RELIGION AND CHARACTER.

as did Hudibras, who

79

"Proved his doctrines orthodox

By apostolic blows and knocks."

Yes, the earnestness of the old-style English Puritans and Scotch Covenenters, reawakened in the hearts of their descendants of the twentieth century, would soon make of ours a Christian nation to compare favorably in morals and self-respecting manliness with the inhabitants of Turkey and Japan!

YE 49TH LESSON.

Religion and Character.

According to common opinion, the religious man is one who contributes liberally to help keep up the church and support the ministry, attends "divine service" regularly, does not use profane language or drink alcoholic liquors; and he professes belief in certain mediaeval dogmas. If he let rooms at two dollars a day to prostitutes or pianos to them at exorbitant rates, or goes to the mayor or the chief of police of the city and protests against the lewd women's being banished from the city, because, as a dry goods merchant, he finds them to be his "best customers" these things do not bar him from being a leader in church work or a Sunday-school teacher.

"I send my wife to church," the merchant says,
"So finely dressed, my silks to advertise."
"I keep a rented pew to show my furs,"
Another says, "and thus I gain big sales."

Commercialism is the defacto religion of America.
be found to controvert the statement.

And no man will

And in every city in the United States, of five thousand inhabitants and over, gambling, prostitution and liquor selling are licensed by the authorities, as a rule, and protected by the police, though state laws, in most instances, make these establishments nuisances, if not felonious. A "mulct tax" is exacted from all. This tax sanctifies the vices and crimes and the nuisances go unabated. This is "government by graft;" and, in regard to the liquor evil, the voters, a majority of them, sanction it by petition in Iowa, though the law says "it is in no way legalized" the saloons being, dejure, "nuisances." To this degree of abasement has the commercial spirit brought a so-called "Christian" state.

ebb

with us.

What is lacking? more unprincipled than was English society in the time of Charles the Second. There was then a reaction from the strictness of Puritanism to the laxity of Parisian morals. There will in America be a return wave of moral reform before many decades have gone by in the future. Beginning in 1830, in our country, a tidal wave of temperance reform flowed over the United States and reached England and Ireland-the "teetotal-pledge" movement. The people are ripe for a change for the better today. Great religious revivals are taking place on both sides

Moral principle. Civilization is at a very low

I believe that American society today is more immoral,

the

seas dividing English-speaking peoples. A great reform movement is near at hand. The ethical teachings of the New Testament will be emphasized as never before since the Apostles' day. All the liquor hells and gambling hells and tobacconist dens will go by the board. And the Magdalenes will be reclaimed as was she who bathed the Master's feet with her tears and wiped them with the hairs of her head.

I see that the madness of money getting has almost spent its force. The building up of manhood will come in next. Our literature is far off the track. What is there for moral betterment in the fiction so eagerly read today? Very little. No man should ever write a book that will not tend to lead the readers of it to be better persons, boys and girls, men and women. Indeed, the whole struggle of life should be to this end. How to build up ideal character in one's self and others is the highest aim of human effort. We would not be out of style in dress for anything. We would be personally handsome and dress superbly and wear diamond rings and a sparkling breastpin. But what is outward appearance compared to inward perfection? "Blessed are the pure in heart."

A beautiful character, an exemplary life, the love of the good and not big suppers at clubs, seats at the wassail board or to be "lions" at the summer resorts, are commendable. The foremost thought and passion of every great soul, as Dr. Hale has so beautifully said and exemplified in his saintly life, is to "lend a hand." How unbecoming it is for us to even seem to desire anything for self, to care to sit in a cushioned seat or to lie on a soft bed. All these unmanly desires are laid aside when duty bids us shoulder our muskets, as in 1861. While war is barbarity, the readiness to accept the deprivations of a soldier's life, and uncomplainingly to meet its hardships, as did the Spartan youth of old and the American boys in all our wars, is true manliness.

YE 50TH LESSON.

The Church and the Saloon.

Is it true that, as a rule, the men who do not go to church do go to the saloon? If so, there are many exceptions. Perhaps Colonel Ingersoll never attended church nor gave money to support it, nor the saloon either. And his disciples keep aloof from the church, it is reasonable to believe, and from the saloon, too, let us hope. Ingersoll was a Christian man, in my opinion, and the reason for my belief is that he was an upright man, loving his country, his home, his wife and his children; in fact, he had been brought up in a Christian land by Christian parents and every good thought he had was a Christian thought and every good principle a Christian principle-for there are no good thoughts and good principles in the minds of Americans and Europeans, not even in the minds of the Turks, that are not, historically and in fact, Christian-as the sea is salt. It is not the brain, however, but it is the heart that is Christian or unchristian. "Love is the fulfilling of the law." No Christian can keep a saloon or visit a saloon; for in keeping it he does harm and that is unchristian; and in visiting it as a patron he does harm to himself and family, and, by his example to the young; therefore, his love of country and of humanity is nil. I mean to say that a great majority of the men who do not uphold the church uphold the saloon and patronize it and hence are unchristian and unpatriotic.

