Hope

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Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  The ideas preached by Socialists and Single Taxers are adopted by Populists, radical Democrats, and conservative Republicans successively, and in coming years the great parties will take credit for championing ideas which they did their best to stifle and then to betray. It is a beneficent scheme by which the joy of life is evened up. The “practical men” and conservatives have the pleasure of feeling that they are the only ones who can really make reforms work. The prophetic minds have the satisfaction of knowing that the world must come their way whether it will or not, because they are on the way to justice, and justice is on the way to God. Summary Here then we have a succession of men perhaps unique in religious history for their moral heroism and spiritual insight. They were the moving spirits in the religious progress of their nation; the creators, directly or indirectly, of its law, its historical and poetical literature, and its piety; the men to whose personality and teaching Jesus felt most kinship; the men who still kindle modern religious enthusiasm. Most of us believe that their insight was divinely given and that the course they steered was set for them by the Captain of history. We have seen that these men were almost indifferent, if not contemptuous, about the ceremonial side of customary religion, but turned with passionate enthusiasm to moral righteousness as the true domain of religion. Where would their interest lie if they lived to-day? We have seen that their religious concern was not restricted to private religion and morality, but dealt preeminently with the social and political life of their nation. Would they limit its range to-day? We have seen that their sympathy was wholly and passionately with the poor and oppressed. If they lived to-day, would they place the chief blame for poverty on the poor and give their admiration to the strong? We have seen that they gradually rose above the kindred prophets of other nations through their moral interest in national affairs, and that their spiritual progress and education were intimately connected with their open-eyed comprehension of the larger questions of contemporary history. Is it likely that the same attitude of mind which enlarged and purified the religion of the Hebrew leaders would deteriorate and endanger the religion of Christian leaders? We have seen that the religious concern in politics ceased only when politics ceased; that religious individualism was a triumph of faith under abnormal conditions and not a normal type of religious life; and that the enforced withdrawal of religion from the wider life was one cause for the later narrowness of Judaism. Does this warrant the assumption that religion is most normal when it is most the affair of the individual? We have seen that the sane political programme and the wise historical insight of the great prophets turned into apocalyptic dreams and bookish calculations when the nation lost its political self-government and training.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  In the preceding chapters we have studied the origins of Christianity. It rested historically on the religion of the Hebrew prophets, and the great aim of the prophets was to constitute the social and political life of their nation in accordance with the will of God. The fundamental purpose of Jesus was the establishment of the kingdom of God, which involved a thorough regeneration and reconstitution of social life. Primitive Christianity cherished an ardent hope of a radically new era, and within its limits sought to realize a social life on a new moral basis. Thus Christianity as an historical movement was launched with all the purpose and hope, all the impetus and power, of a great revolutionary movement, pledged to change the world-as-it-is into the world-as-it-ought-to-be. The organization in which this movement was embodied, after three centuries of obscurity and oppression, rose triumphant to be the dominant power of the civilized world. Christian churches were scattered broadcast over the Roman Empire. Their numbers were so great and their organization so flexible and tenacious that the final attempts of the Empire to uproot the Church proved futile and the Empire capitulated and made terms. Christianity supplanted heathenism as the State religion of the Empire. Its churches were endowed with the ancient properties and rights of the temples. Its clergy were given immunity from the taxes and exactions which crushed all other classes. Its members filled the civil service. Its great bishops had the ear of the men in power. The population of the ancient world entered the Church en masse , and though the great majority may have had little experience of the inner power of the new faith, yet the people lay open to the instruction and guidance of the Church. The bishops came to be the leaders of the local nobility which controlled the municipal life of the Roman cities. In the East the great Justinian formally placed the administration of public charity and the supervision of the public officials under the bishops. When the machinery of imperial administration broke down in the provinces under the invasion of the barbarians in the fifth century, the machinery of the Church remained unbroken. The provincial cities rose like islands of the old Roman civilization amid the flood of barbarian life that covered the provinces, and in the cities the bishops were the leaders, the protectors of the poor, and the organizers of the forces of law and order. Amid the general disorder and insecurity the Church offered the stable points and thereby gathered power to itself. Ancient families became extinct and the Church became the heir of their lands and slaves and serfs. Small proprietors sought security by committing their lands to the Church and becoming its tenants. The landed wealth of the Church alone sufficed to make it a power of the highest rank in the feudal system of the Middle Ages, in which all power finally rested on the possession of the land.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Some would place the emphasis on the spiritual blessings, others on the social justice and emancipation that would be involved in the perfect reign of God. It was an ideal, and a very capacious and elastic ideal. The early Christians were no more unanimous about their eschatology than the Jews had been, and than we are to-day. Paul expected an immediate spiritualization of the entire Cosmos. The dead would be raised in a spiritual body; the living would be transformed into the same kind of body; for flesh and blood in the nature of things could not share in that spiritual kingdom. Death would cease. Nature would be glorified, and the long travail of all creation would end when the children of God would be manifested in their glory. In Paul’s programme of the future there is no room for a millennium of happiness on this present earth. Only the dogmatic theory that all Scripture writers must hold the same views can wedge the millennium into Paul’s scheme of the coming events. His outlook is almost devoid of social elements. To him the spirit was all. This material world could be saved only by ceasing to exist. But there were others to whom the life in the spirit was not so intense and experimental a reality as to Paul. They clung more lovingly to this old earth and to the human intercourse which made their happiness. The material world would, of course, end some day, but first there would be a really good life on earth. When Satan and his hosts were chained and imprisoned, and Christ and his saints reigned instead, then injustice and oppression would cease at last. Nature would be free from the stunting power of sin and the splendid fertility of paradise before the fall would return. Death would come late and gently. If any one had suffered death for the testimony of Jesus, that would not deprive him of his share in that happy time; he would come to life and be invulnerable to death till the thousand years were over. At the end of that time there would be a last rallying of the powers of evil, a final spasm of judgment, and then this earth would pass away. This is the type of the Christian hope expressed in the Apocalypse of John. The twentieth chapter describes this intermediate stage of salvation before the new heavens and the new earth appear in the twenty-first chapter. And even that new earth is only a glorified old earth, with a shining city and ever bearing fruit trees and a crystal river and nations that pass in and out through its gates. The eschatology of the Apocalypse was the orthodox eschatology of primitive Christianity. Most of the writers of the post-apostolic age express or indorse it.