Religion is not an ultimate fact.  When men are religious just for the sake of being religious, their religion is good for nothing.  Religion is for character.  Its end is gained when it has made us good men and women.  Religion is for service.  It finds its justification in the work that it can do in making a better world of this.  Jesus gave us the truth about it when he said, “The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath.”  And he carried the truth forward to a larger application when he said, “I came not to judge the world, but to save the world.”

“To save the world.” That was the errand of the Christ; that is the business of his church.  It is not merely to save a certain number of people out of the world, and to get them safely away to another world; it is to save the world.

There is no danger of giving to this phrase too wide an application.  We are entitled to the expectation that this salvation is to have a large scope; that it is to include the earth and all its tribes of life.  When we speak of making a better world of this, we ought to mean the physical world as well as the social world and the moral world.  It is a true insight of faith which makes the poet say:—­

    “The world we live in wholly is redeemed;
    Not man alone, but all that man holds dear: 
    His orchards and his maize:  forget me not
    And heartsease in his garden, and the wild
    Aerial blossoms of the untamed wood,
    That make its savagery so homelike; all
    Have felt Christ’s sweet love watering their roots: 
    His sacrifice has won both earth and heaven. 
    Nature in all its fullness is the Lord’s. 
    There are no Gentile oaks, no Pagan pines;
    The grass beneath oar feet is Christian grass;
    The wayside weed is sacred unto him. 
    Have we not groaned together, herbs and men,
    Struggling through stifling earth-weights unto light,
    Earnestly longing to be clothed upon
    With one high possibility of bloom? 
    And He, He is the Light, He is the Sun
    That draws us out of darkness, and transmits
    The noisome earth-damp into Heaven’s own breath,
    And shapes our matted roots, we know not how,
    Into fresh leaves, and strong, fruit-bearing stems;
    Yea, makes us stand, on some consummate day,
    Abloom in white transfiguration robes.”

This vital sympathy between man and his environment is never lost sight of by the great prophets.  The redemption of man must mean, as they clearly see, the redemption of the world in which man lives.  When the drunkard is reformed, the house which he inhabits puts on a new face and there are flowers instead of weeds in his garden.  Isaiah knew that when his people were redeemed from their captivity, the wilderness and the parched land would be glad and the desert would rejoice and blossom as the rose.

That wonderful passage in the eighth chapter of the Romans shows how strongly Paul had grasped the old prophetic idea; he beholds the whole creation humiliated and disfigured by its share in man’s degeneration, and waiting to be delivered with man from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God.  That expectation is yet to be realized.  It is an essential part of the Christian expectation.  It is part of what redemption means.