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
Already, in that forever holy strip of land where towns were reduced to
heaps of dust and trees to splintered trunks, where earth was gashed and
torn as men never gashed and tore the kindly bosom of mother earth
before, and where beautiful human bodies were mutilated and destroyed
with a fury unknown in history, there the Great Christianity has
disclosed itself. There at the mouth of hell unfolded the sweetest
flowers that ever bloomed on earth. There in the brotherhood of the
trenches became visible the Great Christianity. There Anglicans,
Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Salvationists,
and every other kind of Protestants, aye, and Roman Catholics, kneeled
together to commemorate the suffering and love of their Common Redeemer,
the Soldier-King.
"Father," wrote a Manitoba boy to his father from the trenches, in the
spring of 1917, "we have a religion here but, father, it is not the same
as yours. You don’t like the Catholics or the Church of England, but,
father, we love everybody here. We are all one. And, father," the boy
went on, "when we come back, our religion is going to blow yours
sky-high."
A prophecy not as yet fulfilled but not, perhaps, beyond fulfillment.
Certain it is that our soldier boys will never crowd into our churches
as they crowded to the colors till those churches are the home of a
Christianity that has the breadth and the brotherliness and something,
at least, of the heroism of the Christianity of the trenches.
But something more must be said about the Great Christianity.
It may be that Latin Christianity and Teutonic combined do not represent
the full splendor and power of Christianity, and that the drastic social
changes which must be carried out in the next quarter of a century, or
even in a briefer period, call for the re-inforcement of another race
and another sort of Christianity.
The distinctive Greek Christianity of the first five or six centuries
made its contribution and passed away with the vanishing of the original
and pure Hellenic race. But there is a Greek Christianity which has
found a new lease of life and a new home in that race which has largely
replaced the Greek in his own home and has diffused itself over most of
eastern Europe, the Slavonic. There is a great Christianity which is
still called Greek, but which is rather Slavonic Christianity, and which
might more narrowly and specifically be called Russian Christianity,
after that people who constitute the largest section of Greek
Christianity and promise to be the most influential.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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