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Socialism has fully as much claim on his intellect as Robert Browning. If a man follows the mind of Jesus Christ in his judgments, he will have to appear partial in a social world which is by no means built on a line with the mind of Christ. It is a different matter entirely for a minister to follow the mind of a political party and make himself liable to the charge of partisanship. It may happen at long intervals in the history of a nation that a political party so thoroughly embodies the righteous instincts of the nation that its cause is almost identified with the triumph of justice. In such a juncture a minister may wisely decide that he must throw his influence publicly with that party and risk a loss of influence in other directions. But it is questionable if that situation has confronted ministers in our country these many years. A man may well doubt if the machinery of our great parties has ground out social progress or ground it up, and whether party loyalty has propagated patriotism or poisoned it. A minister has no business to be the megaphone of a political party and its catchwords. He should rather be the master of politics by creating the issues which parties will have to espouse. Questions are usually discussed a long time before they become political issues. Old political parties are controlled by conservative forces and will take up progressive measures only when it is necessary to retain their followers or outbid another party. The time for the pulpit to do its best work is before a question is torn to tatters on the platform. A Christian preacher should have the prophetic insight which discerns and champions the right before others see it. If he has honestly done that, he can afford to be silent when the “practical men” grumblingly enter to finish up the job which he has helped to lay out for them. Hail to the pioneers! The early work is the formative work. Embodying a moral conviction in law is the last stage of a moral propaganda. Laws do not create moral convictions; they merely recognize and enforce them. Moreover, there are important political questions which never become party issues. The eradication of tuberculosis, for instance, is a public task for the next decade. But the creation of public sanitariums for the infected, and the enforcement of sanitary regulations for the prevention of the disease, will never become a party question. Strong pressure will be brought to bear on legislatures and public officials to protect the financial interests of tenement-house owners who propagate tuberculosis by their death-traps, but no party will dare openly to champion their cause. If the pulpit creates the public sentiment which will insist on the enactment and enforcement of such laws and ordinances, it will not be meddling with party politics.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  There are two great entities in human life,—the human soul and the human race,—and religion is to save both. The soul is to seek righteousness and eternal life; the race is to seek righteousness and the kingdom of God. The social preacher is apt to overlook the one. But the evangelical preacher has long overlooked the other. It is due to that protracted neglect that we are now deluged by the social problem in its present acute form. It is partly due to the same neglect that our churches are overwhelmingly feminine. Woman nurtures the individual in the home, and God has equipped her with an intuitive insight into the problems of the individual life. Man’s life faces the outward world, and his instincts and interests lie that way. Hence men crowd where public questions get downright discussion. Our individualistic religion has helped to feminize our churches. A very protracted one-sidedness in preaching has to be balanced up, and if some now go to the other extreme, those who have created the situation hardly have the right to cast the first stone. It seems likely that even after this present inequality of emphasis is balanced, some preachers will put more stress on the social aspects of religion. In that case we must apply Paul’s large and tolerant principle, “There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit.” Some by nature and training have the gift of dealing with individuals and the loving insight into personal needs; others have the passionate interest in the larger life and its laws. The Church needs evangelists and pastors, but it needs prophets too. If a minister uses the great teaching powers of the pulpit sanely and wisely to open the minds of the people to the moral importance of the social questions, he may be of the utmost usefulness in the present crisis. Intelligent men who live in the midst of social problems do not yet know that there is a social problem, just as one may pass among the noises and sights of a city street without noticing them. If the minister can simply induce his more intelligent hearers to focus what is in their very field of vision, thereafter they can not help seeing it, and information will begin to collect automatically in their minds. The Church itself has riveted the attention of the people on other aspects of life hitherto and thereby has diverted their attention from the social problems. It ought to make up for this. A minister mingling with both classes can act as an interpreter to both. He can soften the increasing class hatred of the working class.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Now that it was no longer necessary to confess one’s status as a pauper in public, I allowed myself to hope again. At noon I asked for permission to put my name down for the summer camp. My mother angrily refused. Was I undernourished? Did I find fault with the quality of my bed? Nowhere can one be happier than at home! The mere thought of wanting to leave my parents proved that I was a selfish son. This accusation of selfishness — I’ll hear it from my mother’s lips until her dying day, and always as a comment on actions that seemed to me to be legitimate enough, in fact necessary as far as my own life is concerned. For all petty crimes, careless hurts, expressions of self-centered forgetfulness, all the peccadillos that weigh on my conscience, she was nevertheless indulgent enough. Here too, her primitive Bedouin mind and heart had unerringly distinguished what was essential from what was accessory. My father didn’t come home at noon for lunch. So we waited until the evening, sulking at each other, my mother as childish about it as I. But my father immediately hit upon the essential argument: it cost nothing. He calculated the price of such a vacation in the mountains if one had to pay for it. The total amount was too big for us to be able to refuse, which would be sheer waste. He probably reckoned also how much he would save while I was away. Anyhow, he decided that I could go there, and my mother, having nothing more to say, began to prepare my kit. It was all quite expensive: I was expected to take with me a number of things we didn’t own, a toothbrush, tooth paste, pajamas, and other items of which we had only a single sample for the whole family: a comb, a towel, a shoeshine kit.