So we have those two institutions and their supporters. If the major portion of the men that patronize the saloons were to pull up stakes, take ship and leave the United States forever, taking all the saloons with them and the seven houses of ill-fame and their inmates and patrons that are now, attached as a rule, to each saloon, what a blessing it would be to our country! This is sober truth. What a blear-eyed and bloated-faced army would reel out of America for America's good! Better than was the retirement of the Russians and Japs both, if our country were Manchuria.

Now, as to the church: It pays no taxes, and, so, speaking of it from the commercial viewpoint, it is "no good" compared with

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81

the saloon-grand contrast! For, the saloons in Iowa pay each a mulct tax of twelve hundred dollars a year! "Keep the saloons, then," does the commercialized, money-crazed reader say, "and let the churches go!" That is about what the people of Iowa have voted to do. It is only for the tax the saloons are tolerated and if the saloons hold their ground the church will go, and the state, too, in so far as free government has place in it, and the liquor power will rule. This is true. The church has stood for nearly two thousand years pointing its sfire toward Heaven with the cross above. The saloon stands with the sign above the door: "Road to And this inscription is literal truth. Fault may be justly found with the church, as it is and has been administered by fallible men, not excepting that of our puritan ancestors. Luther found fault with the church of his day. Luther was the Father of Liberty in the modern world. He did good. No man denies this, Protestant or Catholic. Every earnest movement for reform in this world has

Hell!"

done good. My prayer is: "God bless the church and make it better," and "God, condemn (I mean d-m) the saloon; it cannot be worse." And this is an earnest prayer devoutly uttered. Let the saloon be anathamatized in the prayers of every good man and good woman— nor can language be too terrible in denunciation of the abominable hell into which so many fall as into the crater of a volcano.

And all men know that the church is advancing to a higher and higher appreciation of the meaning of the words "God is Love," and of the words "Godly." What, then, is the office of the church? It is to make men Godly; that is to say, to lead them to be like God. And who have been most like God? Those who loved most, and preeminently, Jesus, whom the New Testament rightly terms "God manifest in the flesh." Why so? Because he was all love. No one can estimate too highly the character of Jesus, having in him the mind that was his. No man lives, or has ever lived, that has spoken of him as other than divine, if not in the mystical sense held by the schoolmen or metaphysicians or visionaries of the mediaeval monasteries, they do in the loftier sense that makes all divine that ripened in the time of Grecian and Roman greatness, art, literature, etc., and makes permanent and admirable what antiquity has given us -the source of our higher enlightenment in the aesthetic sense.

And the church is not dying out. Grander houses of worship are building today in America than ever before. There are no more enlightened, unselfish and better men in the world, as a rule, than our clergy of all denominations. Christianity, born of ancient learning, in an age that has never been surpassed nor equaled in mental and moral sublimity, founded not on ignorance, but on enlightenment, on learning, on the wisdom of the sages of all the enlightened people of old-the choicest fruitage of the tree that has given us all that we possess of knowledge of architecture, sculpture, poetry, painting, oratory, philosophy, religion, etc., etc.. Christianity, I say,

will

remain and continue the mirror of the highest social and moral status of mankind to the end of time. It is the conservator of the good. As the world grows, more and more intelligent Christianity takes forward steps. And not the Christianity of the New Testament, but that of the church. The New Testament presents the highest philosophical ideals of the Grecian and Roman and Hebrew and Egyptian and Babylonian and Hindu and Chinese sages. of antiquity-the handiwork of the Neo-Platonists of Alexandria at the wind

ing
up of the Augustine age-the triumph of eclecticism.

YE 51ST LESSON.
Morality and Religion.

Morailty and religion are not always co-partners. The worship of the Pagan gods of Greece and Rome had no relation to morality.

But the Hebrew religion, of which the Old Testament is the historical record, was bottomed on a moral code, the Ten Commandments. And Christianity inherited the same morality and reinforced it with ideals and precepts derived from Greek philosophy, and the teachings of Confucius and of the Buddha, so that a Christian (not a hypocrite) is a moral man, and a moral man is presumably a Christian; and this has been so from the beginnnig.

Justin, the Martyr, who lived within a century of Christ and who was the first Christian writer after St. John, whose works have come down to us, says:

"One article of our faith then is that Christ is the first begotten of God, and we have already proved him to be the very Logos, (or Universal Reason), of which mankind are all partakers, and therefore, those who live according to the Logos are Christians, notwithstanding they may pass with you for Atheists. Such among the Greeks were Socrates and Herakleitos, and the like; and such among the Barbarians were Abraham and Ananias, and Azarias."

But a period of darkness (the dark ages) intervened when "Credo" became the criterion of the Christian religion and no matter how upright, morally, a man might be, if he professed not to believe certain metaphysical dogmas he was anathamatized as a heretic and put to death with torture.

between the two.

