The Perennial Revival and the Reformation of Society
At the close of an address on “Jesus, the Social Reformer,” treated entirely from a scriptural standpoint, a well-instructed auditor said: ^’ I confess to great surprise in finding how much Jesus did as a social reformer, and how often he spoke on the subject of property and poverty.” No man can go through the New Testament Gospels and note the words of Jesus on these themes without surprise. He was indeed the social reformer of all ages. His mission was the most revolutionary one the world ever saw. One thing that churchmen need to learn is this: that the mission of the Son of man is their mission, if their profession of faith is at all genuine. What he “began to do and teach” we must continue until “the day-star arises and the shadows flee away.” Every opinion which he expressed upon this very important topic of the social order should be ardently repeated and propagated by his disciples. As he spake the truth in love, so should we voice it for all mankind. There is a love that criticizes only, and there is a love that corrects and develops. The latter needs to be more fervent than the former, else men will call it into question. Every social reformer should definitely understand that apart from love he can do nothing. To create a race prejudice, to incite class spirit, to irritate still further existing contentions — these are all easy. But to stand before armies drawn up for battle, and so plead the cause of peace as to scabbard the sword — that is more honorable. Such is the office of the church in its work of social reform.
It is the purpose of this chapter to make some suggestions as to how the church might execute its social mission. These suggestions will reveal the relations between the perennial revival and social reform.
Save the Individual from Sin
The mission of the Son of man is clearly expressed in Luke 19: 10: “The Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.” If, therefore, the mission of the Son of man and the mission of the church are one, the first work of the latter is to win men from the world’s sins.
Sin is the tap-root of all social disorder. It matters not what form that disorder takes, sin is always its origin. The indolent man is guilty of the sin of sloth. The imbecile is such only because sin has marred what God made perfect. When the strong oppress the weak they are guilty of an awful iniquity. When the great or small indulge the passions of the flesh, the fruits thereof are apples of Sodom to the social order. Mr. Dugdale, in a work on “Criminology,” tells us that to one bad woman, in Indianapolis, were born five daughters, known in police circles as “the Juke sisters.” At the time Mr. Dugdale wrote his book the descendants of those five women numbered twelve hundred and sixty-one. Of all the males in this family only twenty had any profession at all, and ten of those learned their trade behind prison-bars. Of all the women in this company, fifty- two per cent were fallen; while only two per cent of the entire progeny seemed to be normal in mind and morals. Up to the time of Dugdale’s writing that family had cost the State of Indiana a million and a quarter dollars. Who will say that the first work of the church is not to save the individual from sin? Who can compute the contribution that would have been made to the social order had this sinful mother been won from her wickedness to the true worship of the Son of God, before one of those five daughters ever opened her eyes to the light of day?
The saved man contributes to social righteousness. His life stands for a better social order. What reforming force is so positive and powerful as a person? How much poorer the social order would be had Paul never lived, had Luther perished in swaddling clothes, had Bunyan continued in his wicked ways, had Wilberforce never been visited by the Spirit of God, had Wendell Phillips never heard Lyman Beecher’s sermon on the subject, “You Belong to God “! It will be a victorious time for the church if she ever sets herself to the problem of making men, as Josiah Strong suggests,” by trying to remove every moral and physical evil; to give every child who comes into the world the best possible chance; to lend a hand to every man struggling to be free from sin and ignorance, and to attain to righteousness and knowledge.” God told Abraham that ten righteous men could save Sodom. Henry Drummond, in his picture of ‘* A city without a church,” thinks that ten righteous men would save the world’s greatest and wickedest municipal center. The life of Savonarola in Florence, Italy, would seem to illustrate the claim. It was the time when the Medici sat on the throne; when, as S. E. Herrick puts it, “culture was wedded to corruption.” “It was an age whose external garb was elegant, whose inmost heart was moral rottenness; an age whose only grand enthusiasms were for art and vice.” Yet, this solitary man went into a city where “splendor and cruelty walked hand in hand; where, in the ducal palace perpetual f eastings were going on in gorgeous saloons; where the clinking of glass and crystals was matched by the clanking of fetters in the dungeons underneath.” He uncovered that cruelty to the eyes of its perpetrators; he exposed those f eastings before the face of God; he stopped the cHnking of glass and the riot of drink; he struck the fetters from the ankles of slaves. When he finished with the throne, the ruler had been led to repentance, compelled to restore his ill-gotten gain, and to give Florence her freedom. Such a life as this, with its effect upon the social order, makes one feel the truth of that now popular phrase, “What we need is not more men; but more man!”
Construct a New Society
Jesus came to do this. No man can read the ministry of the Son of God reported in the four Gospels and question it. And here again the mission of Christ ought to be the mission of the church.