• From The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 4: Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300-1700) (1984)

  Perhaps the most dramatic example of the contrast between such concern and the simple fervor of the apocalyptic vision came in Tertul- lian's Apology. Describing the worship of the Christian community, a society knit together by its common con fession, its discipline, and its hope, he enumerated some of its petitions: "We pray also for the Caesars, for their ministers, and for all who are in high positions; for the commonweal of the world; for the prevalence of peace." To this rather conventional list he appended one more THE FAITH OF THE CHURCH CATHOLIC 130 Tert.Apol.59.2 (CCSL 1:150) Tert.Scap.5.5 (CCSL 2:1129) Tert.Scap.4.1 (CCSL 2:1130) Tert.^/?o/.39.3 (CCSL 1:150) Tert.Praescrip. 36.4-5 (CCSL 1:217); Tert.V/rg.vel.i.$ (CCSL 2:1209) Tert.Marc.5.24.12 (CCSL 1:544) Tert.Ak/ff.3.24.6 (CCSL 1:542-43) Tert.5Vor/Mo.i7 (CCSL 2:1090); Tert.Fug.-j.1-2 (CCSL 2:1144) petition: "And for the delay of the end." The apologetic context of the statement is significant, but so is its liturgical context. The instructions of I Timothy 2:1-4, echoed in Tertullian's words, were apparently being taken in the liturgy to imply the prayer that the world be spared and that the consummation of the age be postponed. It was another echo of the same New Testament passage when Tertullian claimed—directly after predicting the imminent wrath of God—that Christians were intent on "saving all men." In both statements, Tertullian pro fessed to be speaking for the corporate will and action of the church, not simply to be voicing his private opinions. The same service of worship in which the church prayed for the delay of the end also included the reading of the Scriptures, not, presumably, to the exclusion of their apocalyptic portions; some services included also a recita tion of the creeds quoted by Tertullian, including their eschatological affirmations. The prayer for the delay of the end was not a negation of these eschatological hopes, but belonged with them to an eschatology that cannot be classified as either "futuristic" or "realized." It was an eschatology that could go as far as to say that "even if Scripture offered me no hand of celestial hope, I would still have enough of a preliminary judgment of this promise, since I already have the gift on earth and I could expect something from heaven, from the God of heaven as well as of earth," and at the same time could cast this hope in millenarian terms. The plain fact was that the categories of an undiffer- entiated apocalyptic were inadequate to the needs of a faith whose content was a history that had already hap pened.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Amid the general anarchy, against the coarse vice and brutality of the barbarians, herself harried by the rapacity of the nobles and weakened by the ignorance and barbarism of her own clergy, the Church did what she could, but a thorough social reconstruction was impossible. In modern life her power is broken by the prevalent doubt and apostasy, and the current of materialism and mammonism is now too great to be stemmed. Such a statement of the case deserves a more sympathetic consideration than it is likely to get from either friend or foe of the Church. Impetuous Christians are apt to see only the duty that has been left undone, and not the difficulties which beset the stout hearts of the past. Those who are no friends of the Church often have no realizing experience themselves what a task it is to counteract even a single, deep-rooted moral evil or to quicken a single group of human beings to a nobler life. Whoever thinks that Christianity ought to have accomplished more than it did, confesses great faith in its potency. I have that faith. I feel so deeply the inexhaustible powers of renewal pulsating in it, that its very achievements only make me ask: Why has it never done what it was sent to do? Others again will return the opposite reply. If we ask why Christianity has not reconstituted society, they will say it has done so. Has it not lifted woman to equality and companionship with man, secured the sanctity and stability of marriage, changed parental despotism to parental service, and eliminated unnatural vice, the abandonment of children, blood revenge, and the robbery of the shipwrecked from the customs of Christian nations? Has it not abolished slavery, mitigated war, covered all lands with a network of charities to uplift the poor and the fallen, fostered the institutions of education, aided the progress of civil liberty and social justice, and diffused a softening tenderness throughout human life? It has done all that, and vastly more. The influence of Christianity in taming selfishness and stimulating the sympathetic affections, in creating a resolute sense of duty, a stanch love of liberty and independence, an irrepressible hunger for justice and a belief in the rights of the poor, has been so subtle and penetrating that no one can possibly trace its effects. We might as well try to count up the effect in our organism of all the oxygen we have inhaled since our first gasp for breath. In so far as humanity has yet been redeemed, Christianity has been its redemption. Many of us have made test of that regenerating power in our personal lives. Many, too, have marked the palpable difference in the taste of life between some social circle really affected by Christian kindliness and a similar circle untouched by Christian motives and affections. What is true within such small spheres of social life has been true in the large area of Western civilization.