What is morality? And what is religion? Every one thinks that he can answer correctly these questions. But, indeed, they are hard questions to intelligibly answer and draw a clear distinction Webster's definition of morality is: "The doctrine or system of moral duties, or the duties of men in their social character; ethics. The practice of moral duties; virtue. The quality of an action that renders it good; rectitude." Of religion, Webster says: "As distinct from virtue or morality, it consists in the performance of duties we owe directly to God, from a principle of obedience to His will. Any system of faith and worship."

Essentially there is, and ever has been, but one code of morals the world over, wherever civilization exists or has existed, in Europe, Asia, Africa, America and on the islands of the sea. Go back six thousand years before the Christian era and we find, written on papyrus and preserved in the coffins of the embalmed in the tombs along the Nile: "I did no evil-did not allow my mouth to be inflamed-did not plunder-did not oppress-did not steal-did not slay people did not practice eavesdropping-did not use violence save for reason-did not commit adultery-did not cause terror-did not quarrel-did not cause weeping-did not practice impurity nor uncleanness—was not rebellious-did not curse-did not send forth my hand in wrath-was not hasty-did not transgress against a pious one-did not harm an evil doer-did not revile the king-was not proud mouthed. My necessities were not great save according to my possessions. I did not revile the god of my city. I gave bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, clothes to the naked and shelter to the stranger." (From the "Book of the Dead.")

But there are many names of religion, though, in fact, all religions of enlightened peoples are essentially one: recognition of the life to come, a spirit world and means of conciliating spirits-God, angels, demons, etc. They are conciliated in divers ways. The Zulu places the skull of a monkey on the top of a pole outside of his hut or kraal to keep off evil spirits. More enlightened peoples have various ceremonials that answer to "please God" apart from moral duties. There is wickedness. But, as a rule, there is self-justification for wrong-doing. The martyrs were put to death by those who believed they were right in doing so. St. Paul says: "I verily thought I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus. I persecuted even unto strange cities." Jesus prayed, "Father, forgive them. They know not what they do." In religion men do the best

THE CHRISTIAN ORDER.

883

they know: Protestant, Catholic, Mohammedan, Jew, Buddhist, Confucian, etc. Why may we not hold all equally blameless since their intentions are equally good? When in Spain, John Adams did not, in a cathedral, kneel and kiss the relics of a certain saint, nor seem to show deference to them, a devout Catholic whispered to, the ecclesiastic who was Mr. Adams' guide, "He is not a Christian." "Yes," said the guide, "he is in his own way." So let every one be freely granted "his own way" in religion. It is our charge to free the world from vice, immorality, tyranny, ignorance, superstition and want. And we must believe with St. Paul that "as many as are led by the spirit of God they are the sons of God," in a special sense, and with Justin the Martyr that "those who live according to the Logos (the "Word" or Universal Reason of which mankind are all partakers) are Christians." It is well to not lose sight of common sense, even in religious belief and practice.

YE 52D LESSON.

The Christian Order.

There is a new thought and an old- -Christian and Pagan. They are far apart-antipodes. We are not yet entirely clear of the old thought, which stands up like a huge rock in mid-ocean, endangering the ships that pass. The new thought is a haven. But that haven has not been fully reached by the voyagers of the present age. We sail between the old and the new. But the haven is in sight. Happy will we be when anchored safely in the harbor.

Only a single thought and yet it is of greater value to mankind than all the gold ever accumulated on the planet earth since Adam's fall than all else that is sought by human beings-the "lump of leaven" that the woman hid in three measures of meal-the "grain of mustard seed!" New? Not to ripened humanity. The Greek sages almost grasped it; the Hindu Gymnosophists almost held it. It is the leaven of enlightenment the mustard seed of true greatness. Wonderful the effect of this great thought on the mind of the thinker

yes, the thinker; for only the thinker may possess it. The nonthinker is an animal. Instinct controls him. He goes along the path, not of reason, but of passion, and Greed is his god.

What is the effect of it upon the mind of its possessor? Study the character of Jesus. It is shown there; and in that of Socrates, and, to an extreme, in the Cynic. It is the one and only element of true greatness. What is this thought? The value of a living soulthe infinite worth of every soul and the entire worthlessness of every material thing. That is the one world-transforming idea.

Alexander the (so-called) "Great" did not possess it. "If I were not Alexander, I would wish to be Diogenese," he said. But Diogenese did not say that, under any conditions, would he wish to be AlexHe was greater-too great to step down. Diogenese coveted nothing that man can bestow; Alexander coveted the whole. Diogenese had a possession greater than a world conquered. He had

ander.

his

But

own mind subject to his will. So had Socrates; and, pre-eminently above all others, Jesus.

Now this is Christianity. "He had not place whereon to lay his head." So wealth is not taken into account. What is? Nothing that eye can behold or that is tangible. But the effect upon its possessor

upon his demeanor! To make clear what this effect is would fill many volumes. The general effect will be to make the world of mankind a brotherhood; of womankind a sisterhood. The thing in lowest esteem then is what is now most regarded-personal display. The thing in highest esteem then is now least practiced-self-sacrifice.