Chapter IV: Part 4

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.