The Message and Mission of QuakerismBraithwaite, William C. (William Charles)
Religion
The Message and Mission of Quakerism
Braithwaite, William C. (William Charles)
Society of Friends
To take another of the great problems which press upon us in these
days, viz: the relation of Christianity to business. “Business is
business” too often means that Christian principles cannot be applied
to it. There are so many things a man “must do” if he is to get along
at all. “It is better to leave religion out altogether in some of
these practical affairs.” In non-Christian countries we constantly see
the divorce of ethics from religion; and I am afraid the evil is not
confined to distant lands. We all know something of the pulpit that
dare not denounce the sins practiced by the wealthiest of the
congregation: the minister whose tongue is tied upon sweating and
overcrowding: the church-member who is zealous in the observance of
religion, but lacking in his business obligations.
What a need for the thoroughgoing Christian who has ideals and
maintains them in everyday life, who will not lower them to suit the
exigencies of life, or the pressure of social custom, to whom
expediency is a forbidden word even though its exclusion may mean the
Cross!
Or turn to the great non-Christian world with which we are daily
brought into contact. Here is one of the greatest problems, if not the
greatest, which confronts our civilization to-day. How are we going to
meet our fellow-men of other races? The politician has his solution:
the commercial man has his. What is to be the solution of the citizen
of the Kingdom of God? There can only be one answer: we must go to
these men as to those who are our brethren; we must see them not as
wholly bad or depraved, but as those who have in them infinite
potentialities, who are called into the same citizenship and the same
sonship which we enjoy. We must reaffirm to-day our belief in that
Light which lighteth every man, but we dare not be content at that. As
our forefathers led the way in the understanding of sympathy with
other races; so we to whom these still more intricate problems present
themselves, must stand for the ideal, however hard it seems—the ideal
of spiritual kinship and the strenuous effort to realize it in our
relationship with other races; and so it comes about that the Foreign
Missionary enterprise seems to be of the very essence of Quakerism,
and that we find it closely akin to the great causes of Peace and
Anti-slavery with which our Society has ever been identified. Is the
Church of Christ playing the part which it ought to play in regard to
these matters? Is it taking the stand which it ought to take in regard
to the color problem in this country, in regard to the export of
spirituous liquors, and so forth? What, indeed, is to be our view of a
Christian Mission College which deliberately includes in its
curriculum military drill with the full paraphernalia of warfare, and
this in the traditionally peace-loving empire of China? To me it seems
evident that there is a great place for the Society of Friends in this
movement, just because we stand upon the side of idealism in all these
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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