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Title: Leaves from the notebook of a tamed cynic
Author: Reinhold Niebuhr
Release date: March 19, 2026 [eBook #78238]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Willett, Clark & Colby, 1929
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78238
Credits: Sean – @parchmentglow
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LEAVES FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF A TAMED CYNIC ***
_Leaves
from the Notebook of a
Tamed Cynic_
REINHOLD NIEBUHR
Willett, Clark & Colby
Chicago: 440 South Dearborn Street
New York: 200 Fifth Avenue
1929
Copyright 1929 by
REINHOLD NIEBUHR
Manufactured in The U. S. A. by The Plimpton Press
Norwood, Mass.--LaPorte, Ind.
_To
my friends
and former coworkers
in
Bethel Evangelical Church
Detroit, Michigan_
_Publishers’ Note_
The author’s reluctance to have this book published is all the more
reason for the publishers’ desire to have it see the light of day. The
author felt that the book would be regarded as presumptuous criticism.
It is natural that he would feel that way, for he is one of those rare
men who see more error in themselves than they see around them.
But what is presumptuous criticism? In “Human Nature and Its Remaking,”
W. E. Hocking writes:
“Is it not true that the entire interpretation of instinct as
will to power and of the will to power as a will to save souls,
or to recreate, or reform, or educate mankind, has in it more
than a trace of presumption? What it amounts to seems to be this,
that if the complete salvation of an individual will requires the
transformation of all its instincts into the will to save others,
we must be saved by saving; and it is very doubtful whether in our
unsaved condition we have any right to suppose ourselves competent
to save.... Historically speaking, the crux of Christianity is its
element of presumption.”
This book is both an illustration of and an effort to escape the note
of presumption of which Professor Hocking speaks. Perhaps the book can
be better understood in the light of Dr. Lynn Harold Hough’s dedication
of his book “Imperishable Dreams.” The dedication is: “To my friend
Reinhold Niebuhr, in whose words and writings the younger generation
has achieved an almost disconcerting sincerity and a penetrating power
of analysis which searches the conscience and refuses the comfort of
even the most delicate and gracious spiritual self-deception.”
This is sufficient comment to lead into the book itself. Supremely
human and simple in form, this is a book which _touches life as it
is_. A questioning and open-minded young minister reports what he
sees--what he hears--what he thinks. The reader watches. Page by page
the cynic--the same cynic that is in us all--is tamed--not broken,
not forced into compromises, but tamed by the release of impulses of
sympathy, of maturer observation, of sincere analysis.
There is fine poise of judgment and delicate balancing of values
throughout these _Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic_. This
book is not abstract religious and secular philosophy. It is a report
upon life and experience--upon America in the making. It is a book
without pretense. Authority and dogma are absent. The book reveals an
honest, unhampered and penetrating mind actually at work upon the vital
problems of American civilization in their Christian import.
Willett, Clark & Colby
_Preface and Apology_
Most of the reflections recorded in these pages were prompted by
experiences of a local Christian pastorate. Some are derived from wider
contacts with the churches and colleges of the country. For the sake
of giving a better clue to the meaning of a few of them, it may be
necessary to say that they have as their background a pastorate in an
industrial community in which the natural growth of the city made the
expansion of a small church into a congregation of considerable size,
in a period of thirteen years, inevitable. By the time these lines
reach the reader the author will have exchanged his pastoral activities
for academic pursuits.
It must be confessed in all candor that some of the notes, particularly
the later ones, were written after it seemed fairly certain that
they would reach the eye of the public in some form or other. It was
therefore psychologically difficult to maintain the type of honesty
which characterizes the self-revelations of a private diary. The
reader must consequently be warned (though such a warning may be
superfluous) to discount the unconscious insincerities which no amount
of self-discipline can eliminate from words which are meant for the
public.
The notes which have been chosen for publication have been picked to
illustrate the typical problems of a modern minister in an industrial
and urban community and what seem to be more or less typical reactions
of a young minister to such problems. Nothing new or startling was
attempted in the pastorate out of which these reflections grew. If
there is any justification for their publication, it must lie in
the light they may throw upon the problems of the modern church and
ministry rather than upon any possible solutions of these problems.
The book is published with an uneasy conscience, the author half hoping
that the publishers would make short shrift of his indiscretions by
throttling the book. Some of the notes are really too inane to deserve
inclusion in any published work, and they can be justified only as a
background for those notes which deal critically with the problems of
the modern ministry. The latter are unfortunately, in many instances,
too impertinent to be in good taste, and I lacked the grace to rob them
of their impertinence without destroying whatever critical value they
might possess. I can only emphasize in extenuation of the spirit which
prompted them, what is confessed in some of the criticisms, namely,
that the author is not unconscious of what the critical reader will
himself divine, a tendency to be most critical of that in other men to
which he is most tempted himself.
The modern ministry is in no easy position; for it is committed to
the espousal of ideals (professionally, at that) which are in direct
conflict with the dominant interests and prejudices of contemporary
civilization. This conflict is nowhere more apparent than in America,
where neither ancient sanctities nor new social insights tend to
qualify, as they do in Europe, the heedless economic forces of an
industrial era.
Inevitably a compromise must be made, or is made, between the rigor
of the ideal and the necessities of the day. That has always been
the case, but the resulting compromises are more obvious to an
astute observer in our own day than in other generations. We are a
world-conscious generation, and we have the means at our disposal
to see and to analyze the brutalities which characterize men’s
larger social relationships and to note the dehumanizing effects
of a civilization which unites men mechanically and isolates them
spiritually.
Our knowledge may ultimately be the means of our redemption, but for
the moment it seems to rob us of self-respect and respect for one
another. Every conscientious minister is easily tempted to a sense of
futility because we live our lives microscopically while we are able
to view the scene in which we labor telescopically. But the higher
perspective has its advantages as well as its dangers. It saves us from
too much self-deception. Men who are engaged in the espousal of ideals
easily fall into sentimentality. From the outside and the disinterested
perspective this sentimentality may seem like hypocrisy. If it is
only sentimentality and self-deception, viewed at closer range, it
may degenerate into real hypocrisy if no determined effort is made to
reduce it to a minimum.
It is no easy task to deal realistically with the moral confusion of
our day, either in the pulpit or the pew, and avoid the appearance,
and possibly the actual peril, of cynicism. An age which obscures the
essentially unethical nature of its dominant interests by an undue
preoccupation with the application of Christian principles in limited
areas, may, as a matter of fact, deserve and profit by ruthless satire.
Yet the pedagogical merits of satire are dubious, and in any event its
weapons will be foresworn by an inside critic for both selfish and
social reasons. For reasons of self-defense he will be very gentle in
dealing with limitations which his own life illustrates.
But he will be generous in judgment for another reason. His intimate
view of the facts will help him to see that what an outside critic
may call hypocrisy may really be honest, because unconscious,
sentimentality and self-deception. When virtues are used to hide moral
limitations the critic ought not to be too sure that the virtues are
bogus. Sometimes they are. But sometimes they merely represent the
effort of honest but short-sighted men to preserve the excellencies
of another day long after these have ceased to have relevancy for the
problems of our own day; or sometimes they spring from efforts to apply
the Christian ideal to limited and immediate areas of conduct where
application is fairly easy. In such cases no one can be absolutely sure
whether it is want of perspective or want of courage which hinders the
Christian idealist from applying his ideals and principles to the more
remote and the more difficult relationships.
That the ministry is particularly tempted to the self-deceptions
which afflict the moral life of Christians today is obvious. If it is
dangerous to entertain great moral ideals without attempting to realize
them in life, it is even more perilous to proclaim them in abstract
terms without bringing them into juxtaposition with the specific social
and moral issues of the day. The minister’s premature satisfaction
in the presentation of moral ideals is accentuated by the fact that
he is a leader in a community in which appreciative attitudes are on
the whole more prevalent than critical ones. The minister is therefore
easily fooled by extravagant conceptions of his own moral stature,
held by admiring parishioners. If he could realize how much of this
appreciation represents transferred religious emotion he could be more
realistic in analyzing himself. And if he could persuade himself to
speak of moral ideals in terms of specific issues and contemporary
situations, he would probably prompt currents of critical thought which
would destroy the aura which invests his person with premature sanctity.
If a minister wants to be a man among men he need only to stop
creating devotion to abstract ideals which every one accepts in theory
and denies in practice, and to agonize about their validity and
practicability in the social issues which he and others face in our
present civilization. That immediately gives his ministry a touch of
reality and potency and robs it of an artificial prestige which it can
afford to dispense with, and is bound to be stripped of, the kind of
prestige which is the prerogative of priests and professional holy men.
The number of ministers who are perfectly realistic about their
tasks and who are sincerely anxious to help the modern generation
find itself, not only in the intricate problems of the personal life
but in the moral and social complexities of an industrial society, is
much larger than the critics outside of the church are able to know
and willing to concede. If I have any regrets, it is that these pages,
preoccupied with criticism, deal inadequately with such men and fail
to discharge my debt of gratitude to them. It is comparatively easy
for professors, secretaries and even bishops to criticise the man in
a local situation from the perspective and the safety (relative, of
course,) which an irresponsible itinerancy supplies.
No amount of pressure from an itinerant “prophet” can change the fact
that a minister is bound to be a statesman as much as a prophet,
dealing with situations as well as principles. In specific situations,
actions must be judged not only in terms of absolute standards but in
consideration of available resources in the lives of those whom the
minister leads.
It may be well for the statesman to know that statesmanship easily
degenerates into opportunism and that opportunism cannot be sharply
distinguished from dishonesty. But the prophet ought to realize that
his higher perspective and the uncompromising nature of his judgments
always has a note of irresponsibility in it. Francis of Assisi may
have been a better Christian than Pope Innocent III. But it may be
questioned whether his moral superiority over the latter was as
absolute as it seemed. Nor is there any reason to believe that Abraham
Lincoln, the statesman and opportunist, was morally inferior to William
Lloyd Garrison, the prophet. The moral achievement of statesmen must be
judged in terms which take account of the limitations of human society
which the statesman must, and the prophet need not, consider.
Having both entered and left the parish ministry against my
inclinations, I pay my tribute to the calling, firm in the conviction
that it offers greater opportunities for both moral adventure and
social usefulness than any other calling if it is entered with open
eyes and a consciousness of the hazards to virtue which lurk in it. I
make no apology for being critical of what I love. No one wants a love
which is based upon illusions, and there is no reason why we should not
love a profession and yet be critical of it.
Reinhold Niebuhr
_Leaves
from the Notebook of a
Tamed Cynic_
_1915_
There is something ludicrous about a callow young fool like myself
standing up to preach a sermon to these good folks. I talk wisely
about life and know little about life’s problems. I tell them of the
need of sacrifice, although most of them could tell me something about
what that really means. I preached a sermon the other day on “The
Involuntary Cross,” using the text of Simon the Cyrene bearing the
cross of Jesus. A good woman, a little bolder than the rest, asked me
in going out whether I had borne many crosses. I think I know a little
more about that than I would be willing to confess to her or to the
congregation, but her question was justified.
Many of the people insist that they can’t understand how a man so
young as I could possibly be a preacher. Since I am twenty-three their
reaction to my youth simply means that they find something incompatible
even between the ripe age of twenty-three and the kind of seasoned
wisdom which they expect from the pulpit. “Let no one despise thy
youth,” said Paul to Timothy; but I doubt whether that advice stopped
any of the old saints from wagging their heads. I found it hard the
first few months to wear a pulpit gown. Now I am getting accustomed
to it. At first I felt too much like a priest in it, and I abhor
priestliness. I have become reconciled to it partly as a simple matter
of habit, but I imagine that I am also beginning to like the gown as a
kind of symbol of authority. It gives me the feeling that I am speaking
not altogether in my own name and out of my own experience but by the
authority of the experience of many Christian centuries.
Difficult as the pulpit job is, it is easier than the work in the
organizations of the congregation. Where did anyone ever learn in a
seminary how to conduct or help with a Ladies Aid meeting? I am glad
that mother has come to live with me and will take care of that part
of the job. It is easier to speak sagely from the pulpit than to act
wisely in the detailed tasks of the parish. A young preacher would do
well to be heard more than he is seen.
_1915_
I am glad there are only eighteen families in this church. I have
been visiting the members for six weeks and haven’t seen all of them
yet. Usually I walk past a house two or three times before I summon
the courage to go in. I am always very courteously received, so I
don’t know exactly why I should not be able to overcome this curious
timidity. I don’t know that very much comes of my visits except that I
really get acquainted with the people.
Usually after I have made a call I find some good excuse to quit for
the afternoon. I used to do that in the days gone by when I was a book
agent. But there was reason for it then. I needed the afternoon to
regain my self-respect. Now it seems to be pure laziness and fear. The
people are a little discouraged. Some of them seem to doubt whether the
church will survive. But there are a few who are the salt of the earth,
and if I make a go of this they will be more responsible than they will
ever know.
_1915_
Now that I have preached about a dozen sermons I find I am repeating
myself. A different text simply means a different pretext for saying
the same thing over again. The few ideas that I had worked into sermons
at the seminary have all been used, and now what? I suppose that as
the years go by life and experience will prompt some new ideas and I
will find some in the Bible that I have missed so far. They say a young
preacher must catch his second wind before he can really preach. I’d
better catch it pretty soon or the weekly sermon will become a terrible
chore.
You are supposed to stand before a congregation, brimming over with
a great message. Here I am trying to find a new little message each
Sunday. If I really had great convictions I suppose they would struggle
for birth each week. As the matter stands, I struggle to find an idea
worth presenting and I almost dread the approach of a new sabbath. I
don’t know whether I can ever accustom myself to the task of bringing
light and inspiration in regular weekly installments.
How in the world can you reconcile the inevitability of Sunday and
its task with the moods and caprices of the soul? The prophet speaks
only when he is inspired. The parish preacher must speak whether he
is inspired or not. I wonder whether it is possible to live on a high
enough plane to do that without sinning against the Holy Spirit.
_1916_
Visited old Mrs. G. today and gave her communion. This was my first
experience with communion at the sick bed. I think there is a good deal
of superstition connected with the rite. It isn’t very much different
in some of its aspects from the Catholic rite of extreme unction. Yet
I will not be too critical. If the rite suggests and expresses the
emotion of honest contrition it is more than superstition. But that
is the difficulty of acting as priest. It is not in your power to
determine the use of a symbol. Whether it is a blessing or a bit of
superstition rests altogether with the recipient.
I must admit that I am losing some of the aversion to the sacraments
cultivated in my seminary days. There is something very beautiful about
parents bringing their child to the altar with a prayer of thanksgiving
and as an act of dedication. The trouble is that the old ritual in the
book of forms does not express this idea clearly. I have to put the
whole meaning of the sacrament as I see it into the prayer. Perhaps I
can use my own form later on, if I get the confidence of the people.
Incidentally Mrs. G. gave me a shock this afternoon. After the service
was completed she fished around under her pillow and brought forth a
five dollar bill. That was to pay me for my trouble. I never knew this
fee business still existed in such a form in Protestantism. I knew they
were still paying for baptism in some denominations, ours included.
But this is a new one. The old lady was a little hurt, I think, by my
refusal. I think she imagined that pity prompted my diffidence. She
insisted that she was quite able to pay. I’d better get started on
this whole fee question and make an announcement that I won’t accept
any fees for anything. I think I’ll except weddings however. Every
one takes fees for them. It will just make a scene when the groom or
best man slyly crosses your palm with a bill and you make a righteous
refusal. They never will understand. Marriage is not a sacrament
anyway. Then, too, it’s fun getting a little extra money once in a
while. But isn’t marriage a sacrament?
_1916_
Doesn’t this denominational business wear on one’s nerves? If I were
a doctor people would consult me according to the skill I had and the
reputation I could acquire. But being a minister I can appeal only to
people who are labeled as I am. Yesterday that professor I met asked me
what denomination I belonged to. Being told, he promptly pigeonholed
me into my proper place and with a superior air assumed that my mind
was as definitely set by my denominational background as is that of an
African Hottentot by his peculiar environment.
Perhaps if I belonged to a larger denomination this wouldn’t irk me
so much. I suffer from an inferiority complex because of the very
numerical weakness of my denomination. If I belonged to a large one I
might strut about and claim its glory for myself. If I give myself to
religion as a profession I must find some interdenominational outlet
for my activities. But what? Secretaries and Y.M.C.A. workers are too
inarticulate. They deal too much with machinery and too little with
ideas. I don’t want to be a chauffeur. Does that mean that I am a
minister merely because I am a fairly glib talker? Who knows?
But let us not be too cynical and too morbidly introspective. I may
find something worth saying in time and escape the fate of being a mere
talker. At any rate I swear that I will never aspire to be a preacher
of pretty sermons. I’ll keep them rough just to escape the temptation
of degenerating into an elocutionist. Maybe I had better stop quoting
so much poetry. But that is hardly the point. Plenty of sermons lack
both beauty and meaning.
_1916_
The young fellows I am trying to teach in Sunday school don’t listen
to me attentively. I don’t think I am getting very close to where they
live. Or perhaps I just haven’t learned how to put my message across.
I am constantly interrupted in my talk by the necessity of calling
someone to order. It is a good thing that I have a class like that.
I’ll venture that my sermons aren’t getting any nearer to the people,
but the little group of adults I am speaking to in the morning service
are naturally more patient or at least more polite than these honest
youngsters, and so I have less chance to find out from them how futile
I am. But that doesn’t solve the problem of how to reach those fellows.
_1916_
I had a letter from Professor L---- today suggesting that I return to
college and prepare myself for the teaching profession. A year ago I
was certain that I would do that. Now I am not so sure. Nevertheless
the academic life has its allurements. It is really simpler than
the ministry. As a teacher your only task is to discover the truth.
As a preacher you must conserve other interests besides the truth.
It is your business to deal circumspectly with the whole religious
inheritance lest the virtues which are involved in the older traditions
perish through your iconoclasm. That is a formidable task and a
harassing one; for one can never be quite sure where pedagogical
caution ends and dishonesty begins.
What is particularly disquieting to a young man in the ministry is the
fact that some of his fine old colleagues make such a virtue of their
ignorance. They are sure that there is no Second Isaiah and have never
heard that Deuteronomy represents a later development in the law. I
can’t blame them for not having all the bright new knowledge of a
recent seminarian (not quite as new as the seminarian imagines); but
the ministry is the only profession in which you can make a virtue of
ignorance. If you have read nothing but commentaries for twenty years,
that is supposed to invest you with an aura of sanctity and piety.
Every profession has its traditions and its traditionalists. But the
traditionalists in the pulpit are much more certain than the others
that the Lord is on their side.
_1917_
Next week we are going to hold our first every member canvass. They
expect me to preach a sermon which will prepare the good people to give
generously. I don’t mind that. Most people give little enough for the
church or for anything else not connected with their own pleasures.
But I don’t see how you can preach a sermon adequate to the needs of
the moment without identifying the church with the kingdom of God too
unqualifiedly. And meanwhile you are drawing your salary from the
church and remembering that if the canvass is a success there may be
an increase in salary next year. It isn’t easy to mix the business
of preaching with the business of making a living and maintain your
honesty and self-respect.
Of course every laborer is worthy of his hire. But you notice that
Paul, who insisted on that point, nevertheless prided himself on his
independence. He wanted “not yours but you.” But let us not be too
squeamish. There is old J.Q. It would do his soul good if he loosened
up a bit. One might say to him, “I want yours so that I can get you.”
_1918_
(After a trip through the war training camps.)
I hardly know how to bring order out of confusion in my mind in regard
to this war. I think that if Wilson’s aims are realized the war will
serve a good purpose. When I talk to the boys I make much of the
Wilsonian program as against the kind of diplomacy which brought on the
war. But it is easier to talk about the aims of the war than to justify
its methods.
