We must send Heavenward a steady volume of intercessory prayer to win its own mighty response. All these things we ought to do and not to leave certain other things undone. We must bear ourselves among all nations, toward Japan and toward China, toward the warring countries across the sea and toward the representatives of all those lands here within our own borders, in such a way that this land shall be indeed a Messianic nation in whose life all the nations of the earth shall be blessed. We must not allow the glare of huge profits in the manufacture of munitions to blind our eyes to that vision of righteousness which alone will exalt us among all peoples and in the sight of God. "If drunk with sight of power we loose Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe, Such boasting as the Gentiles use Or lesser breeds without the law; Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, Who is sufficient for these things! No one, nor all of us together, except there come what some one has called "a larger discovery of superhuman resources and a greater irradiation of spiritual power." "How many loaves have you?" the Master asked His disciples one day when they were facing a hungry multitude. They did not know. They went out to investigate. Presently they came back and reported, "Five, but what are they among so many?" Still they did not know. They were doing their little sums in arithmetic, leaving out of the account the most significant fact in that situation, the presence of Christ. And their dismay in the face of all that need is a picture of the world's dismay at this hour, conscious of the disproportion between its own meager resources and the stupendous work to be accomplished. But here in our own land there is a latent capacity for heroism and for gen erosity, for moral adventure and for self-sacrifice, which once called into action will yet write some of the finest chapters ever written in the moral history of the race. The present outbreak of evil yonder does not represent the essential spirit of our Christian civilization. There is another and a better Europe, an unseen and eternal Europe, beneath and within that Europe now so much in evidence. And "with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right," it is for us to ally ourselves with that better Europe sure to emerge and thus show to the world that the soul of this western life of ours is still sound and true. Those non-Christian lands are asking out loud whether or not this Christian religion has in it the necessary spiritual dynamic to master and expel the evil spirit now at work among us. Unless we show ourselves able to meet that challenge the Christianization of the world will be set back for centuries. I believe as surely as I stand here that this challenge, bitter and terrible as it seems at this hour, can be met. It will be met not by military might nor by political power, but by the Spirit of the Lord of Hosts! THE WORK OF EVANGELISM In the second place the recruiting of members for the army of the Lord here at home is no less imperative. This cannot be done by any form of conscription. The army of the Lord has been from the first a volunteer army. If glorious and permanent victories over evil are to be won, the work of enlistment must go on without a break. Companies and regiments, battalions and brigades, of knightly, valorous souls intent upon giving the best they have to the highest they see, must be swinging into line. How can this work of enlistment best be achieved? It is a question which lies heavy upon the heart of every pastor who is an honest man. It is a question which compels the attention of every layman who really belongs—we use the phrase so lightly though it implies so much—who really belongs to the church. In certain cities we have seen spasms I use this term advisedly and in its full strength-spasms of evangelistic effort. They have not always commended themselves to our sober judgment either by their form or by their spirit or by their results. We might be willing for the sake of some greater good to overlook the introduction into the pulpit of the slang of the gutter and the antics of the circus. These things are not without importance, but they are secondary. But when it comes to irreverence and blasphemy in an age already flippant; when it comes to coarseness and vulgarity in dealing with human values altogether sacred; when it comes to teaching multitudes of unthinking children and adults conceptions of religion which are unscriptural and moral ideas which are untrue; when it comes to having religious work done and the religious appeal made in an intolerant, vindictive spirit toward those who hold divergent views touching evolution, or Biblical criticism, or social ethics, then we are not indifferent. These things are not secondary they are primary. How far it is in moral distance from the spirit of the four Gospels to the spirit of one of those worked-up campaigns! How far it is from the spirit of Him who went about doing good, envying oftentimes the foxes their holes and the birds of the air their nests in the consciousness that he had nowhere to lay His head how far it is from that to the public exploitation of costly gifts from the altars of religion or the screwing up of a community