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Thus the millennial hope was necessarily a political hope and in antagonism to the existing political situation. As soon as the Roman Empire took an attitude of active hostility toward the followers of Christ, some at least of them took an attitude of passive hostility toward the Empire. This was neither wise nor Christian, but in estimating the social impetus of primitive Christianity we cannot overlook these revolutionary tendencies. If the broadening current of the Christian movement had such sucking whirlpools on one of its edges, it helps us to estimate the swiftness and force of the entire stream. The political consciousness of Christians The apocalyptic hope expressed a tremendous sense of political destiny. All the world was to be made over and the Christians placed in the centre of things. The reins of power were to be torn from the hands of the mighty and given to the followers of Jesus. The history of the world converged upon them. They had this proud consciousness of an exalted future, not because of their own worth, but because they believed in the worth of Jesus Christ and hoped to be lifted to power with him as his faithful adherents. At the core this hope was sound, but we cannot help feeling that the form of the hope was largely visionary. It certainly did not come true. As we pointed out in an earlier chapter, the apocalyptic hope was a debased form of the prophetic hope, developed at a time when the Jewish people were without political power or experience. The whole scheme of the future in the apocalyptic literature is artificial, unreal, unhistorical, and mechanical. Jesus turned away from it and emphasized the law of organic development, but his followers did not generally rise to that higher view. Yet we do find in early Christianity a different type of thought which had the same high sense of an historical mission, but which combined it with a saner and more philosophical outlook on the world. It was evolutionary, while apocalypticism was catastrophic. For those who believed in Christ his coming marked the fundamental epoch in human history. All that had gone before was but preparation. In Paul’s philosophy it was a basal thought that Christ was the second Adam, the source and starting-point of a new and spiritual humanity, the originator of a new type of man. The Christian Gnostics, who were the Christian evolutionary philosophers of that age, went even farther and made the revelation of Christ the central cosmic event. And it was not simply a new kind of individual that was being produced within the sphere of Christ’s influence, but a new people, a novel social unity. “You are a chosen race, a kingly priesthood, a consecrated nation, God’s own people”—four terms in which organic solidarity is expressed with reiterated emphasis. In their churches Christians had a visible demonstration of the fact that the old social unities were being broken up to build a new unity.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Our generation is profoundly troubled by the problems of organized society. The most active interest of serious men and women in the colleges is concentrated on them. We know that we are in deep need of moral light and spiritual inspiration in our gropings. There is an increasing realization, too, that the salvation of society lies in the direction toward which Jesus led. And yet there is no clear understanding of what he stood for. Those who have grown up under Christian teaching can sum up the doctrines of the Church readily, but the principles which we must understand if we are to follow Jesus in the way of life, seem enveloped in a haze. The ordinary man sees clearly only Christ’s law of love and the golden rule. This book seeks to bring to a point what we all vaguely know. It does not undertake to furnish predigested material, or to impose conclusions. It spreads out the most important source passages for personal study, points out the connection between the principles of Jesus and modern social problems, and raises questions for discussion. It was written primarily for voluntary study groups of college seniors, and their intellectual and spiritual needs are not like those of an average church audience. It challenges college men and women to face the social convictions of Jesus and to make their own adjustments. [image "A person wearing a suit and tie Description generated with very high confidence" file=Image00006.jpg] A Theology for the Social Gospel Walter Rauschenbusch In April, 1917, I had the honour of delivering four lectures on the Nathaniel W. Taylor Foundation before the Annual Convocation of the Yale School of Religion. These lectures are herewith presented in elaborated form. The Taylor Lectures are expected to deal with some theme in Doctrinal Theology, but the Faculty in their invitation indicated that a discussion of some phase of the social problem would be welcome. I have tried to obey this suggestion and still to remain well within the original purpose of the Foundation by taking as my subject, “A Theology for the Social Gospel.” Of my qualifications for this subject I have reason to think modestly, for I am not a doctrinal theologian either by professional training or by personal habits of mind. Professional duty and intellectual liking have made me a teacher of Church History, and the events of my life, interpreted by my religious experiences, have laid the social problems on my mind. On the other hand, it may be that the necessity of approaching systematic theology from the outside may be of real advantage. Theology has often received its most fruitful impulses when secular life and movements have set it new problems. Of the subject itself I have no cause to speak modestly. Its consideration is of the highest importance for the future of theology and religion. It bristles with intellectual problems. This book had to be written some time, and as far as I know, nobody has yet written it.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  It cannot afford to have young men sniff the air as in a stuffy room when they enter the sphere of religious thought. When the world is in travail with a higher ideal of justice, the Church dare not ignore it if it would retain its moral leadership. On the other hand, if the Church does incorporate the new social terms in its synthesis of truth, they are certain to throw new light on all the older elements of its teaching. The conception of race sin and race salvation become comprehensible once more to those who have made the idea of social solidarity in good and evil a part of their thought. The law of sacrifice loses its arbitrary and mechanical aspect when we understand the vital union of all humanity. Individualistic Christianity has almost lost sight of the great idea of the kingdom of God, which was the inspiration and centre of the thought of Jesus. Social Christianity would once more enable us to understand the purpose and thought of Jesus and take the veil from our eyes when we read the synoptic gospels. The social crisis offers a great opportunity for the infusion of new life and power into the religious thought of the Church. It also offers the chance for progress in its life. When the broader social outlook widens the purpose of a Christian man beyond the increase of his church, he lifts up his eyes and sees that there are others who are at work for humanity besides his denomination. Common work for social welfare is the best common ground for the various religious bodies and the best training school for practical Christian unity. The strong movement for Christian union in our country has been largely prompted by the realization of social needs, and is led by men who have felt the attraction of the kingdom of God as something greater than any denomination and as the common object of all. Thus the divisions which were caused in the past by differences in dogma and church polity may perhaps be healed by unity of interest in social salvation. As we have seen, the industrial and commercial life to-day is dominated by principles antagonistic to the fundamental principles of Christianity, and it is so difficult to live a Christian life in the midst of it that few men even try.