Out at Funston I watched a bayonet practice. It was enough to make
me feel like a brazen hypocrite for being in this thing, even in a
rather indirect way. Yet I cannot bring myself to associate with the
pacifists. Perhaps if I were not of German blood I could. That may be
cowardly, but I do think that a new nation has a right to be pretty
sensitive about its unity.
Some of the good old Germans have a hard time hiding a sentiment which
borders very closely on hatred for this nation. Anyone who dissociates
himself from the cause of his nation in such a time as this ought
to do it only on the basis of an unmistakably higher loyalty. If I
dissociated myself only slightly I would inevitably be forced into
the camp of those who romanticize about the Kaiser. And the Kaiser
is certainly nothing to me. If we must have war I’ll certainly feel
better on the side of Wilson than on the side of the Kaiser.
What makes me angry is the way I kowtow to the chaplains as I visit
the various camps. Here are ministers of the gospel just as I am. Just
as I they are also, for the moment, priests of the great god Mars.
As ministers of the Christian religion I have no particular respect
for them. Yet I am overcome by a terrible inferiority complex when I
deal with them. Such is the power of a uniform. Like myself, they have
mixed the worship of the God of love and the God of battles. But unlike
myself, they have adequate symbols of this double devotion. The little
cross on the shoulder is the symbol of their Christian faith. The
uniform itself is the symbol of their devotion to the God of battles.
It is the uniform and not the cross which impresses me and others. I am
impressed even when I know that I ought not be.
What I dislike about most of the chaplains is that they assume a very
officious and also a very masculine attitude. Ministers are not used
to authority and revel in it when acquired. The rather too obvious
masculinity which they try to suggest by word and action is meant
to remove any possible taint which their Christian faith might be
suspected to have left upon them in the minds of the he-men in the
army. H---- is right. He tells me that he wants to go into the army as
a private and not as a chaplain. He believes that the war is inevitable
but he is not inclined to reconcile its necessities with the Christian
ethic. He will merely forget about this difficulty during the war. That
is much more honest than what I am doing.
_1918_
I can see one element in this strange fascination of war which men
have not adequately noted. It reduces life to simple terms. The
modern man lives in such a complex world that one wonders how his
sanity is maintained as well as it is. Every moral venture, every
social situation and every practical problem involves a whole series
of conflicting loyalties, and a man may never be quite sure that he
is right in giving himself to the one as against the other. Shall he
be just and sacrifice love? Shall he strive for beauty and do it by
gaining the social privileges which destroy his sense of fellowship
with the underprivileged? Shall he serve his family and neglect the
state? Or be patriotic to the detriment of the great family of mankind?
Shall he be diligent at the expense of his health? Or keep healthy at
the expense of the great cause in which he is interested? Shall he
be truthful and therefore cruel? Or shall he be kind and therefore a
little soft? Shall he strive for the amenities of life and make life
less robust in the process? Or shall he make courage the ultimate
virtue and brush aside the virtues which a stable and therefore soft
society has cultivated?
Out of this mesh of conflicting claims, interests, loyalties,
ideals, values and communities he is rescued by the psychology of war
which gives the state at least a momentary priority over all other
communities and which makes courage the supreme virtue. I talked to a
young captain at camp last week who told me how happy he was in the
army because he had “found himself” in military service. Our further
conversation led me to suspect that it was this simplification of life
which had really brought him happiness; that and his love of authority.
Unfortunately, all these momentary simplifications of the complexities
of life cannot be finally satisfying, because they do violence to life.
The imperiled community may for a moment claim a kind of unqualified
loyalty which no community or cause has the right or ability to
secure in normal times. But judgment returns to sobriety as events
become less disjointed and the world is once more revealed in all its
confusion of good in evil and evil in good. The imperiled community was
threatened because of its vice as much as because of its virtue, and
the diabolical foe reassumes the lineaments of our common humanity.
Physical courage is proved unequal to the task of ennobling man without
the aid of other virtues, and the same men who have been raised to
great heights by the self-forgetfulness of war have been sunk into new
depths of hatred. There is only momentary peace in an all-consuming
passion, except it be a passion for what is indubitably the best. And
what is the best?
_1919_
We had a great Easter service today. Mother made the little chapel look
very pretty, working with a committee of young women. It takes real
work to decorate such a little place, and make it really inviting. We
received our largest class of new members into the church thus far,
twenty-one in all. Most of them had no letters from other churches and
yet had been reared in some church. We received them on reaffirmation
of faith.
This matter of recruiting a membership for the church is a real
problem. Even the churches which once believed a very definite
conversion to be the sine qua non of entrance into the fellowship of
the church are going in for “decision days” as they lose confidence in
the traditional assumption that one can become a Christian only through
a crisis experience. But if one does not insist on that kind of an
experience it is not so easy to set up tests of membership. Most of
these “personal evangelism” campaigns mean little more than an ordinary
recruiting effort with church membership rather than the Christian
life as the real objective. They do not differ greatly from efforts of
various clubs as they seek to expand their membership.
Of course we make “acceptance of Jesus as your savior” the real door
into the fellowship of the church. But the trouble is that this may
mean everything or nothing. I see no way of making the Christian
fellowship unique by any series of tests which precede admission.
The only possibility lies in a winnowing process through the
instrumentality of the preaching and teaching function of the church.
Let them come in without great difficulty, but make it difficult for
them to stay in. The trouble with this plan is that it is always easy
to load up your membership with very immature Christians who will
finally set the standard and make it impossible to preach and to teach
the gospel in its full implications.
_1919_
What a picture that is of Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau settling
the fate of the world in Paris! Wilson is evidently losing his battle.
He would have done better to stay at home and throw bolts from Olympus.
If you have honest and important differences of opinion with others, it
is better to write letters than to put your feet under the same table
with them. Compromises are always more inevitable in personal contact
than in long distance negotiation.
What seems to be happening at Paris is that they will let Wilson label
the transaction if the others can determine its true import. Thus
realities are exchanged for words. There will be “no indemnities” but
of course there will be reparations; and, since the damage was great,
the reparations may be made larger than any so-called indemnity of the
past. There will be “no annexations” but there will be mandates.
Wilson is a typical son of the manse. He believes too much in words.
The sly Clemenceau sneaks new meanings into these nice words, in
which task he is probably ably helped by Mr. Lloyd George, who is
an admirable go-between, being as worldly wise as M. Clemenceau and
as evangelical as Mr. Wilson. Yet who knows? Time may yet give Mr.
Wilson the victory. Words have certain meanings of which it is hard to
rob them, and ideas may create reality in time. The league of nations
may be, for the time being, merely a league of victors but it will be
difficult to destroy the redemptive idea at the heart of it completely.
Realities are always defeating ideals, but ideals have a way of taking
vengeance upon the facts which momentarily imprison them.
On the other hand, it is always possible that diabolical facts will
so discredit the idea which they ostensibly incarnate that they will
necessitate the projection of a new idea before progress can be made.
_1919_
Visited Miss Z. at the hospital. I like to go now since she told me
that it helps her to have me pray with her. I asked the doctor about
her and he says her case is hopeless. Here faith seems really to be
functioning in lifting the soul above physical circumstance. I have
been so afraid of quackery that I have leaned over backwards trying to
avoid the encouragement of false hopes. Sometimes when I compare myself
with these efficient doctors and nurses hustling about I feel like an
ancient medicine man dumped into the twentieth century. I think they
have about the same feeling toward me that I have about myself.
It must be very satisfying to deal as an exact scientist with known
data upon which to base your conclusions. I have to work in the
twilight zone where superstition is inextricably mixed up with
something that is--well, not superstition. I do believe that Jesus
healed people. I can’t help but note, however, that a large proportion
of his cures were among the demented. If people ask me, I tell them
that religion has more therapeutic value in functional than in organic
diseases. But I don’t know whether I am altogether honest about this at
the bedside. I am still praying for health with Miss Z. But of course
I don’t leave it at that. I am trying to prepare her for the inevitable
and I think I have helped her a little in that respect.
_1919_
This sickness of Miss Z.’s is getting on my nerves. I can’t think of
anything for the rest of the day after coming from that bed of pain.
If I had more patients I suppose I would get a little more hardened.
Talk about professionalism! I suppose men get professional to save
their emotional resources. Here I make one visit in an afternoon and
get all done up. Meanwhile the doctor is making a dozen. He is less
sentimental, but probably does more good.
_1920_
I am really beginning to like the ministry. I think since I have
stopped worrying so much about the intellectual problems of religion
and have begun to explore some of its ethical problems there is more of
a thrill in preaching. The real meaning of the gospel is in conflict
with most of the customs and attitudes of our day at so many places
that there is adventure in the Christian message, even if you only play
around with its ideas in a conventional world. I can’t say that I have
done anything in my life to dramatize the conflict between the gospel
and the world. But I find it increasingly interesting to set the two in
juxtaposition at least in my mind and in the minds of others. And of
course ideas may finally lead to action.
A young woman came to me the other day in ---- and told me that my
talk on forgiveness in the C---- Church of that town several months
ago has brought about a reconciliation between her mother and sister
after the two had been in a feud for five years. I accepted the news
with more outward than inward composure. There is redemptive power in
the message! I could go on the new courage that came out of that little
victory for many a month.
I think I am beginning to like the ministry also because it gives
you a splendid opportunity to have all kinds of contacts with people
in relationships in which they are at their best. You do get tired of
human pettiness at times. But there is nevertheless something quite
glorious about folks. That is particularly true when you find them
bearing sorrow with real patience. Think of Mrs. ---- putting up with
that drunkard of a husband for the sake of her children--and having
such nice children. One can learn more from her quiet courage than from
many a book.
_1920_
Good old Gordon came to me today to advise me that so-and-so might
join the church but that he had been told that I talked considerably
on political issues and he did not like politics in church. I told my
friend that I did not like political lectures in a worship service
myself, but that every religious problem had ethical implications
and every ethical problem had some political and economic aspect. We
had quite a nice chat about it, though my explanation did not seem
altogether satisfactory. Gordon suggested that I seemed unable to get
as many “prominent” people into the church as I ought. I told him
that we had some very nice people in our church, but that I had no
particular desire or ability to cater to “prominent” people, especially
since there are plenty of churches who seem to serve this class quite
well.
This is as close as I have come to having the freedom of the pulpit
challenged, except of course by the tacit challenge of an occasional
defection from the ranks. The problem of the freedom of the pulpit is a
real one. But I am convinced that the simplest way to get liberty is to
take it. The liberty to speak on all vital questions of the day without
qualifying the message in a half dozen ways adds sufficient interest
to the otherwise stodgy sermon to attract two listeners for every
one who is lost by having some pet prejudice disarranged. But that
generalization is hardly justified by my meager experience.
_1920_
I had a great discussion in my young men’s class this morning.
Gradually I am beginning to discover that my failure with the class
was due to my talking too much. Now I let them talk and the thing is
becoming interesting. Of course it isn’t so easy to keep the discussion
steered on any track. Sometimes we talk in circles. But the fellows
are at least getting at some of the vital problems of life and I am
learning something from them. Disciplinary problems have disappeared.
The only one left is the fellow who is always trying to say something
foolish or smart in the discussion.
_1920_
I went to the funeral of Mrs. T. at St. Cecilia’s church. It must be
a grateful task to deal as a priest with the definite symbols which
the Catholic church uses and to dispense the absolute certainties with
which she assures the faithful. Of course the requiem mass contains
nothing that would be of obvious comfort to the sorrowing heart. But
the implication of the whole transaction is that the soul is now taken
up in another world in which the heartaches of this life are overcome.
I don’t think the mass is so satisfying as a well conducted Protestant
funeral service in which some cognizance is taken of the peculiar
circumstances of a great sorrow and of the unique characteristics of
the deceased. But it is certainly immeasurably superior to the average
Protestant service with its banalities and sentimentalities. Religion
is poetry. The truth in the poetry is vivified by adequate poetic
symbols and is therefore more convincing than the poor prose with which
the average preacher must attempt to grasp the ineffable.
Yet one must not forget that the truth is not only vivified but also
corrupted by the poetic symbol, for it is only one step from a vivid
symbol to the touch of magic. The priest does, after all, deal with
magic. When religion renounces magic it finds itself in the poor
workaday world trying to discover the glimpses of the eternal in the
common scene. That is not an easy task, but it is not an impossible
one. Wherefore let us envy the priest, but pity him too, meanwhile. He
has been betrayed by his magic. He has gained too easy a victory over
life’s difficulties and he helps his people to find a premature peace.
The rivers of life in Protestant religion are easily lost in the sand,
but if they really run they carry more life than holy water.
_1921_
I spoke to the ---- club today and was introduced by the chairman as a
pastor who had recently built a new church at “the impressive cost of
$170,000.” While the figure was not quite correct it gave me somewhat
of a start to find how much emphasis was placed upon what was regarded
as a great business achievement. Here was a group of business men, and
the chairman knew of no way to recommend me to them but by suggesting
that I was myself a business man of no mean ability. That would have
given the good men of my church council a laugh. Knowing how little I
had to do with the raising of the money for the new church and how I
have always failed to put on the kind of “pressure” they desired when
we were raising money, they would certainly have smiled wryly at this
eulogy.
But it is all natural enough. America worships success and so does the
world in general. And the only kind of success the average man can
understand is obvious success. There must be
“Things done that took the eye, that had the price;
O’er which from level stand,
The low world laid its hand,
Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice.”
After all the real work of a minister is not easily gauged and the
world may not be entirely wrong in using external progress as an
outward sign of an inward grace. Even those who value the real work of
the ministry sometimes express their appreciation in rather superficial
phrases. I remember when dear old ---- celebrated his twenty-fifth
anniversary the good toastmaster pathetically described his pastor’s
successful ministry by explaining that under his leadership the
congregation had “doubled its membership, installed a new organ,
built a parsonage, decorated the church and wiped out its debt.” Not
a word about the words of comfort the good pastor had spoken or the
inspiration he had given to thirsting souls.
Perhaps it is foolish to be too sensitive about these inevitable
secularizations of religious values. Let us be thankful that there
is no quarterly meeting in our denomination and no need of giving
a district superintendent a bunch of statistics to prove that our
ministry is successful.
_1921_
I visited Mrs. S. today. She is suffering from cancer and will not
live long. Her young grandson E. came home from high school just as
I was leaving. He had a question for me. The Jewish boys at school
told him Jesus was a bastard and Joseph was not his father. He also
reported that they accused him of having two Gods instead of one.
That dissolution of the Trinity into a dualism by high school boys
interested me. Even boys seem to sense that if orthodox trinitarianism
makes for polytheism it really suggests two gods rather than three.
I chided E. for remembering so poorly what he had learned in the
preparatory class and for being so irregular in church school where
these problems are discussed. I went over some of the ideas on the
humanity and the uniqueness of Jesus which we had discussed in the
class.
Meanwhile I wished that I could talk to him alone without interference
from grandma, who naïvely added her own theological mustard to the
dish. It is no easy task to build up the faith of one generation and
not destroy the supports of the religion of the other. But fortunately
the old lady didn’t get what I was driving at and so didn’t interfere
very seriously. She was thankful to me for straightening the young man
out on his theology and seemed to think that I had settled all his
difficulties by my few words. “Ich habe ihm gesagt, wart bis der Pastor
kommt. Der wird dir alles erklaeren.” It isn’t a bad idea to find
someone who has such confidence in you.
_1922_
When I sit in my study and meditate upon men and events I am critical
and circumspect. Why is it that when I arise in the pulpit I try to
be imaginative and am sometimes possessed by a kind of madness which
makes my utterances extravagant and dogmatic? Perhaps this change of
technique is due to my desire to move the audience. Audiences are not
easily moved from their lethargy by cool and critical analyses. An
appeal to the emotions is necessary and emotions are not aroused by a
careful analysis of facts but by a presentation of ideal values. I do
not mean that I disavow the critical method entirely in the pulpit.
Indeed many of my friendly critics think I am too critical to be a
good preacher. Nor am I ever very emotional. Nevertheless there is a
distinct difference between my temper in the study and my spirit in the
pulpit.
Perhaps this is as it should be. Let the study serve to reveal the
relativity of all things so that pulpit utterances do not become too
extravagant, and let the pulpit save the student from sinking in the
sea of relativities. However qualified every truth may be there is
nevertheless a portion in every truth and value which is essentially
absolute and which is therefore worth proclaiming. “All oratory,”
declares a Greek scholar, “is based on half truths.” That is why one
ought naturally to distrust and to discount the orator. On the other
hand, oratory may be the result of the kind of poetic gift which sees a
truth dissociated, for a moment at least, from all relativities of time
and circumstance and lifted into the light of the absolute.
I notice that the tendency of extravagance in the pulpit and on the
platform increases with the size of the crowd. As my congregation
increases in size I become more unguarded in my statements. Wherefore
may the good Lord deliver me from ever being a popular preacher. “Why
is it,” asked one of my elders the other day, “that your Sunday evening
sermons are more pessimistic than your morning sermons?” I think what
he really meant is that they were more critical in analyzing life’s
problems. I told him that I tried to give inspiration in the morning
and education in the evening.
But the fact is that circumstance probably affects the quality of
the message as much as purpose. A full church gives me the sense of
fighting with a victorious host in the battles of the Lord. A half
empty church immediately symbolizes the fact that Christianity is
very much of a minority movement in a pagan world and that it can be
victorious only by snatching victory out of defeat.
_1922_
Just received a pitiful letter from a young pastor who is losing his
church because he has been “too liberal.” I suppose there are churches
which will crucify a leader who tries to lead them into the modern
world of thought and life. Yet here I have been all these years in a
conservative communion and have never had a squabble about theology. I
suppose that is partly due to the fact that there were so few people
here when I came that no one had to listen to me if he didn’t like
my approach. Those who have come have associated themselves with us
because they were in general agreement with “our gospel.” They have
come, however, from conservative communions and churches. But of course
they have been mostly young people.
If preachers get into trouble in pursuance of their task of
reinterpreting religious affirmations in the light of modern knowledge
I think it must be partly because they beat their drums too loudly when
they make their retreats from untenable positions of ancient orthodoxy.
The correct strategy is to advance at the center with beating drums and
let your retreats at the wings follow as a matter of course and in the
interest of the central strategy. You must be honest, of course, but
you might just as well straighten and shorten your lines without mock
heroics and a fanfare of trumpets.
The beauty of this strategy is that there is enough power at the
center for a real advance and enough opposition for a real conflict.
If you set the message of a gospel of love against a society enmeshed
in hatreds and bigotries and engulfed in greed, you have a real but
not necessarily a futile conflict on your hands. There is enough
natural grace in the human heart to respond to the challenge of the
real message in the gospel--and enough original sin in human nature
to create opposition to it. The sorriest preachers are those who
preach a conventional morality while they try to be intellectually and
theologically radical.
Men will not make great intellectual readjustments for a gospel which
does not greatly matter. If there is real adventure at the center of
the line the reserves are drawn from the wings almost unconsciously.
_1923_
Gradually the whole horrible truth about the war is being revealed.
Every new book destroys some further illusion. How can we ever again
believe anything when we compare the solemn pretensions of statesmen
with the cynically conceived secret treaties? Here was simply a
tremendous contest for power between two great alliances of states in
which the caprice of statesmen combined with basic economic conflicts
to dictate the peculiar form of the alliances. Next time the cards
will be shuffled in a different way and the “fellowship in arms” will
consist of different fellows.
As the truth becomes known there are however some compensations for the
disillusionment. If the moral pretensions of the heroes were bogus, the
iniquity of the villains was not as malicious as it once appeared. The
Kaiser was evidently a boob who was puerile enough to permit the German
navalists to force him into policies which he did not understand.