to what has been humorously called "a freewill offering!" We were enjoined at the beginning not to allow ourselves to be stampeded by the showy appearance of success, but to look closely at the spirit and the disposition which characterized the effort. "Many will say to Me in that day" not one here and one there, but many - "Many will say to Me in that day, 'Have we not prophesied in Thy name and in Thy name cast out devils, and in Thy name done many wonderful works?' and then I will say unto them (because of the lack of a certain spirit and disposition), 'I never knew you.' But it gets results! Yes, it gets results, all sorts of results, and some of those results make us pause. It is easy to tabulate the results which are instant and visible. It is not so easy to tabulate and appraise those deeper results which last. Here are a few questions to be answered by the intelligence and conscience of the community as it studies the effect of that sort of effort upon the life of a generation! Has the spiritual taste of the community been lowered and coarsened? Has the great work of religion been vulgarized in the minds of many? Has the quiet presentation of the truth after the method of the Master been openly discredited? Have thoughtful, discriminating men and women been pushed just a bit farther away from organized religion? Have boys and girls been confused in their moral judgments and in their conception of the Bible in such a way as to work havoc to their faith when the inevitable day of awakening comes? Have impressionable people been rushed through experiences which were supposed to represent repentance and faith, regeneration and consecration, only to find later that they have been roughly mishandled? Here are results to be appraised and to be added in when we cast up the debits and credits of such a campaign. THE LONGER VIEW The Master taught us to take the long view. In His eyes the religious worker is not a hustler but a sower of seed. He deals with processes which are vital. He casts his seed into the soil. He waits patiently for the early and the latter rain from Heaven. He allows the seed to grow, first the blade, and then the ear, and finally the full ripe corn. In like manner we find that in commerce and in education, in science and in civic betterment, the men of vision and achievement take uniformly the long view rather than the swift, short, smart glance. Why not also in that which is higher than them all, the work of religion? During the last twenty-five years two lines of effort have gained tremendously upon the popular interest, the work of higher education and the work of medical science. Measure them by the amount of money men will give, or by the number of aspiring young men who can be enlisted in their service, or by the readiness of people to accept their guidance, and you will see that they have forged ahead tremendously. During that same period the church has not made any such relative gain. There are those who feel that it has really lost ground. And I need not remind you that the universities and the physicians have all but uniformly taken the long view. They have stood for thoroughness and against quackery of every kind. We as churchmen have sometimes been led by our desire for immediate results, or by our tender concern lest we should forbid anyone who can cast out a devil, to give encouragement to the most gigantic and preposterous forms of religious quackery. In the long run we can do nothing against the truth, nor against the spirit, nor against the method of Jesus Christ. And I believe we shall do well to go back and sit down again at the feet of Him who said, "I am the Truth. And ye shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall make you free." We have no reason as Congregationalists to blush for our own record in this matter of evangelism. The Great Awakening in the Eighteenth Century came by the mighty evangelistic preaching of Jonathan Edwards. The great revivals of the Fifties which furnished so much of the moral passion for freeing the slaves and preserving the Union came largely from the work of Charles G. Finney. The greatest evangelist of the Nineteenth Century in the whole English-speaking world was Dwight L. Moody, a rugged, Congregational layman. In that mighty work of enlisting the young in religious service through "Christian nurture," the pioneer was Horace Bushnell. In these better methods of religious education now being pursued we are reaping the harvest for which he furnished the seed wheat. And we are still true to these great traditions. We believe with all our souls in personal and pastoral evangelism. The Commission on Evangelism appointed two years ago by this National Council straightway spent two whole days in New York City in conference with our Executive Committee considering ways and means. They sent letters to all of our Congregational pastors. They arranged for seventy conferences in various parts of the country to plan for a more effective use of those weeks which come before Easter in the open enlistment of men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. And one of the results flowing from this effort may perhaps be seen in the fact that the number of members added to our Congregational churches that year on pro |