The Making of a Country Parish: A Story — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
The Making of a Country Parish: A Story
John Stuart Mill · en
Their name is legion. Everything is to be done. Only a beginning has been
made. Nothing is finished. What has been accomplished is only a prophecy
of the larger and completer work that lies before us in the future.
Religious and community work is not mechanical. You cannot finish it up
and store it away as the carpenter finishes a box, or the housewife a
garment. Life is a development, a growth, and those who deal with life
must always be content with beginnings. "Nothing that has life is ever
finished." Life in its larger unfolding and its fuller meaning must always
be in the future. A life that is finished and complete would better end,
and a community that has reached perfection should be translated to
another sphere. We must ever be content to spend our labor upon
beginnings, thankful for such fruitage as may appear from time to time.
The real ingathering must always be in the future. What has been
accomplished in the Larger Parish gives us confidence in the methods
employed, and encourages us to expect larger things from the better and
completer application of those and similar methods in the days to come.
In may be well to mention some of the things that have not as yet been
fully done, but that we hope to see accomplished in the Larger Parish in
the future.
1. The first and most important aim of this work, and of all church work,
is to bring people into the kingdom of God. All social and community work
must be subordinate to this and lead up to it. The Church must be
something more than a social settlement. I still hold to the old-fashioned
idea that men need to be saved, and that the only salvation that there
can be for them is found in loyalty to Jesus Christ. While this salvation
is a matter of the spirit, affecting one's standing with God and his
relation to the great eternal realities, it also affects his standing with
men and his relation to society. And here comes in all the humanitarian
and community work that is a legitimate and important part of the church's
concern. Community work can never take the place of the work of God's
Spirit in the individual life. To be permanently valuable it must be the
_result_ of that work. The kingdom of God embraces the complete ideal, and
if we can induce men to live according to the principles of that kingdom,
careful attention will be paid to all the work that needs to be done for
the community. Therefore the work of the Larger Parish is primarily,
though not exclusively, evangelistic. We are trying to lead men to become
Christians, not in a narrow sense, but in the large, rich meaning of that
word which the teaching of Jesus gives it.