Von Tirpitz and his crowd may have been the real villains but they
probably did not want the war so much as they wanted to glorify the
navy and themselves through it. If Poincaré was the villain, it was the
limitations of a narrow and bigoted nationalism rather than the malice
of an evil heart which prompted his policies. The poor little Czar was
the victim of a neurotic wife, and she in turn the tool of religious
fanatics and fear-tormented bureaucrats.
There doesn’t seem to be very much malice in the world. There is simply
not enough intelligence to conduct the intricate affairs of a complex
civilization. All the chief actors in the war appear now in the light
of children who played with dangerous toys. If they were criminal
it was in the sense that the weal of millions was involved in their
dangerous games and they didn’t let that fact dissuade them from their
play. All human sin seems so much worse in its consequences than in its
intentions.
But that is not a fact which justifies moral nihilism. The consequences
are obvious and inevitable enough to deter a sensitive soul from the
course which leads to destruction. Not merely ignorance but callousness
to human welfare is an ingredient in the compound of social and
personal evil.
In one sense modern civilization substitutes unconscious sins of
more destructive consequences for conscious sins of less destructive
consequences. Men try consciously to eliminate the atrocities of
society, but meanwhile they unheedingly build a civilization which is
more destructive of moral and personal values than anything intended in
a more primitive society.
_1923_
I met a wonderful parson in the little village of ----. I went there
to speak at a high school commencement. His church seemed to be an
ordinary village church, but he was undeniably the real leader of the
community. Broad sympathies had made it possible for him to transcend
the usual denominational divisions which reduce most ministers to
impotence in small communities, at least as far as wider community
leadership is concerned. There were a few other churches in town, but
he had developed so many types of cooperation between them that they
were almost a unit in their enterprise.
He had built a small church house which was a hive of activity
throughout the week. He conducted his own weekday school of religion,
spending three afternoons at the job. His influence upon the young
people was evidently a fruit of this close contact with them. He was so
happy in his work that he did not look upon big city churches as the
natural goal of his ambition. His wife and he and two little kiddies
live very modestly in a little parsonage, and the mistress of the manse
seems to find time to mother the neighborhood as well as her children.
Perhaps I am inclined to romanticize about village life. Sometimes
it is very petty and mean, I know. But the absence of great class
distinctions makes for a higher type of fellowship in church and
community than is achieved in the metropolis, and the preacher is not
tempted to placate the powerful. The modest stipend which the small
church can afford makes for simple living and the absence of social
pride. If more young fellows would be willing to go into churches like
that and not suffer from inferiority complexes because they had not
landed one of the “big pulpits,” we might put new power into the church.
Fortunately, this young fellow has an astute intelligence without being
an orator. If he were a more gifted speaker he would probably have been
“promoted”--and spoiled--long ago. I have often observed that privilege
and power tend to corrupt the simple Christian heart. I am now
convinced that to these two must be added the kind of obvious success
which the world knows how to measure. The simplicity which is preserved
because it does not meet the temptation of success is innocence rather
than virtue; but if we can’t have virtue, innocence is preferable to
moral failure.
There are successful men who have maintained a virtuous humility and
sincerity in the day of success, but the achievement is very difficult.
_1923_
In Europe
I have been spending a few days with S---- and P---- in the Ruhr
district. Flew back to London from Cologne by aeroplane. The Ruhr
cities are the closest thing to hell I have ever seen. I never knew
that you could see hatred with the naked eye, but in the Ruhr one is
under the illusion that this is possible. The atmosphere is charged
with it. The streets are filled with French soldiers in their grey-blue
uniforms. Schools have been turned into barracks. Germans turn anxious
and furtive glances upon every stranger. French officers race their
automobiles wildly through the streets with sirens blowing shrilly. If
you can gain the confidence of Germans so that they will talk they will
tell you horrible tales of atrocities, deportations, sex crimes, etc.
Imagination fired by fear and hatred undoubtedly tends to elaborate
upon the sober facts. But the facts are bad enough.
When we arrived at Cologne after spending days in the French zone
of occupation we felt as if we had come into a different world. The
obvious reluctance of the British to make common cause with the French
in the Ruhr adventure has accentuated the good will between the
British troops and the native population. But a day in Cologne cannot
erase the memory of Essen and Duesseldorf. It rests upon the mind
like a horrible nightmare. One would like to send every sentimental
spellbinder of war days into the Ruhr. This, then, is the glorious
issue for which the war was fought! I didn’t know Europe in 1914, but
I can’t imagine that the hatred between peoples could have been worse
than it is now.
This is as good a time as any to make up my mind that I am done with
the war business. Of course, I wasn’t really in the last war. Would
that I had been! Every soldier, fighting for his country in simplicity
of heart without asking many questions, was superior to those of us
who served no better purpose than to increase or perpetuate the moral
obfuscation of nations. Of course, we really couldn’t know everything
we know now. But now we know. The times of man’s ignorance God may wink
at, but now he calls us all to repent. I am done with this business. I
hope I can make that resolution stick.
Talking about the possibility of the church renouncing war, as we came
over on the boat, one of the cynics suggested that the present temper
of the church against war was prompted by nausea rather than idealism.
He insisted that the church would not be able to prove for some time
that it is really sincere in this matter. I suppose he is right; though
I do not know that one ought to be contemptuous of any experience
which leads to the truth. A pain in the stomach may sometimes serve
an ultimate purpose quite as well as an idea in the head. Yet it is
probably true that nausea finally wears off and the question will then
be whether there is a more fundamental force which will maintain a
conviction in defiance of popular hysteria.
For my own part I am not going to let my decision in regard to war
stand alone. I am going to try to be a disciple of Christ, rather
than a mere Christian, in all human relations and experiment with the
potency of trust and love much more than I have in the past.
_1923_
This has been a wonderful Christmas season. The people have been
splendid. It is fun to go into the homes and see the laughter and joy
of the children. It is rewarding to see how the people respond to our
call for Christmas giving among the poor. The church was piled high
yesterday with groceries and toys of every description. There is so
much that is good in human nature.
Of course the cynics will say that it is easier to be charitable than
to be just, and the astute social observers will note that what we give
for the needy is but a small fraction of what we spend on ourselves.
After all, the spirit of love is still pretty well isolated in the
family life. If I had a family maybe that thought would never occur to
me. The old Methodist preacher who told me some time ago that I was so
cantankerous in my spirit of criticism about modern society because I
am not married may be right. If I had about four children to love I
might not care so much about insisting that the spirit of love shall
dominate all human affairs. And there might be more value in loving the
four children than in paying lip service to the spirit of love as I do.
_1924_
A revival meeting seems never to get under my skin. Perhaps I am
too fish-blooded to enjoy them. But I object not so much to the
emotionalism as to the lack of intellectual honesty of the average
revival preacher. I do not mean to imply that the evangelists are
necessarily consciously dishonest. They just don’t know enough about
life and history to present the problem of the Christian life in its
full meaning. They are always assuming that nothing but an emotional
commitment to Christ is needed to save the soul from its sin and chaos.
They seem never to realize how many of the miseries of mankind are due
not to malice but to misdirected zeal and unbalanced virtue. They never
help the people who corrupt family love by making the family a selfish
unit in society or those who brutalize industry by excessive devotion
to the prudential virtues.
Of course that is all inevitable enough. If you don’t simplify issues
you can’t arouse emotional crises. It’s the melodrama that captivates
the crowd. Sober history is seldom melodramatic. God and the devil may
be in conflict on the scene of life and history, but a victory follows
every defeat and some kind of defeat every victory. The representatives
of God are seldom divine and the minions of Satan are never quite
diabolical.
I wonder whether there is any way of being potent oratorically without
over-simplifying truth. Or must power always be bought at the expense
of truth? Perhaps some simplification of life is justified. Every
artist does, after all, obscure some details in order to present others
in bolder relief. The religious rhetorician has a right to count
himself among, and take his standards from, the artists rather than
the scientists. The trouble is that he is usually no better than a
cartoonist.
_1924_
After preaching tonight at a union service in ---- the pastor loci
took me about to show me his “plant” (industrialism has invaded even
ecclesiastical terminology) and with obvious pride told me of all the
progress that the church had made since his advent. One of the most
disillusioning experiences which I have had with ministers is their
invariable tendency to belittle or to be unappreciative of the work
of their predecessors. If one were to take the implications of their
remarks about their churches without a grain of salt one would imagine
that every church was in an obvious state of spiritual and organic
decay before the present generation of prophets took hold of the
desperate situation. There are, of course, marked exceptions to this
rule. But there is too much of this petty jealousy of former laborers
in the vineyard of the Lord. Some of the men are probably victims of
fawning parishioners and others are just naturally petty.
_1924_
I am not surprised that most prophets are itinerants. Critics of the
church think we preachers are afraid to tell the truth because we
are economically dependent upon the people of our church. There is
something in that, but it does not quite get to the root of the matter.
I certainly could easily enough get more money than I am securing now,
and yet I catch myself weighing my words and gauging their possible
effect upon this and that person. I think the real clue to the tameness
of a preacher is the difficulty one finds in telling unpleasant truths
to people whom one has learned to love.
To speak the truth in love is a difficult, and sometimes an almost
impossible, achievement. If you speak the truth unqualifiedly, that
is usually because your ire has been aroused or because you have no
personal attachment to the object of your strictures. Once personal
contact is established you are very prone to temper your wind to the
shorn sheep. It is certainly difficult to be human and honest at the
same time. I’m not surprised that most budding prophets are tamed in
time to become harmless parish priests.
At that, I do not know what business I have carping at the good people
who are doing the world’s work and who are inevitably enmeshed to
a greater or less degree in the iniquities of society. Conscience,
Goethe has observed, belongs to the observer rather than the doer,
and it would be well for every preacher to realize that he is morally
sensitive partly because he is observing and not acting. What is
satisfying about the ministry is to note how far you can go in
unfolding the full meaning of the Christian gospel provided you don’t
present it with the implication that you have attained and are now
laying it as an obligation upon others.
If the Christian adventure is made a mutual search for truth in which
the preacher is merely a leader among many searchers and is conscious
of the same difficulties in his own experience which he notes in
others, I do not see why he cannot be a prophet without being forced
into itinerancy.
_1924_
In Europe
We began the day with a visit to the York minster and ended it with
a dinner at the Rountree cocoa works. Some of the men thought there
was more spirituality in the discussion of the ethical problems of
modern industry in which we engaged at Rountree’s than in the communion
service we heard so atrociously read in the minster. Of course the
dinner discussion was richer in ethical content, but there are
nevertheless religious values in the cathedral which one cannot find in
a discussion of ethical problems however vital.
Religion is a reaction to life’s mysteries and a reverence before the
infinitudes of the universe. Without ethical experience the infinite
is never defined in ethical terms, but the soul which is reverent and
morally vital at the same time learns how to apprehend the infinite in
terms of holiness and worships a God who transcends both our knowledge
and our conscience. The cathedral with its dim religious light, its
vaulted ceiling, its altar screen, and its hushed whispers is symbolic
of the element of mystery in religion.
Without an adequate sermon no clue is given to the moral purpose at the
heart of the mystery, and reverence remains without ethical content.
But a religion which never goes beyond a sense of awe is no less
{“more” in 1929 reprint} complete (though perhaps less serviceable)
than one which has reduced life’s ultimate and ineffable truth to a pat
little formula which a proud little man expounds before a comfortable
and complacent congregation. I am sorry that there is no more ethically
vital preaching in the cathedral, though that wretched communion
service this morning, which could help no one if he did not believe in
magic, is hardly typical of everything which happens in a cathedral.
But I am equally sorry that the sense of awe and reverence has departed
from so many of our churches.
The very appearance of many of our churches betrays the loss of
one necessary element in religion. Everything suggests the secular
rather than the religious, from the red hat of the rather too
sensuously pretty soprano soloist and the frock coat of the rather
too self-conscious parson to the comfortable pew cushions and the
splendiferous pew holders. The morning sun shines brightly into the
“auditorium” and the sun of worldly wisdom illumines the discourse of
the preacher.
Of course I know that the devotional attitude frequently destroys
clear thinking, and we need clear thinking for ethical living in a
complex civilization. But it ought not be impossible to preserve the
poetic with the scientific attitude, the mystical with the analytical,
to have both worship and instruction. I think that is what Heywood
Broun was driving at some time ago when he expressed a preference
for an “Episcopal church with an heretical sermon.” Unfortunately
the heretical, i.e., the morally vital and contemporaneous religious
instruction, does not seem to flourish in the liturgical church.
But there are men here in England who preach prophetic sermons in
cathedrals. There might be more. In America they are certainly not
numerous. But that is no reason why we should dismiss religious awe
and reverence as morally dangerous. After all, the prophetic preaching
which we hear in our “church auditoriums” is not so vigorous as to give
us any certainty that a secularized church is superior in its moral
potency.
_1924_
While visiting at the home of Mr. and Mrs. ---- today little Ralph felt
it incumbent upon himself to entertain me by putting the family dog
through his tricks. I have already forgotten the breed of the dog, but
his shaggy locks covered his eyes so completely that he seemed to be
without eyesight. Ralph told me with great eagerness that the dog would
go blind if his locks were cut to improve his eyesight. Thus nature
adjusts herself to her own inadequacies, and women of the future may
run the peril of deafness if they uncover their ears.
Ralph’s dog gave me the clue to much of our irreligion. The eyes of
so many people have been covered by superstitions and illusions that
they are not strong enough to preserve their sight in the daylight of
knowledge. Freed from their superstitions, they are blinded in the very
moment that they are given an unhindered view. They could see beauty
while they lived in twilight, but a brilliant light obscures life’s
beauty and meaning.
Of course the eye may ultimately adjust itself to the brilliance of the
light, and as men grow accustomed to the concrete and specific objects
which distract them on first sight, they will learn again to view the
whole scene and to regard all things in their relationships.
It is in relationships and in totalities that life’s meaning is
revealed.
_1924_
Since spending the summer in Europe I have been devoting the entire
fall to a development of our worship service. The various types of
ritualistic services in non-conformist churches I heard over there
appealed to me so much that I decided to imitate them. Of course the
Anglican services have their own appeal, but the technique which makes
them possible is beyond us. For some years I have been having a few
prayer responses, but now I am developing a program with litanies,
confessions, acts of praise and every other bit of liturgical beauty
and meaning by which the service can be enriched.
It’s a shame we have permitted our services to become so barren. My
only regret is that I did not wake up in time to build our church
properly for liturgical purposes. There could be much pleasure in
conducting a richly elaborated liturgical service without the restraint
of the rubrics to which the Anglicans must submit. I do not know
whether the people like the added beauty in the service as much as I
do, but many have expressed appreciation. It seems to me to make a
great deal of difference in the spiritual value of a service to have
some unison prayer with an authentic religious emotion expressed in
a well turned phrase, to have choir responses for the prayers and
moments of silence for quiet prayer.
The idea that a formless service is more spontaneous and therefore
more religious than a formal one is disproved in my own experience.
Only a very few men have ever really put me in a mood of prayer by
their “pastoral prayers.” On the other hand, a really beautiful worship
service actually gives me a mystic sense of the divine.
_1924_
Arrived in ---- today and spoke this noon to a group of liberal people.
The meeting was arranged by the secretary of the Y.W.C.A. I poked fun
at them a little for enjoying their theological liberalism so much in
this part of the country, while they were afraid of even the mildest
economic and political heresy. Of course that didn’t quite apply to the
people at the table, but it does apply to this whole section. There is
no one quite so ridiculous as a preacher who prides himself upon his
theological radicalism in a city where the theological battle was won a
generation ago, while he meanwhile speaks his convictions on matters of
economics only in anxious whispers.
I was asked to visit ---- (leading preacher) and see whether I could
not interest him in our organization. He was an interesting study. He
told me of his important connections in the city, of his tremendous
church program, of the way he had increased the budget of his church,
of his building plans, of the necessity “of fighting on one front at a
time,” of his theological battles; and he ended by declining to join
the liberal group which sought his aid.
He thought it would not be advisable, considering his heavy
responsibilities, to imperil the many great “causes” to which he was
devoting his life by identifying himself with a radical movement. I
didn’t mind his cowardice so much, though he tried to hide it, as his
vanity, which he took no pains to hide. I could just see him cavorting
weekly before his crowd of doting admirers.
Obviously one of his chief difficulties is that he is good looking. A
minister has enough temptations to vanity without bearing the moral
hazard of a handsome face. If this young fellow had only been half as
homely as old Dr. Gordon he might have a chance of acquiring a portion
of his grace. But I don’t want to drive that generalization too far. I
know one or two saintly preachers who could pose for a collar ad.
_1924_
Had a letter today informing me that the First ---- church in ---- has
called a new pastor. After trying futilely to find the right man, who
was to have as much scholarship as his predecessor and more “punch,”
they decided to raise the salary to $15,000. I don’t know whether that
was the factor which finally solved their problem, but at any rate they
have the man they want. I suppose it is not easy to get a combination
of Aristotle and Demosthenes, and on the current market, that ought to
be worth $15,000. Nevertheless there must be some limit to this matter
of oversized salaries.
There ought to be some questioning, too, about the growing tendency of
churches to build their congregations around pulpit eloquence. What
kind of fundamental ethical question can a man be eloquent about when
he draws that much cash, particularly since a Croesus or two usually
has to supply an undue proportion of it? I don’t know anything about
the prophet of the Lord who accepted this call, but I venture to
prophesy that no sinner in that pagan city will quake in his boots in
anticipation of his coming.
The idea of a professional good man is difficult enough for all of us
who are professionally engaged as teachers of the moral ideal. Of
course, “a man must live,” and it is promised that if we seek first the
kingdom and its righteousness “all these things shall be added unto
us.” But I doubt whether Jesus had a $15,000 salary in mind. If the
things that are added become too numerous they distract your attention
terribly. To try to keep your eye on the main purpose may only result
in making you squint-eyed. I hope the new prophet won’t begin his
pastorate with a sermon on the text, “I count all things but loss.”
_1924_
I was a little ashamed of what I wrote recently about ministers’
salaries, but today I was strangely justified in my criticism. Walking
into a store to buy a hat I met an old friend who told me about his new
preacher. His church had tried for a long while to secure the right
man, and then by dint of a special campaign they raised the salary
from $6,000 to $10,000. That is obviously more than most of the people
in the congregation make. He said to me with considerable pride, “You
ought to hear our new preacher. My, but he is a great talker!” Then he
came close and whispered to me out of hearing of the other customers:
“He ought to be. We are paying him ten thousand dollars.” The cynicism
was quite unconscious.
_1924_
I begin to realize how little religious faith depends upon dialectical
support. When called upon to bury some one whose life revealed
spiritual charm and moral force I can preach the hope of immortality
with conviction and power. But funerals of religious and moral
nondescripts leave me enervated. I think I could bury a brazen sinner
with more satisfaction. There is always a note of real tragedy in the
life of an obvious reprobate that gives point to a sermon. But these
Tomlinsons are a trial.
Of course, there is a good deal of pride in such an attitude, and it is
partly due to ignorance. As soon as I know the person whose death is
mourned I can enter into the occasion sympathetically. There is hardly
a soul so poor and flaccid but does not reveal some glimpse of the
eternal in its life. If I happen to lack contact with the deceased I
might well remind myself that his death is sincerely mourned by those
who are near. It is after all a glorious tribute to the qualities of
human nature that those who know us best love us most. Perhaps their
love is occasionally no more than a natural attachment which men
conceive for familiar objects.
Funerals are a terrible trial to me, but I must admit that the
stolid courage and quiet grief of most mourners is a real source of
inspiration. Only occasionally does one meet with hysterical grief and
theatrical and insincere sorrow. How desperately people brush up their
little faith in times of sorrow! It is quite easy to see that religious
faith prospers because of, and not in spite of, the tribulations of
this world. It is because this mortal life is felt as an irrelevancy
to the main purpose in life that men achieve the courage to hope for
immortality.
