
cess and a hidden one. The man who drinks
of the spring at the mouth of the valley may
not see the forests on the far slopes without
which that spring would never have been.
He may suppose that he can be indifferent
to the cutting down of forests which he
has-never seen. What difference can it make
to him what happens far off there where the
rain falls, so long as he in his particular place
has the spring? “What difference do the
churches make to me?P” asks the man who
never goes into them. “I find that I can get
along very well without them. I have my own
ideas of right and wrong, and [I live by these.”
But his shallow opinion takes no account of
the fact that without the forests there pres-
ently will be no flowing water, and that with-
out the long, sweet growth of religious insti-
tutions, there will be no accumulation of those
beneficent influences which pour out by hid-
den channels into the matter-of-fact thinking
of men. As the Christian centuries go on,
there are in Christian lands a thousand springs
of clear and strengthening waters from which
men drink without stopping to inquire into
the far sources from which they came. The
163
THE INESCAPABLE CHRIST
sense of social responsibility which increas-
ingly is pervading our industrial relation-
ships, and the gradual idealizing of every-day
pursuits, trace back to those quiet glades of re-
ligious worship and service which the
churches represent. Therefore, it would be
a perilous thing if those great institutions
which accumulate religious inspirations, as
the forests accumulate the rain, should ever
be destroyed. All the living growth of men’s
ways of worship have their inestimable
worth; and even the heritage of those old
forms and outgrown ideas which, like the
dead leaves of yesterday, have fallen to the
ground, possess their value, too. Through
them the waters of the new thoughts and new
interpretations must make their way, and by
that sifting are held back from hasty chan-
nels and saved for the deeper reservoirs of
quiet assurance. When for some ruthless pur-
pose of human gain, or through mere indiffer-
ence because he thinks he is too far away to be
concerned, a man sanctions the destruction of
religious institutions, he sanctions destruction
of the forests which, when they are gone, will
turn the fertile lands into a desert. Let men
today remember this, when with a frivolous
unconcern they contribute to the influences
164
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CHURCH
which may in the end destroy the nurturing
places of religion. Let men consider this who
inaugurate in their business a policy which
gives to themselves, and it may be to hundreds
of others, the excuse that they must spend
Sunday at work. Let men consider this who
take their golf bags and go to the country club,
while they indifferently suppose that their
- wives and children will be going to church.
They, by all the weight of their example, have
laid the axe to the root of the tree. They
have made it plain that, so far as they care
about it, organized worship can disappear
from modern society. Some of them would
be startled if they were told that that is what
they are doing; but the truth remains. Ev-
ery man and woman who by the actual choice
of his or her own life sharpens the axe of that
indifference which can in time destroy the
fairest growth of the worship of the centuries,
contributes to the coming of a time when their
children may live in a world harsh and bar-
ren as a desert because all the sources of sweet
and generous inspirations shall have vanished
with the feeding places of its springs.
Great is the service, on the other hand, of
those who as members of the Church cherish
the trees of God—those trees whose mighty
165
THE INESCAPABLE CHRIST
trunks are the experience of the centuries,
whose leaves are the thoughts and prayers of
living men. Often men cannot see the imme-
diate influence of the Church. Looking only
at the near and obvious, they might be dis-
mayed. Does the Church, with all its great
organization, with all its august inheritance
of the years, justify its lifer And then they
look abroad into the community and see the
motives of kindness, the fiowing wells of gen-
erosity, the mighty outpourings of human
compassion to meet the depths of human need,
the striving of the human conscience to slake
the thirst for a better life, and they know that
though much of our world be parched and un-
satisfied, yet, nevertheless, the great streams of
the Christian influence of the Church are go-
ing forth, and that all the best that men do
drink of in hope and faith and confidence,
traces back to the quiet places of worship, as
the springs trace back to the sweet serenity of
the trees.
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CHAPTER IX
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