The New Christianity; or, The Religion of the New AgeBland, Salem Goldworth
Religion
The New Christianity; or, The Religion of the New Age
Bland, Salem Goldworth
Christian sociology; Church and social problems
1. Both are too exclusively inward and individualistic. They do not
deal adequately with conditions and causes, the Franciscan movement not
at all, the Salvation Army very timidly. The weakest element in the
latter is its willingness to accept gifts from even those who have made
their wealth out of the degradation of men and women, and its seeming
reluctance to engage in any drastic social reforms which might dry up
such bounty. It is content with ambulance work, and even the most
devoted and heroic ambulance work will never stop the war.
2. Both, too, are sectional; fitted only for the few, the enthusiasts.
Each has cared for the saint; neither has made provision for the
ordinary man. Christian perfection, in the thought of Francis and of
General Booth, is for the man who withdraws from the ordinary work of
the world, turns away from its culture, crucifies a thousand human
instincts, breaks all the strings of the human lute but one. Both
movements organized by these great saints are eccentric, abnormal.
Neither is workable on a catholic, or universal, scale. Both
sectionalize the holy life.
What is needed to-day is another leader, a leader for the ordinary man.
The ordinary man is neither saint nor fanatic, neither preacher nor
monk; he would be bored to death if he had to sing or pray or meditate
all day; his joy is in building bridges and planning railways and
ripping up the matted prairie sod with gasoline engines; he likes his
wife and children and does not feel called upon to become a missionary
to China or Central Africa. The need is for the leader who can show
this ordinary man how to bring the truest love and the deepest piety
into the ordinary, commonplace, work-a-day life, revealing the glory of
God, not alone as gilding the cold snows of Alpine peaks or bathing the
distant desert with unearthly beauty, but transfiguring the city street,
the cozy home, the quiet fields where lovers walk at even.
Francis, Wesley, Booth--the time has come for each section of the
Christian Church to remember that "all things are hers: whether Paul or
Apollos or Cephas." We Protestants may think the Roman Catholic Church
less likely to appropriate our saints than we theirs. This judgment of
ours may be right or wrong, but we have no right to pass it until we
ourselves have recognized the limitations of Protestantism and set
ourselves heartily to appropriate the great elements of the Christian
life that are the distinctive glories of Latin Christianity.
Protestantism, too, has its own peculiar glories. Neither great
division of Christendom is adequate to meet the religious needs of
to-day. The hour has struck for the great Christianity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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