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  On the other hand, the classes within which Anabaptism gained lodgement lacked that concrete power, and so the Anabaptist movement, which promised for a short time to be the real Reformation of Germany, just as it came to be the real Reformation of England in the Commonwealth, died a useless and despised death. In the French Revolution the ideal of democracy won a great victory, not simply because the ideal was so fair, but because it represented the concrete interests of the strong, wealthy, and intelligent business class, and that class was able to wrest political control from the king, the aristocracy, and the clergy. The question is whether the ideal of coöperation and economic fraternity can to-day depend on any great and conquering class whose self-interest is bound up with the victory of that principle. It is hopeless to expect the business class to espouse that principle as a class. Individuals in the business class will do so, but the class will not. There is no historical precedent for an altruistic self-effacement of a whole class. Of the professional class it is safe to expect that an important minority—perhaps a larger minority in our country than in any country heretofore—will range themselves under the new social ideal. With them especially the factor of religion will prove of immense power. But their motives will in the main be idealistic, and in the present stage of man’s moral development the unselfish emotions are fragile and easily chafe through, unless the coarse fibre of self-interest is woven into them. But there is another class to which that conception of organized fraternity is not only a moral ideal, but the hope for bread and butter; with which it enlists not only religious devotion and self-sacrifice, but involves salvation from poverty and insecurity and participation in the wealth and culture of modern life for themselves and their children. It is a mistake to regard the French Revolution as a movement of the poor. The poor fought in the uprising, but the movement got its strength, its purpose, and its direction from the “third estate,” the bourgeoisie, the business class of the cities, and they alone drew lasting profit from it. That class had been slowly rising to wealth, education, and power for several centuries, and the democratic movement of the nineteenth century has in the main been their march to complete ascendency. During the same period we can watch the slow development of a new class, which has been called the fourth estate: the city working class, the wage-workers. They form a distinct class, all living without capital merely by the sale of their labor, working and living under similar physical and social conditions everywhere, with the same economic interests and the same points of view. They present a fairly homogeneous body and if any section of the people forms a “class,” they do.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Luke characterized John’s purpose by quoting the call of Isaiah to make ready the way of the Lord by levelling down the hills and levelling up the valleys and making the crooked things straight. John would not have been so silent about the ordinary requirements of piety, and so terribly emphatic in demanding the abolition of social wrongs, if he had not felt that here were the real obstacles to the coming of the kingdom of God. From this preaching, coupled with our general knowledge of the times, we can infer what his points of view and his hopes and expectations were, and also what the real spring of the remarkable popular movement was which he initiated. It was the national hope of Israel that carried the multitudes into the desert to hear John. The judgment which he proclaimed was not the individual judgment of later Christian theology, but the sifting of the Jewish people preparatory to establishing the renewed Jewish theocracy. The kingdom of God which he announced as close at hand was the old hope of the people, and that embraced the restoration of the Davidic kingdom, the reign of social justice, and the triumph of the true religion. John was a true descendant of the prophets in denying that Jewish descent constituted a claim to share in the good time coming. He put the kingdom on an ethical basis. But it was still a social hope and it required social morality. According to our evangelists the work of John came to an end because he had attacked Herod Antipas for his marriage with Herodias. According to Josephus it was because Herod feared the great influence of John over the people and wanted to forestall a revolutionary rising under his impulse. The two explanations are not incompatible. Josephus had very direct lines of information about John and his intimation deserves the more weight because his book was written for a Roman audience and his general tendency was to pass with discreet silence the revolutionary tendencies in his people. Now Jesus accepted John as the forerunner of his own work. It was the popular movement created by John which brought Jesus out of the seclusion of Nazareth. He received John’s baptism as the badge of the new Messianic hope and repentance. His contact with John and the events at the Jordan were evidently of decisive importance in the progress of his own inner life and his Messianic consciousness. When he left the Jordan the power of his own mission was upon him. He took up the formula of John: “The kingdom of God has come nigh; repent!” He continued the same baptism. He drew his earliest and choicest disciples from the followers of John. When John was dead, some thought Jesus was John risen from the dead.