CHAPTER XII

THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY IN RELIGION

TRUE religion is the same in all ages: "The life of God in the soul of man." It is doing justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God; is faith and hope and love; it is realizing the invisible world, aspiring toward a divine future, seeking the well-being of others.

But because it is life it changes from age to age. "When I was a child," says Paul, "I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things." The man not only speaks a different language from the child, he apprehends life differently, he thinks different thoughts, and has different experiences. The faith of a man is not a child's faith; his hopes are different, his loves are different. The religion of the twentieth century and of the first century are the same that is, they are both the life of God in the soul of man. Yet they are different, as the life of nature is different in October from the life of nature in May. Religion is a working life, therefore it has an organization-a church; it is an intel

lectual life, therefore it has ordered thought a theology; it is an emotional life, therefore it has an experience and a worship. And this church, this theology, this experience and worship, change in the race as in the individual. The religious life is not the same in a democratic as in an autocratic society.

Christianity, passing out from Judea into Rome, passed from a partially democratic into a wholly autocratic world. It transformed the world, but was itself transformed. The Church of Rome is not a copy of the Jewish synagogue; the theology of Augustine is not a copy of the Sermon on the Mount; the worship of the mass is not patterned after the primitive prayer-meetings described in the Books of Acts. The Church of Rome was an imperial church with a supreme pontiff whose power was autocratic, whose word was final. The theology of Latin Christians was an imperial theology: God was King; law was his edict; the Bible was a book of laws; its canons of interpretation were legal canons; sin was rebellion; forgiveness was remission of penalty; atonement was transfer of penalty from the guilty to the innocent. Man is not a bundle of separated faculties. His experience determines his thinking; his thinking colors his experiences. In this imperial religion worship was a petition for pardon

by rebellious but penitent subjects, addressing a justly indignant sovereign whose gracious pardon was besought by intercessors and purchased by the offering of a perpetual but bloodless sacrifice.

Changes in organization are more easily effected than changes in habits of thought or in types of experience. The religious revolution which for the Protestant world overthrew autocracy in church government has more gradually introduced the democratic spirit into the thought of the Church, and still more gradually into the experience of Christians. But we are coming to a consciousness of the change which that spirit is effecting. In the Roman Catholic Church we call it Modernism; in the Protestant Church we call it sometimes the New Theology, sometimes the Spirit of Humanitarianism. It is criticised as an innovation and condemned as a heresy; but I believe that it is a new phase in the victory of Hebraism over paganism, of a democratic Christianity over a pagan autocracy. The democratic, that is the Christian, spirit is transfusing our thoughts and our experiences as well as our political and religious organizations; and we are trying, half consciously, to readjust to the new conditions our intellectual and spiritual expressions. The democratic spirit does not deny the

affirmations of the autocratic religion; it reaffirms them, but it gives to them a new significance. It conceives that God is a Sovereign; that laws emanate from him; that the Bible is a trustworthy interpretation of those laws; that sin is lawlessness; that forgiveness involves some remission of penalty; and that it is accomplished through the offering of sacrifice. But filled with the democratic, that is the Christian, spirit, the legalistic theology ceases to be legalistic and becomes spiritual, ceases to be supernatural and is becoming more frankly human because more truly divine.

There is no better definition of Political Democracy than Abraham Lincoln's "Government of the people, by the people, for the people." It is the doctrine of Political Democracy that the source of authority is in the people and that authority is to be exercised by the people and for their benefit. It is the doctrine of Industrial Democracy that the source of wealth is in the people and wealth is to be used by the people and for their benefit. The doctrine of Religious Democracy may be similarly expressed: Religion is of the people, by the people, for the people. The source of the religious life is in human nature its instruments and institutions exist for men and are to be controlled by men. Religion is the

natural life of man,- his privilege and prerogative, his inheritance and equipment. It is the democratic spirit in religion which is making those changes in religious thought and life which are the despair of some, a sacrilege to many, but a joy and inspiration to an increasing number.

The democratic spirit regards, or is slowly coming to regard, the religious life as the natural life of man, and irreligion as unnatural. It regards religion as a life developed in man, not as something external imposed upon him. It esteems that life as supernatural in no other sense than as art life, or musical life, or literary life, or business life is supernatural-supernatural because in God we live and move and have our being. Jesus compares the Kingdom of God to a seed which groweth up secretly; for the earth, he says, bringeth forth of herself. The democratic spirit accepts this figure as an interpretation of the Kingdom of God in the individual soul: the soul bringeth forth of itself. God, says the Hebrew Psalm of Creation, made man in his own image and breathed into him the breath of life. The democratic spirit believes this to be true of all men-Jew and Gentile, Christian and pagan, saint and sinner. We are his offspring, says Paul, and in saying that he quotes a heathen poet. The