ritual; the Pope by the interdict could desolate a nation. We of to-day can have no adequate conception of the times when the ritual ruled the world. It is still potent in the Catholic Church and it lingers out its dying life in the Protestant bodies. We still baptize our children and call on the ministers to bury our dead.

In the second decade of the nineteenth century, just after the close of the Napoleonic wars, there was a great revival of the ritual in Western Europe. The Catholic Church furbished its rusty armour. Lecordaire roused in France an enthusiasm for Neo-Catholicism, while Keble, Newman, and Pusey attempted the catholicizing of the English Church. Enthusiastic young men and women were carried backward by this reactionary movement into the Middle Ages. Long-lost ritual was revived in the churches and Gothic architecture was used in the restoration of the old and in the building of new churches. The vital questions in those stirring times among the clergy were not concerned with doctrine nor conduct; they were questions of ritual.

It was just at this time that England and the Western world were entering upon the industrial era: when men and women and children were working twelve hours a day, under conditions destructive of decency and life, in the factories and the mines, while the English clergy were so enmeshed in their ritualistic revival that they could not see, much less remedy, these growing evils. Ritualistic precision was carried to such a degree that a woman might with more safety commit a breach of the seventh Commandment than a clergyman omit a prescription of the ritual. In this Catholic movement Christianity ceased more and more to be a way of life and degenerated into a ceremonial form. When I preached this sermon I naturally became in the eyes of my High Church brethren a traitor to my party.

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CHAPTER XXXVI

THE SOCIALIZATION OF CHRISTIANITY

s from my place in the pulpit I looked on the upturned faces of the people who crowded the pews

of the Third Presbyterian Church on the occasion of my preaching, I was conscious of that elation which comes to every preacher in the presence of his audience. There is in this elation not only an exalted sense of power, but also a sinful feeling of personal pride; my heart swelled with the vain thought that all these people had come to church to hear me preach. This is the besetting sin of the preacher which, unless he can lose it in the flow of his thought and the fervour of his preaching, ruins him as a preacher. A self-conscious preacher is a failure in the pulpit, and this is a disaster which neither the minister nor the church can long survive. In the Catholic Church the altar is the heart of the life of the church. When the priest is at the altar, God is in his hands and all the people are drawn to the altar by the presence of God.

In the Protestant Church it is the preacher in his pulpit who proclaims that power of God which is the salvation of the world. There can be no more august office than this to employ the energies of man; it is either profane assumption or divine audacity which permits a man to stand before his fellow men and say, "Thus saith the Lord."

A speaker to be effective must speak in the tongue of his hearers: If the language is foreign to the thought of the people the preaching is but as sounding brass and tinkling cymbal, a noise and not a word. As I looked down

on my congregation, it was my desire to tell them of the Lord Jesus and of His religion; to do this I must use words which came within their comprehension. It is my custom in preaching to pick out one man in the congregation and watch his face and attitude as a gauge of the power of my speech to reach the heart and stir the mind of my congregation.

On this night in the Third Presbyterian Church there was in the line of my vision a lawyer of high standing in his profession because of his native ability and great learning. As I watched the face of this man I saw in it attention, but not comprehension: he heard but he did not understand. The reason for this-as I know too wellwas that he did not understand the language of the Christian Church: this language was evolved to describe the facts and express the thought of the Christian life. But this life was no longer lived; it was in all its essential as foreign to the modern world as the life of the man in the moon. Let us take one of the fundamental words of Christianity—the word "charity," so nobly described by Paul in I Corinthians, xiii. When we hear the word "charity" it does not attract, it repels us. To be an object of charity is to suffer the last shame and degradation that can befall us: we think of asylums for old men and, as one New York institution has it, "homes for decayed gentlewomen." "Charity," in its modern significance, is a divisive word; it separates the rich from the poor: the rich bestow, the poor receive, charity. When a preacher uses the word "charity" he calls up the vision of poor old Betsy curtsying to my Lady Bountiful, who brings her flannel and soup from the Great House.

But in the language of Christianity the word "charity" has an entirely different meaning; it is not a divisive, it is a uniting word: it does not separate the Christian community into the rich and the poor, the high and the low,

but it unites them; it levels up and it levels down; it puts down the mighty from their seat and exalts the humble and meek. As Isaiah taught the Kings of Israel, the State exists for the sake of its weakest members. The sublimest forces of the household gather about the cradle and the sick-bed. Every member of the household has the right to his seat at the family table. And there is the corollary principle that everyone who eats at the table must, according to his ability, furnish the table. There must be in the Christian community no idle rich, no overworked poor.

Now, all this is so foreign to our modern, so-called Christian civilization that it is set down as criminal; he who preaches it is a fool and a madman. And this was the doctrine which I was trying to preach to the learned lawyer. I was insisting that Christianity was not primarily a doctrine nor a ritual; it was a social order. And a social order cannot be orderly as long as it is composed of conflicting elements. Slavery is fatal to the social order because of the necessary conflict between the master and the slave. Poverty and riches cannot live in peace together. The arrogance of the rich will for ever excite the envious hatred of the poor-landlordism and tenancy make possession of the land an ugly bone of contention.

That great Master of social science, Jesus of Nazareth, saw this truth with the clear vision of His prophetic soul. He saw that human society must be a society of equals. Each man must have his place in that social order as his right; each man must have his work in that social order as his duty. There must be political equality. A society divided into classes of rulers and subjects, nobles and serfs, producers and consumers, cannot bring peace to mankind; the struggle of these classes has been the tragedy of the world. As I preached this doctrine from the pulpit of the Third Presbyterian Church, I could see by his face that it was entirely beyond the comprehension of the lawyer

in his pew. His mind was not scientific; it was legalistic; his thought was governed, not by the eternal laws of God, but by the passing laws of men. And so it was with that great congregation. The almost unanimous verdict passed upon the sermon was that it was not practical. Poverty was practical, crime was practical, starvation was practical, extravagance and waste were practical, the arrogance of the rich and the cringing of the poor were practical: The Devil was a very practical gentleman, and Hell had all the requirements of a popular social resort. But economic comfort for all was not practical; forgiveness for sins was not practical; sobriety and continence were not practical. Equality of economic condition was not practical; God was a failure and heaven an illusion. Such, I was made to feel, was the judgment of my hearers upon my sermon. We were not living in the same country nor speaking the same language. Religion to them was the lip-service of God. Religion to me was the hand-service of man. Religion to them was a privilege. Religion to me was a responsibility; not that I was better or wiser than they, but I had been in a country which they had never visited, and had learned a language which was to them an unknown tongue. So far as I know, only one man was able to comprehend my message, and he told me that it was to him as if the roof of the church were lifted away and he saw the sun in the sky with all the planets moving each in its order about this centre of light and heat, the sun serving the planets and the planets holding the sun in its place. This man became my friend and my disciple; held up my hands in the day of my battle and gave me and mine a roof to cover us when we were exiled from our home in the Church.