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  I would preach the doctrine of work to all, and to the men of wealth the doctrine of unremunerative work.” The most “unremunerative work” is the work that draws opposition and animosity. Mr. Roosevelt implies here that a man’s duty to his family is the first and dominant duty, and that this exempts him in some measure from service to the larger public. It follows that the childless have a call to the dangerous work of the kingdom of God. A man and woman who are feeding and training young citizens are performing so immense and absorbing a service to the future that they might well be exempt from taxes to the State and from sacrificial service to the kingdom of God. If nevertheless so many of them assume these duties in addition, the childless man and woman will have to do heroic work in the trenches before they can rank on the same level. It is not fair to ask a man with children to give his time and strength as freely to public causes as if he had none. It is still more unfair to expect him to risk the bread and the prospects of his family in championing dangerous causes as freely as if he risked only himself. The childless people should adopt the whole coming generation of children and fight to make the world more habitable for them as for their own brood. The unmarried and the childless should enlist in the new apostolate and march on the forlorn hopes with Jesus Christ. In asking for faith in the possibility of a new social order, we ask for no Utopian delusion. We know well that there is no perfection for man in this life there is only growth toward perfection. In personal religion we look with seasoned suspicion at any one who claims to be holy and perfect, yet we always tell men to become holy and to seek perfection. We make it a duty to seek what is unattainable. We have the same paradox in the perfectibility of society. We shall never have a perfect social life, yet we must seek it with faith. We shall never abolish suffering. There will always be death and the empty chair and heart. There will always be the agony of love unreturned. Women will long for children and never press baby lips to their breast. Men will long for fame and miss it. Imperfect moral insight will work hurt in the best conceivable social order. The strong will always have the impulse to exert their strength, and no system can be devised which can keep them from crowding and jostling the weaker. Increased social refinement will bring increased sensitiveness to pain. An American may suffer as much distress through a social slight as a Russian peasant under the knout. At best there is always but an approximation to a perfect social order. The kingdom of God is always but coming. But every approximation to it is worth while.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  If a man’s calling consisted in manufacturing or selling useless or harmful stuff, he would find himself unable to connect it with his religion. In so far as the energy of business life is expended in crowding out competitors, it would also be outside of the sanction of religion, and religious men would be compelled to consider how industry and commerce could be reorganized so that there would be a maximum of service to humanity and a minimum of antagonism between those who desire to serve it. As soon as religion will set the kingdom of God before it as the all-inclusive aim, and will define it so as to include all rightful relations among men, the awakened conscience will begin to turn its searchlight on the industrial and commercial life in detail, and will insist on eliminating all professions which harm instead of helping, and on coordinating all productive activities to secure a maximum of service. That in itself would produce a quiet industrial revolution. Scatter through all classes and professions a large number of men and women whose eyes have had a vision of a true human society and who have faith in it and courage to stand against anything that contradicts it, and public opinion will have a new swiftness and tenacity in judging on right and wrong. The murder of the Armenians, the horrors of the Congo Free State, the ravages of the liquor traffic in Africa, the peace movement, the protest against child labor in America, the movement for early closing of retail stores—all these things arouse only a limited number of persons to active sympathy; the rest are lethargic. It takes so long to “work up public sentiment,” and even then it stops boiling as fast as a kettle of water taken off the fire. There are so many Christian people and such feeble sentiment on public wrongs. It is not because people are not good enough, but because their goodness has not been directed and educated in this direction. The multiplication of socially enlightened Christians will serve the body of society much as a physical organism would be served if a complete and effective system of ganglia should be distributed where few of them existed. The social body needs moral innervation; and the spread of men who combine religious faith, moral enthusiasm, and economic information, and apply the combined result to public morality, promises to create a moral sensitiveness never yet known. The pulpit and the social question The new evangel of the kingdom of God will have to be carried into the common consciousness of Christendom by the personal faith and testimony of the ordinary Christian man. It is less connected with the ministrations of the Church and therefore will be less the business of the professional ministry than the old evangel of the saved soul. It is a call to Christianize the everyday life, and the everyday man will have to pass on the call and make plain its meaning.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  In the gospel and epistle of John we have a confirmation of this translation of the future tense into the present. The expected antichrist is already here; the judgment is now quietly going on; the most important part of the resurrection is taking place now. The discourse about the future coming of the Lord in the Synoptists is replaced in John by the discourse about the immediate coming of the Comforter. This, then, is our interpretation of the situation. Jesus, like all the prophets and like all his spiritually minded countrymen, lived in the hope of a great transformation of the national, social, and religious life about him. He shared the substance of that hope with his people, but by his profounder insight and his loftier faith he elevated and transformed the common hope. He rejected all violent means and thereby transferred the inevitable conflict from the field of battle to the antagonism of mind against mind, and of heart against lack of heart. He postponed the divine catastrophe of judgment to the dim distance and put the emphasis on the growth of the new life