_1924_
We had a union Thanksgiving service today. It would have been a nice
service but for the fact that the leader could not get over the fact
that four denominations had been able to achieve unity to undertake
such a service. This was supposed to be a great advance. As a matter
of fact the people in the church were long since united in dozens of
community enterprises. The men, whatever church they belonged to,
attended the same Rotary and Kiwanis clubs and the women were members
of the same literary and review clubs.
The church has lost the chance of becoming the unifying element in
our American society. It is not anticipating any facts. It is merely
catching up very slowly to the new social facts created by economic and
other forces. The American melting pot is doing its work. The churches
merely represent various European cultures, lost in the amalgam of
American life and maintaining a separate existence only in religion.
What we accomplish in the way of church unity ought to be accepted with
humility and not hailed with pride. We are not creating. We are merely
catching up with creation.
_1924_
Going to St. Louis today a portly and garrulous gentleman sat back
of me and became very much interested in two nuns who were reading
their prayerbooks. The man, who seemed the perfect type of successful
drummer, felt very superior to the nuns. How can anyone “fall for that
stuff” in this day and age, he wanted to know in a loud whisper. “They
remind me of ghosts,” he said.
I had to admit that there was something almost unearthly about these
black figures with their white-rimmed hoods. But their faces were
kindly and human, and the face of the drummer was sensuous and florid.
Perhaps the difference between him and the nuns illustrates the quality
of our “modernity,” though I don’t want to maintain that he is the
perfect type of a modern man. But we do have a great many moderns
who are emancipated from every kind of religious discipline without
achieving any new loyalty which might qualify the brutal factors in
human life.
It is better that life incarnate some ideal value, even if mixed with
illusion, (though anything which has the spirit of love in it is not
wholly illusion) than that it should express nothing but the will to
live. My drummer thinks of himself as a modern in comparison with those
nuns. I looked at him squatting there and glanced again at the homely
but beautiful faces of the nuns and said to myself: What is modern and
what is ancient? Were there not toads before there were ghosts and
fairies?
_1924_
Bishop Williams is dead. I sit and stare at the floor while I say that
to myself and try to believe it. How strangely a vital personality
defies the facts of death. Nowhere have I seen a personality more
luminous with the Christ spirit than in this bishop who was also
a prophet. Here was a man who knew how to interpret the Christian
religion so that it meant something in terms of an industrial
civilization. His fearless protagonism of the cause of democracy in
industry won him the respect and love of the workers of the city as no
other churchman possessed it.
Yet I am afraid that it must be admitted that he didn’t change the
prevailing attitude of Detroit industry by a hair’s breadth. He even
had to offer his resignation in the face of increasing hostility to
his social views. That letter of resignation was incidentally a gem
of humble self-analysis and courageous insistence on the truth of his
doctrine.
He did not change Detroit industry but he left many of us holding our
heads more upright because of his intelligent and courageous analysis
of contemporary civilization from the perspective of a Christian
conscience. If a bishop with all his prestige could make no bigger dent
upon the prevailing mood of the city, what chance is there for the
rest of us? Perhaps the best that any of us can do is to say:
Charge once more then and be dumb,
Let the victors when they come,
When the forts of folly fall,
Find thy body by the wall.
Rejoice, said Jesus, not that the devils are subject unto you but
that your names are written in heaven. One ought to strive for the
reformation of society rather than one’s own perfection. But society
resists every effort to bring its processes under ethical restraint so
stubbornly that one must finally be satisfied with preserving one’s
moral integrity in a necessary and yet futile struggle. Of course the
struggle is never as futile as it seems from an immediate perspective.
The bishop did not change Detroit industry, but if the church
ever becomes a real agency of the kingdom of God in an industrial
civilization, his voice, though he is dead, will be in its counsels.
_1925_
When I sit through a church conference I begin to see a little more
clearly why religion is on the whole so impotent ethically, why
the achievements of the church are so meager compared to its moral
pretensions. Sermon after sermon, speech after speech is based upon the
assumption that the people of the church are committed to the ethical
ideals of Jesus and that they are the sole or at least chief agents of
redemptive energy in society.
It is very difficult to persuade people who are committed to a general
ideal to consider the meaning of that ideal in specific situations.
It is even more difficult to prompt them to consider specific ends of
social and individual conduct and to evaluate them in the light of
experience.
The church conference begins and ends by attempting to arouse an
emotion of the ideal, usually in terms of personal loyalty to the
person of Jesus, but very little is done to attach the emotion to
specific tasks and projects. Is the industrial life of our day
unethical? Are nations imperialistic? Is the family disintegrating? Are
young people losing their sense of values? If so, we are told over and
over again that nothing will help but “a new baptism of the spirit,”
a “new revival of religion,” a “great awakening of the religious
consciousness.”
But why not be specific? Why doesn’t the church offer specific
suggestions for the application of a Christian ethic to the
difficulties of our day? If that suggestion is made, the answer is that
such a policy would breed contention. It certainly would. No moral
project can be presented and no adventure made without resistance from
the traditionalist and debate among experimentalists. But besides being
more effective, such a course would be more interesting than this
constant bathing in sentimentalities. If the church could only achieve
schisms on ethical issues! They would represent life and reality. Its
present schisms are not immoral as such. They are immoral only in the
sense that they perpetuate issues which have no relevancy in our day.
_1925_
The reactions of a group of ministers to an address on the relation of
religion to modern life are always interesting. Invariably there is one
group of men who are pathetically eager to “do something about it,”
to save civilization from its perils. I think the church will compare
favorably with the university in the number of men who are not blinded
to the defects of modern life and who are not enervated by a sense of
futility. The university has plenty of men whose eyes are open, but
they despair much more easily of finding a way out than the preachers.
The ministers have not lost some of that saving grace, “the foolishness
of faith.”
Of course there is always a group of those who sit sullenly while you
harangue them. I had my eye fixed on one portly and prosperous priest
today who was obviously out of accord with what I was saying. Of course
I have no right to judge him because he did not agree with me. But he
seemed to me to be one of those satisfied and complacent chaplains who
has fed so long at the flesh-pots of Egypt that he resents anything
which disturbs his ease. A man like that reminds me of the eunuchs of
old who were robbed of their virility that they might adorn without
endangering their masters’ luxurious establishments.
The old gentleman was there too who wanted to know whether I believed
in the deity of Jesus. He is in every town. He seemed to be a nice
sort, but he wanted to know how I could speak for an hour on the
Christian church without once mentioning the atonement. Nothing, said
he, but the blood of Jesus would save America from its perils. He made
quite an impassioned speech. At first I was going to answer him but it
seemed too useless. I finally told him I believed in blood atonement
too, but since I hadn’t shed any of the blood of sacrifice which it
demanded I felt unworthy to enlarge upon the idea.
_1925_
We went through one of the big automobile factories today. So
artificial is life that these factories are like a strange world to
me though I have lived close to them for many years. The foundry
interested me particularly. The heat was terrific. The men seemed
weary. Here manual labor is a drudgery and toil is slavery. The men
cannot possibly find any satisfaction in their work. They simply work
to make a living. Their sweat and their dull pain are part of the price
paid for the fine cars we all run. And most of us run the cars without
knowing what price is being paid for them.
Looking at these men the words of Markham’s “The Man with the Hoe” came
to me. A man with a hoe is a happy creature beside these suffering
souls.
“The emptiness of ages in his face”
· · · · · · · · ·
“Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?”
We are all responsible. We all want the things which the factory
produces and none of us is sensitive enough to care how much in human
values the efficiency of the modern factory costs. Beside the brutal
facts of modern industrial life, how futile are all our homiletical
spoutings! The church is undoubtedly cultivating graces and preserving
spiritual amenities in the more protected areas of society. But it
isn’t changing the essential facts of modern industrial civilization by
a hair’s breadth. It isn’t even thinking about them.
The morality of the church is anachronistic. Will it ever develop a
moral insight and courage sufficient to cope with the real problems of
modern society? If it does it will require generations of effort and
not a few martyrdoms. We ministers maintain our pride and self-respect
and our sense of importance only through a vast and inclusive
ignorance. If we knew the world in which we live a little better we
would perish in shame or be overcome by a sense of futility.
_1925_
The new parish organization seems to be working splendidly. The
congregation is divided into nine sections, each with a man and woman
as parish leaders. Each section meets twice a year in cottage meetings,
and meanwhile the leaders and their assistants visit the various
families, particularly the new members and those who are sick. Some
splendid new leaders have already been developed by this plan. Since I
must be absent from the city so much, the plan is all the more valuable.
Last Sunday we discussed in the class whether a church ought to develop
fellowship for its own sake or whether fellowship ought to be the
inevitable by-product of unifying convictions. I suppose a small church
in a hostile environment would not have to worry about fellowship. If
people fight shoulder to shoulder they will be brothers. But even the
most heroic church is not so definitely in conflict with the society in
which it lives that you can really count on that kind of fellowship.
A local congregation is, after all, a social organism in which heroic
idealism is expressed in an occasional adventure, if at all, rather
than in a constant tension between its principles and the moral
mediocrities of the world.
Meanwhile, it seems to me to be worth while to cultivate the graces of
neighborliness merely for their own sake. This is particularly true in
the large city where life is so impersonal and where the church has a
fine opportunity to personalize it a little. What surprises me is the
readiness with which people give themselves to various forms of mutual
aid once they are prompted to engage in them.
Most people lack imagination much more than they lack good will. If
someone points out what can be done and what ought to be done there is
usually someone to do it.
_1925_
On a Western Trip
Out here on the Pacific coast, particularly in Los Angeles, one is
forcibly impressed with the influence of environment upon religion.
Every kind of cult seems to flourish in Los Angeles, and most of them
are pantheistic. Every sorry oriental religious nostrum is borrowed
in the vain effort to give meaning to pointless lives and to impart a
thrill to vacuous existences. The pantheism is partly due, no doubt,
to the salubrious nature of the southern California climate. Wherever
nature is unusually benignant, men tend to identify God and the natural
world and to lose all moral vigor in the process.
But that is hardly the whole explanation. There are too many retired
people in Los Angeles. They left the communities where their
personalities had some social significance in order to vegetate on
these pleasant shores. In this sorry and monotonous existence they try
to save their self-respect by grasping for some religious faith which
will not disturb their ease by any too rigorous ethical demands. Of
course Aimee Semple McPherson is more successful than the pantheistic
cults. She fights the devil and gives the people a good show. She
storms against the vices which flourish in this paradise without
touching their roots. Furthermore she has the art of casting the glow
of religious imagination over sensuality without changing its essential
nature. In that art she seems to be typical rather than unique for this
whole civilization. If she is unique it is only in her success.
They are always telling me that Detroit is the most typically American
of our cities. Perhaps Detroit is typical of the America which works
feverishly to get what it wants, while Los Angeles is typical of
the America which has secured what it wants. On the whole I prefer
the former to the latter. An honest enthusiasm even for inadequate
ends is better than a vacuous existence from which even the charm
of an imperfect ambition has departed. Of course the paganism of
power is more dangerous than the paganism of pleasure, but from the
perspective of a mere observer it is more interesting. Who would not
prefer Napoleon to his imbecile brothers who merely luxuriated in the
prosperity created by his ambition?
Only in the case of complete innocency, as that of a child’s, is life
more beautiful in repose than in activity. Character is created by
a balance of tensions, and is more lovely even when the balance is
imperfect than in a state of complete relaxation.
Of course Los Angeles has more culture than our midwestern cities.
Culture flourishes in leisure and sometimes redeems it. But it will
be a long time before this kind of leisure will produce more than
dilettantism.
_1925_
We had a communion service tonight (Good Friday) and I preached on the
text “We preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and
to the Gentiles foolishness, but to them that are called the power of
God and the wisdom of God.” I don’t think I ever felt greater joy in
preaching a sermon. How experience and life change our perspectives! It
was only a few years ago that I did not know what to make of the cross;
at least I made no more of it than to recognize it as a historic fact
which proved the necessity of paying a high price for our ideals. Now I
see it as a symbol of ultimate reality.
It seems pathetic to me that liberalism has too little appreciation of
the tragedy of life to understand the cross and orthodoxy insists too
much upon the absolute uniqueness of the sacrifice of Christ to make
the preaching of the cross effective. How can anything be uniquely
potent if it is absolutely unique? It is because the cross of Christ
symbolizes something in the very heart of reality, something in
universal experience that it has its central place in history. Life
is tragic and the most perfect type of moral beauty inevitably has at
least a touch of the tragic in it. Why? That is not so easy to explain.
But love pays such a high price for its objectives and sets its
objectives so high that they can never be attained. There is therefore
always a foolish and a futile aspect to love’s quest which give it the
note of tragedy.
What makes this tragedy redemptive is that the foolishness of love is
revealed as wisdom in the end and its futility becomes the occasion for
new moral striving. About heroes, saints, and saviors it must always
remain true “that they, without us should not be made perfect.”
_1925_
I wonder if the strong sense of frustration which comes over me so
frequently on Sunday evening and to which many other parsons have
confessed, is merely due to physical lassitude or whether it arises
from the fact that every preacher is trying to do a bigger thing
than he is equal to--and fails. I have an uneasy feeling that it may
be native honesty of the soul asserting itself. Aren’t we preachers
talking altogether too much about what can be proved and justified only
in experience?
_1925_
Mr. ---- spoke at a luncheon meeting today. He made everyone writhe as
he pictured the injustices and immoralities of our present industrial
system. The tremendous effect of his powerful address was partially
offset by the bitterness with which he spoke and by the ill-concealed
assumption that his hearers would not care enough about what he said to
change their attitudes. I suppose it is difficult to escape bitterness
when you have the eyes to see and the heart to feel what others are too
blind and too callous to notice. The mordant note in the discourse of
the prophet may not only be inevitable but pedagogically effective.
Perhaps there is no other way to arouse a people who are so oblivious
to the real issues of modern civilization. Yet I am compelled to doubt
the pedagogical benefits of this approach. While I use it myself,
sometimes I don’t like to have it used on me. It freezes my soul. And
there is usually some injustice, some insupportable generalization,
involved in this method which obsesses my mind and makes it difficult
for me to see the general truth with which the speaker wants to impress
me.
If I had to choose between this bitterness and the blandness of many
pulpiteers I would, of course, choose the former. Better a warrior’s
grimness than the childish sentimentalities of people who are too
ignorant or too selfish to bear the burdens of the world. There are too
many men in the pulpit who look and act for all the world like cute
little altar boys who have no idea that the mass in which they are
participating is a dramatization of tragedy.
Yet there seems to be no reason why a warrior ought not maintain his
effectiveness and yet overcome his bitterness, particularly if he is
a warrior who is fighting “not against flesh and blood but against
spiritual wickedness in high places.” The one certain cure for a bitter
spirit seems to me a realization that the critic is himself involved in
the sins which he castigates. Man is imperialistic and even parasitic
in his nature. He lives his life at the expense of other lives. By both
outer compulsion and inner restraint, his expansive desires are brought
under sufficient discipline to make social life possible.
But there is no social life, not even in the family, which does
not illustrate this native imperialism in life. Look at all these
professional people, preachers, professors and doctors! Even in the
moment in which they declare their superiority over the commercial
world, where life is more frankly selfish and more obviously brutal,
they illustrate the common human frailty by some petty jockeying for
position, or some jealous depreciation of the success of others, or
some childish ego-assertion.
The pessimist might draw the conclusion from this fact that we can make
progress only by a reorganization of society and never by a reformation
of human nature. But that conclusion does not seem to me to follow from
the facts. We do need a constant reorganization of social processes and
systems, so that society will not aggravate but mitigate the native
imperialistic impulses of man. The greed of modern civilization is
partly an expression of a universal human tendency and partly a vice
peculiar to a civilization with our kind of productive process.
But meanwhile we can not afford to leave the capacities of man out of
the picture. There seems to me no reason why we can not cure people of
greed by making them conscious of both the nature and the consequences
of their expansive tendencies. Only we ought to realize, while we are
doing it, that our own life reveals some refined form of the sin which
we abhor. That will make it possible to undertake the task of world
regeneration with a spirit of patience and humility.
The modern pulpit does not face this problem because it is not really
preaching repentance. Its estimate of human nature is too romantic
to give people any appreciation of the brutalities of life which are
frequently most real where they are most covert--in the lives of the
respectable classes. But whenever a prophet is born, either inside or
outside of the church, he does face the problem of preaching repentance
without bitterness and of criticising without spiritual pride.
It is a real problem. Mr. ---- is effective, after a fashion, because
he is an itinerant. We only have to hear him once in so many years.
But think of sitting Sunday after Sunday under some professional holy
man who is constantly asserting his egotism by criticising yours. I
would rebel if I were a layman. A spiritual leader who has too many
illusions is useless. One who has lost his illusions about mankind and
retains his illusions about himself is insufferable. Let the process of
disillusionment continue until the self is included. At that point, of
course, only religion can save from the enervation of despair. But it
is at that point that true religion is born.
_1926_
Preachers who are in danger of degenerating into common scolds might
learn a great deal from H----’s preaching style. I am not thinking
now of the wealth of scholarship which enriches his utterances but
of his technique in uniting religious emotion with aspiration rather
than with duty. If he wants to convict Detroit of her sins he preaches
a sermon on “the City of God,” and lets all the limitations of this
get-rich-quick metropolis emerge by implication. If he wants to flay
the denominationalism of the churches he speaks on some topic which
gives him the chance to delineate the ideal and inclusive church.
On the whole, people do not achieve great moral heights out of a sense
of duty. You may be able to compel them to maintain certain minimum
standards by stressing duty, but the highest moral and spiritual
achievements depend not upon a push but upon a pull. People must be
charmed into righteousness. The language of aspiration rather than that
of criticism and command is the proper pulpit language. Of course it
has its limitations. In every congregation there are a few perverse
sinners who can go into emotional ecstasies about the “City of God” and
yet not see how they are helping to make their city a hell-hole.
It is not a good thing to convict sin only by implication. Sometimes
the cruel word of censure must be uttered. “Woe unto you Scribes and
Pharisees, hypocrites” was spoken by one who incarnated tenderness. The
language of aspiration is always in danger of becoming soft; but it is
possible to avoid that pitfall and yet not sink into a habit of cheap
scolding. I like the way H---- does it.
_1926_
Cynics sometimes insinuate that you can love people only if you don’t
know them too well; that a too intimate contact with the foibles and
idiosyncrasies of men will tempt one to be a misanthrope. I have not
found it so. I save myself from cynicism by knowing individuals, and
knowing them intimately. If I viewed humanity only from some distant
and high perspective I could not save myself from misanthropy. I think
the reason is simply that people are not as decent in their larger
relationship as in their more intimate contacts.
Look at the industrial enterprise anywhere and you find criminal
indifference on the part of the strong to the fate of the weak.
The lust for power and the greed for gain are the dominant note in
business. An industrial overlord will not share his power with his
workers until he is forced to do so by tremendous pressure. The middle
classes, with the exception of a small minority of intelligentsia, do
not aid the worker in exerting this pressure. He must fight alone.
The middle classes are in fact quite incapable of any high degree of
social imagination. Their experience is too limited to give them a
clear picture of the real issues in modern industrial life. Non-union
mines may organize in West Virginia and reduce miners to a starvation
wage without challenging the conscience of a great middle class nation.
If the children of strikers are starving it is more difficult to find
support for them than to win contributors for the missions of the
church. America may arouse the resentment of the world by its greed
and all the good people of the American prairie will feel nothing but
injured innocence from these European and Asiatic reactions to our
greed.