It should form a circle within a circle. The way to correct society is not to begin at the rim, and try to set it all right, from circumference to center, by a single enactment. One must work from within outward. When, in the later fifties, good democrats saw that their party was linked indissolubly with the custom of slavery, they began an abolition agitation. One man won another, and the two a third, and so on until the heart of democracy was eaten out, and a social revolution was the result. That Jesus meant to build up a society within society is evident in his speech concerning his own disciples: “I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me; for they are thine... I have given them thy word; and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world” (John 17: 9, 14-16).
Think how significant is the expression which the Jews at Thessalonica employed concerning Paul and Silas — disciples of this same Jesus! They went to the house of one Jason, supposed to be entertaining these brethren, and violently assaulted it, carrying Jason and certain brethren unto the rulers of the city, and crying: “These that have turned the world upside down have come hither also. And these all do contrary to the decrees of Caesar.” The charge was well founded. This little circle of Christ’s disciples, having found the world wrong-side up, had set themselves to the task of righting it. They, having seen the superiority of Christ over Caesar, propagated the opinions of the former as against the decrees of the latter. The world to-day is in equal need of being righted, and the politics of this hour smell as loudly of corruption, and are put to the same inconvenience by the opinions of the Christ. It is a circle within a circle, a company working from the center to the circumference, a society instituted of God to set things to rights.
It must condemn, by contrast, bad social customs. The men who bring in a new social order will not be selfish reformers. Holtzman, a German theologian, says: “There can be no manner of doubt that the fundamental ideas of socialism ought to be referred to Jesus.” Professor Peabody justly remarks: “There is a subtle difference, as of a change of atmosphere, when one passes from the presence of many social reformers and approaches the spirit of the teaching of Jesus. One breathes in the Gospels a climate of tolerance, mercy, and manysidedness, which is far from stimulating to the socialist’s temper, and moderates the bitterness of his indictment of the world.” That accounts for the fact that Carl Marx parts company with the Christ, and puts his plea into the phrases of the materialist. Yet what scheme of social reform ever proved itself so effective as has the very conduct of consistent Christians? When Paul carried the gospel to Rome, law was the watchword of the State, tyranny the custom of its emperors, oppression the practice of its favored classes. In a single century the whole face of society was changed. Love vied with law; the emperor thought more humbly of himself; the upper classes recognized in their slaves Christian brethren and sisters. This same society, called Christian, compasses a similar mission to this moment.
You can follow the track of the true church of God by the better social order left in its train. Witness England and America where Protestant Christianity are in the ascendency; go into the heathen worlds, and wherever you find a church you find the beginnings of civilization, the rising consciousness of a common brotherhood, and the exercise of an increasing justice as between man and man. When, in 1872, Mr. Moody was returning from Europe there was a number of ministers on board. A young man with the spirit of a braggart stepped up to the captain, and said in a loud tone that he was sorry he had taken passage on that boat, as it would be unlucky to travel with so many parsons. The captain was himself a pretty rough fellow, but he had no sympathy with this egotist, and replied: “ You fool! If you will show me a town in England where there are five thousand people and not one parson, I will show you a place a mile nearer hell than you have ever been.” The average European or American hardly imagines how much of the good social order he enjoys is due to the gospel of the Son of God.
Dr. Fred Haggard states that he has seen a filthy, almost nude, ignorant Assamese woman, with the juice of the beetle-nut running from each corner of her mouth, transformed in five short years into a woman of genuine refinement, with habits of tidiness, clothed as a westerner, worthy to be spoken of as civilized. What did it? The village in which she lived underwent a kindred change in the same brief season. What did it? Doctor Clark, missionary in the Congo Free State, Africa, testifies to having seen the same social order brought from heathen confusion in as short a season. What did it? Informed men will tell you that it came about in consequence of the regenerating influences of the gospel of the Son of God.
Some time since, in a Sunday-school convention in Minneapolis, Marion Lawrance reported how William Reynolds drove into a county-seat in southern Illinois and found it an utterly God-forsaken place, a veritable Sodom indeed. Saloons competed with dwelling-houses for numbers; the county jail was full of criminals, and an iron railing, running around the building, had twoscore of men, with manacled hands, chained to it, because the prison appointments could not receive all who belonged behind the bars. In seven years the saloons had gone, the chains had been taken from the wrists of this evil row; and even the jail’s cells contained but a single man. What wrought the change? A circle within a circle; a church within the city; Christian conduct contrasting bad social customs. Do you tell us that an institution capable of this victory can do nothing for the great social problems which now appeal to beneficent powers for a solution?