that was now going on. He thought less of changes made en masse , and more of the immediate transformation of single centres of influence and of social nuclei. The Jewish hope became a human hope with universal scope. The old intent gaze into the future was turned to faith in present realities and beginnings, and found its task here and now. Luke says that the boy Jesus “advanced in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men”; that is, he grew in his intellectual, physical, religious, and social capacities. It is contrary to faith in the real humanity of our Lord to believe that he ever stopped growing. The story of his temptation is an account of a forward leap in his spiritual insight when he faced the problems of his Messianic task. When a growing and daring mind puts his hand to a great work, his experiences in that work are bound to enlarge and correct his conception of the purpose and methods of the work. It is wholly in harmony with any true conception of the life of Jesus to believe that his conception of the kingdom became vaster and truer as he worked for the kingdom, and that he moved away from the inherited conceptions along the lines which our study has suggested. But after all this has been said, it still remained a social hope. The kingdom of God is still a collective conception, involving the whole social life of man. It is not a matter of saving human atoms, but of saving the social organism. It is not a matter of getting individuals to heaven, but of transforming the life on earth into the harmony of heaven. If he put his trust in spiritual forces for the founding of a righteous society, it only proved his sagacity as a society-builder.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  The massing of labor in the factories since the introduction of power machinery has brought them into close contact with one another. Hard experience has taught them how helpless they are when they stand alone. They have begun to realize their solidarity and the divergence of their interests from those of the employers. They have begun to organize and are slowly learning to act together. The spread of education and cheap literature, the ease of communication, and the freedom of public meeting have rapidly created a common body of ideas and points of view among them. The modern “labor movement” is the upward movement of this class. It began with local and concrete issues that pressed upon a given body of workingmen some demand for shorter hours or better wages, some grievance about fines or docking. The trades-unions were formed as defensive organizations for collective action. It is quite true that they have often been foolish and tyrannical in their demands, and headstrong and even lawless in their actions; but if we consider the insecurity and narrowness of the economic existence of the working people, and the glaring contrast between the meagre reward for their labor and the dazzling returns given to invested capital, it is impossible to deny that they have good cause for making a strenuous and continuous fight for better conditions of life. If Christian men are really interested in the salvation of human lives and in the health, the decency, the education, and the morality of the people, they must wish well to the working people in their effort to secure such conditions for themselves and their dear ones that they will not have to die of tuberculosis in their prime, nor feel their strength ground down by long hours of work, nor see their women and children drawn into the merciless hopper of factory labor, nor be shut out from the enjoyment of the culture about them which they have watered with their sweat. But the labor movement means more than better wages and shorter hours for individual workingmen. It involves the struggle for a different status for their entire class. Other classes have long ago won a recognized standing in law and custom and public opinion—so long ago that they have forgotten that they ever had to win it. For instance, the medical profession is recognized by law; certain qualifications are fixed for admission to it; certain privileges are granted to those inside, irregular practitioners are hampered or suppressed.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I spend a night with my beloved. I ask only that he does not return to America with June, which reveals to him how much I care. And he makes me swear that whatever happens when June comes I must believe in him and in his love. It is a difficult thing for me to do, but Allendy has taught me to believe, so I promise. Then Henry asks, “If I had the means today and I asked you to come away with me for good, would you do it?” “Because of Hugo and June I would not, could not But if there were no June and no Hugo, I would go away with you, even if we had no means.” He is surprised. “Sometimes I wondered if it was a game for you.” But he sees my face and is moved to silence. A night of clear, calm talk, when sensuality is almost superfluous. Allendy is watching over my life. He has hypnotized me into a trusting somnolescence. He wants me to be lulled by my happiness, to rest on his love. We decide, for Hugo’s sake (Hugo has become jealous of him), that I should not come to see him for ten or twelve days. It is also like a test of my confidence. Suddenly I relax my fevered desire for him and accept his nobility, his seriousness, his self-sacrifice, his concern for my happiness, and I feel humble. What makes me humble is that he believes I love him, and I feel that I am lying. It moves me to think I can lie to this great, sincere man. I wonder whether he knows better than I whom I love or whether I am deceiving him, as I have deceived them all. In 1921, when I was still corresponding with Eduardo, I was already in love with Hugo. If Hugo knew that in Havana, while we were exchanging love letters, I was stirred by Ramiro Collazo. If Henry knew that I love Allendy’s kisses, and if Allendy knew how deeply I want to live with Henry . . . Allendy believes my life with Henry, my low life, is not true or real or lasting, whereas I know I belong to it. He says, “You have traversed shady experiences, but I feel that you have remained pure. They are temporary curiosities, a hunger for experience.” Whatever experience I enter I come out unscathed. Everyone believes in my sincerity and purity, even Henry. Allendy wants me to see my love for Henry as a literary or dramatic excursion and my love for him as an expression of my true self, whereas I believe it is exactly the opposite. Henry has me, mind and womb; Allendy is my “experience.”