Men are clearly not very lovely in the mass. One can maintain
confidence in them only by viewing them at close range. Then one may
see the moral nobility of unselfish parenthood, the pathetic eagerness
of father and mother to give their children more of life than they
enjoyed; the faithfulness of wives to their erring husbands; the
grateful respect of mature children for their old parents; the effort
of this and that courageous soul to maintain personal integrity in a
world which continually tempts to dishonesty, and the noble aspirations
of hearts that must seem quite unheroic to the unheeding world.
The same middle classes which seem so blind to the larger moral
problems of society have, after all, the most wholesome family life of
any group in society.
_1926_
Here is a preacher whom I have suspected of cowardice for years because
he never deviated by a hair’s breadth from the economic prejudices
of his wealthy congregation. I thought he knew better but was simply
afraid to speak out and seek to qualify the arch-conservatism of
his complacent crowd with a little Christian idealism. But I was
mistaken. I have just heard that he recently included in his sermon a
tirade against women who smoke cigarettes and lost almost a hundred
of his fashionable parishioners. He is evidently not lacking courage
in matters upon which he has deep convictions. Nobody, for that
matter, lacks courage when convictions are strong. Courage is simply
the rigorous devotion to one set of values against other values and
interests.
Protestantism’s present impotence in qualifying the economic and
social life of the nation is due not so much to the pusillanimity of
the clerical leaders as to its individualistic traditions. The church
honestly regards it of greater moment to prevent women from smoking
cigarettes than to establish more Christian standards in industrial
enterprise. A minister who tries to prevent fashionable women from
smoking cigarettes is simply trying to enforce a code of personal habit
established in the middle classes of the nineteenth century upon the
plutocratic classes of the twentieth century. The effort is not only
vain but has little to do with essential Christianity.
I would not deny that some real values may be at stake in such
questions of personal habits. But they affect the dominant motives
which determine the spirituality or sensuality of character but
slightly. The church does not seem to realize how unethical a
conventionally respectable life may be.
_1926_
Some of these young business men in the congregation would compare
favorably with any leaders who grace the pulpits of our churches. Their
family relations seem to be almost ideal. They are trying honestly
to live a Christian life in their business relations. Lack of power
sometimes means that they cannot go as far in experimenting with
Christian values as they would like. But they are not complacent. They
are eager to learn, and are fair and careful in their judgments. Their
virtues are acquired with less self-conscious effort than those of
more studious people. They think and plan, but they do not stop the
adventure of life to meditate upon its difficulties and inadequacies.
Extravert people are on the whole happier and more wholesome than the
introverts. If they do not act too unreflectively, they are able to
define their goals fairly accurately and they certainly pursue them
with more robust energy than do the moody intellectuals.
It is surprising, too, how considerate and generous they are in their
relations with one another and with me. They take my impetuosities
for granted and exhibit little pettiness in their dealings with one
another. The women do not get along quite so well together. They are
too new at playing the game of life with others. But I will not
belabor that point. I may be exhibiting bachelor prejudices in making
it. At any rate I am willing to compare this group of young men who
bear the burdens of our church with any faculty group in the country.
They can teach you nothing about philosophy, but they do teach you much
about life and they reënforce your confidence in human nature.
_1926_
After Attending a Jewish-Christian Conference
Fellowship with peoples of other religious groups always results in
the grateful experience of discovering unsuspected treasuries of
common sentiment and conviction. More contact between enlightened Jews
and Christians would change the emphasis in many a Christian homily.
This conference was rewarding in many ways. But at one point I fail
absolutely to understand my Jewish friends. All of them, high and low,
intelligent and those who are less so, insist that the story of the
crucifixion is the real root of all or of most antisemitism, and they
seem to have some vain hope that broadminded Christians will be able
and willing to erase the story of the cross from the gospel record. The
least they expect is that the odium of the cross be placed upon the
Romans rather than the Jews.
I can see that there would be some advantage in ascribing a historic
sin to a people who live only in history and who can therefore not
be victimized by belated vindictive prejudices. But would that be
history? The record is pretty plain and the fact that the Jewish elders
rather than Roman soldiers were the real crucifiers is supported not
only by evidence but by logic. The prophets of religion are always
martyred by the religious rather than by the irreligious. The Romans,
being irreligious, were not sufficiently fanatical to initiate the
crucifixion.
It must be admitted that the phraseology of the Fourth Gospel may
easily incite the prejudices of the ignorant. But the enlightened will
find a better method to allay any antisemitic feeling which may result
from the record than to ascribe the crucifixion to the Romans. They
need only ascribe it to the general limitations of human nature and
society. Jews are not the only people who martyr and who have martyred
their prophets. The history of every nation and every people makes the
crucifixion a perennial and a universal historical fact.
That is the very reason why Christians can no more afford to eliminate
the cross than they can ascribe it to the fortunately extinct
Romans. Anyone who incarnates the strategy of love as Jesus did
meets the resistance and incites the passions of human society. The
respectabilities of any human society are based upon moral compromises
and every community is as anxious to defend these compromises against
the prophet who presents some higher moral logic as against the
criminal who imperils the structure from below.
The cross is central in the Christian religion, moreover, because it
symbolizes a cosmic as well as an historic truth. Love conquers the
world, but its victory is not an easy one. The price of all creativity
and redemption is pain. Most modern religionists who understand the God
of creation and not the God of redemption fail in understanding the
latter precisely because they do not see how closely related creation
and redemption are. Which simply means that they don’t understand that
creation is a painful process in which the old does not give way to the
new without trying to overcome it.
The cross of Jesus is truly the most adequate symbol of both the
strategy and the destiny of love not only in history but in the
universe. We may grant our Jewish brethren that it is not the only
possible symbol of eternal verities, but it is a true one, and it
cannot therefore be sacrificed.
Incidentally, I believe that Jewish people have a tendency to
overestimate the religious bases of antisemitism. Racial rather than
religious prejudice is the dominant factor in this social disease.
All ignorant people hate or fear those who deviate from their type.
Religious divergences may be as important as cultural and physical
differences, but they are not dominant. The Jews could accept our
religion and if they maintained their racial integrity they would
still suffer from various types of social ostracism. After all the
Negroes are Christian, but that hasn’t helped them much. Some Jews
dislike this comparison very much. They do not like to be put upon
the same basis with the Negroes. But that reveals unrealistic social
analysis. The majority group is intolerant of minorities whether their
culture is inferior, superior or equal.
_1926_
One is hardly tempted to lose confidence in the future after listening
to a group of young people discussing the important problems of life.
Of course the number who approach the future reflectively and with real
appreciation for the issues involved in the readjustment of traditions
to new situations is not large. There are not many such groups and even
in these the number who really take part in the discussion is small.
Nevertheless their wholesomeness is impressive. I can’t always withhold
a sense of pity for them. With traditions crumbling and accepted
standards inundated by a sea of moral relativity, they have a desperate
task on their hands to construct new standards adequate for their
happiness. There is always the temptation to be too rebellious or too
traditional, to be scornful of the old standard even when it preserves
obvious virtues, or to flee to it for fear of being lost in the
confusion of new standards. Yet the best way of avoiding these dangers
is to subject them to the scrutiny of a thoughtful group which knows
how to discern the limitations of any position, old or new.
On the whole the discussions of our young people at the church seem to
be more wholesome than those in which I participate in the colleges.
Most of these young folks have assumed responsibilities and are
therefore not as inclined to be morbidly critical and sceptical as
the college group. The cases cited from their own experience help to
give vitality to their discussion, and they are not enervated by that
extreme sophistication which imperils the college youth and tempts
him to end every discussion and discount every discovery with the
reflection, “This also is vanity.”
I really wonder how we are going to build a civilization sufficiently
intelligent to overcome dangerous prejudices and to emancipate itself
from the inadequacies of conventional morality without creating the
kind of sophistication which destroys all values by its scepticism and
dampens every enthusiasm by its cynicism. In America that possibility
is particularly dangerous because our intellectualism is of the
sophomoric type. There is no generation, or only one generation,
between the pioneers who conquered the prairies and these youngsters
who are trying to absorb the whole of modern culture in four years. The
traditions against which they react are less adequate, less modified by
experience and culture, than those which inform the peoples of Europe.
And the teachers who guide them into the world of new knowledge are
frequently themselves so recently emancipated that they try to obscure
their cultural, religious and moral heritages by extreme iconoclasm.
It is difficult to be patient with one of these smart aleck Ph.D.s
on a western campus who imagines that he can impress the world with
his learning by being scornful of everything that was thought or done
before this century.
_1926_
A letter from Hyde brings the sad news that C---- has lost his
pastorate. I am not surprised. He is courageous but tactless.
Undoubtedly he will regard himself as one of the Lord’s martyrs.
Perhaps he is. Perhaps loyalty to principle will always appear as
tactlessness from the perspective of those who don’t agree with you.
But I agree with C---- and still think him wanting in common sense. At
least he is pedagogically very awkward.
You can’t rush into a congregation which has been fed from its very
infancy on the individualistic ethic of Protestantism and which is
immersed in a civilization where ethical individualism runs riot, and
expect to develop a social conscience among the people in two weeks.
Nor have you a right to insinuate that they are all hypocrites just
because they don’t see what you see.
Of course it is not easy to speak the truth in love without losing a
part of the truth, and therefore one ought not be too critical of those
who put their emphasis on the truth rather than on love. But if a man
is not willing to try, at least, to be pedagogical, and if in addition
he suffers from a martyr complex, he has no place in the ministry.
Undoubtedly there are more ministers who violate their conscience than
such as suffer for conscience sake. But that is no reason why those
who have a robust conscience should not try to master the pedagogical
art. Perhaps if they would learn nothing else but to be less emotional
and challenging in the pulpit and more informative and educational not
only in the pulpit but in their work with smaller groups, they could
really begin to change the viewpoints and perspectives of their people.
_1926_
Spoke tonight to the Churchmen’s Club of ----. The good Bishop who
introduced me was careful to disavow all my opinions before I uttered
them. He assured the brethren, however, that I would make them think.
I am getting tired of these introductions which are intended to
impress the speaker with the Christian virtue of the audience and its
willingness to listen to other then conventional opinions. The chairman
declares in effect, “Here is a hairbrained fellow who talks nonsense.
But we are Christian gentlemen who can listen with patience and
sympathy to even the most impossible opinions.” It is just a device to
destroy the force of a message and to protect the sensitive souls who
might be rudely shocked by a religious message which came in conflict
with their interests and prejudices.
There is something pathetic about the timidity of the religious leader
who is always afraid of what an honest message on controversial
issues might do to his organization. I often wonder when I read the
eleventh chapter of Hebrews in which faith and courage are practically
identified whether it is psychologically correct to assume that the one
flows from the other. Courage is a rare human achievement. If it seems
to me that preachers are more cowardly than other groups; that may be
because I know myself. But I must confess that I haven’t discovered
much courage in the ministry. The average parson is characterized by
suavity and circumspection rather than by any robust fortitude. I do
not intend to be mean in my criticism because I am a coward myself and
find it tremendously difficult to run counter to general opinion. Yet
religion has always produced some martyrs and heroes.
I suppose religion in its most vital form does make men indifferent to
popular approval. The apostle Paul averred that it was a small thing
to be judged of men because he was seeking the approval of God. In
a genuinely religious soul faith does seem to operate in that way.
Issues are regarded _sub specie aeternitatis_ and the judgment of
contemporaries becomes insignificant. But the average man fashions his
standards in the light of prevailing customs and opinions. It could
hardly be expected that every religious leader would be filled with
prophetic ardor and heedless courage. Many good men are naturally
cautious. But it does seem that the unique resource of religion ought
to give at least a touch of daring to the religious community and the
religious leader.
_1926_
The excitement about the Federation of Labor convention in Detroit
has subsided, but there are echoes of the event in various magazines.
Several ministers have been commended for “courage” because they
permitted labor leaders to speak in their churches who represented
pretty much their own convictions and said pretty much what they had
been saying for years.
It does seem pretty bad to have the churches lined up so solidly
against labor and for the open shop policy of the town. The ministers
are hardly to blame, except if they are to be condemned for not
bringing out the meaning of Christianity for industrial relations more
clearly in their ministry previous to the moment of crisis. As it
was, few of the churches were sufficiently liberal to be able to risk
an heretical voice in their pulpits. The idea that these A. F. of L.
leaders are dangerous heretics is itself a rather illuminating clue
to the mind of Detroit. I attended several sessions of the convention
and the men impressed me as having about the same amount of daring and
imagination as a group of village bankers.
The ministers of the country are by various methods dissociating
themselves from the Detroit churches and are implying that they would
have acted more generously in a like situation. Perhaps so. There
are few cities in which wealth, suddenly acquired and proud of the
mechanical efficiency which produced it, is so little mellowed by
social intelligence. Detroit produces automobiles and is not yet
willing to admit that the poor automata who are geared in on the
production lines have any human problems.
Yet we differ only in degree from the rest of the country. The
churches of America are on the whole thoroughly committed to the
interests and prejudices of the middle classes. I think it is a bit of
unwarranted optimism to expect them to make any serious contribution
to the reorganization of society. I still have hopes that they will
become sufficiently intelligent and heroic to develop some qualifying
considerations in the great industrial struggle, but I can no longer
envisage them as really determining factors in the struggle. Neither am
I able for this reason to regard them as totally useless, as some of
the critics do.
The ethical reconstruction of modern industrial society is, to be sure,
a very important problem, but it is not the only concern of mankind.
The spiritual amenities and moral decencies which the churches help
to develop and preserve in the private lives of individuals are worth
something for their own sake. Yet it must be obvious that if anyone
is chosen by talent and destiny to put his life into the industrial
struggle, the church is hardly his best vehicle.
The church is like the Red Cross service in war time. It keeps life
from degenerating into a consistent inhumanity, but it does not
materially alter the fact of the struggle itself. The Red Cross neither
wins the war nor abolishes it. Since the struggle between those who
have and those who have not is a never-ending one, society will always
be, in a sense, a battleground. It is therefore of some importance that
human loveliness be preserved outside of the battle lines. But those
who are engaged in this task ought to realize that the brutalities of
the conflict may easily negate the most painstaking humanizing efforts
behind the lines, and that these efforts may become a method for
evading the dangers and risks of the battlefield.
If religion is to contribute anything to the solution of the industrial
problem, a more heroic type of religion than flourishes in the average
church must be set to the task. I don’t believe that the men who are
driven by that kind of religion need to dissociate themselves from the
churches, but they must bind themselves together in more effective
association than they now possess.
_1926_
After preaching at ---- University this morning I stopped off at ----
and dropped in at the Presbyterian church for the evening service. The
service was well attended and the music was very good. The minister had
a sermon which might best be described as a fulsome eulogy of Jesus
Christ. I wonder whether sermons like that mean anything. He just piled
up adjectives. Every hero of ancient and modern times was briefly
described in order that he might be made to bow before the superior
virtue of the Lord. But the whole thing left me completely cold.
The superiority of Jesus was simply dogmatically asserted and never
adequately analyzed. There was not a thing in the sermon that would
give the people a clue to the distinctive genius of Jesus or that would
help them to use the resources of his life for the solution of their
own problems.
Through the whole discourse there ran the erroneous assumption that
Christians are real followers of Jesus and no effort was made to
describe the wide chasm which yawns between the uncompromising idealism
of the Galilean and the current morality. I wonder how many sermons of
that type are still being preached. If that sermon is typical it would
explain much of the conventional tameness of the church.
How much easier it is to adore an ideal character than to emulate it.
_1926_
That resolution we passed in our pastors’ meeting, calling upon the
police to be more rigorous in the enforcement of law, is a nice
admission of defeat upon the part of the church. Every one of our
cities has a crime problem, not so much because the police are not
vigilant as because great masses of men in an urban community are
undisciplined and chaotic souls, emancipated from the traditions which
guided their fathers and incapable of forming new and equally potent
cultural and moral restraints. The children of the puritans are in
this respect no better than the children of the immigrants. Both have
reacted against traditions which do not fit their new circumstances and
both are unable to escape license by new and better standards.
Perhaps the real reason that we live such chaotic lives in urban
communities is because a city is not a society at all, and moral
standards are formed only in societies and through the sense of mutual
obligation which neighbors feel for one another. A big city is not a
society held together by human bonds. It is a mass of individuals, held
together by a productive process. Its people are spiritually isolated
even though they are mechanically dependent upon one another. In such
a situation it is difficult to create and preserve the moral and
cultural traditions which each individual needs to save his life from
anarchy.
All of us do not live in moral chaos. But in so far as we escape it,
it is due to our loyalty to religious, moral and cultural traditions
which have come out of other ages and other circumstances. That is
why churches, Protestant, Catholic and Jewish, however irrelevant
their ethical idealism may be to the main facts of an industrial
civilization, are nevertheless indispensable. It is enough that our
society should be morally chaotic without also losing the kind of moral
restraint which still determines the life of many individuals.
There is something very pathetic about the efforts of almost every one
of our large cities to restore by police coercion what has been lost by
the decay of moral and cultural traditions. But of course we do have
to save ourselves from anarchy, even if it must be done by force. Only
I think the church would do well to leave the police problem alone. If
violence must be used temporarily, let the state do so without undue
encouragement from the church. The church must work in another field
and if it has failed in that field, it cannot recoup its failures by
giving advice to the police department. The priest as a sublimated
policeman is a sorry spectacle.
_1926_
We were discussing the first commandment in the preparatory class
today. The boys were trying to see whether “Thou shalt have no other
Gods before me” meant anything in modern life. It is a constant source
of surprise and delight to see with what profundity these boys and
girls deal with the problems of life. They decided that anything
that we loved more than God was in effect another god. But how do we
love God, I asked. There were the usual answers which show how some
children still identify religion with religious practices and customs,
particularly Sunday observance. But one of the boys came through with
this answer, “We love God by loving the best we know.” That seemed to
me not bad at all.
Now we put on the blackboard all those interests which threatened to
become gods to us: money, clothes (volunteered by a girl, of course),
automobiles, eating, playing. We took up each one of these interests
and tried to determine when they were in danger of becoming too central
in life. On automobiles the boys didn’t have much conscience except
that they thought one ought not to clean them on Sunday. They take the
cult of the automobile for granted as everyone else. The girls had
quite a time defining the place where clothes cease to be a legitimate
interest and become an obsession. I was probably a poor one to lead
them in that discussion.
On the matter of eating there was considerable difficulty. “We have
to eat to grow,” said one of the boys. Correct answer. When then,
is eating a form of idolatry? “When we eat all the time,” suggested
another boy. That left Junior in a corner. “I like to eat most all the
time,” he confessed ruefully. How can a hungry boy be anything but a
sceptic about a philosophy of values which does not have eating at the
center of it? Thus do the necessities of a robust organism defy the
value schemes prompted by tradition or arrived at by reflection.
Junior just about stopped our discussion of comparative values by that
confession, “I like to eat most all the time,” and I couldn’t help but
think that my pedagogical impotence before this demand of natural life
was closely akin to the impotence of the church before a youthful and
vigorous national life, immersed in physical values and intent upon
physical satisfactions. Our youthful nation is also declaring, “I love
to eat most all the time”; and the error in its judgment is not easily
overcome by preachment and precept until time and experience will show
it the limits of animal satisfactions and teach it that man does not
live by bread alone.
_1926_
I had a letter from a young preacher today who told me how he was
suffering for truth’s sake. He had merely been telling his congregation
that Jesus was a great spiritual teacher, as was Confucius and Laotsze,
and that the Christ idea was the product of Greek legend and ancient
mythology. His good people were so ignorant, he thought, that they
failed to show proper appreciation of his learning and resented his
iconoclasm.