Preach and Practise Social Righteousness
The truth will fell on the social order. WTio can better teach it than a church of Christ? For centuries it has been the custodian of God’s truth as revealed in his word — the best book ever written on social order. Wise socialists and intelligent Christians are, alike, working for the recovery of the scheme of social life set forth in that book. As long ago as the time of Moses, God provided against the accumulation of great estates to pass them on to indolent heirs. As long ago as Moses’ time, God, through the same word, uttered an emancipation proclamation, which was effective every seven years. As long ago as Moses’ time, God declared the right of the laborer to share with the owner the fruits of the field; and as long ago as Jesus’ time, God presented the peril of riches, witnessed in the strongest words against all oppression, and affirmed in unmistakable speech, the fraternity of all men. What wonder, then, that Carroll D. Wright, qualified by the office which he held to understand the social problem at first hand and fitted by his knowledge of the word of God to know what it says concerning this great subject, wrote, some years ago, these words: “After many years of investigation into the social, moral, and industrial condition of the people, I came to the conclusion that, in the adoption of the philosophy of the religion of Christ as a practical creed for the conduct of business, there was tO’ be found the surest and speediest solution of the difficulties which excite the minds of men, and which lead many to think social, industrial, and political revolution is at hand. I still remain of the same opinion.” Dr. George C. Lorimer, speaking of the effort which men have made to frame a social gospel with Christ left out, said: “Deprived of the supernatural, how much of sanctity and authority would survive? Robbed of that distinction, religion could pretend to no revelations and could impart no assurance. Repudiating it, men and women have tried to worship and do good to their fellows; but they have found no basis on which to rest duty or to make it anything other than mere preference, and they have been unable to comfort the afflicted with anything but a vague fancy relative to a future life. They have eulogized the gospel of soup and bread, clothes and shelter; have so idealized humanity as to substitute it for God himself, and have awakened a temporary interest in their experiments; but the outcome has uniformly discouraged them. They have found that charity apart from spiritual communion with the Almighty increases its objects; that the soup of to-day will not satisfy the poor of to-morrow; that pauperism actually grows under the touch of relief that is prompted simply by secularism; and that the crowd soon turns up its nose at the worship of humanity. The Christianity that succeeds in bringing succor to the forlorn and destitute is unquestionably the Christianity that is grounded in the supernatural, and whose very doctrines are permeated through and through with the supernatural.” To teach that doctrine, then, is the plain duty of the church. It is no mere sophistry to say, “Truth is mighty, and will prevail.” There was a time when slavery was the custom of the world, but Christ’s single sentence, “All ye are brethren,” brought it to an end. There was a time when polygamy was a common practice, but God’s word concerning the better custom of monogamy has condemned it as sin and made it a shame. There was a time when rulers oppressed the people with impunity, but wherever Christ’s name is known and his gospel spoken, that custom comes more and more to an end. He is a poor philosopher who does not know that truth is an effective social reformer. The time is past when the average family is compelled to live on an
income of thirty dollars per annum; when the common people are permitted to own no land; when the poor perish without a physician; and the ignorant can enjoy no opportunities of education. And what brought it to an end? Among other things, certainly the utterance of that truth which has fearlessly denounced tyranny on the one side, and called to account lawless’ ness on the other.
If there isp one thing, however, which is more potent than teaching the truth, it is to live it. Hence our statement, “by the preaching and practice of social righteousness.” Professor Peabody says: “Many a man can teach Christian doctrine to heathen listeners; but only a life, which has been ’ hid with Christ in God ’ can communicate to heathen lives the spiritual energy which proceeds through Christ from God.” We all understand his meaning. The “Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister.” “The disciple is not above his Master.” “As the Father sent Christ, even so sends he us.” We are not in the world to fleece it, but here to favor and help it. A clean distinction has been made by Josiah Strong on this point when he says, “Commercial service aims to supply a demand; Christian service aims to meet a need.” There is a vast deal of preaching in the world that would be more effective if turned into practice; as there is a vast deal of praying that would be more consistent if associated with doing. To illustrate, we noticed some years ago a little squib from the Omaha *’ World-Herald “to the effect that a poor man was sick and in severe financial straits. Some of his brethren of the church met at his house to pray for his speedy recovery, and asked God to send material sustenance to his family. While one of the deacons was offering a fervent petition there was a rap at the door. A friend opening it found this same deacon’s stout son standing on the steps. “How do you do, my boy; what brought you here?” “I have brought pa’s prayers,” he replied. “Brought your pa’s prayers? What do you mean?” “Yep; I have brought his prayers, and they are out in the wagon. You jest help me, and we will get them in.” Investigation disclosed the fact that he had hauled from his father’s house a load of potatoes, apples, corn-meal, flour, bacon, together with some clothing, and a lot of jellies for the sick. And the reporter went on to say that this discovery “broke the meeting up.” And yet, underneath this facetious story, there is a most serious suggestion. To preach the truth is a power, as praying is; but to practise it is the better part. The words of Jesus are again in requisition: “Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. Then shall they also answer him, saying. Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee? Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you. Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.”
God works with them who walk with him. How any man can hope to influence the social order for righteousness without first finding out what God thinks about it, without praying for his guidance at every step, we cannot understand. The selfish are always trying to get God to agree with them. The wise are always searching for God’s thought, that they may be in agreement with him. It is said that during the stormy days of the Civil War some one asked Abraham Lincoln to appoint a day of fasting and prayer that God might be on the side of the Union army. “Don’t bother about that,” said the man of common sense, “God is now on the right side, and simply get with him.” When the church gets with him a perennial revival will follow, and in that revival social reform will be surely found.