riences will never narrow you. As Browning makes David say, not what we do, but what we would do, exalts us. There is always danger of a group failing at that point. Many a society organized to protest against some abuse on a campus or in a community has presently slipped into the same evil against which it protested. It is hard not to capitalize our ideals, to make amusement with our highest hopes for people who have no such hopes and so to cheapen them for ourselves. The exiles were psychologically correct in refusing to sing their songs in Babylon to show mirth (137: 3, 4). No man can use his highest hopes for cheap purposes without sacrificing them. What is the actual effect of amateur plays that ridicule the supposed ideals of the town, that take off its religious or moral life? Do they make it easier to be sincerely religious and deeply honorable, or harder? And if such things result in the cheapening of life, that only illustrates again the fact that the group is easily overcome by its environment, taking the color of its surroundings. Salt has become common earth. II Maintaining this distinctive value is all the harder when we are surrounded with other groups which have the same responsibility and have abandoned it. The little 123rd psalm is one of the "songs of ascent," connected with the pilgrimages to Jerusalem undertaken under command of religious duty by all the pious Jews. Along the way were villages or settlements of various sizes whose people had only contempt for those who still followed so trying a custom. The pilgrims as they went on found themselves sneered at by others who ought themselves to have been on the pilgrimage. Their souls were exceedingly filled with the contempt of those who were at ease, who had abandoned the difficulties of duty and had only a sneer for others who persisted in them. Or else, those who sneered were the heathen settlers among whom they had to pass, who would condemn so stupid a custom as the pilgrimage. Few men, known to any considerable body of friends, ever persistently followed the custom of church going in a university or in a city without having to face the same thing. The name of the Methodist Church is the outcome of fellow students' contempt for the group of Oxford students who persisted in being religious and maintaining their group testimony before the larger group. At the root of such sneering is the desire for the easy way of living. Religion makes demands and they are irksome to some men. Once adopt the principle that one ought not to be asked to do anything he does not feel like doing, or that he ought to reduce such demands to the minimum, and you have the whole argument against religion in a phrase. Most men find it easier to lounge around a club Sunday morning than to go to church, easier to loaf and chat in negligee than to take a place in a committee or a Bible class, and they pity the poor dubs who do not see it so. And while there are always some men who can pass that off with a jest, it goes to the very roots of the matter with other men. It was not a sword that upset Peter and made ́him deny Christ; it was being quizzed by a servant girl (Mark 14:66-70). Most of us would rather be thought bad than foolish. We would rather be denounced than ridiculed. And it is under just such conditions that we have to be on our guard that we maintain the thing that makes our existence worth while. Have you ever known any compromises in such things that have resulted well for either side of the difference? III The difficulty is increased when those who are equipped for helping will not do so. The hint of the dereliction of Ephraim (78:9-11) is worth noticing: "The children of Ephraim, being armed and carrying bows, turned back in the day of battle." Ready for war, they left their brethren in the lurch. It is the defection of the equipped that endangers everything good in the world. The marvel is that good causes prosper as they do when so many of them go shorthanded, while people armed and bearing bows turn back when the strain comes. College people are as faithful as the average, and yet there are enough college graduates, equipped to make great warfare against all the social evils, to win the victory ten times over, who have settled down into the comfortable ways of the world and are valueless when the need arises. They are not merely losses on their own ac count; they make everything harder for the men who keep in the thick of the fight. Hopes are built upon them which hurt when they fail. IV The largest group for social good ought to be the Church. We must oppose any effort to make social service a side issue of the Church's life. Speaking of it as a permissible duty, depending on whether strength and time are left after the gospel work is done, is sheer underreading of the terms of the gospel. The old question persists as it did among the Hebrews: Is the Church a body of people rescued from the world for their own sakes, blessed because God loves them peculiarly and alone; or is it a body of rescued people called together to do the work of rescuing, the whole earth to profit by God's blessing of them? A refuge or a place of inspiration for world service-which is the Church? Is Mount Zion the home of the faithful nation or the joy of the whole earth (48:2)? And if it is for the whole earth, then for what phases of the life of the earth, for all of them or for only some of them? Does it not make any difference to religion where and how a man works, whether children are educated or abused, whether immigrants are humanely or brutally treated, whether men live in houses or in warrens? Life is too closely interwoven in all its interests to be split up so that the Church may be exonerated from concern for the whole of it. Not as a side issue, but as part of its very central duty, the Church must take its relation to the larger social order within which it is placed. All the world and everything in the world is part of its business. Its line of care and its methods of correction will differ in different fields of need, but as a social group it must recognize its relation to the social order in God's world. Jesus had in hand a great enterprise which even he did not attempt to accomplish alone. He had his own unique part to do, and that he did. But the enterprise itself was laid on social lines. At the very beginning he formed a group out of which the Church has grown. That group he set squarely down in the world, knowing what their dangers were and not asking to have them escape, but asking only that they be kept true to the task and in the spirit needed for the enterprise. He wanted them to be salt that would stay salty, lights that would stay lighted, Christians who would stay Christian. In that spirit he turned them to the enterprise, setting the world before them as their field. When they fail or when evils come in the social group which they have thus far mastered, the shame is not theirs alone; it is the shame of the enterprise (79:9; 115:2). The worst thing about war in Christendom, or labor riots or drunkenness or harlotry, is not its inherent badness; it is the right it gives to non-Christian nations to sneer at the God whose worship we profess in Christendom. If this inner group of those who know Christ had kept themselves as they should, if they had pushed out their influence as they should, could these things have occurred? SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER THOUGHT AND STUDY Consider the mutual relations that should exist between a college society or fraternity or other inner group and the institution as a whole, constituting what we are here calling the social order. Go on to consider the relations that should exist between the institution considered as a social group and the general life of the world, conceived as a larger social order. What is the result of conceiving these relations as onesided? Under what conditions would it be wise to serve the interests of the group even at the cost of the order, and when would the opposite course be wise? In general, so far as you have observed, which problem presents itself oftener? CHAPTER IX God in the Social Order The writers of the psalms, like all the Hebrews of their times, have little to say about formal religion, and much to say about God, but they mean the same thing. To them religion was simply holding relation to God and religions were measured by the God to whom relation was held. Hegel's familiar statement of religion would have been fairly satisfactory to them: "Religion is a relation—a living and true connection between God and man." DAILY READINGS Ninth Week, First Day God is our refuge and strength, A very present help in trouble. Therefore will we not fear, though the earth do change, And though the mountains be shaken into the heart of the seas; Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, Though the mountains tremble with the swelling thereof. There is a river, the streams whereof make glad the city of God, The holy place of the tabernacles of the Most High. The nations raged, the kingdoms were moved: He uttered his voice, the earth melted. Jehovah of hosts is with us; The God of Jacob is our refuge. Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth. -Psalm 46: 1-7, 10. |