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  The Hague Tribunal is an institution of far-reaching historical importance which has grown up under our eyes. Its real origin was in the hearts of idealists who supported their protest against war and armed peace by scientific reasoning. These ideas found lodgement in the mind of Czar Nicholas, and by the power of initiative vested in a great monarch he was able by a single manifesto to compel world-wide attention to the question and force a theory into the field of practical politics. But the suspicion and non-ideal conservatism of governments is so great that they would have let the movement die still-born, if it had not awakened the moral enthusiasm of the common people in those countries in which democracy had trained the people to act, and in which purified religion had stored the strongest ethical dynamic. English and American public sentiment were probably the decisive factor which made the first conference at the Hague more than a dress parade. The aim for which the Conference was really called, was not accomplished; the increase in armaments was not checked. Instead of that a permanent tribunal of international arbitration was created. For a time no use was made of it. Many made mock of this puny outcome of a movement which had been mistakenly heralded as a proposition for universal peace. Many religious journals sat on the seats of the scornful. Then another strong man with convictions put his hand on the idle machinery and set it in motion. President Roosevelt secured the reference of the “Pious Fund” dispute with Mexico and later the reference of the Venezuelan disputes, and therewith the Hague Tribunal became an operative force in history. Andrew Carnegie, that one of our great millionnaires who has the strongest leaven of democratic idealism, has undertaken to house the Tribunal in adequate splendor. It is safe to say that the institution will now perpetuate itself and gradually enlarge its functions. Here we have under our eye the various forces which cooperate to advance humanity; the dissemination of ideas by idealistic thinkers, the action of individuals strong by hereditary position, personal character or wealth, and the support of enlightened public opinion. History will do the rest. It will be immeasurably easier to assign additional powers to the Tribunal than to create it in the first place. These forces triumphed over the sullen reluctance and cynical doubt of some governments and the amused ridicule of many “practical men.” Many religious people looked askance, because peace on earth can be established only by the coming of Christ. Others hailed it with a shout of triumph as another step in the coming of Christ. The future will probably look back to it as the faint beginning of a new era in international relations and will marvel that any doubted the clear call of Christ at such a turning-point.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Religion no longer spends its immense force in tearing men out of social life and isolating them from family, property, and State. Therefore it is now free to direct that force toward the Christianizing of the common life. It no longer establishes monastic communities to live the truly Christian and communistic life. Therefore it ought now to make the life of the entire community truly Christian. If the disappearance of ascetic enthusiasm means the evaporation of Christian self-sacrifice, it would mean a net loss and a surrender of Christianity to worldliness. If it means that the old enthusiasm is now directed toward the moral regeneration of society, it would mean a new era for humanity. Ceremonialism, which early clogged the ethical vigor of Christianity, was broken in the Reformation and is slowly dying out. Greek and Roman Catholicism are faithful to it by virtue of their conservatism, but even there it is no longer a creative force. There are ritualistic drifts in a few Protestant bodies, but they are not part of modern life, but romantic reactions toward the past. The present tendency to a more ornate and liturgical worship in the radical Protestant denominations of America is æsthetic and not sacramental in motive. It is proof that sacramentalism is so dead that Protestant churches no longer need to fear the forms that might revive it. The priest is dying. The prophet can prepare to enter his heritage, provided the prophet himself is still alive with his ancient message of an ethical and social service of God. It is a commonplace that Christianity has grown less dogmatic. There is probably just as much earnest conviction, but it is modified by greater respect for the conviction of others and by a deeper interest in right living. Men and churches fellowship freely with little regard to doctrinal uniformity. One of the chief anti-social forces has therewith disappeared from Christianity, and the subsidence of the speculative interest has to that extent left Christianity free to devote its thought to ethical and social problems. Christianity in the past was almost wholly churchly. The organized Church absorbed the devotion, the ability, and the wealth of its members. To some degree that is still true. The churches need time and money and must strive to get their share. For very many men and women the best service they can render to the kingdom of God is really through the local church and its activities. In some measure, religion is still supposed to be bounded by the Church. What is connected with the churches is religious; what is apart from them is supposed to be secular. Even very worldly affairs, like bazaars and oyster suppers, are religious if they raise the support or increase the popularity of a church. On the other hand, efforts to fight tuberculosis or secure parks and playgrounds are viewed as secular, because they are not connected with a church. But there has been a great change.