I find myself reacting violently to the sophomoric cocksureness of
this young fellow. I suppose I am getting old and have made those
compromises with the devil of superstition against which the editor of
the Christian Register warns so hysterically. But for the life of me I
can no more reduce Jesus to the status of a mere Galilean dreamer and
teacher than I can accept the orthodox Christologies. The person who
can make no distinction between a necessary symbolism and mythology
seems to me no better than the wooden-headed conservative who insists
that every bit of religious symbolism and poetry must be accepted
literally and metaphysically.
It is not easy to define the God idea. Scientifically I suppose God is
“the element of spirituality which is integral to reality,” but for all
practical and religious purposes I find it both helpful and justified
to define him by saying that “God is like Jesus.” The ultimate nature
of reality cannot be grasped by science alone; poetic imagination is
as necessary as scientific precision. Some of the supposedly ignorant
peasants against whom my youthful friend is drawing his heroic sword
may have more truth on their side than any fresh young theologue could
possibly realize.
_1926_
In the young men’s class this morning we continued our discussion of
the Sermon on the Mount. The boys have been making some interesting
contributions. On the whole they are sceptical of the practicability
of the demands which Jesus makes in the matter of trust and love and
forgiveness. It is rather interesting to have this revelation of the
basic cynicism of even the adolescent mind. They think that to follow
Jesus “would put a business man out of business in no time,” as one
expressed it today. Of course, it is better to see the difficulties
than to engage in some kind of sentimental avowal of Christian faith
without realizing how stubbornly life resists the ideal.
After all, those boys are up against what St. Anthony saw when he was
tempted by the vision of the young woman and the old woman. The one
meant life but also lust, and the other meant faith but also death.
At least that is the way Flaubert has it. It is certainly not easy to
separate life from lust without destroying life. Yet Jesus came to give
us a more abundant life.
“Maybe it would work if we tried it hard enough,” thought one of the
boys today when we discussed the practicability of trusting people.
That may be the answer to the whole question.
_1926_
Bishop ---- and I shared the platform tonight. Fortunately, I spoke
first so that I did not have to compete with his powerful eloquence.
His sermon warmed the heart, but it was based upon the uncritical
assumption that modern Christianity is an exact replica of primitive
Christianity and is characterized by the same qualities of heroism and
faith. There was a disquieting tendency to patronize in the good man’s
demeanor. I should think it would be a very difficult achievement for
a bishop to be a real Christian. The position is bound to aggravate
the inclination to pride which all of us possess. I do not know many
bishops intimately. The few that I have known well have been singularly
free of arrogance; but they were unusual, for they were saved by
a sense of humor which is not frequently found in the pulpit and
certainly hardly ever in the episcopacy.
“Be not ye called rabbi,” said Jesus, “and call no man father upon
earth, for one is your father which is in heaven.” I am not interested
in applying the words of Jesus literally, but it seems to me that the
principle involved in these words would wipe out the episcopacy. It
wouldn’t leave much justification either for “The Reverend Doctor.” Of
course the Christian community cannot do without leaders. But it might
learn to save them from pride and arrogance.
The highest type of leadership maintains itself by its intrinsic worth,
sans panoply, pomp and power. Of course, there are never enough real
leaders to go around. Wherefore it becomes necessary to dress some men
up and by other artificial means to give them a prestige and a power
which they could not win by their own resources. But it would be well
if the church realized how dangerous power and prestige are, and how
easily they corrupt a man’s spiritual integrity.
It is certainly not to the credit of the church that it is less
eager than the democratic state to circumscribe the authority and
socialize the power of the leader. The Methodists try to preserve the
proper spirit of humility among the bishops by relegating them to
parliamentary impotence once every four years. But who wouldn’t be
willing to suffer for that brief period for the sake of the power and
authority which the bishop exercises for the rest of the quadrennium?
Somewhere I read the observation of an anthropologist that naked
savages could never have evolved a priesthood or an hereditary
monarchy. No one is so much superior to his fellows that he deserves
the positions of authority which a complex society finally evolves.
That is why the leader must be put over with the proper clothes and
paraphernalia. The throne and the crown make the king. Even the
President of the United States has impressive naval and military
aids to offset the unimposing frock which the democratic tradition
prescribes. As for the bishop, who could be more awe-inspiring than a
hierarch sitting upon his “throne” in his full regalia? That does not
apply to Methodist bishops. But they have so much power that they don’t
need the panoply.
Think how insufferable bishops might be if they had to be both
worshiped and feared. I am afraid that is true of Catholic bishops.
Perhaps that is why the Catholic saints are not frequently found in the
hierarchy.
_1927_
An impertinent youngster at the forum (midwestern college) accused
me today of being an authoritarian because I quoted several modern
philosophers and scientists in my address in support of my theistic
belief. I made a deep bow before him and congratulated him upon being
so proficient in laboratory experiments in every science and so
profound in his philosophical meditations that he could arrive at his
conclusions without the help of anyone else, scientist or philosopher.
His question did set me thinking on the problem of freedom. Why do we
believe what we believe, and why do we do what we do? If the religion
of my home had been harsh and unlovely I would probably be today where
that young man is, in a position of rebellion against all religion. If
I had not had the aid of this helpful professor and that illuminating
book when my religious convictions were undergoing adjustment I might
not have made the necessary adjustments but would have thrown religious
convictions into the discard.
If I were not in a position where human nature reveals itself in its
more lovely characteristics would I be able to maintain confidence
in the integrity of man, upon which so much of the confidence in God
depends? Has the class-conscious worker not a right to dismiss both
my political and my religious convictions as bourgeois prejudices? And
could I not with equal justice condemn his as myopic views which his
resentments against society explain but do not prove true?
What we know as truth is determined by peculiar and individual
perspectives. Pressures of environment, influences of heredity, and
excellencies and deficiencies of teachers help to determine our life
philosophies. We ought therefore to hold them with decent humility and
a measure of scepticism. But if we permit ourselves to be tempted into
a complete subjectivism and scepticism by these facts, we put an end to
all philosophy and ultimately to civilization itself. For civilization
depends upon the vigorous pursuit of the highest values by people who
are intelligent enough to know that their values are qualified by their
interests and corrupted by their prejudices.
_1927_
Perhaps there is no better illustration of the ethical impotence of the
modern church than its failure to deal with the evils and the ethical
problems of stock manipulation. Millions in property values are created
by pure legerdemain. Stock dividends, watered stock and excessive rise
in stock values, due to the productivity of the modern machine, are
accepted by the church without a murmur if only a slight return is made
by the beneficiaries through church philanthropies.
Here is C---- recapitalizing his business and adding six million
dollars in stock. At least five of these millions will not be invested
in physical expansion but pocketed by the owner. They simply represent
capitalization of expected profits. Once this added burden has been
placed upon the industry any demands of the workers for a larger share
in the profits will be met by conclusive proof that the stock is
earning only a small dividend and that further increase in wages would
be “suicidal” to the business.
Meanwhile C---- has become quite philanthropic. He gives fifty thousand
dollars here and a hundred thousand there. Since the good man is a
“Christian,” religious organizations profit most by his benefactions.
Every new donation is received with paeans of praise from church and
press.
What I wonder is whether the gentleman is deceiving himself and really
imagines himself a Christian or whether he is really quite hard-boiled
and harbors a secret contempt for the little men who buzz about his
throne, singing their hallelujahs. One can never be sure how much we
mortals are fooled by our own inadequate virtues and sanctified vices
and how much we accept the world’s convenient tribute without being
convinced by it. Nor do I know which interpretation of the facts is to
be preferred, not as a matter of truth, but as a matter of charity.
What is worse--to be honest with yourself while you are dishonest with
the world, or to be dishonest with the world because you have deceived
yourself?
_1927_
Dropped in on the First ---- Church of ---- on my way back from ----
University. Went into the young people’s meeting before the evening
service and found a typical Endeavor meeting in progress. Some ninety
wholesome youngsters were in attendance. All the various tricks of a
good Endeavor meeting were used. Several little poems clipped from
the Endeavor World were recited at the appropriate time and some of
the members contributed quotations from Scripture and from well-known
authors. The leader gave a good but platitudinous talk. There was no
discussion. My impression was that this type of meeting, if still held,
would be very poorly attended. But here the facts belied my theories.
So much the worse for the young people of the church. Only a very inert
type of youngster could be satisfied with such a meeting, and only a
very uncritical mind would accept the pious platitudes which filled it,
without uttering a protest or challenging a dozen assumptions.
However much such meetings may cultivate habits of loyalty to the
church among young people and preserve among them the traditional
religious attitudes and customs, they do nothing to fit young people
to live a Christian life amid the complexities of the modern world
or to hold to the Christian faith in the perplexities of a scientific
world view. What worries me particularly in regard to these meetings
is the assumption which underlies them that nothing but moral good
will is necessary to solve the problems of life. Almost every other
meeting is a consecration meeting. No one seems to introduce the young
people to the idea that an ethical life requires honest and searching
intelligence. Nothing is done to discover to their eyes the tremendous
chasm between the ideals of their faith and the social realities in
which they live.
Under such circumstances we can expect no new vitality in the Christian
life as the new generation takes hold. Old virtues and respectabilities
will be maintained, but the areas of life which are still unchristian
will remain as they are. I see the danger in our own discussion groups
that the young people may satisfy all their idealism in incessant talk.
But the talk has at least the merit of exploring all sides of a problem
and of revealing the limitations of traditional attitudes and the need
of new ventures in faith.
_1927_
Whenever I exchange thoughts with H----, as I do with greater frequency
and with increasing profit to myself, I have the uneasy feeling that
I belong to the forces which are destroying religion in the effort
to refine it. He is as critical as I am--well, perhaps not quite so
critical; but in all his critical evaluations of religious forms
he preserves a robust religious vitality which I seem to lack. His
scholarship is of course much more extensive than mine, but it has not
robbed him of religious naïveté, to use Schweitzer’s phrase. He has
preserved a confidence in the goodness of men and the ultimate triumph
of righteousness which I do not lack, but to which I do not hold so
unwaveringly. While we understand each other, we really belong to
different schools of thought.
I have been profoundly impressed by the Spenglerian thesis that culture
is destroyed by the spirit of sophistication and I am beginning
to suspect that I belong to the forces of decadence in which this
sophistication is at work. I have my eye too much upon the limitations
of contemporary religious life and institutions; I always see the
absurdities and irrationalities in which narrow types of religion
issue. That wouldn’t be so bad if I did not use the instruments of
intellectualism rather than those of a higher spirituality for the
critical task.
Nevertheless I hate a thoroughgoing cynic. I don’t want anyone to be
more cynical than I am. If I am saved from cynicism at all it is by
some sense of personal loyalty to the spirit and the genius of Jesus;
that and physical health. If I were physically anaemic I never would
be able to escape pessimism. This very type of morbid introspection
is one of the symptoms of the disease. I can’t justify myself in my
perilous position except by the observation that the business of being
sophisticated and naïve, critical and religious, at one and the same
time is as difficult as it is necessary, and only a few are able to
achieve the balance. H---- says I lack a proper appreciation of the
mystical values in religion. That is probably the root of the matter.
Yet I can’t resist another word in self-defense. The modern world is so
full of bunkum that it is difficult to attempt honesty in it without an
undue emphasis upon the critical faculty.
If in this civilization we cannot enter the kingdom of God because we
cannot be as little children, the fault, dear Brutus, is in our stars
and not in ourselves.
_1927_
I fell in with a gentleman on the Pullman smoker today (Pullman smokers
are perfect institutes for plumbing the depths and shallows of the
American mind) who had made a killing on the stock exchange. His luck
appeared like success from his perspective, and he was full of the
confidence with which success endows mortals. He spoke oracularly on
any and all subjects. He knew why the farmers were not making any
money and why the Europeans were not as prosperous as we. Isn’t it
strange how gambler’s luck gives men the assurance of wisdom for which
philosophers search in vain? I pity this man’s wife. But she probably
regards a new fur coat as adequate compensation for the task of
appearing convinced by his obiter dicta.
_1927_
Seven clergymen sat down today with the national defense committee of
the board of commerce. They invited us to talk over our stand against
compulsory military education in the schools. It was an interesting
experience, particularly as it came but shortly after our conflict with
the same group on the matter of labor speakers in our pulpits. The
contrast in the attitude of the business men in these two controversies
is very illuminating.
In the labor controversy they were hard-boiled realists who simply
wanted to prevent labor from getting its side before the public. At
that time they did not invite us to a round table discussion. They
had nothing to discuss. They simply used their power in the city to
prevent any discussion of the character of their power and the method
of its preservation. In this case they were aggrieved and bewildered
romanticists and idealists. They want military training in the schools
because they have been told by the army officers that such training
makes for patriotism. And patriotism is the only religion they know.
They invited us to a luncheon precisely because they felt themselves
in a morally, not to say spiritually, impregnable position. I think
they were quite sure that a little argument would convince us of the
error of our ways. Our resistance was obviously very disconcerting to
them. Perhaps they had a right to be disconcerted; for it is only a
little while since there was a perfect alliance between the religion
of patriotism and organized Christianity. Since most of the men do not
attend church they had not heard of the qualms of conscience in the
pulpit that had, at least for the time being, dissolved that alliance.
We stood our ground and the meeting dissolved without any results.
I wonder if it isn’t a little bit wicked to challenge the validity of
the only kind of altruism which men know. But no--narrow loyalties may
become more dangerous than selfishness.
_1927_
I wonder why it is that so many of the churches which go in for
vaudeville programs and the hip-hip-hooray type of religious services
should belong to the Methodist and Baptist denominations. The
vulgarities of the stunt preacher are hardly compatible with either
the robust spiritual vitality or the puritan traditions of the more
evangelistic churches. Perhaps the phenomenon of which I speak is
due merely to the size of the two denominations. They may have more
showmen simply because they are big enough to have more leaders of all
varieties. Certainly no church surpasses the Methodist in the number
of men who possess real social passion and imagination. Nor are the
old emotionally warm and naïvely orthodox preachers wanting in either
church.
Nevertheless there is a growing tendency toward stunt services in both
denominations. Perhaps it represents the strategy of denominational
and congregational organisms which are too much alive to accept the
fate of innocuous desuetude, which has befallen some other churches.
Finding the masses, which they once attracted by genuine religious
emotion, less inclined to seek satisfaction in religion, they maintain
themselves by offering such goods in entertainment and social life as
the people seem to desire.
When the naïve enthusiasms of those generations, among whom religion is
an emotional experience and not a social tradition, begin to cool, the
churches which serve the new generations must either express religious
feeling through devotion to moral and aesthetic values or they must
substitute a baser emotionalism for the lost religious feeling. Perhaps
the prevalence of cheap theatricality among the churches of our great
democracy is a sign of the fact that the masses in America have lost
the capacity for unreflective and exuberant religious feeling before
they could acquire the kind of religion which is closely integrated
with the values of culture and art.
There is something pathetic about the effort of the churches to capture
these spiritually vacuous multitudes by resort to any device which may
intrigue their vagrant fancies. But it may not represent a total loss.
The entertainment they offer may be vulgar, but it is not vicious,
and without them the people might find satisfaction in something even
cheaper.
_1927_
At the Lenten service today the dynamic speaker dilated upon the heroic
character of the Christian faith. “Someone said to me recently,” he
reported, “‘Do you realize that it is dangerous to be a Christian?’
‘Certainly,’ I answered, ‘It always has been and always will be.’”
Isn’t it strange how we preachers insist on emphasizing the heroic
aspect of the Christian faith? That pose today was exactly like the
one struck by the minister in ---- who loved to say dramatically,
“The church needs a new casualty list,” while it was generally known
that he carefully evaded every issue which might create dissension or
contention.
I think we ministers strike these heroic poses because we are dimly
aware of the fact that the gospel commits us to positions which require
heroic devotion before they will ever be realized in life. But we are
astute rather than heroic and cautious rather than courageous. Thus
we are in the dangerous position of being committed to the cross in
principle but escaping it in practice. We are honest enough to be
uneasy about that fact, but insincere enough to quiet our uneasiness by
heroic poses.
Let any group of ministers gather and you will find someone declaring
fervently, “No one ever tells me what to say. My congregation gives
me perfect liberty.” That is just another way of quieting an uneasy
conscience; for we all know that if we explore the full meaning of a
gospel of love its principles will be found to run counter to cherished
prejudices. It is of course not impossible to retain freedom of the
pulpit, but if anyone is doing so without the peril of defections from
his ranks and opposition to his message, he is deceiving himself about
the quality of his message. Either his message is too innocuous to
deserve opposition or too conventional to arouse it.
An astute pedagogy and a desire to speak the truth in love may greatly
decrease opposition to a minister’s message and persuade a difficult
minority to entertain at least, and perhaps to profit by, his message;
but if a gospel is preached without opposition it is simply not the
gospel which resulted in the cross. It is not, in short, the gospel of
love.
_1927_
Talked today at the open forum which meets every Sunday afternoon in
the high school. The “lunatic fringe” of the city congregates there,
in addition to many sensible people. The question period in such
meetings is unfortunately monopolized to a great extent by the foolish
ones, though not always. Today one old gentleman wanted to know when I
thought the Lord would come again, while a young fellow spoke volubly
on communism and ended by challenging me to admit that all religion
is fantasy. Between those two you have the story of the tragic state
of religion in modern life. One half of the world seems to believe
that every poetic symbol with which religion must deal is an exact
definition of a concrete or an historical fact; the other half, having
learned that this is not the case, can come to no other conclusion but
that all religion is based upon fantasy.
Fundamentalists have at least one characteristic in common with
most scientists. Neither can understand that poetic and religious
imagination has a way of arriving at truth by giving a clue to the
total meaning of things without being in any sense an analytic
description of detailed facts. The fundamentalists insist that religion
is science, and thus they prompt those who know that this is not true
to declare that all religious truth is contrary to scientific fact.
How can an age which is so devoid of poetic imagination as ours be
truly religious?
_1927_
Our city race commission has finally made its report after months of
investigation and further months of deliberation on our findings. It
has been a rare experience to meet with these white and colored leaders
and talk over our race problems. The situation which the colored people
of the city face is really a desperate one, and no one who does not
spend real time in gathering the facts can have any idea of the misery
and pain which exists among these people, recently migrated from the
south and unadjusted to our industrial civilization. Hampered both by
their own inadequacies and the hostility of a white world they have
a desperate fight to keep body and soul together, to say nothing of
developing those amenities which raise life above the brute level.
I wish that some of our romanticists and sentimentalists could sit
through a series of meetings where the real social problems of a city
are discussed. They would be cured of their optimism. A city which is
built around a productive process and which gives only casual thought
and incidental attention to its human problems is really a kind of
hell. Thousands in this town are really living in torment while the
rest of us eat, drink and make merry. What a civilization!
Incidentally I wish the good church people who hate our mayor so
much because he doesn’t conform to their rules and standards could
appreciate how superior his attitudes and viewpoints on race relations
are to those held by most church people. It seems to me rather
unfortunate that we must depend upon the “publicans” for our social
conscience to so great a degree while the “saints” develop their
private virtues and let the city as such fry in its iniquities.
_1927_
I think I have solved the Sunday night service problem for good. I
give a short address or sermon upon a more or less controversial moral
issue, or upon a perplexing religious question, and after closing the
service we have a half-hour to forty-five minutes of discussion. The
group attracted by this kind of program is not large. It is not the
usual forum crowd. But it is a group of unusually thoughtful people,
and the way they explore the fundamental themes and problems of life is
worth more than many sermons.
I am absolutely convinced that such discussions come to grips with
life’s real problems much more thoroughly than any ex cathedra
utterance from the pulpit. For one thing the people themselves make
the application of general principles to specific experiences. Then,
too, they inevitably explore the qualifications which life seems to
make upon every seemingly absolute principle. The real principles
of Christian living seem so much more real and also so much more
practicable when a group of thoughtful people make an honest effort to
fit them into the complexities of modern life.
Perhaps the most interesting point about such a discussion is the way
every type of experience can be used to illustrate a certain general
truth. Last Sunday night an advertising man made a most interesting
contribution to the question of marriage and divorce out of his
experience as advertising counsel. He said that he had learnt in
business that it is always well to regard relationships as permanent
even when they are not so absolutely in a legal sense. If the parties
to a contract assume that it can be broken easily they will not extend
themselves as they ought to make those adjustments which a permanent
relationship requires.--Thus we make the experience gained in one
field of activity serve the problem of another field. Again and again
thoughtful mothers have thrown light upon the problems of democracy,
the place of coercion in life and the efficacy of trust out of
experience gained in their work with their children.
If there were only more thoughtful people it would be worth while to
change every service into something like this evening discussion. But
discussion requires time and it doesn’t mean much to people who are
looking for “inspiration” rather than guidance. I suppose there is
still a place for inspirational addresses. But in a world in which so
many traditional moral ideas are in solution and so many others are
generally accepted and never applied, this kind of honest searching
with others, rather than for them, is particularly rewarding.
_1927_
I wonder if it is really possible to have an honest Thanksgiving
celebration in an industrial civilization. Harvest festivals were
natural enough in peasant communities. The agrarian feels himself
dependent upon nature’s beneficence and anxious about nature’s
caprices. When the autumnal harvest is finally safe in the barns there
arise, with the sigh of relief, natural emotions of gratitude that must
express themselves religiously, since the bounty is actually created
by the mysterious forces of nature which man may guide but never quite
control.
All that is different in an industrial civilization in which so much
wealth is piled up by the ingenuity of the machine, and, at least
seemingly, by the diligence of man. Thanksgiving becomes increasingly
the business of congratulating the Almighty upon his most excellent
coworkers, ourselves. I have had that feeling about the Thanksgiving
proclamations of our Presidents for some years. An individual, living
in an industrial community might still celebrate a Thanksgiving day
uncorrupted by pride, because he does benefit from processes and forces
which he does not create or even guide. But a national Thanksgiving,
particularly if it is meant to express gratitude for material bounty,
becomes increasingly a pharisaic rite.
The union Thanksgiving service we attended this morning was full of
the kind of self-righteous bunk which made it quite impossible for me
to worship. There was indeed a faint odor of contrition in one of the
prayers and in an aside of the sermon, but it did not spring from the
heart. The Lord who was worshiped was not the Lord of Hosts, but the
spirit of Uncle Sam, given a cosmic eminence for the moment which the
dear old gentleman does not deserve.
It is a bad thing when religion is used as a vehicle of pride. It would
be better to strut unashamedly down the boardwalk of nations than to
go through the business of bowing humbly before God while we say, “We
thank thee Lord that we are not as other men.”
_1927_
Mother and I visited at the home of ---- today where the husband is
sick and was out of employment before he became sick. The folks have
few connections in the city. They belong to no church. What a miserable
existence it is to be friendless in a large city. And to be dependent
upon a heartless industry. The man is about 55 or 57 I should judge,
and he is going to have a desperate time securing employment after he
gets well. These modern factories are not meant for old men. They want
young men and they use them up pretty quickly. Your modern worker, with
no skill but what is in the machine, is a sorry individual. After he
loses the stamina of youth, he has nothing to sell.
I promised ---- I would try to find him a job. I did it to relieve the
despair of that family, but I will have a hard time making good on my
promise. According to the ethics of our modern industrialism men over
fifty, without special training, are so much junk. It is a pleasure
to see how such an ethic is qualified as soon as the industrial unit
is smaller and the owner has a personal interest in his men. I could
mention quite a few such instances. But unfortunately the units are
getting larger and larger and more inhuman.
I think I had better get in contact with more of these victims of our
modern industrialism and not leave that end of our work to mother
alone. A little such personal experience will help much to save you
from sentimentality.
_1927_
Have just returned from the student conference at ----. A smart young
professor told the students that all social customs are based upon
irrational taboos. Our generation is the first with the opportunity to
build a rational social order. The way to build a rational society,
according to this savant, is to regard every relationship, custom,
convention and law as irrational until it has proved itself rational by
experience.
A sample of the kind of society he would build by his reason was given
in his discussion of sex relations. He thinks the highest kind of
family life would result from the love of one woman for one man while
both indulged in promiscuous relations. Thus would the values of both
freedom and love be maintained. The smart young man seems never to have
heard that you cannot have your cake and eat it too.
If you want love and cooperation in any kind of society, and most of
all in the family, it is necessary to sacrifice some freedom for its
sake. What strange fanatics these moderns are! Imagining themselves
dispassionate in their evaluation of all values, they are really
bigoted protagonists of the one value of freedom. Every other value
must be subordinated to it.
It is true that every convention, custom, law and usage contains an
irrational element. Some were unreasonable from the beginning and
others have become so by shifting circumstance. It is necessary,
therefore, that we approach the facts of life experimentally and
scientifically, rather than traditionally. However, it seems to me
quite unreasonable to proceed upon the assumption that all traditions
are wholly unreasonable. Most of the moderns who think so are
significantly defective in the knowledge of history.
There is at the heart of almost every tradition an element of
reasonableness and around its circumference a whole series of
irrationalities. Our business must be to destroy the latter and
restore the former by fitting it to contemporaneous circumstances and
conditions.
I doubt whether it is wise for every person to be extremely critical
of all traditions in every field of thought and life. I imagine we
ought to specialize a little in this matter and let various people
experiment in various areas. This seems to me a wise policy for the
simple reason that it does not make for happiness for one person to do
the experimenting in every field. At any rate most of the intellectuals
I know who try to do it are miserable souls. I am always glad to escape
their company and consort with folks who take some things for granted.
There is an unnatural strain in their lives and, having made a virtue
of the critical temper, they usually discount virtue and achievement
even where it is indubitable.
Since there are many more traditionalists than experimentalists, all
this may be bad advice. But I doubt whether the lethargy of the many
justifies the few in spoiling their tempers and their judgment. Let
every reformer find at least one field of interest and life where he
can be happily conventional. If he is trying to remake the economic
order, let him accept family life and be happy in it without too many
scruples about its alleged imperfections. On second thought I don’t
like this advice. At any rate it is inconsistent with my scorn for the
liberal theologians who are so preoccupied with the task of reforming
religion that they have no interest in the iniquities of society which
ought to challenge their conscience.
Let us have reformers, then, who try to reform everything at the same
time! But I am going to keep my distance from them.
_1927_
The new Ford car is out. The town is full of talk about it. Newspaper
reports reveal that it is the topic of the day in all world centers.
Crowds storm every exhibit to get the first glimpse of this new
creation. Mr. Ford has given out an interview saying that the car has
cost him about a hundred million dollars and that after finishing it he
still has about a quarter of a billion dollars in the bank.
I have been doing a little arithmetic and have come to the conclusion
that the car cost Ford workers at least fifty million in lost wages
during the past year. No one knows how many hundreds lost their homes
in the period of unemployment, and how many children were taken out of
school to help fill the depleted family exchequer, and how many more
children lived on short rations during this period. Mr. Ford refuses to
concede that he made a mistake in bringing the car out so late. He has
a way of impressing the public even with his mistakes. We are now asked
to believe that the whole idea of waiting a year after the old car
stopped selling before bringing out a new one was a great advertising
scheme which reveals the perspicacity of this industrial genius. But no
one asks about the toll in human lives.
What a civilization this is! Naïve gentlemen with a genius for
mechanics suddenly become the arbiters over the lives and fortunes
of hundreds of thousands. Their moral pretensions are credulously
accepted at full value. No one bothers to ask whether an industry which
can maintain a cash reserve of a quarter of a billion ought not make
some provision for its unemployed. It is enough that the new car is
a good one. Here is a work of art in the only realm of art which we
can understand. We will therefore refrain from making undue ethical
demands upon the artist. Artists of all the ages have been notoriously
unamenable to moral discipline. The cry of the hungry is drowned in the
song, “Henry has made a lady out of Lizzy.”
_1927_
This prayer book controversy in the Church of England ought to give us
liberals who make so much of tolerance a pause. What are the limits of
tolerance? Does not tolerance of a theological position which one knows
or believes to be untrue become a betrayal of the truth? How can one
be tolerant of medievalism without playing traitor to the best in the
modern day?
Here is the Episcopal church which many of us have counted blessed
because it was the one bridge over the chasm which separates
Catholicism and Protestantism. But the chasm is now revealed as too
wide for any bridge. Cooperation with the Catholic demands connivance
with religious practices which reduce religion to magic. No wonder the
Protestant laymen in Parliament threw the revised prayer book out. How
can anyone in the year of our Lord 1927 be seriously exercised over the
problem of the “real presence” in the Eucharist? Think of the spiritual
leaders of a torn and bleeding world debating learnedly on whether
and how God can be magically localized and salvation be confined in
a capsule. To read the arguments of the sacerdotalists is enough to
drive one into the arms of the unrepentent rationalists who regard all
religion as dangerous.
The weaknesses of Catholicism ought not prompt one to disregard all
the finer spiritual and moral values which still live in this ancient
church. But there can be no final unity between an institution which
reduces religion to magic and a fellowship of the spirit which tries to
subdue the chaos of life under the ideal of faith.
Magic is an enemy of all morality. It offers a short cut to all prizes
of the spirit which can be won only by heroic effort.
_1927_
After speaking at ---- University today Professor ---- said he objected
to my assumption that the family is the root of human societies. He
said he believed that most forms of human cooperation were formed by
men who had to resist the special interests of the family, as typified
particularly by the narrow loyalty of the mother to her own offspring,
before they could establish wider fellowships. That was a new idea to
me and one that seems to be not without merit. Of course it does not
invalidate the thesis that the family is the first unit of society; for
the first fighting unit was probably composed of a group of fathers and
sons and sons’ sons. That is, not the family in the narrowest but in
the widest sense, the family as it develops into the clan is the first
real society.
The idea that the family is frequently opposed to ventures in wider
fellowship is justified by more than one present fact. The family
is still essentially selfish, and many a man is beguiled from ideal
ventures by a false sense of obligation to his family. Think of the
number of men who sell their souls merely that their wives and children
may enjoy higher standards of living than other families. Think of the
number of mothers whose interest in life never goes beyond the ambition
to secure special advantages for their children. The mother of the
sons of Zebedee is a good example. In her you have motherhood in its
tragic limitations as well as in its sublime beauty.
The family is not inevitably selfish or invariably opposed to larger
ventures in fellowship, but it may easily become so. Jesus’ ruthless
words, “He who loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of
me, he who loveth son and daughter more than me is not worthy of me,”
have more meaning than most Christians have realized. Celibacy may
be wrong because it escapes rather than solves this problem. But the
invariable tendency of religious movements of great moral sensitiveness
to experiment with celibacy is significant. Thus speaks a bachelor.
Let the cynic make the most of the private prejudice which colors this
judgment.
_1928_
This conference on religious education seems to your humble servant the
last word in absurdity. We are told by a delightful “expert” that we
ought not really teach our children about God lest we rob them of the
opportunity of making their own discovery of God, and lest we corrupt
their young minds by our own superstitions. If we continue along these
lines the day will come when some expert will advise us not to teach
our children the English language, since we rob them thereby of the
possibility of choosing the German, French or Japanese languages as
possible alternatives. Don’t these good people realize that they are
reducing the principle of freedom to an absurdity?
Religion, like language, is a social product. The potentialities
for both are in the child, but their highest articulations are the
result of ages of cultural and spiritual experience, and in the right
kind of religious education the experience of the race is joined
with the inclinations of the individual. We do not get a higher type
of religious idealism from children merely by withholding our own
religious ideas from them (however they may be filled with error), any
more than we would get a higher type of civilization by letting some
group of youngsters shift for themselves upon a desert island.
A wise architect observed that you could break the laws of
architectural art provided you had mastered them first. That would
apply to religion as well as to art. Ignorance of the past does not
guarantee freedom from its imperfections. More probably it assures the
repetition of past errors. We ought of course to cultivate a wholesome
scepticism in our young people so that they will not accept the ideas
of the past too slavishly. But appreciation must come before criticism.
We do not teach a child the limitations of Beethoven before we have
helped it to appreciate him; nor do we withhold any appreciation of the
classics in order that the child might be free to prefer Stravinsky to
Beethoven. What some of these moderns are doing is simply to destroy
the organs of religious insight and the atmosphere in which religious
attitudes may flourish, ostensibly for the sake of freedom, but really
at its expense.
I have a dark suspicion that some of these modern religious educators
do not really know what religion is about. They want a completely
rational faith and do not realize that they are killing religion by
a complete rationalization. With all their pious phraseology and
supposedly modern pedagogy they really are decadent forces.
Life is a battle between faith and reason in which each feeds upon the
other, drawing sustenance from it and destroying it. Nature has wisely
ordained that faith shall have an early advantage in the life of the
child to compensate for its later difficulties. If we imagine that we
help the progress of the race by inoculating children with a premature
sophistication we are of all men most miserable. Reason, without the
balance of faith, destroys a civilization soon enough, without giving
it this advantage among the young. I wonder if any of these modern
religious pedagogues have ever read Unamuno’s “The Tragic Sense of
Life”?
Here I am talking like a fundamentalist. But why not? If we must choose
between types of fanaticism is there any particular reason why we
should prefer the fanatics who destroy a vital culture in the name of
freedom and reason to those who try to strangle a new culture at birth
in the name of authority and dogma? The latter type of fanaticism is
bound to end in futility. The growth of reason cannot be stopped by
dogma. But the former type is dangerous because it easily enervates a
rational culture with ennui and despair.
_1928_
This Federal Council meeting is an interesting study in the geography
of morals. The race commission presented a report today in which it
tried to place the council on record as favoring the enforcement of
the fifteenth amendment as well as the eighteenth. It was obviously
an effort to exploit the strong prohibition sentiment of the churches
for the sake of committing them to the espousal of the interests of
the disfranchised Negroes in the south. That is not a bad political
strategy. But it did not quite work.
A good brother from the southern Presbyterian church warned that to
interfere with this “political issue” would “soil the garments of the
bride of Christ.” To him the eighteenth amendment represented a “moral”
issue but the fifteenth was a “political” one. I have a sneaking
suspicion that the fifteenth amendment expresses more of the genius of
the gospel than the eighteenth, but that is neither here nor there.
What was interesting was the way in which various church leaders tried
to rescue us from the embarrassment into which the council was brought
by this proposal.
A good brother who was raised in the south and now lives in the north
tried to act as mediator. He introduced his remarks with the usual
nice story about how much he loved his negro mammy. Some day he ought
to have a lesson in ethics and learn how much easier it is to love
those who acknowledge their inferiority than those who challenge our
superiority. It is indeed a virtuous woman who can love her social
competitor as sincerely as she loves her faithful maid.
Another mediator was a southern bishop who has many northern
connections. He made much of the fact that the south disregards only
the spirit and not the letter of the enfranchising amendments to the
constitution. The bishop is really a man of some courage who has
spoken out bravely on the industrial conditions in the south. But he
was evidently afraid in this instance either to accept or to reject
a Christian view of race relations. So he stuck to casuistry about
the letter of the law. He has probably preached many a sermon on the
text about the letter killing and the spirit making alive. At any rate
everyone who spoke revealed how geographic and historical circumstance
had qualified Christian conviction.
That was as true of those of us who took an uncompromising position
as the southern equivocators and the semi-southern mediators. To
the southerners we are not Christian idealists but merely “Yankee”
meddlers. And perhaps we are. At any rate it was easy to see from the
debate that the north cannot help the south much in solving its race
problem. If it is solved the solution must come out of the conscience
and heart of the south.
After all, the problem, as every moral problem, is not merely
conditioned by geography but by mathematics. Contact between races when
the one race is almost as numerous as the other is quite a different
story from a relationship in which the subject race is numerically very
much weaker than the dominant group. Therefore let us not judge, lest
we be judged. It is so easy to repent of other people’s sins.
Nevertheless it does not make one feel very comfortable to have a great
church body seek some politic solution for a problem in which the ideal
of Christian brotherhood leaves little room for equivocation.
_1928_
There is a discouraging pettiness about human nature which makes
me hate myself each time I make an analysis of my inner motives
and springs of action. Here I am prodding and criticizing people
continually because they have made too many compromises with the
necessities of life and adjusted the Christian ideal until it has
completely lost its original meaning. Yet I make my own compromises all
the time.
It is Christian to trust people, and my trust is carefully qualified by
mistrust and caution.
It is Christian to love, and to trust in the potency of love rather
than in physical coercion. Logically that means non-resistance. Yet I
believe that a minimum of coercion is necessary in all social tasks, or
in most of them.
It is Christian to forgive rather than to punish; yet I do little by
way of experimenting in the redemptive power of forgiveness.
I am not really a Christian. In me, as in many others, “the native hue
of resolution is sicklied o’er by a pale cast of thought.” I am too
cautious to be a Christian. I can justify my caution, but so can the
other fellow who is more cautious than I am.
The whole Christian adventure is frustrated continually not so much
by malice as by cowardice and reasonableness. Of course everyone must
decide for himself just where he is going to put his peg; where he is
going to arrive at some stable equilibrium between moral adventure
and necessary caution. And perhaps everyone is justified if he tries
to prove that there is a particular reasonableness about the type
of compromise which he has reached. But he might well learn, better
than I have learned, to be charitable with those who have made their
adjustments to the right and to the left of his position. If I do
not watch myself I will regard all who make their adjustments to my
right as fanatics and all who make them to the left as cowards. There
is a silly egotism about such an attitude. But it is difficult to be
pedagogically effective if you do not hold pretty resolutely to some
position.
A reasonable person adjusts his moral goal somewhere between Christ and
Aristotle, between an ethic of love and an ethic of moderation. I hope
there is more of Christ than of Aristotle in my position. But I would
not be too sure of it.
_1928_
Jack Hyde came up today for a chat. These newspaper men are always
interesting company. As religious editor of the Daily ----, he has been
following the preachers of the town pretty closely. Of course he is a
cynic, though a gentle one. He tells many an interesting story on how
the preachers try to get free publicity.
I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists
could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with
the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to
the truth. The interesting part of the contrast is that the newspaper
is officially as optimistic about contemporary life as the pulpit. The
difference between the two is that the preacher is ensnared by his own
sentimentality and optimism while the newspaper man has two views, one
for official and one for private consumption.
_1928_
My good friend ---- has sent me his church calendar. Among other things
he reports “Last Sunday almost as many strangers as members were
present. The weather was a bit cold. Was your loyalty chilly too? You
cannot fight battles with half the soldiers in their tents. Lent is
here. Give your church the right of way. Do your duty next Sunday.”
Here we see how easily even the Protestant minister gravitates to the
viewpoint of the priest. He thinks people ought to regard it as a duty
to hear him preach. What is still worse is that he identifies church
attendance with moral heroism. Does he not realize that faithful church
attendance develops and reveals the virtue of patience much more than
the virtue of courage?
I must admit that I have urged people to come to church myself as
a matter of duty. But I can do so no longer. The church service is
not an end in itself. Not even religion is an end in itself. If the
church service does not attract people by the comfort and challenge it
brings to them, we only postpone the evil day if we compel attendance
by appealing to their sense of duty. It may not be wrong to appeal to
their sense of loyalty to the institution and tell them that if they
have identified themselves with the institution as members they owe it
to the strangers to be there. But even that is dangerous. The church is
already too much an end in itself.
These appeals make it appear that we regard religious devotion as a
service to God, a very dangerous idea. Of course a modern preacher
doesn’t really believe that. What is really in his mind, consciously or
unconsciously, is that the people owe him the duty to hear him preach.
That is perhaps a natural glorification of his own function but it
cannot be denied that there is something pathetic about it.
I can see, of course, that all good things depend in part upon right
habits. Customs, attitudes and actions which are desirable cannot
always depend upon impulse and will. It may be a good thing that people
attend church as a matter of habit and because of a general sense of
obligation to the institution. If churches depended only upon people
who must make up their minds each Sunday whether or no they will attend
church, our attendance would be even smaller than it is.
Yet habitual actions easily become meaningless, and institutions which
depend upon them lose their vitality. If habitual actions are not
continually revitalized by the compulsion of ideals and the attraction
of the values involved in them, they may easily become useless.
_1928_
Detroit observed Good Friday today as never before. Sixteen theatres
and many churches besides were filled to capacity during the three-hour
period. I wonder how one is to understand this tremendous devotion
of this pagan city. How little place the real spirit of Christ has
in the industrial drive of this city. And yet men and women flock by
the thousands to meditate upon the cross. Perhaps we are all like the
centurian who helped to crucify Jesus and then was so impressed by the
whole drama of the cross that the confession was forced from his lips
“Surely this was the son of God.”
Before going to the theatre service I passed a Methodist church with a
message on its bulletin board that explains many chapters in American
church history. It was: “Good Friday service this afternoon. Snappy
song service.” So we combine the somber notes of religion with the jazz
of the age.
I wonder if anyone who needs a snappy song service can really
appreciate the meaning of the cross. But perhaps that is just a
Lutheran prejudice of mine.
_1928_
A very sophisticated young man assured me in our discussion today
(student discussion at a middle western university) that no intelligent
person would enter the ministry today. He was sure that the ministry
was impossible as a vocation not only because too many irrationalities
were still enmeshed with religion but also because there was no real
opportunity for usefulness in the church. I tried to enlighten this
sophomoric wise man.
Granted all the weaknesses of the church and the limitations of the
ministry as a profession, where can one invest one’s life where it can
be made more effective in as many directions?
You can deal with children and young people and help them to set their
life goals and organize their personalities around just and reasonable
values.
You can help the imperiled family shape the standards and the values by
which the institution of family life may be saved and adjusted to the
new conditions of an industrial civilization.
You can awaken a complacent civilization to the injustices which
modern industrialism is developing. While ministers fail most at this
point there is nothing to prevent a courageous man from making a real
contribution to his society in this field.
You can soften the asperities of racial conflict and aid the various
groups of a polyglot city to understand one another and themselves.
You can direct the thoughts and the hopes of men to those facts and
those truths which mitigate the cruelty of the natural world and give
men the opportunity to assert the dignity of human life in the face of
the contempt of nature.
You can help them to shape and to direct their hopes and aspirations
until their lives are determined and molded by the ideal objects of
their devotion. While it is true that magic and superstition are
still entwined, seemingly inextricably intertwined, with the highest
hopes and assurances of mankind, you may find real joy as a skillful
craftsman in separating hopes from illusions so that the one need not
perish with the other.
Here is a task which requires the knowledge of a social scientist
and the insight and imagination of a poet, the executive talents of
a business man and the mental discipline of a philosopher. Of course
none of us meets all the demands made upon us. It is not easy to be
all things to all men. Perhaps that is why people are so critical of
us. Our task is not specific enough to make a high degree of skill
possible or to result in tangible and easily measured results. People
can find fault with us easily enough and we have no statistics to
overawe them and to negate their criticisms.
_1928_
I spoke today at the “Victory dinner” of one of our civic organizations
which had been conducting a financial campaign in the interest of its
worthy objects. Not being well prepared I animadverted disconnectedly
upon the lack of culture in Detroit and expressed the hope that the
dawn of a new day was breaking.
Mr. ---- who sat close to me was so angry about what I said that he
confessed that he had been tempted to interrupt me in the middle of
my address. He cited a large benefaction of his in the interest of a
religious organization as proof of Detroit’s culture and insisted that
the “old families,” to which he belonged, had real culture, whatever
might be said about the newer crowd. I told him his contribution was in
the interest of righteousness rather than culture. Inasmuch as it is
generally known that he made a fortune by rigging the stock market, he
was a little nonplussed by my answer. We finally came to an amicable
agreement upon the proposition that the streets of Detroit are cleaner
than those of Chicago.
_1928_
I believe every preacher ought to take several radical journals,
preferably the ones which are extremely inimical to religion. The
ethical ideals of Christianity are so high and the compromises which
the average church and the average minister has made between these
ideals and the economic necessities of society are so great, and
self-deception is so easy, that we need the corrective of a critical
and perhaps cynical evaluation of religion in modern life.
I should like to recommend this kind of reading particularly to
successful ministers who are so easily obsessed by a messianic complex
because of the compliments they receive. Let them remind themselves
that there are astute observers who think that all their preaching
is superficial and never touches the fundamental defects of modern
society, and that these critics are at least as near the truth as their
too generous devotees.
_1928_
I think I ought to repent of the many unkind things I have said about
various ministers. We liberal preachers (I am thinking of social
liberalism now) are too ready to attribute conventional opinions
to cowardice. What we don’t realize is that the great majority of
parsons simply don’t share our radical convictions. If they get along
very handsomely in the kind of a civilization in which we live, that
is simply because they are in sincere general agreement with the
prevailing ideas of our day. Of course I think we have a right to
wonder a little how one can claim discipleship to one who disturbed
history so much and yet be such a thorough conformist. Yet it is
usually not cowardice but mental inertia which creates the conformity;
and sometimes the conformity is the honest fruit of a finely poised
rather than a daring mind. After all most of us are conformists in some
sense, and it is rather presumptuous on our part to condemn every type
of conformity except our own.
I am moved to this reflection by the insistence of such men as the
editor of the Christian Register that every liberal who remains in
an evangelical communion and does not immediately join the Unitarian
church must be prompted by cowardice. When it is theological rather
than social liberalism that is made the test of conformity or
radicalism, it is my ox that is gored, and I begin to recant my
previous harsh opinions. If the editor of the Register can go so far
wrong in gauging the motives of evangelical liberals we social radicals
may be wrong in explaining why parsons fail to be thoroughgoing
pacifists. Great achievement! I learn how to be tolerant when I become
the victim of somebody else’s spiritual pride.
_1928_
Had a profitable talk with a Jewish friend in the east. He said the
only Christian church that he could ever join would be that of the
Quakers. Of course he would not join the Quakers in the kind of a world
in which we are living, where Christians practice social ostracism
against Jews and thereby force every Jew to regard such a transfer of
religious loyalty in the light of treason to his racial community. He
felt that if he were free to choose his religious group he would choose
the Quakers because they have no professional ministry. He dabbles in
psychiatry and thinks he has looked through the professional minister.
I would like to have him talk to a group of preachers sometime. Like
all realists he barely escapes the kind of cynicism which destroys
wholesome human relations. But he does escape it and is not at all
bitter in his analysis of human nature. That is why his reaction to the
ministry disquiets me. He has his hands on considerable truth.
There is something very artificial about the professional ministry.
When religion deals with magic the professional priests can dispense
the magic and be quite happy. But when religion becomes a search for
all of life’s highest values there is something incongruous about
making your living in the business of helping people to discover and
develop these values. I don’t think this consideration invalidates the
ministry as a profession. In a day of specialists and experts there
ought to be room for a specialist in moral and spiritual values. But
think of commanding a large salary because you are a better preacher
than someone else! Isn’t that putting a market value on the ability of
a man to help people find God? Fortunately it is the rhetorical rather
than the spiritual gift that usually creates the different prices in
the preacher market.
_1928_
Passing one of our big churches today I ran across this significant
slogan, calculated to impress the passing wayfarer: “We Will Go Out
of Business. When? When Every Man in Detroit Has Been Won to Christ.”
Of course it is just a slogan and not to be taken too seriously, but
the whole weakness of Protestantism is in it. Here we are living in a
complex world in which thousands who have been “won to Christ” haven’t
the slightest notion how to live a happy life or how to live together
with other people without making each other miserable.
Yet the church goes about the business of winning people to
Christ--that is, pulling them through some kind of emotional or social
experience in which they are made to commit themselves, or in which
they really do commit themselves, to the good life as it is symbolized
in Christ, and imagining that this is the end of the task. I do not say
that such commitments do not have their value. But surely one must be
very blind to live under the illusion that the desire or even the will
to live a Christ-life is automatically fulfilled in present-day society
or in any society.
The church which conceived that slogan is really better than the silly
advertisement might lead one to suppose. I think people receive some
light and leading there. Nevertheless, most of its energies go into
the business of “winning others.” The saddest part about these highly
evangelistic churches who put everything into the recruiting task
is that they generally tempt those who are already “won” to imagine
themselves perfect, or at least “saved.” I know one lawyer in that
church, and not a bad man either, who needs to be “won” to several
ideas in the gospel of Christ about which he hasn’t the faintest
glimmer of light. But he is too sure of himself to get a new idea.
_1928_
Here is a minister making a confession in his weekly paper: “Last
Sunday night,” he writes, “I was at my worst and unfortunately there
were many strangers in the audience. I tried, but I could not get the
ball over the plate. I had taught a Sunday-school class, preached over
the radio, gone out to dinner, entertained a guest at supper, met the
---- committee and failed to get rest after Easter. I will try to do
better next Sunday, so come then.”
It is all very nice and humble, but there is an implication of
professionalism in the whole thing that is appalling. The idea is that
he didn’t put on a good performance, “didn’t get the ball over the
plate.” There you have the whole weakness of a professional ministry,
striving each Sunday to make an interesting speech. It simply can’t be
denied that the business of furnishing inspiration twice each week,
on a regular schedule, by a person who is paid to do just that and
whose success is judged by the amount of “pep” he can concentrate
in his homilies, is full of moral and spiritual dangers. To follow
such a program without running into spiritual bankruptcy requires the
resources of a saint.
_1928_
Arriving at ---- today, I was put up at the luxurious home of a very
charming potentate of the local pulpit. I was driven to my meeting in
a big Packard car (a gift of the congregation, my host informed me)
with a liveried chauffeur at the wheel. I don’t think I would have
reacted so strongly against this kind of life if I hadn’t been reading
Savotorelli’s Life of St. Francis on the way down and was inclined to
look at the world through the little brother’s rather than my own eyes.
To object to this kind of luxury for ministers, and not voice the same
objection in regard to the standards of living among laymen, may seem
to involve us in a moral dualism. But I am no longer afraid of dualism.
We might well have more of it. It will be long while before we can
convince laymen of the spiritual implications in standards of living
in a civilization which knows of no other way to give a man a sense of
achievement than to let him advertise it by outward show. But ministers
ought to know better.
Furthermore there is a moral peril in accepting the largess of men
to whom you are trying to minister. It is not that they try to
take conscious advantage of your sense of gratitude, but that such
dependence upon their generosity creates a psychological hazard
against honest presentation of the truth. Of course it is probably
true that men who receive these excessive benefactions are usually
too tame to need taming. Innocuous virtue is always more charming and
more liable to prompt a generous affection than the kind which raises
disquieting questions.
Then too, ministers who can preach the gospel of Jesus in our kind of
civilization without making anyone uncomfortable deserve an automobile
for the difficult feat. And they need one to compensate them for that
lack of spiritual vitality which makes the performance of the feat
possible. Most of these modern appurtenances are toys which appeal to
childlike people. When we sacrifice the adventure of trying to maintain
an inner moral integrity, we are bound to seek for compensating thrills
and to find them in our mechanical toys.
But all this may be the voice of jealousy. I love nothing so much in
the realm of physical pleasures as the sense of power which comes from
“stepping on the gas” when ensconsed in a big car.
_1928_
Spoke today at the Jewish temple in ----. The more I make contact
with the Jews the more I am impressed with the superior sensitiveness
of the Jewish conscience in social problems. I have yet to find a
Christian men’s group that can surpass and few to equal the intelligent
interest of a Hebrew group in the economic and social issues of the
day. I do not say that there is not in privileged Jewish groups more
moral complacency than is compatible with their avowed devotion to the
Hebrew prophets, but there is at least a considerable appreciation of
the genius of prophetic religion and some honest effort to apply the
prophetic ideal to life.
I am afraid that the individualistic traditions of Protestantism, and
perhaps also the strong Pauline strain in Protestant theology, have
obscured the social implications of Jesus’ gospel much more than is the
case in Jewish religion. I am not sure that the religious life in the
Jewish temple is always as obviously vital as it is in many Christian
churches, but what there is of it seems to me to be directed much more
astutely, at least from the social viewpoint, than in our groups.
The Jews are after all a messianic people, and they have never escaped
the influence of their messianic, or if you will, their utopian
dreams. The glory of their religion is that they are really not
thinking so much of “salvation” as of a saved society.
_1928_
The way Mrs. ---- bears her pains and awaits her ultimate and certain
dissolution with childlike faith and inner serenity is an achievement
which philosophers might well envy. I declare that there is a quality
in the lives of unschooled people, if they have made good use of the
school of life and pain, which wins my admiration much more than
anything you can find in effete circles. There is less of that whining
rebellion against life’s fortunes, less morbid introspection and more
faith in the goodness of God. And that faith is, whatever the little
cynics may say, really ultimate wisdom.
Mrs. ---- has had a hard life, raised a large family under great
difficulties, is revered by her children, respected by her friends,
and she has learned to view the difficult future with quiet courage as
she surveys the painful and yet happy past with sincere gratitude. She
thanks me for praying with her and imagines that I am doing her a favor
to come to see her. But I really come for selfish reasons--because I
leave that home with a more radiant faith of my own. My confidence in
both man and God is strengthened.
It is the quality in that woman’s life that seems to me to be
dissipated in the modern day, for all our progress. Perhaps we will
work out something comparable to it some day in a highly disciplined
culture. But as we lose the moral fibre of the generation of pioneers
and wait for the discipline of a generation of moral aristocracy, it is
ordained that we should wander through this present world where life is
too comfortable to have the tragic nobility which our fathers had and
too chaotic to disclose the charms which come from a great cultural and
moral tradition.
_1928_
Here is a pastor singing himself to sleep. He writes: “Business men
who attend church have sense enough to go out and run their business
as Christians without the minister interfering with the technique.
Many of the most spiritual and influential ministers I know never deal
directly with politics, industry or reform.” It is true of course that
a minister can’t offer expert advice on the detailed application of
Christian principles to specific fields. But neither can he assume
that principles get themselves automatically applied in the world’s
complexities.
One of the most fruitful sources of self-deception in the ministry is
the proclamation of great ideals and principles without any clue to
their relation to the controversial issues of the day. The minister
feels very heroic in uttering the ideals because he knows that
some rather dangerous immediate consequences are involved in their
application. But he doesn’t make the application clear, and those who
hear his words are either unable to see the immediate issue involved or
they are unconsciously grateful to the preacher for not belaboring a
contemporaneous issue which they know to be involved but would rather
not face.
I have myself too frequently avoided the specific application of
general principles to controversial situations to be able to deny what
really goes on in the mind of the preacher when he is doing this.
I don’t think I have always avoided it, and when I haven’t I have
invariably gotten into some difficulty. Nobody challenges principles.
Like the diplomats, the average man always accepts the gospel
“in principle,” and then proceeds to emasculate it by a thousand
reservations. I know we can’t be expert on every technical problem
involved in modern industrial and national civilization. But the
ministers who make a virtue of their pious generalities are either
self-deceived or conscious deceivers.
_1928_
I am glad to hear of the new honors which have come to Bishop M----.
He seems to me to be the most glorious figure in American church life.
To have a philosopher, prophet and statesman all rolled into one, and
to have that one achieve a peculiar eminence in our religious life is
a clear illustration of how the richest character is achieved when
various, seemingly incompatible, tendencies and functions are fused in
one personality.
Philosophers are not usually prophets. They are too reasonable and
circumspect to create or preserve the prophetic vision. The wise man is
too capable of balancing the truth, to which he ought to be loyal, with
some other truth with which it is in conflict. Thus he involves himself
in the endless antinomies of intellectualism.
This philosopher is enough of a Christian to escape this fate. But he
has another hazard to overcome; for he is a statesman. For years he has
carried heavy responsibilities as a church leader; and it is always
more difficult for a responsible leader, tied to an organization, to
speak bravely than an irresponsible prophet. Yet he has accomplished
it. Here is a vindication of the power of the Christian life. Here
is a Thomas Aquinas and an Innocent III and something of a Francis
all under one hat. He is not as much of an absolutist as Francis, of
course; and his power is not as great as that of Innocent. But his
learning would compare favorably with that of Aquinas, and like the
great medieval philosopher, he has combined the study of metaphysics
with that of social economy.
Strange that while I am so critical of bishops my greatest hero should
be a bishop and that, while I call myself an anti-puritan, that hero
should be a Methodist bishop. So life defies our prejudices and
generalizations.
_1928_
I always thought I was a fairly brutal realist, but I am beginning
to suspect that the whole thing is a pose to hide the sentimental
preacher. At any rate now that the time has come to sever my
connections with the church I find it almost impossible to take the
step. There is nothing quite like the pastoral relationship. I would
almost be willing to sacrifice the future for the sake of staying here
and watching the lovely little kiddies grow up, and see the young boys
and girls that I have confirmed blossoming into manhood and womanhood.
There must be something bogus about me. Here I have been preaching the
gospel for thirteen years and crying, “Woe unto you if all men speak
well of you,” and yet I leave without a serious controversy in the
whole thirteen years.
It is almost impossible to be sane and Christian at the same time,
and on the whole I have been more sane than Christian. I have said
what I believe, but in my creed the divine madness of a gospel of
love is qualified by considerations of moderation which I have called
Aristotelian, but which an unfriendly critic might call opportunistic.
I have made these qualifications because it seems to me that without
them the Christian ethic degenerates into asceticism and becomes
useless for any direction of the affairs of a larger society.
I do not say that some one ought not to undertake an ascetic revolt
against civilization. Certainly there would be a peace in it which
no one can find who tries to adapt the principles of love to a
civilization built upon the drive of power and greed. Those of us who
make adjustments between the absolute ideal of our devotion and the
necessities of the immediate situation lack peace, because we can never
be sure that we have our adjustment at the right place.
Every moral position which has left the absolute basis is in danger
of becoming a rationalization of some selfish purpose. I am not
unconscious of the fact that my tendency to criticise others so
severely for their alleged rationalizations and hypocrisies springs
from my own sense of insecurity.
I persevere in the effort to combine the ethic of Jesus with what
might be called Greek caution because I see no great gain in ascetic
experiments. I might claim for such a strategy the full authority of
the gospel except that it seems to me more likely to avoid dishonesty
if one admits that the principle of love is not qualified in the gospel
and that it must be qualified in other than the most intimate human
associations. When one deals with the affairs of a civilization, one
is trying to make the principle of love effective as far as possible,
but one cannot escape the conclusion that society as such is brutal,
and that the Christian principle may never be more than a leaven in it.
There has never been a time when I have not been really happy in
the relationships of the parish ministry. The church can really be
a community of love and can give one new confidence in the efficacy
of the principles of brotherhood outside of the family relation. The
questions and qualms of conscience arise when one measures the church
in its relationships to society, particularly to the facts of modern
industry. It is at this point where it seems to me that we had better
admit failure than to claim any victory. The admission of failure may
yet lead to some kind of triumph, while any premature confidence in the
victory of a Christian ethic will merely obfuscate the conscience.
Modern industry, particularly American industry, is not Christian. The
economic forces which move it are hardly qualified at a single point
by really ethical considerations. If, while it is in the flush of its
early triumphs, it may seem impossible to bring it under the restraint
of moral law, it may strengthen faith to know that life without
law destroys itself. If the church can do nothing else, it can bear
witness to the truth until such a day as bitter experience will force a
recalcitrant civilization to a humility which it does not now possess.
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